By
MARSHA MERCER
I
have a word to describe the summer of 2015. It’s groovy. Make that neo-groovy.
Yes,
children, Groovy is now a programming language, but in the 1960s groovy --
lower case -- meant wonderful or cool. Simon and Garfunkel sang “Feelin’
Groovy” (“The 59th Street Bridge Song”) on their 1966 album,
“Parsley, Sage, Rosemary and Thyme.”
Over
the last few weeks, nearly every major news event – whether it came from the
heavens, the political mud or a cultural landmark between the two – has had ties
to the 1960s. This may be the summer the Sixties built.
Everybody
was feelin’ groovy when the New Horizons spacecraft finally flew by Pluto on
Tuesday. After traveling nearly a decade and 3 billion miles, the spacecraft
about the size of a baby grand piano made its one and only flyby of the former
planet.
President
Barack Obama tweeted his congratulations.
Everybody
loves Pluto. Images of the dwarf planet with its heart-shaped region charmed
the world 50 years to the day after the first mission to Mars, Mariner 4, explored
the red planet on July 14, 1965.
The
space program didn’t just happen. President John F. Kennedy feared that the
Soviets, having launched Sputnik and then the first human into space, would win
the space race. On May 25, 1961, he addressed a joint session of Congress with
a stunning proposal.
“I
believe that this nation should commit itself to the goal, before this decade
is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to earth,” JFK said.
Just
eight years later, on July 20, 1969, the first two humans -- American
astronauts -- walked on the moon. It took them 76 hours to travel the 240,000
miles.
To
compare, when New Horizons launched Jan. 16, 2006, it passed the moon nine
hours later.
In
another sign of how the 1960s are informing our lives, Obama this week drew
from Kennedy’s 1961 inaugural address to argue in favor of a nuclear deal with
Iran.
“It’s
now more than 50 years since President Kennedy stood before the American people
and said, `Let us never negotiate out of fear, but let us never fear to
negotiate,’” Obama said.
In
politics, the big news this summer is a brash Republican candidate in the
populist tradition. Some commentators liken real estate mogul Donald Trump to
George Wallace “without the charm.” Wallace, a former Alabama governor and
segregationist, ran for president four times from the 1960s to 1980s.
Trump’s
propensity for harsh rhetoric – he has called Mexican immigrants rapists and
drug dealers -- and loose use of facts worries the GOP establishment. In early polls
of likely Republican voters, though, he leads the pack of GOP presidential
hopefuls.
The
book of the summer is a novel written more than half a century ago. Readers dreamed
for decades that Harper Lee would publish another novel after her perennial
bestseller “To Kill a Mockingbird” came out in 1960. The 1962 movie based on the book starring Gregory Peck was a classic.
Lee
finally released another novel this month, but it confounded readers. Written
before Mockingbird but set 20 years after it, “Go Set a Watchman” altered the character
of saintly Atticus Finch into a cranky, racist coot.
Readers
will long debate the merits of Watchman and whether Lee, 89, should have allowed
it to be published. Her “new” novel brought back the dark side of the 1960s –
but this summer also saw South Carolina give the decade the boot symbolically.
After
54 years, the Confederate battle flag came down from the statehouse grounds in Columbia
on July 10. Raised over the capitol dome in 1961 during the civil rights era, the
flag had been moved to the grounds in 2000. It was taken down permanently after
the murders last month of nine black worshippers at a prayer meeting in a Charleston
church.
This
summer we also saw the 1960s as a selling point. Jaguar has come out with a new
Lightweight E-Type racer that only looks like it was built in 1964. It can be yours
for a cool one million British pounds, or about $1.5 million.
That
must be one groovy car.
©2015
Marsha Mercer. All rights reserved.
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