Practically everybody knows the beautiful melody written by the musical genius Paul McCartney: A young girl runs away with a man from the motor trade leaving her grieving bewildered parents behind. The mother picks up the letter that’s lying there and reads.
She “breaks down and cries to her husband – ‘Daddy, our baby is gone … What did we do that was wrong? We didn’t know it was wrong. We struggled hard all our lives to get by”.
The subtext seems to be that McCartney, John Lennon and George Harrison wanted our generation to leave the 1950s with its rules and ways, the old moral certainties, far behind and to immerse ourselves in wildly imaginative subjectivity, where “nothing is real” and “nothing to get hung about,” because “fun is…the one thing that money can’t buy,” — creating for ourselves brand new identities like which The Beatles seem to showcase in Sgt Peppers Lonely Hearts Club Band.
Along wiith the others, McCartney called for “Revolution,” a massive global cultural transformation which left behind the values our parents and ancestors handed down to us, in exchange for free love, which they said was “all we need”. It was the most shocking cultural disengagement; and of a piece with Henry VIII’s thefts and slaughters, the French Revolution and 1914. Only this time it was souls who fell.
The author Phillip Norman, I discovered recently, pretty much agrees with this,
“If we are honest we must accept the extent to which the heady new freedoms of youth in the sixties paved the way for the frightening, ungovernable world we see about us today. From the happy high of pot and pills and the cozy hallucinations of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band grew the drug menace that now saturates the most respectable, most rural communities, turns once bright and happy children into black-and-blue-punctured suicides, litters public thoroughfares and parks with the same foul stew of broken ampules and needles.
From the sexual freedom granted to sixties boys and girls by the contraceptive pill came the long breakdown in the age-old, civilizing influence of the family, the freedom of sixties children’s children in their turn to thieve and vandalize without the slightest fear of parental retribution. From the great discovery of sixties youth through the example of the Beatles—that, with a bit of cheek, you could get away with anything—evolved the whole ghastly panoply of modern contempt for convention and self-restraint that encompasses urban terrorism at one extreme and supermarket “shopping cart rage” at the other.
Just as John Lennon realized he could get away with teasing his blue-blooded audience at the 1963 Royal Command performance, so the IRA realized they could get away with blowing up innocent women and children; so successive governments realized they could get away with allowing the national infrastructure to fall into decay; so the police found they could get away with abandoning whole communities; so hospitals found they could get away with ceasing to accord patients basic human dignity; so the legions of murderers, child molesters, muggers, and celebrity stalkers found they could become ever more arrogantly audacious in their predatory activities; so egotism, viciousness, and disregard for others grew to the point where bin Laden and his fanatics found they could get away with the vileness of September 11, 2001. If you seek to pinpoint the exact place in the twentieth century where civilization ceased moving steadily forward and began taking quantum leaps backward, there can be no other culprit but the sixties” —- Philip Norman, Shout
Stephen Hand
Ah, she looks like snow –
I want to put her in a broadway show–
Ah she’ll dance and dine–
Like a lucifer she’ll always shine… I feel like letting go…Mother Nature look at what you’ve done!” —Letting Go,Venus and Mars album. Paul McCartney
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