That '60s show

IT WAS IN 1969 that Dan Hicks & his Hot Licks came out with their existential classic, ''How Can I Miss You When You Won't Go Away?" The same could be said for that decade.

You can never really get rid of the Sixties. They're like teenage acne. Someone's always repackaging the March on Washington or Tet or Monterey Pop. There is zero new to say about those years, but that hasn't stopped PBS from unloading 10 hours of prime-time TV this week, much of it about the culture of that epoch, built around Martin Scorsese's four-hour opus on Bob Dylan. Let's see, we've also got the Beatles, the history of pop music and protest, and, my personal favorite title, ''The Sixties: The Years That Shaped a Generation."

The great gift of the Sixties was the right to believe without appearing foolish or lunatic that anything was possible. But the further we get from those years the more precious they seem. It's hard to imagine a more self-indulgent decade. Or intolerant. You were either righteous or evil. I was a Bobby Kennedy guy in 1968 as an undergraduate. You'd have thought I was for Joseph McCarthy had you listened to Gene McCarthy's true believers who ruled the campus that year.

I cringe at our lockstep mentality about Vietnam and so much else. We assumed that, merely by mouthing lofty words, they were true. Good and necessary things happened around race, gender, and the environment, among many areas. We were right on so much of it and yet we countenanced no real debate. We hooted down opposing voices. We wallowed in overweening pride and self-centered rage. We harbored no generosity of spirit.

From the perspective of the new millennium, we can discern in those years the roots of the political correctness that courses through college campuses today. Like all well-meaning movements, PC sprang from the unassailable need for change and the bruising effort to achieve it. Everything that happened in the Sixties made sense at the time. And nowhere, save the extraterrestrial enclave of Berkeley, did this construct run deeper than in Boston.

Let's not forget Manhattan, though, where Leonard Bernstein hosted a cocktail party for the Black Panthers in his apartment in the Dakota. This was the supremely lampoonable event that led Tom Wolfe, at the height of his powers, to coin the term Radical Chic.

Principled opposition to the war was the high ground in the Sixties, yet most young men I knew fought it, let's be honest here, more out of fear of getting offed in an alluvial rice paddy, which is a very human reaction to the threat of violent death. I ducked combat by learning a language in the Army. (I was offered Vietnamese or Hungarian. Guess what I chose?)

Of course a protest is, at its heart, a social event. The actress Swoosie Kurtz secured her reputation, along with a Tony, for her portrayal of Gwen, the heiress who used to take limos to protests, in Lanford Wilson's Broadway hit ''Fifth of July." Her performance was so memorable because her character was so scathingly true.

I was in Harvard's football stadium on April 14, 1969, when upwards of 10,000 students voted to continue a student strike. (To boycott classes for whatever reason was to many of us a no-brainer.) Earnest oratory aside, this was a festive occasion. According to the Harvard Crimson, only about half of the crowd participated in the first individual vote.

I discount in no way the historic advances of the Sixties, most notably the gains in civil rights that came at such a brutal price. The dual disgrace of race and poverty exploded into the national consciousness. The grainy footage of Bull Connor's dogs in Montgomery and the ''I Have A Dream" speech of Martin Luther King will never leave us, nor will the crowds along the tracks of Bobby's funeral train carrying him home from LA.

And Woodstock stands, the brown acid notwithstanding. If there's one thing about the Sixties that has stood the test of time, it's the music. Don't take my word for it. My 22-year-old daughter instantly got the greatness of Neil Young and Dylan and the Beatles. Remind me again who today is in their league?

That said, it's time to give the Sixties and its hagiography a rest. We could use some truth in advertising about it. Our obsession with the period is tiresome. It is, in marketing parlance, overexposed.

Sam Allis writes the Observer column in the Sunday Globe.