"If you remember the sixties," quipped Robin Williams (and quite a few others), "you weren"t there." He was, of course, referring to the haze created by all those mind-expanding drugs the beautiful people popped, mainlined and smoked. In truth, however, time has proved an equally effective hallucinogen. As years go by, real events have given way to wild imagination. The decade has been transformed into a morality play, an explanation of how the world went astray or, conversely, how hope was squandered. Problems of the present are blamed on myths of the past.

Memory acts like a filter, yielding a clearer image of the past. The impurities are removed, producing a distillation both logical and meaningful. We forget, for instance, that back then the music business made a lot of money from silly songs like"Yummy, Yummy, Yummy," or that Sergeant Barry Sadler"s"Ballad of the Green Berets" outsold"Give Peace a Chance." We remember the Students for a Democratic Society, but forget the Young Americans for Freedom. We recall Che Guevara's success in Cuba but not his humiliation in Bolivia. The decade belongs to Kennedy and Dubcek, not Reagan and deGaulle.

The Sixties is both a decade and an idea. Strictly speaking, it is a finite period of 3,653 days sandwiched between the Fifties and the Seventies. But it is also, unfortunately, a collection of beliefs zealously guarded by those keen to protect something sacred. Fantasy has been turned into ideology, with the effect that the Sixties has come to be defined not by time but by faith. Believers object violently to any attempt to redefine the decade, dismissing rebel analysts as reactionary, revisionist, or neo-conservative. For forty years, a battle has raged over ownership of the decade, with those who dare to question hallowed truths bombarded with a fusillade of consecrated dogma.

After the decade died it rose again as religion. For quite a few people, the Sixties is neither memory nor myth, but faith. Religions do not require a foundation of logic--indeed they defy logic. So it is with the religion of the Sixties. Believers in the gospel cling faithfully to a dream that ignores the laws of economics, politics and human nature. They imagine into existence a world where everyone is rendered peaceful by the power of love and where greed, ambition and duplicity are banished. Reality itself is suspended.

The believers worship a few martyred gods (Che, Lennon, Kennedy, King, Lumumba) and seek truth in the teachings of an assortment of sometimes competing prophets (Malcolm X, Leary, Hoffman, Hendrix, Dylan, Dutschke, Muhammad Ali, et al). Their reliquary includes the incense, hash pipes, beads, buttons, tied-dyed shirts and day-glo posters still sold at sacred sites in Berkeley, Greenwich Village, Soho, and Amsterdam. Their gospel is peppered with stock slogans from the Heavenly Decade:"all you need is love,""make love not war,""power to the people,""turn on, tune in, drop out."

The power of the faith, and the equal and opposite zealotry of those who reject it, has impeded rational assessment. Quite simply, the Sixties has been invested with far too much singularity. For the faithful, it was a time of hope and promise, an example to us all. Thus, every glowing ember of that spirit is carefully nurtured, in the vain hope that it will someday flair again. On the other side, the Sixties is used as an example of what happens when freedom is allowed to run amok, and a convenient scapegoat for all the ills that followed.

Cast aside the rose-tinted spectacles and we find a decade dominated by mindless mayhem, shallow commercialism and unbridled cruelty. The Cultural Revolution was the one of the worst atrocities of the 20th century. The Six Day War made victims of every nation in the Middle East. In Indonesia, one million people were slaughtered at the temple of greed. An accurate timeline of the decade is packed with events not normally identified with Sixties iconography. How many people, when considering those times, think about Sharpeville, the Six Day War, Vatican II, the massacre in Mexico City, Biafra, Jakarta, the rise of McDonalds and Murdoch or the cannibals of Guangxi?

The music was great, the drugs colorful, the dreams transcendent. Unfortunately that was not enough. The Sixties counterculture started from the assumption that changing the world begins with changing oneself. Metamorphosis is not, however, as easy as lighting a stick of incense. In any case, the soul is seldom a match for machines. In the Sixties, fantasy worlds were built on a flimsy understanding of how the real world works; in consequence, they had as much logic as an M.C. Escher print. No wonder, then, that"reality sucks" became a popular expression in the Seventies.

My book, The Sixties Unplugged, was intended, somewhat obliquely, as a leftwing criticism of the Sixties ethos, a condemnation of those self-serving Sixties radicals who caused irreparable damage to the liberal mainstream. Perhaps not surprisingly, the American left has rallied to condemn the book, while at the same time I have regrettably become a darling of the right. What this demonstrates is how admiration for the Sixties has become a shibboleth on the left. In order to retain one's leftwing credentials, one must pay homage to Rudi Dutschke, Abbie Hoffman and Tariq Ali. As a result, the lunatic clowns of the 1960s have escaped censure for the harm they did.

Those who bemoan the betrayal of the Sixties spirit are in effect arguing that the decade had no effect on our present, that it was a delightful interlude between the conformist Fifties and the self-indulgent Seventies. Yet this denies the law of historical continuity – the fact that everything develops from that which precedes it. No decade is unimportant; no period exists as anomaly. The Sixties are important, but not for reasons most people understand. Revolution was never in the cards. Positive progress was derailed by a bunch of deluded misfits in thrall to violence and in love with their own television image. Perhaps the most enduring bequest is the convenient gallery of scapegoats it produced. Across the Western world, populist leaders have been eager to blame current problems -- moral decay, crime, violence and the plight of the family -- on a generation of revolutionary desperadoes more powerful in myth than they ever were in life. If the Sixties seems strange to us today, it is probably because we tend to look at the wrong things. By paying so much attention to what was happening on Maggie's Farm, we failed to notice the emergence of Maggie Thatcher.

As summer beckons, we find ourselves facing another sequence of significant anniversaries. It is now nearly 40 years since the May events in Paris, the Chicago riots, and the Grosvenor Square demonstrations. Anniversaries have a way of cleansing the past of unpleasantness. History becomes party. I'm told that every hotel in Paris is fully booked for the upcoming celebrations even, ironically, the Ritz. The celebrations will provide yet another opportunity to assert ownership over a decade. Lighting a joint will again take on political significance. Play a few bars of"Blowin' in the Wind" and even the most apathetic baby boomer will recall that he once manned the barricades.

The survival of the Sixties myth says something about the resilience of our spirit, if not about the reality of our world. The decade brought flowers, music, love and good times. It also brought hatred, murder, greed, dangerous drugs, needless deaths, ethnic cleansing, neo-colonialist exploitation, soundbite politics, sensationalism, a warped sense of equality, a bizarre notion of freedom, the decline of liberalism and the end of innocence. Bearing all that in mind, the decade should seem neither unfamiliar nor all that wonderful.