Raging hormones. I was neither child nor adult and every morning I struggled in front of the bathroom mirror to keep my pimples in check, or at least hide them with Clearasil. I was shy, blushed easily, and my voice tended to crack when I had to speak in front of the class.
I had gotten a Beatles haircut in the summer of sixty-seven, wore Jesus sandals and tight jeans that I had rolled-up over my ankles. On my left shoulder hung a Nikon F. I had given up on the dream of becoming an astronaut and now wanted to become a photographer like Thomas in the movie Blow-Up, a job where you were not only surrounded by beautiful women but could expose the evil in the world.
This was the year when God had been declared dead, Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy were murdered, American B-52’s bombed Vietnam, students protested, the Cultural Revolution raged in China, the Soviet Union invaded Czechoslovakia, and the Beatles sang All You Need is Love.
It was also a year when we talked over the phone. Texting was done with pens or pencils. Every home normally had one phone line and there were no answering machines. Telephones were mobile, but only as far as the wire allowed. There was one television channel, and it broadcast in black and white. We had tape recorders and record players, but not video recorders, so if you missed a show, that was it.
2018
Carl waited patiently on the steps of the Dramatic Theater. I was half an hour late since I had landed the day before and still was jet lagged. I had woken up at three o’clock, taken a glass of Jack Daniels and written in my diary before falling back asleep.
“It takes longer to adjust these days,” I said.
“Yes, it’s the same thing for me. Age takes its toll,” he said.
We crossed Nybroplan by the bus stop and continued along Strandvägen. In the background we could hear seagulls, tourists, and lapping water. Once the sun peaked out, it felt warmer in the air.
“The last time I was here we had Obama and looked forward to the future. Now we have Trump.”
“Everybody here thought Hillary would win.”
“So did she. After all, it was her turn.”
“It would have been nice to have a female President though.”
“Sure, but the arrogance was a bit too much,” I said.
“As I saw it, she had the knowledge and skills needed,” he said.
“Sure, but the enthusiasm was terribly low. Obama nailed it when he said that Hillary was likeable enough, but the democratic party’s leadership had decided that she was invincible,” I said.
“She would have won if the electoral system had been fair,” he said.
“Certainly, but all the experts and strategist know how the system works. It was arrogance that led her to bungle the campaign. I remember a giant billboard in Hoboken which said, ‘I’m With Her’ as if voting was a declaration of feminist loyalty. She was tone-deaf as far as ordinary people goes.”
We crossed the bridge to Djurgården and continued east along the northern side of the island. It was leafy and nice and many sun bathers on Lejonslätten. A family had parked their baby carriage near a large oak tree and spread out a blanket in the grass for a pick-nick.
“It’s fifty years since 1968,” he said.
”It feels like a very long time ago,” I said.
“That’s my point. It’s as far to 68 as from 68 to the end of World War one,” he said.
“We experience time subjectively but measure it objectively. I began to take interest in politics in the spring, but I wasn’t politically engaged. When I was asked which party I would vote for, I said Folkpartiet (the liberal party) since I hadn’t thought much about it.”
“For me it was a done deal. Capitalism was a rotten system and socialism the solution. I was a Marxist and were planning to vote for Vänsterpartiet kommunisterna in the school election,” he said.
”Do you remember the poster we did?”
“It was Mikael’s idea. He felt we had to act fast,” he said.
“The message was simple — Stop! Think! — written in all caps. I borrowed Dad’s spray paint so that the text would come out looking psychedelic. How on earth could we have thought that two words could save the world?”
“Like, Jesus comes!“
”The next morning, I rolled up the poster and brought it to school. Mikael and I were afraid that some teacher would discover us when we put it up with tape,” I said.
“It was a pretty lame protest, but it was at least a beginning,” Carl said.
”If people just understood the state of the world, they would start protesting.”
“As I saw it, politics was about organizing people. That’s why I joined the student council.”
“Why didn’t you become chairman? You liked to be a leader, which I never did. Why did you nominate me instead?”
“It was a tactic from my side. I had opened my mouth too many times, and I was afraid that somebody would nominate a right-winger if I was a candidate. You were radical too, but not as known, and you were more diplomatic. And it worked,” he said.
We had planned to have lunch at Djurgårdsbrunns Wärdshus, but the wait was impossibly long, so we turned back the same way we came. Fortunately, we found a café near Skånska Gruvan where we got beer and sandwiches.
“Why did we become so radical when we had it pretty well overall?”
“The fifties’ optimism had been punctured by the Vietnam war and left a vacuum behind,” he said.
“To us, this optimism looked really naive. Unlike our parents, we had no clue about what it was to live during war or threat of war. They had lived through a depression and a world war. Collective needs had been prioritized, while private needs had been rationed. Dad told me that he used to trade his liquor coupons for coffee coupons. Then came peace and freedom. They had children, bought a car, and moved to a bigger apartment. It must have been a little bit like China after Mao. God was dead and materialism ruled. Private interests were no longer a vice,” I said.
“It was such a positive time despite the Cold War. Welfare Sweden grew like crazy and life improved. We had enormously good artists and we won silver at the 1958 Soccer World Championship after having lost to Brazil, which was nothing to be ashamed of. People loved the US and everything that came from the US, but then the wind turned. Was it the Cuba crisis, McCarthyism, or the race riots after the murder of Martin Luther King?”
“I don’t think it was a single thing that awoke us, but a kind of mental domino effect that culminated with the Vietnam war protests,” I said.
“The US had been seen as a moral example, but the B52s and the napalm bombs could not be matched with the moralism the US was preaching. It was the same thing with the racism,” he said.
“Our reaction had a lot to do with television. I spent a week with a friend who lived outside Eskilstuna during the summer of 1968. I remember one night when we watched student protests on the TV news. His dad said that it was terrible, but I thought that they did the right thing,” I said.
“The older generation didn’t understand what was going on. They had been taught to shut up and obey, but young people began to talk back and raise questions.”
“We stepped out of our childhood and into a world that had lost its footing,” I said.
“And the pop musicians who used to be neat and well-dressed let their hair grow and turned up the volume so that it hurt the ears of the adults. That was the real cultural revolution. The music gave us an identity that was entirely separate from the adult world,” he said.
“We joined Vänsterns Ungdomsförbund (VUF) that autumn,” I said.
“There were a lot of nice people there, but now and then some dude would pop up and declare that everybody else were misinterpreting Marx which led to ideological wars and splintering. We got a lot of new political acronyms,” he said.
“Once we had five different groups peddling their papers outside the Systembolaget in my neighborhood. It was VUF, KAF, KFML, KFML(r) and DFFG. People laughed when they came out with their bags,” I said.
“It wouldn’t surprise me if the Salvation Army was there too,” he said.
“You had to read a lot just to keep up. All groups had their own newspapers and theoretical magazines where people threw quotations at each other,” I said.
“I dropped out when VUF split up. After that I spent a lot of time sitting at home playing on my guitar while you went to your meetings. I didn’t understand it then, but the ship had sailed. The revolution was over. I didn’t like the dogmatic fights over text interpretations and all the talk about the people and the masses. That’s why I joined the Social Democrats who had roots in the real working class. That’s something I have never regretted,” he said.
”My life would have turned out very differently if I too had dropped out at that time instead of ten years later.”
“You wasted a decade that you could have used in a much better way.”
“True, but it was not easy to escape the maelstrom, especially not when you thought you were surfing on the waves of history,” I said.
“Like Jesus comes,” he said.
“We told ourselves that we had the situation under control, and we had excuses for all setbacks.”
