The Man of the Year ran the mile in 3:51.3, and died under mortar fire at An Lao. He got a B-minus in Physics I, earned a Fulbright scholarship, filmed a documentary in a Manhattan ghetto, and guided Gemini rendezvous in space. He earns $76 a week with Operation Head Start in Philadelphia, picks up $10,800 a year as a metallurgical engineer at Ford, and farms 600 acres of Dakota wheat land. He has a lightening-fast left jab, a rifling right arm, and reads medieval metaphysicians. He campaigned for Reagan, booed George Wallace, and fought for racial integration. He can dance all night, and if he hasn't smoked pot himself, knows someone who has. He tucks a copy of Playboy onto his concerto score as he records with the Boston Philharmonic. He is disenchanted with Lyndon Johnson, is just getting over his infatuation with Jack Kennedy—and will some day run for President himself.

For the Man of the Year 1966 is a generation: the man—and woman—of 25 and under.

Moved Permanently

In the closing third of the 20th century, that generation looms larger than all the exponential promises of science or technology: it will soon be the majority in charge. In the U.S., citizens of 25 and under in 1966 nearly outnumbered their elders; by 1970, there will be 100 million Americans in that age bracket. In other big, highly industrialized nations, notably Russia and Canada, the young also constitute half the population. If the statistics imply change, the credentials of the younger generation guarantee it. Never have the young been so assertive or so articulate, so well educated or so worldly. Predictably, they are a highly independent breed, and—to adult eyes—their independence has made them highly unpredictable. This is not just a new generation, but a new kind of generation.

Omphalocentric & Secure. What makes the Man of the Year unique? Cushioned by unprecedented affluence and the welfare state, he has a sense of economic security unmatched in history. Granted an ever-lengthening adolescence and life-span, he no longer feels the cold pressures of hunger and mortality that drove Mozart to compose an entire canon before death at 35; yet he, too, can be creative.

Reared in a prolonged period of world peace, he has a unique sense of control over his own destiny—barring the prospect of a year's combat in a brush-fire war. Science and the knowledge explosion have armed him with more tools to choose his life pattern than he can always use: physical and intellectual mobility, personal and financial opportunity, a vista of change accelerating in every direction.

Untold adventures await him. He is the man who will land on the moon, cure cancer and the common cold, lay out blight- proof, smog-free cities, enrich the underdeveloped world, and, no doubt, write finis to poverty and war.

For all his endowments and prospects, he remains a vociferous skeptic. Never have the young been left more completely to their own devices. No adult can or will tell them what earlier generations were told: this is God, that is Good, this is Art, that is Not Done. Today's young man accepts none of the old start-on-the-bottom-rung formulas that directed his father's career, and is not even sure he wants to be A Success. He is one already.

In the omphalocentric process of self-construction and discovery, he stalks love like the wary hunter, but has no time or target—not even the mellowing Communists—for hate.

One thing is certain. From Bombay to Berkeley, Vinh Long to Volgograd, he has clearly signaled his determination to live according to his own lights and rights. His convictions and actions, once defined, will shape the course and character of nations.

Obverse Puritanism. This is a generation of dazzling diversity, encompassing an intellectual elite sans pareil and a firmament of showbiz stars, ski whizzes and sopranos, chemists and sky watchers. Its attitudes embrace every philosophy from Anarchy to Zen; simultaneously it adheres above all to the obverse side of the Puritan ethic—that hard work is good for its own sake. Both sensitive and sophisticated, it epitomizes more than any previous generation the definition of talent by Harvard Dropout Henry James as "the art of being completely whatever it was that one happened to be." Yet is by no means a faceless generation.

Its world-famed features range from the computer-like introspection of Bobby Fischer, 23, defending the U.S. chess title in Manhattan last week, to the craggy face of French Olympic Skier Jean-Claude Killy, 23, swooping through the slalom gates in Chile. It is World Record Miler Jim Ryan, 19, snapping news pictures for the Topeka Capital-Journal to prepare himself for the day when he can no longer break four minutes. It is Opera Singer Jane Marsh, 24, capturing first prize at Moscow's Tchaikovsky competition. It is Medal of Honor Winner Robert E. O'Malley, 23, who as a Marine Corps corporal in Viet Nam was severely wounded by enemy mortar fire, yet succeeded in evacuating and killing eight V.C.s.

It is Folk Singer Buffy Sainte-Marie, 24, passionately pleading the cause of her fellow Indians when she is not recording top-selling LPs. It is Artist Jamie Wyeth, 20, improving on his father's style while putting in some 200 hours on a portrait of John F. Kennedy; Violinist James Oliver Buswell, 20, carrying a full Harvard freshman load and a 44-city concert tour simultaneously; Actress Julie Christie, 25, shedding miniskirt for bonnet and shawl while filming Hardy's Far from the Madding Crowd and denouncing "kooky clothing" in the women's magazines. It is Sanford Greenberg, 25, President of the senior class as Columbia, Phi Bete, Ph.D. from Harvard, George Marshall Scholar at Oxford, special assistant to the White House science advisor and friend of Folk Rocker Art Garfunkel, saying: "You've got to live with the nitty-gritty, man."

Early & Earnest. The young have already staked out their own minisociety, a congruent culture that has both alarmed their elders and, stylistically at least, left an irresistible impression on them. No Western metropolis today lacks a discotheque or espresso joint, a Mod boutique or a Carnaby shop. No transistor is immune from rock 'n' roll, no highway spared the stutter of Hondas. There are few Main Streets in the world that do not echo to the clop of granny boots, and many are the grannies who now wear them. What started out as a distinctively youthful sartorial revolt—drainpipe-trousered men, pants- suited or net-stockinged women, long hair on male and female alike—has been accepted by adults the world over.

If their elders have been willing to adapt to the outward life style of the young, they have been far more chary of their inner motivations and discrete mores. Youth, of course, has always been a topic of indefatigable fascination to what was once regarded as its elders and betters. But today's young people are the most intensely discussed and dissected generation in history.

Modern communications have done much to put them on center stage. Returning from a recent rally on the Berkeley campus, one U.C. coed reported that the demonstration had been a fiasco, "Why," she lamented, "we didn't get a single TV camera!" A more compelling reason for adult angst is that the young seem curiously unappreciative if the society that supports them. "Don't trust anyone over 30," is one of their rallying cries. Another, "Tell it like it is," conveys as abiding mistrust of what they consider adult deviousness.

Sociologists and psephologists call them "alienated" or "uncommitted"; editorial writers decry their "non-involvement." In fact, the young today are deeply involved in a competitive struggle for high grades, the college of their choice, a good graduate school, a satisfactory job—or, if need be, for survival in Viet Nam. Never have they been enmeshed so early or so earnestly in society. Yet they remain honestly curious and curiously honest. Far from "disaffiliated," they are more gregarious than any preceding generation.

Hang-Ups & Ardor. Despite its vast numbers and myriad subspecies, today's youth is most accurately viewed through the campus window: nearly 40% of all American youth go on to higher education, (compared to a scant 17% in 1940. By contrast, Britain sends only 9% of its young to university, and France, for all De Gaulle's grandeur, not more than 10%.) and more will soon follow. Despite their vaunted hang-ups, Yale's Kenneth Keniston, 36, a Rhodes scholar who has concentrated on student psychology, concludes that most of today's college students are a dedicated group of "professionalists." In the meritocracy of the '60s and '70s, he says, `No young man can hope simply to repeat the life pattern of his father; talent must be continuously improved." According to Keniston, only about one student in ten deviates from the spartan code of professionalism. "Few of these young men and women have any doubt that they will one day be part of our society," he concludes. "They wonder about where they fit in, but not about whether."

For the American fighting man in Viet Nam, the "whether" does not even arise. Unlike his World War II or Korean predecessor, he has known all his life that he must serve a military tour of duty, indeed has planned it along with college, marriage, and choice of vocation. From the moment he arrives (usually aboard a comfortable troop ship), through his bivouac experience (under conditions less arduous then most Stateside weekend hunting camps), to combat itself (as intense as any in history, but brief), he is supported by the best that his country has to offer—even though it is to fight a mean and dirty war.

He is swiftly moved into and out of combat in planes, helicopter or trucks. He has a camera, transistor, hot meals and regular mail. If he is hit, he can be hospitalized in 20 minutes; if he gets nervous, there are chaplains and psychiatrists on call. It is little wonder that he fights so well, and quite comprehensible that his main concern in off-duty hours is aiding the Vietnamese civilian. Among the fighting men, there is a good deal of the Peace Corps ardor that animates their peers back home.

Non-Protest Protest. In the U.S., for all the attention won (and sought) by their picket lines, petitions and protest marches, political activists on campus number at best 5% of the student bodies at such traditionally cause-conscious universities as Chicago, Columbia or California. At the majority of colleges and universities, there have been no student demonstrations against anything. At Shimer, a small (enrollment: 500) liberal arts college in Illinois, the undergraduates recently staged a rally to protest the lack of protest.

Indeed, despite tolerance of quixotic causes and idiosyncratic roles, the Man of the Year reflects—more accurately than he might care to admit—many of the mainstream currents in society at large. In 1966, the young American became vociferously skeptical of the Great Society. Though he retains a strong emotional identification of his own and other societies, he recognizes that the civil rights revolution, in which he was an early hero at the barricades, has reached a stage at which his own involvement is no longer vital. And, as a letter to the President signed by 100 student leaders across the nation showed last week, he has become increasingly perturbed by the war.

In nearly all their variants, the young possess points of poignant common interest. From activists to acidheads, they like to deride their elders as "stick-walkers" and "sellouts." Fond of such terms as "fragmentation" and "anomie" in sketching their melodramatic self-portraits, many of them assume an attitude that borders on nihilism. To the standard adult charge of youthful irresponsibility, as young California can reply, as Authors J.L. Simmons and Barry Winograd show in It's Happening, with the emotional outrage of a John Osborne character:

"Look at you, brainwashing a whole generation of kids into getting a revolving charge account and buying your junk. (Who's a junkie?) Look at you, needing a couple of stiff drinks before you have the guts to talk with another human being. Look at you, making it with your neighbor's wife just to prove that you're really alive. Look at you, screwing up the land and the water and the air for profit, and calling this nowhere scene the Great Society! And you're gonna tell us how to live? C'mon, man, you've got to be kidding!"

Instant Hedonism. Few organized movements of any description, from the John Birch Society to the A.F.L.-C.I.O to the Christian church, have the power to turn them on. "We're not going to get in Wrigley Field and `put one over the plate for Jesus baby,'" says a Georgia coed. Even union members have little sense of militancy. Having little fear that they will ever lack material comforts for their own part, the young tend to dismiss as superficial and irrelevant their elders' success- oriented lives. "You waited," sniffs a young Californian. "We won't." Nonetheless, today's youth appears more deeply committed to the fundamental Western ethos—decency, tolerance, brotherhood—than almost any generation since the age of chivalry. If they have an ideology, it is idealism; if they have one ideal, it is pragmatism.

Theirs is an immediate philosophy, tailored to the immediacy of their lives. The young no longer feel that they are merely preparing for life; they are living it. "Black power now!" cries Stokely Carmichael. "Action now!" demands Mario Savio. "Drop out now!" urges Timothy Leary. As Buell Gallagher, president of the City College of New York, sees it: "This generation has no utopia. Its idea is the Happening. Let it be concrete, let it be vivid, let it be personal, let it be now!"

With its sense of immediacy, the Now Generation couples a sense of values that is curiously compelling. It esteems inventiveness, eloquence, honesty, elegance and good looks—all qualities personified in the Now Generation's closest approximations of a hero, John F. Kennedy. "Heroism and villainy begin with fantasy," says Stephen Kates, 23, a brilliant concert cellist. "This generation has no fantasies."

In fact, as Harvard Sociologist Seymour Lipset observes they are "caught up in the myth that J.F.K. was a radical President, and would have done all sorts of things, bypassing the older generation." By contrast, the Now People almost universally mock Lyndon Johnson—as Leonard Iaquinta, 22, of Kensoha, Wis., puts it, for his "bluffs, come-on gimmicks and intellectual dishonesty."

Snoopy for President. They admire consistency, even when it comes to a conservative wrapping as that of William F. Buckley Jr. or Everett McKinley Dirkson (a sort of "camp" hero to the young for his hypersincere LP, Gallant Men). They deride extremists of all stripes—from Alabama's Wallaces to Mao Tse- tung. Whom would they nominate for President? The latest survey shows Bobby Kennedy and Mark Hatfield trailing Snoopy.

The vast majority of the Now Generation has little time for the far-out revels of the beatniks. In consequence, perhaps, its leisure time Happenings have an imaginative opulence that far transcends the entertainments of its parents. The result, as one authority puts it, is "a kind of hedonism of the moment." That hedonism was vibrantly evident last week on the beaches of Florida, where the vacationing young had arrived in force. While the sands thundered to the Big Beat of transistors at full blast, surfers leafed lightly over the waves, and girls in Bermuda length "cutoffs" or gaudy minishifts strolled languidly down the strand. Mostly, they read: Hans Reichenbach's The Rise of Scientific Philosophy, giant Batman comics, In Cold Blood, J.R.R. Tolkein's Lord of the Rings, and a strategic paperback titled How to Get Ahead in the Army. For those who could not make the sun scene, there was an new crop of movies to catch, coffeehouses for conversation, or further out, a burgeoning of psycho-discotheques tripping with lobster lights and the whining anti-melodies of Indian sitar music.

Positive Outlets. The Now Generation's hunger for sentience was honed in part by an adult invention: TV. From the tube they first acquired the almost frightening awareness and precocity that so often stuns adults. It is impossible for a youth who has stirred to Martin Luther King's rhetoric or the understated heroism of a combat-weary Negro officer in the Viet Nam jungles to accept the stereotypes about the Negro.

Though, as tomorrow's historians, they may ultimately credit their elders with a certain degree of prowess in staving off thermonuclear war, many pop-psych their growing pains in terms of the atom. "We're the Bomb Babies," says Los Angeles City College Student Ronald Allison, 23. "We grew up with fallout in our milk." The hyperbole may sound sentimental, but because of the Bomb, some Now People reach their teens feeling that they are trying to compress a lifetime into a day.

Despite unprecedented academic and social pressure, the young on campus are carefully keeping their options open (After all, it was Kierkegaard who said: "The desire to avoid definition is a proof of tact.") From Columbia to U.C.L.A., the shift is away from specialized subjects such as engineering and business administration and toward the humanities: English, history, political science. In particular, engineering, once a burgeoning discipline, is in sharp decline as a major subject: last year nearly a third of its engineering openings in the U.S. went unfilled. A new field of interest is urban planning, for today's young are committed as was no previous generation to redeeming the social imperfections that have ired and inspired the New Muckrakers: Ralph Nader (Unsafe at Any Speed), Richard Whalen (A City Destroying Itself), Michael Harrington (The Other America).

For the most altruistic, there are the Peace Corps and the 14 domestic service programs. "Here is a real, positive outlet," says Gibbs Kinderman, 23, who with his wife Kathy, 24, daughter of Historian Arthur Schlessinger Jr, is director of a poverty program in Appalachia. Lawrence Rockefeller Jr., 22, great- grandson of John D., obliquely justifies his work as a $22.50-a-week VISTA volunteer in Harlem: "Beyond affluence, what?" Answers Co-Worker Tweed Roosevelt, 24, great-grandson of Teddy: "Individualism."

Death & Transfiguration. The search for individual identity is as old as the generational gap. Athens and Rome both fondly cosseted and firmly curbed their children. Youth did not achieve a degree of social and political freedom until the 12th century. A rebellious band of University of Paris students decamped to Oxford and established a new and freer university; soon their idea spread throughout Europe, along with an entire youth subculture of drinking, wenching, dueling and an arcane language, a bastardized Latin eminently suited for drinking songs. In Italy, students formed guilds and hired professors (granted only one holiday a year), dictated the curriculum, and at Bologna, even insisted that their teachers speak at the double in order to get their money's worth.

In the eyes of many a modern university protester, this was the golden age of education. The essential debate between Lernfreiheit, student freedom, and the Anglo-Saxon tradition that the college stood in loco parentis, was first articulated in Germany in the late 18th century, and later drew some 9,000 American students eager to endorse the new freedom. The issue is still being fought on American campuses.

The transition from the free university of the Middle Ages to the disciplined college of the Renaissance heralded the birth of a new concept: the prolonged and protected childhood. "The adolescent," writes British Sociologist Frank Musgrove, "was invented at the same time as the steam engine. The principal architect of the latter was Watt in 1765; of the former, Rousseau in 1761." Rousseau extolled puberty as the second birth; "then it is that man really enters upon life; henceforth no human passion is a stranger to him."

The Romantic poets added self-pity to Rousseau's definition, Keats, whose death at 26 enhanced the mystique, made beauty and truth dependent on youthful death—or at least transfiguration. Yet another was taking place at the same time. With the surge of medical advice that accompanied the Industrial Revolution, mortality rates dropped among the young (life expectancy today is 70 years v. 41 in 1860), while factories and urbanization made youth a political-economic force.

By 1741, the Edler Pitt, at 32, could sardonically concede "the atrocious crime of being a young man." In the century after the French Revolution, new youth movements throughout Europe were the harbingers of change: Mazzini's "Young Europeans" in Italy; Russia's Czar-bombing nihilists; the Balkan Omladina (rejuvenation); Germany's Wandervogel (birds of passage). With their folk songs and philosophy—formed by Nietzsche and Ibsen, principally—they laid the groundwork for generations of activists to come.

Pines in the Storm. That youth movements can be perverted and captured by dictators and demagogues became all too clear: the successor to Germany's Wandervogel was the Hitler Youth, which the Communists took over intact in East Germany after 1945, changing only the name. Mao Tes-tung and his heir, Marshal Lin Piao. have shown that China's youth, steeped for millennia in a tradition of respect for their elders, can be turned in a moment into marauding anarchists. Indeed there is even a superficial similarity of style between the Red Guards and their Western counterparts among the Now People. Their evolutionary favorite, the Young Generation, could have been written by Mao Tse-Dylan: "We are not flowers in a greenhouse; we are pine trees in a storm."

Since World War II, activist youth has striven to regain the traditional, nonideological unity it has not possessed for a century. In the U.S., the leftist causes of the Depression remained inert in the immediate postwar years. Then the "Silent '40s" spawned the Beat Generation of the '50s, which reached deeply into such existentialist authors as Camus, Heidegger and Sartre, and cultivated a keen sense of social dislocation along with its beards. But their Zeitgeist was intellectual and stylistic; the 1960s brought a revival of true political dissident. Civil rights was the trigger, civil disobedience their weapon, marches and sit-ins the strategy.

Past Nietzsche. Because the nation endorsed the civil rights movement, America's youthful activist tasted victory in their pioneering cause. For the first time, commitment seemed to pay off, and a New Left was born: a grass-roots populist melange of organizations and splinter groups that struck in all directions—antipoverty, anticensorship, antiwar, anti- establishment. Says C.C.N.Y.'s Gallagher, himself a target of agitation: "Unlike the rebels of the '30s, who knew where they were going, the New Lefter today rejects ideologies—he's issue-oriented, not ideology-oriented."

Barry Metzger, 21, who as a Princeton undergraduate analyzed the new radicals in his senior thesis, breaks them down into a "Programmatic Left" (the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, Students for a Democratic Society); a "Far Left" (Communist-lining groups such as the W.E.B. DuBois Clubs); and the "Pot Left"—the alienated who totally condemn society but do not believe anything can be done about it.

Those who believe something can be done are, however, turning away from traditional areas of commitment such as religion. Harvard-based Lutheran Chaplain Paul Santmire, 29, finds that "these kids have been fed a Milquetoast gospel in a modern world; they view religion with a certain anthropological sophistication. Yet they are past Nietzsche, because they really would like to believe." More than 250,000 students are helping tutor children in depressed areas. A more immediately fruitful area for social involvement is the campus itself—a malleable microcosm of an existing and perfectible world. Harold Taylor, former president of Sarah Lawrence College, observed recently: "The student has become the most powerful invisible force in the reform of education—and, indirectly, in the reform of American society."

The Bunk Detector. What the Now Generation possesses in every stratum is a keen ability to sense meaning on many levels at the same time. In its psychological armory it counts a powerful array of weapons—both defensive and offensive. Foremost among them: a built-in bunk detector for sniffing out dishonesty and double standards.

When the Now People go on the offensive, they break out three very effective weapons: the Put-On, the Gross-Out, and the In-Talk. The first, which they adapted from the American Negro and learned during the civil rights marches, is the technique of the elaborate lie, the phony story that is aimed at gulling the listener and shaming him without his knowing it. the Gross-Out—or "garbage mouth"—is a blunter weapon. A group of young people in a club dominated by adults will suddenly begin chanting four-letter words, louder and filthier all the time, until they have completely disrupted the scene.

Both the Put-On and the Gross-Out are part of the Now Generation's "language bag"—a constantly changing lingo brewed from psychological jargon, show-biz slang and post- Chatterley obscenity. What the 1920s admiringly called a "good-time Charlie" is today Freudianized as a "womb baby," one who cannot kick the infantile desire for instant gratification. Anyone who substitutes perspiration for inspiration is a "wonk"—derived from the British "wonky," meaning out of kilter. The quality an earlier generation labeled cool is "tough" "kicky," "bitchin'," or "groovy." But the most meaningful facet of In-Talk is its ambiguity, a reflection of youth's determination to avoid self-definition even in conversation. "Up tight" can mean anxious, emotional, involved or broke; to "freak out" can mean to flip, go high on drugs, or simply to cross the edge of boredom' a "stud" can be either male or female, as long as he or she is "go"; a "bag" is both a problem and a field of interest.

Psychedelic Flip-Out. The ultimate weapon of the alienated young remains the same as that employed by Goethe's Werther" oblivion, wither physical (through suicide) or psychological (through drugs). Usually it is the latter though suicide rates are rising through much of the world in the 18-to-25 age group. In Iran, for example, fully 95% of the suicides are in the Now Generation; in the U.S. nearly one in ten. More often the flip- out is psychedelic. Acidheads and pot smokers feel that they can ease the weight of the Sisyphean stone by drug use. "LSD is like Ban deodorant," says a University of Michigan acidhead. "Ban takes the worry out of being close, LSD takes the worry out of being." The National Student Associations's Chuck Hollander, 27, who has written extensively on the subject, estimates that 20% of collage students use drugs, ranging from pep pills to marijuana, the amphetamines to the psychedelics (LSD, mescaline, and Psilocybin).

In the two major population centers of California, the use of marijuana (alias "boo", "grass", "tea" or "Mary Jane") is so widespread that pot must be considered an integral part of the generation's life experience. Insiders say that no fewer than 50% of Los Angeles high school students have tried marijuana at least once, and the 25% use it regularly once or twice a week. At Berkeley, marijuana has given way to acid, which costs $2.50 per trip v. $2 for a milder marijuana kick. In fact, though, the great majority of Now People shun the traditional opium derivatives—heroin and morphine—because they represent a passive withdrawal from experience. They want their "now" heightened and more meaningful.

The Core of Love. The generation shows the same empirical approach to love as many do to drugs. Says Billie Joe Phillips, 23, a Georgia coed who writes a twice-weekly column for the Atlanta Constitution: "For most of the girls in my age group who are married, it would have been better if someone had given them a gross of prophylactics, locked them in a motel room for two weeks, and let them get it out of their systems." Boys and girls together reject the post-Renaissance notion that passion, like a chrysanthemums, blooms best when vigorously pinched off. Says Sybil Burton Christopher, who married 25-year-old Bandleader Jordan Christopher after Richard Burton left her for Elizabeth Taylor: "They're breaking away from the unrealities of romantic love to get at the core of love."

Esoteric as that may sound to the adult ear, what it means to the young is that they have exorcised sexual inhibitions, They are monogamous only if they choose to be; they claim to find the body neither shameful nor titillating, and sneer self- righteously at the adults who leer at "topless" waitresses. "Hung up on no sex," is the put-down. Ironically, the revolt of the teeny-bopper on the Sunset Strip last November resulted in the demise of discotheques and the rise of "topless" clubs.

Many adults fear that the long-hair kicks among boys, the pants-suit fancies of girls, indicate a growing transferal of roles. Max Lerner warns darkly that homosexuality is on the rise among the young throughout he world. Not so, says the Now People: It's just that we talk about it more openly."

Another adult worry is that the pervasive Pill will give rise to mindless, heartless promiscuity among the young. They do, it is true, subscribe to a more tolerant morality than their elders, but their mating habits have changed little. "The old submarine—the girl who's under all the time—that's wrong." says a Southern coed. "So is being a professional virgin." Reasons Elizabeth Crosby, a sophomore at New College in Sarasota, Fla.: "Our attitudes are more an emphasis on relationships, and sex is bound up in this."

Out of Rhythm. For all their skepticism and hedonism, the Now Generation's folk art reflects a uniquely lyrical view of the world. Music is its basic medium, having evolved from the brassy early days of rock 'n' roll into the poignant, earthy beat of folk-rock (or "rock-Bach" as the West Coast enthusiasts call it.). From the controlled venom of the Beatles in a song like Eleanor Rigby ("Wearing the face that she keeps in a jar by the door") to the Eliotesque elegance of Simon & Garfunkel's Dangling Conversation ("Like a poem poorly written/We are verses out of rhythm/Couplets out of rhyme..."), the subject matter goes far beyond the moon-June lyrics of the past in pop.

Says Lyricist Paul Simon, 24: "It's become out of style to lay yourself open, to approach people with your arms open. Everybody nowadays is closed up—the put-on, the put-down. It's tough to come on with your arms wide, knowing you may get kicked in the groin. That's why I can look at Lyndon Johnson one day and despise him and another day I'll love him. Like that time he pulled up his shirt to show his scar—that was so human! I loved him for that."

The generation's other folkways are equally expressive. The no-touch, deadpan dances that so intrigue and sometimes repel adults are, to the Now People, not a sex rite but a form of emancipation from sex. "After all," says Jordan Christopher, "the beginning of dance was self-expression. It began without physical contact, and it wasn't for centuries that dancing went into the drawing room and became stiff and formal."

Shunning the novel and the theater, the Now People have a flair for film in keeping with their flickering values. John MacKenzie, an 18-year-old college sophomore from Stockton, Calif., won this year's Kodak Senior Teen-Age Movie Award with an evocative, camera-of-the-absurd put-on that showed two leather-jacketed, switch-bladed punks running up and down crumbling ladders, dancing on rooftops, beating up little kids, being chased by two other hoods, and finally escaping to lean wearily, ecstatically, on one another, saying, "Oh, boy! Oh, boy!" National Student Film Award Winner Eric Camiel, 23, evokes the sympathy most Now People feel for the underdog in his Riff '65, a deadpan portrait of a 15-year-old Manhattan dweller with artistic talent who loses his fingers under a subway train. "I can take all they can dish out," insists Riff.

Commitment to Change. Riff's stoic statement could stand as a self-deception. Can the Now People really take it? Can they endure all the abrasive relationships and anomalous demands—the psychological subway wheels—that the "real world" has to offer? Can they, as a first step, accommodate their own parents?" The generational gap is wider than I've ever seen it in my lifetime," says Harvard's David Riesman. Predicts Britain's Leslie Paul, whose autobiography gave the phrase "angry young man" to the world in 1951: "The relations of the generations may become the central social issue of the next 50 years, as the relations between the classes have been for the past half-century."

The questing, restless majority of the young may already be ahead of that issue. By the existential act of rejecting cogito, ergo sum for sum, ergo sum, they have taken on, willy- nilly, a vast commitment toward a kinder, more equitable society. The young often seem romantics in search of a cause, rebels without raison d'etre. Yet in many ways they are markedly saner, more unselfish, less hag-ridden than their elders.

Insulated by an ever-lengthening educational process from the instant adulthood they seek, pressed by modern change and technology into a precocious appreciation—often misguided—of the world they face, they are amazing resilient. Job Corps Sociologist David Gottlieb, 36, who was himself a dropout, finds in the Now People "a certain fidelity and loyalty that older people don't have." American G.I.s in South Viet Nam, for example, evince little envy or disapproval of their draft-exempt brothers-on-campus at home, despite student protests against their sacrifice. "This is an experience you get a lot out of," says Sgt. James Henderson, 21, of Guthrie, Ky. "If you live through it."

Indeed, Viet Nam has given the young—protesters and participants alike—the opportunity to disprove the doom criers of the 1950s who warned that the next generation would turn out spineless and grey-flannel-souled. Henry David Thoreau would have felt at home with the young of the '60s; they are as appalled as he was at the thought of leading "lives of quiet desperation." Indeed, for the future, the generation now in command can take solace from its offspring's determination to do better.

They will have to. For better or for worse, the world today is committed to accelerating change: radical, wrenching, erosive of both traditions and old values. Its inheritors have grown up with rapid change, are better prepared to accommodate it than any in history, indeed embrace change as a virtue in itself. With his skeptical yet humanistic outlook, his disdain for fanaticism and his scorn for the spurious, the Man of the Year suggests that he will infuse the future with a new sense of morality, a transcendent and contemporary ethic that could infinitely enrich the "empty society." If he succeeds (and he is prepared to) the Man of the Year will be a man indeed—and have a great deal of fun in the process.

COVERS GALLERY: Click here to see the cover image from 1966

Previous	Next