The Red House on Isla Vista

The decade that began so brilliantly for so many young Americans ended in a drug-induced inner-space nightmare on the streets of America and in the rice paddies of Southeast Asia. Militant anti-communist politicians took full advantage of our inherited patriotism with few moral boundaries or even fewer consistent values. The Sixties produced the best music and the worst politicians ever. Nobel Laureate Bob Dylan, The Beatles, Country Joe McDonald and the Fish, Jefferson Airplane, Jim Morrison and the Doors, Joan Baez, and the Rolling Stones would have never achieved fame during the ensemble brassiness of the Big Band Era or within the confines of the syncopated rhythms of the Fifties. Rock musicians offered the truth, but politicians deceived in the cruelest way-using the draft as a stick and patriotism as a carrot-to engage in bloody crusades against imaginary threats to capitalism, democracy, and freedom which blew in from Southeast Asian windmills. During this twisted decade, American society was fundamentally and irreparably shattered by three prominent occupants of the White House: John F. Kennedy, the visionary scion too rich and too bold for his own survival; Lyndon "how many kids have you killed today" Johnson, the Texas cornpone fascist with a guilt-ridden conscience; and Richard Milhous Nixon, the Shakespearian self-destructive over-achiever consumed by alcohol and ambition. These three political leaders set the stage for today's divisive, dysfunctional and identity-driven deep pocket plutocracy. Sadly, JFK's New Frontier, LBJ'S Great Society, and 'Nixonland' were populist fairy tales foisted on a paranoid society hungry for security from Russian satellites beeping overhead and Cuban communists poised to invade just 90 miles from Key West. God help us if those Commies ever launched those nukes and land on our shores! DUCK AND COVER! Three naïve post-adolescents imagine "Isla Vista" as a seductive playground, an undiscovered paradise where they can consume alcohol underage, receive tuition-free quality higher education, and experience erotic sexual freedom. Instead, their futures were purloined by events beyond their control: among them, civil rights struggles, drugs, political assassinations, threat of nuclear war, and fighting for a cause in Vietnam that few understood. As they and their friends nervously reflect upon their pasts at a reunion, they remember how war, psychotropic drugs, and struggles for equal rights and social justice affected entire families. They recall how some listened more intently, became political activists and marched against discrimination, militarism, and segregation. Many silently confess that they were troubled by violence triggered by war, inequality and racism, but instead sought economic security and joined the academic, business and legal establishments. Meanwhile, the agenda for change initiated in the Sixties remains incomplete. The Sixties shattered attitudes about civil rights, drugs, gender roles, race, sex, sexism, war, and paternalistic authority-causing deep rifts in politics, morality and the American Dream. From a pristine and unspoiled environment known as "Isla Vista," three naïve post-adolescents cope with uncertain futures. Personal choices play out against a larger world stage filled with multiple obstacles and intense struggles. The fragile fault lines of American identity politics began to crack in Sixties, deepened in the ensuing decades, and eventually fractured with the anti-establishment electoral tsunami and the ensuing seismic transition of power in 2016. Our leaders failed us and American politics still suffers from the social malaise that began in this jumbled decade-the music is still the greatest!