Elegies are all about endings, of course, and the only way to maintain a view of the `60s as an unwrinkled utopia of upheaval is to present it as something that ended but isn't over. This can get tricky. On the one hand, the aura and example of the decade have to be seen as enduring-otherwise, the `60s was pointless. Yet at the same time the `60s must be portrayed as a kind of discrete empyrean, unsullied by the compromised, workaday decades that followed-otherwise, the `60s were really pointless.