Remembering 1969 as it really was

What does nineteen sixty nine mean to you?
The last dying tremor of the swinging sixties,
Woodstock and free love, groovy baby,
Empty-headed teenagers and wasted hippies
Dancing in the fading glimmer of their youth,
Painted, cracked beads perished in the sun.

Or maybe you weren't even born then
- all you know is a tatty documentary film
about a media-created pop music fest,
and some footage of silver-shining Michelin men
jumping about in lunar zero gravity
(which malicious rumour has it was faked -
anything to distract the American public from
the forthcoming national humiliation of Vietnam).

So let me remind you how it really, really was:
Swinging London was rocking like crazy,
Wow, it was so cool, the groovy discos served
Delicious lukewarm coca-cola after eleven p.m.
And trendy Britain was a cute place to be gay
With homosexuality finally legalised
After a century of puritanical persecution,
Including hangings and thrashings galore.
Except that the law reform didn't apply in
Scotland or Northern Ireland or to the armed forces
And you had to be twenty-one and you could only do it
In private and if no third person was there
And, amusingly, not in a hotel.
Theatrical censorship was still in force
Which meant all naughty plays were blue-pencilled
By bureaucrats and narrow-minded prigs
And the worst kind of naughtiness was
Showing a queer as being human after all..

So let me remind you how it really, really was:
Religious riots in Belfast, Franco still in power in Spain,
(Cheers, you could go there for a cheapo sunshine holiday
With watered down sangria in the shade of a bayonet);
The Berlin Wall an unchallenged affront to human decency,
Thanks to old man Kosygin in absolute power in the Kremlin,
His iron rule in force throughout Eastern Europe,
Poor Prague's defeat emphasised by occupying Soviet tanks.
And lovely Greece, birthplace of democracy, home to Zorba's dance
(except that it was a criminal offence under the Colonels
to play any of Theodorakis's music because the most famous living Greek
was condemned as a goddamned communist revolutionary bastard,
"serves him right" thought the Conservative Party of GB and NI).

So, let me remind you how it really, really was:
Nixon in the White House, half a million American troops
Fighting a losing battle for democracy in Vietnam
(more accurately against democracy, but the jury is still out on that),
And nearly as many US citizens on the march against the war.
Whilst the rest of the world looked on in indifference or disgust,
Since they had had enough common sense to stay out of it,
Jolly well done. Socialist Harold Wilson told the warlike yanks
To shove their imperialist war in a sunless place.
When we think back nostalgically to such a terrible, terrible year,
All the media seems to tell us is the insipid lie
That nineteen sixty-nine was a lovely summer of love.
It wasn't like that, dear readers, one and all, wise and foolhardy:
It was boring and provincial and not at all swinging and I was there
Letting it all hang out but discreetly as of necessity.