Mad Magazine + Tom Hayden = SDS

Wanna read more? Here's another excerpt from the intro (on view at the exhibit):

The Vietnam War was, of course, the central political issue of Students for a Democratic Society, as inevitable as its locus on the nation's campuses. The mystery of the rebellion unraveled in this book is that SDS and all its energies never resembled the specter that so many in powerful places and in lonely living rooms feared and pondered. If, according to polls conducted among them, a large segment of the student population considered itself somehow "revolutionary" by the peak years of 1968-70, it was not in the name of any revolution that had existed or would exist, perhaps any that could exist.

Some more samples from the exhibit and intro:

In our twenty-first century, the perspective has, of course, become very different. Not because the doddering radical veterans of that era have lived through so many years (and tears, and beers) and still remain part of the largest population bubble. Not because the structure of American society has changed in any fundamental way. Rather, it has to do with the sobering fact that just as the sixties generation is itself entering old age, its hard-won lessons seem to have reappeared.

Today the Empire has badly overreached again. Our political elite is once again in disarray. The current Iraqi conflict, raising the voices of the powerful against each other as never since the sixties, exposes the flawed logic of Empire. However different the nation has become in forty years, creativity still arguably blossoms best among youth, those who have the least stake in the existing rules of society.

The reasons that the 1960's have never quite gone out of common perspective is that the music, the cartoons and comics, the posters, the impulses, and the fears did not actually get old with the people who first lived them. The idea that any little group of saviors, self-avowed Weathermen or dogmatic Marxists, would lead America or the world into the promised land is over. Everyone in the Wal-Mart Nation knows better. But the crises didn't really go away, any more than did the urgent need and the simultaneous improbability of an inspired mass awakening to a better, more ecologically sound, more peaceful and cooperative, Age of Aquarius-like future.

You could spend a couple of hours just looking and reading. And shaking your head up, down and sideways.