It seems that every decade since it ended, writers and journalists and people who were there are prone to dusting off their tie-dye shirts and red bandanas and Grateful Dead records and getting down to the wistful, frustrating business of remembering the year 1968.
In its half-centenary year, the nostalgia and wonder and sheer improbability of the tumultuous events that swept so much of the world in 1968 have once again been making their way into newspapers and TV specials and onto magazine covers and websites.
The more that's been written about it, the more it seems that there never was and never will be another year so full of anger and hope and dashed dreams and dead heroes and what writer Mark Kurlansky, in his seminal book on the subject, describes as "a spontaneous combustion of rebellious spirits around the world".From the streets of Paris to Prague, Mexico City, Rio de Janeiro, Port Harcourt, Chicago and the intersection of Haight and Ashbury streets in San Francisco, something unusual was very clearly happening, even though - in a haze of marijuana smoke, LSD consciousness expansion, acid rock, free love and the shocking TV images of the war in Vietnam - it wasn't always exactly clear what.
Many places since have had their watershed years - 1989, 1994, 2001, the Arab Spring, 2016, but even in the age of the internet and the smartphone there's never been a single moment in which people in places all over the world began to question and protest against the growing divides between parents and their children, leaders and their followers, ideologies and their lived realities.
It was the year of the Yippies, and Palestine and the Prague Spring and The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. It was the year in which the realities of what was happening to young men forced to go and fight an unwinnable war in Southeast Asia were brought into living rooms around the world - wreaking havoc on the relationships between fathers and mothers who had served in World War 2 and their sons and daughters who were not going to die like the men on their TV screens in a year when the Tet Offensive had shown that president Lyndon B Johnson's assertion that the US was gaining significant ground was plainly untrue.
Instead, the youth packed their rucksacks and put on their Eastern-inspired clothes and bracelets and headed off to San Francisco, where they could be found dancing in their birthday suits, smoking joints, hanging out with the Grateful Dead and drinking liquid dinners with Janis Joplin.
Their increasingly exasperated and bewildered parents struggled to understand what the hell was going on while their children were dreaming of a world that might be possible beyond the staid, middle-class conventions they'd been taught to aim for.They were also angry - angry about race, about war, about capitalism, communism or whatever other total idea was being forced down their throats in the black and white, good and evil version of the world created in the shadow of World War 2, the Holocaust and the nuclear bomb.
It was a situation headed for confrontation and born out of a divide in attitudes that in many cases never quite healed, and paved the way for the hardening of conservative values in many countries and a failure to properly resolve questions of inequality in many others.
The kids had seen the bodies on their TVs but they'd also grown up in the age of the Civil Rights Movement and had seen the power of organised protest to effect change - evidenced in student demonstrations from France to Mexico and Columbia University.
Even a few University of Cape Town students got in on the act, staging a sit-in to protest against the university's buckling under pressure from the apartheid government and deciding not to hire a black professor.
That was just about the most 1968 thing that happened in South Africa, where white rule was enjoying a relatively prosperous and unencumbered period thanks to prime minister BJ Vorster's determination that in spite of all the nonsense that may have been going on in the rest of the world, the breakdown of law and order in South Africa would "not be tolerated under any circumstances".
Tanks rolled in to crush the Prague Spring
As Vorster was making these assurances, South African newspapers were carrying pictures of tanks rolling into Prague, where they were met by long-haired hippie Czechs still hopeful but increasingly helpless as it turned out you couldn't stop Russian tanks with smiles and transistor radios blaring rock 'n' roll.
In August, mayor Richard J Daley let his Chicago cops loose on protesters during the Democratic national convention, causing outrage and fear and ruining the chances of the election of any anti-Vietnam candidates. Bobby Kennedy, the Democratic candidate on whom so many hopes had rested, had died in a pool of his own blood after being shot in a hotel kitchen in LA, Martin Luther King had been taken out by an assassin's bullet on the steps of a motel in Memphis, Andy Warhol had survived being shot by Valerie Solanas outside The Factory in New York.By the time Tommie Smith and John Carlos took to the podium at the Olympics in Mexico City in October to give the black power salute, much of the anger and violence that had erupted on streets all over the world had ended. Either with violence from the authorities - as had happened just a few weeks earlier when 300 to 400 Mexican students were killed by the army in a massacre that was covered up for decades - or by what seemed to be a deflation of the idealism that had characterised much of the year's events.
Not all the dreams you may have of a better world while living in a commune populated by geodesic dwellings are possible when the man has many guns and tanks and teargas.
Culturally, all of these tectonic social upheavals were reflected, as what was once the counterculture now became the culture. The Beatles took so much acid they turned themselves into animated characters and went to live in a yellow submarine, Mick Jagger and Keith Richards wrote Street Fighting Man and Sympathy for the Devil, Jean-Luc Godard was making Maoist films featuring revolutionary slogans and the Rolling Stones, Roman Polanski turned a generation off pregnancy with Rosemary's Baby and Stanley Kubrick blew the minds of decades of filmmakers with 2001: A Space Odyssey.
Eldridge Cleaver put the fear of god into white America with his book Soul on Ice while Gore Vidal turned the stomachs of heteronormative, uptight middle America with Myra Breckinridge. Everywhere you looked, whether on the streets, on the shelves of your local record or bookstore, or in the dark of the cinema, something must have seemed to be happening - in the '60s use of the word.
TV, a relatively new medium, was still finding its way to establishing what it should and shouldn't show, and so many of the events of 1968 - violent, upsetting, controversial - found their way onto TV screens in ways they would never really get a chance to do on mainstream networks again, spreading potentially subversive and divisive imagery that caused many a fight in many a dining room. There were the assassinations, the war, the protests, the hippies, the rock stars and the women's rights activists burning their bras outside the Miss America pageant - not the kind of things that The Brady Bunch should be exposed to.
The most influential environmental photograph ever
You could argue, in our moment of tweeting world leaders, #BlackLivesMatter, #MeToo, #RhodesMustFall and the increasing footage of social protests we're sent on our Facebook pages and phones, that the tensions which gave rise to the events of 1968 are again being felt in the ether, and you may be right - who knows what might happen, as they used to ask jokingly in 1967.
However, it's not only as a marker of similarities to subsequent eras that we keep remembering 1968, it's because it truly was a unique moment in the history of humanity worth recalling for its own sake - for its mad, whirling mix of hope and despair and the potential for people to think beyond the often harsh and oppressive realities of their daily existence.It may have ended with the terrible spectre of Richard Nixon and his landslide election victory, but I like to think that the image that best captures the real lesson of 1968 is one taken very far away from Tricky Dick's victory podium. It's the "most influential environmental photograph ever", taken by astronaut Bill Anders during the Apollo 8 mission on Christmas Eve 1968.
Because, after all the many outbreaks of rebellion and attempted change that took place on Earth that year, Anders's Earthrise is the most powerfully simple reminder of the fact that in the end, as David Bowie would point out in 1969, "Planet Earth is blue", and there's not much you can do.
The D'Oliveira affair
England's 1968 cricket tour of South Africa was cancelled because prime minister BJ Vorster, pictured, refused to let South Africa play a racially mixed team. Vorster was offended by the inclusion in the test team of all-rounder Basil D'Oliveira, who had left South Africa to play for England because he was not permitted to participate at national level at home. The cancellation kicked off the sporting isolation of South Africa, which helped bring an end to apartheid. Eventually...