Wolfgang, 23, and Lisa, 24, will be sentenced next week by a California judge who they must hope is a Deadhead, as the hand’s astonishingly loyal and often nomadic fans like to be called. He could sentence the Maryland couple to six years in prison for abandoning their 3-year-old son at a San Bernardino mall on June 2. “I figured that without food and without money and without diapers to put on his butt what else could I do,” says Wolfgang, who also says, “I walked away in tears.” Then he dried his tears and he and Lisa, who were not really without money, abandoned their ear and took a bus north to a Grateful Dead concert in San Francisco.

Then, with the help of a driver of a strawberry truck they met in Nevada, they headed for Maryland. There they boasted of abandoning their son, and talked of hiking the Appalachian Trail. On the Trail a sheriff’s investigator first detained Lisa on a 1993 warrant for failing to appear in a child support ease involving her four other children. Later both were charged with endangering their child. What a bummer for two Deadheads who probably only wanted to have their own version of the Summer of Love, as the summer of 1907 was known in San Francisco.

Garcia, who was rarely a martyr to the strictures of healthy behavior, died in his sleep at a drug treatment center. He had used a lot of LSD and heroin and other substances in his day, but his death at age 53 strikes his fans as proof that the universe as currently administered is unfair. The New York Times front-page obituary said that the Grateful Dead “symbolized a spirit of communal bliss, with freewheeling, anything-can-happen music,” and Garcia “had come to represent the survival of 1960s’ idealism.”

But Wolfgang and Lisa really represent that survival. And they may well be wondering just what exactly they did that was so awfully wrong. Why are the authorities now acting so, well, so judgmental? After all, the Sixties are incessantly praised and they were a celebration of “liberation,” understood as emancipation from the oppression of social restraints and from the repression of inner restraints. Duties, responsibilities, obligations and other notions that interfere with immediate gratifications were understood to be mere “hang-ups.” Or they were considered “constructions” of bourgeois society, imposed by the “power structure” to prevent the free-flowering of a truly human counterculture. The Sixties were, and the unending rhapsodizing about that decade is, a sustained exhortation to a four-word ethic: “Do your own thing.” Which is precisely what Wolfgang and Lisa did.

Garcia, who was as personable as he was industrious, and the Grateful Dead cannot be held accountable for the character of all their fans. But he and the band were pleased to be thought of as keepers of the flame of the Sixties. The band’s music may have been grand but the band has promoted much more than music. Around it has hung an aroma of disdain for inhibitions on recreational uses of drugs and sex. During the band’s nearly 30-year life the costs of “liberation” from such inhibitions have been made manifest in millions of shattered lives and miles of devastated cities. The band has been a touring time capsule, keeping alive the myth that there is something inherently noble about adopting an adversary stance toward “bourgeois” or “middle class” values. But it turns out that society’s success depends on these values. Never mind that the band is big business (some years it has grossed more than some major league baseball teams) and that some of its fans are stockbrokers. The band has prospered as the emblem of an era and is complicit in the continuing consequences of the era.

The spirit of the Sixties was, strictly speaking, infantile. For an infant, any appetite is self-legitimizing. Infantilism was the leitmotif of that decade and is the insistent theme of much of today’s popular culture. In the current issue of The New Republic, Stanley Crouch explains why “the value of youth is hysterically championed at the expense of a mature sense of life. This exploits the insecurities of young people by telling them, over and over, that never growing up is the best defense against an oppressive world where fun isn’t given its proper due.” But that is only part of the story. The portion of popular culture that constantly sentimentalizes the Sixties also panders to the arrested development of the Sixties generation which is no longer young but wishes it were and seeks derivative vitality from graying rock stars.

However, every once in a while mortality rears its ugly head. Then the Sixties generation gets terribly serious and goes to the movies. To “The Big Chill,” to be exact. You remember that one, in which popular music is the all-purpose cue for memories and some alumni of the Sixties gather and act almost affronted by the fact that death can happen to someone of their generation. Speaking of a mature sense of life.

Shortly before she died of a heroin overdose, Janis Joplin sang, “Freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose.” No, it is not, and it does not just mean an absence of restraints. What does it mean to say a rock band “epitomizes freedom”? Nothing, really. And what is the meaning of the phrase “psychedelic optimism”? The adjective “psychedelic” is an echo of the Sixties. Webster’s dictionary used to refer, not altogether helpfully, to “a person with psychedelic social and cultural interests and orientation.” It also said the adjective could mean “brightly colored” or could refer to the results of drugs that produce hallucinations, delusions and other abnormal psychic states sometimes resembling mental illnesses. The phrase “psychedelic Sixties” suitably suggests that the decade, and today’s nostalgia for its “idealism,” are subjects to be considered in the context of mental states and disturbances that are not benign.