It is an easy target, but still, I don't know about this "wish I could have been around" stuff. I have a friend who is in his 30s and dresses like a hippie and wishes he could have been 10 years older and at Woodstock. I tell him that the 60s were at least as full of fakers and assholes (actually probably more) than any other period. But his dream is ineradicable, and makes him ineffective: he is an activist haunted by the 60's, which will never come back, and so he is failing in the 90's. My feeling is that it is a bit like a belief in IBM -- everyone who is outside thinks it must be wonderful or full of geniuses -- and when you get in you discover that as usual there is a tiny fraction of titans, and the rest are the standard dreck. It is the same about history. What one wants is to be back in that period knowing what you know now, but that never happens outside of movies -- one would inevitably have grown up 10 or more years earlier in a different culture which had never heard of the things that the culture 10 years later had begun to hear about on the fringes, and so on, and one would have made a whole range of other silly, lazy choices.
I dream about being here now, and one day I may even make it. It hasn't happened yet, but one day, if I work at it enough.
yours, Peter T.