The '60s ended 30-odd years ago, but you'd never know it. It's the Groundhog Day of decades, relived over and over in an endless loop. And lately, it's with us more than ever.

Hippie, a lavish new coffee-table book about the decade's counterculture, is a national best-seller. A movie about Che Guevara has opened to critical hosannas. Bob Dylan is on the cover of Newsweek. Smile, the just-released album by Brian Wilson, based on a legendary 1966 recording session, is a cultural phenomenon comparable to the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls.

Vietnam came roaring back recently and all but blotted out the sun. Iraq? Where's that? Only a '60s war could pull off such a stunt.

Long-past decades have always cycled in and out fashion. The '70s hosted revivals of both the '20s (Redford's Gatsby) and the '50s (Happy Days). Today, the latter decades of the 20th century come and go through pop culture's ever-faster-revolving door, each an inexhaustible font of sitcoms, Web sites, DVD reissues, and Rhino Music box sets. That '70s Show. The Greatest Generation. Things are so gloomy at the moment, even the '90s are looking golden.

But the '60s have a keen demographic advantage. Boomers got naked and high at Woodstock and never fully came down. They've kept the hookah burning ever since, through a long stream of cultural products including the concerts of all those eternally touring, wizened rockers who at this rate will soon be performing from gurneys.

As members of that generation get older, their decade moves with them through time, conquering every inch of the culture it happens to touch. They even turned their era into a canny marketing device, when they discovered you can sell pretty much anything—running shoes, laptops, deodorant, minivans—by associating it with the patchouli-and-paisley years. People were creative and wild back then, see, and if you buy our product, you'll be creative and wild, too—because we played an old Stones song during the ad. It's idiotic, but it works. This is how Janis Joplin got into hawking Mercedes-Benz, and why Jimi Hendrix is a now a Pepsi pitchman.

The narcissism can be breathtaking. When '60s folk were young, they famously wouldn't trust anyone over 30. Now that they're running the cultural show, it's hip to be old, and getting hipper by the minute. Perhaps you've noticed that Rolling Stone and AARP The Magazine are harder and harder to tell apart. Last week, The New York Times ran a big lifestyle piece about cool places where "active" oldsters are retiring: "The new retirees are sort of a senior version of college-age ski bums, migrating to resort towns not to work but to play all day."

Yes, the hairy rebels who rejected materialism and wanted to live in yurts are now flocking to deluxe gated communities. Can't you just see them curled up in their Japanese soak-tubs, devouring Hippie? A coffee-table book about the counterculture! What a long, strange trip it's been.

Funny, though, if you pick up Hippie and page through it, you can see why '60s-ophilia is selling again. There's something extremely magnetic just now about these images: the Dionysian cavorters in bell-bottoms; the cross-legged gurus; the bearded, toking poets; the grave protesters in the streets.

The mesmerizing Dylan essay in Newsweek, an excerpt from his new memoir, is the '60s at its most tortured and sincere—a great artist saying the same sorts of strange, gnomic things he said back then. Dylan actually regrets what his own decade did to him, wishes he could have lived a quietly anonymous, picket-fence kind of life. "I really was never any more than what I was—a folk musician who gazed into the gray mist with tear-blinded eyes and made up songs that floated in a luminous haze." In short, he rejects the '60s in a very '60s way.

Even for those of us born too late to join the be-in, there's a tremendous pull here. It's not just one self-absorbed generation foisting its nostalgia on the rest of us, or a cynical Madison Avenue ploy. Society is always turning away from the present, trying to find itself—or lose itself—in the past. In a time of anger and confusion, we naturally look to an earlier time that seems to mirror our own.

We're drawn to the '60s again because of what's happening right now, in the world and culture we share. We're in a terrible war that was launched on dubious evidence, in a zealous fervor. Our great public institutions, including the media, have failed us.

Of course we're running back to the Summer of Love. It's a kind of therapy, a way of escape. Some days, it's too painful to look hard at Iraq, so we stare again at Vietnam. Listen one day to "Blowin' in the Wind," either the Dylan version or Peter, Paul, and Mary's. It could have been written last week.

The '60s were an intense, foolish, scary, expressive, amazingly vital time, a time when people woke up to lies they'd been telling themselves and tried to find a better way to live.

In the end, there was no revolution, and just as well. Who wants to live in a yurt, anyway? There were beautiful moments and real achievements, and there were endless mistakes and excesses.

So let's revisit that wonderful-awful time and take from it what we can. But then let's make sure we return to the present.