THREE YOUNG MEN, their faces painted with geometrical designs, were lying in the rubble of what was to be a life-size papier-mache cow, wailing loudly, "La vaca es muerta!," while two policemen attempted to pull them to their feet. People were spinning around ecstatically to a Jimi Hendrix guitar riff. A girl stops short: "I'm tripping," she says, her eyes dilated and staring at an image of a dragon overhead.

Is this some obsucre tribal ritual? Performance art? Haight-Ashbury, circa 1967?

Close. Try Columbia University, at last weekend's Reality Fest.

A small band of Columbia students planned this multi-media event, featuring montages of surrealist films, psychedelic slideshow, sixties-style rock bands, laser shows, communal art projects and huge quantities of drugs. Nine hundred Columbia students showed up to attend. But this was not an eighties beer party with a nostalgic sixties decore, but a genuine revival of the mind-blowing, consciousness-raising sixties "happening."

But the very accurace of the revival makes it a disturbing phenomenon. Even though Columbia students know as well as anyone that you cannot turn back the clock, they still flocked to participate in a scene straight out of Hair--an affair where over 100 people were doing hard drugs simultaneously.

The whole Fest was a false storefront for a particularly conspicuous expression of eighties values. The organizers of the Reality Fest reversed the sixties ethos, putting the means (drugs) before the ends (enlightenment and love). Back in the sixties, young people had some positive beliefs about drugs like L.S.D. Hallucinogens were a new frontier, something the Establishment had not discovered, thus something that could allow youth to reach a higher level of understanding than their stuffy elders.

Now, 20 years down the road, the Establishment is agonizing--a la The Big Chill--over the fact that all the acidinduced free expression didn't keep them from taking the same jobs as their stuffed-shirt predecessors, making the same money, and living in a society plagued with the same inequality, misery and ignorance.

Students know this. We are all able to see the element of absurdity in the conflict of sixties youthful idealism and the eighties middle-aged complacency. The fervor of today's youth is tempered by cynicism. Not even the most drugaddled mind at the Reality Fest believed that the event was for a good cause.

"It's just a big excuse to take drugs. Everybody knew about it," said one of the organizers. This is a different kind of defiance than that expressed in the sixties. Instead of the right to "do your own thing," students proclaim the right to "get baked.

THE REALITY FEST was not a hardened, jaded assortment of eighties youth out of the pages of Less Than Zero or Bright Light, Big City. There was a jubilant esprit de corps that arose from the irony of the situation. Here was a new twist on an old and no longer meaningful pastime--"mass bakage" in the thinly disguised form of an idealism dead for 20 years. The festival offered fresh entertainment in the mild lampooning of flower power, a perfect showcase for cynically irreverent eighties fun.

As the festivities died down and the visions began to fade away, people heading home from their brush with Reality saw that same vaguely bovine pile of rubble hoisted to the top of a large inscribed cylinder in the center of Columbia's quad. The light shining down upon it from the eminence of the Columbia Library gave it the ridiculous appearance of a sacrifice.

Everyone had to laugh. The builders of this joke-cow didn't really care if Columbia figured out a reason for the sacrifice. The rubble was there only to demonstrate that they had managed to have a good time in some mysterious way. And that's all that mattered.