The nutzoid column of the week: Dawn Eden on "The Summer of Love" [View All]

When it comes to the most over-the-top breathless hyperbole in a column, this is my nominee for the week. "Dawn Eden" a former editor at the New York Daily News (of course), writes a column in today's LA Times that is completely, and I mean completely, nuts. Here's her blog, and if you are not right wing and Opus Dei Catholic, be aware that she seeks that fate for you: http://www.dawneden.com/blogger.html

Here's the column, http://www.dailynews.com/theiropinion/ci_6158414, and a few of my own comments:

Summer of love: 40 years later
Hippie Hippie Shakedown: But where was love?
BY DAWN EDEN, Guest Columnist

(Where was Dawn Eden? She was born in 1968 - the year after "The Summer of Love." Wouldn't know it from the judgment she renders about 1967.)

"WHEN it comes to inappropriate names, "Summer of Love" has to be right up there with "Joy Division," the name the Nazis reportedly gave to the sections of concentration camps that housed the guards' sex slaves."

("Right up there?" With the Nazis? Sets a lovely tone for what's to come in her column.)

"At the celebrated Be-Ins and Love-Ins, the mob ruled, while - like those Playboy cartoons of orgies where one person's orifice is indistinguishable from another's - the individual was subsumed."

("Mob ruled?" I seem to recall that no one ruled. It was about as unruly a time as it gets. Maybe the music ruled. She apparently has a thing for orifices. In cartoons, most characters don't even have orifices. Actually, the individual is more likely to be subsumed by religious fanatacism, Dawn - better beware.)

"Supporters of the hippies' objectives argue that they and future generations benefited from the dismantling of repressive Eisenhower-era values that restricted sex to marriage. Well, say what you will about a culture that presumed women found their highest fulfillment in motherhood, but one doesn't see many repressed housewives panhandling on modern-day Haight Street. One does see lost geriatric flower children with stringy hair and rotten teeth who contracepted or aborted the children who could have taken care of them in their old age."

(I love this paragraph. I have no idea what she is talking about with the "repressed houswives panhandling" comment, but the last sentence is one I shall always treasure as over-the-top to the nth degree, absolutely hilarious. Are these the same stringy hair-rotten teeth geriatrics that investment firms are now spending fortunes marketing to using Iron Butterfly and Donovan music? As for the "contracepted" part, apparently Dawn doesn't have to worry about contraceptives - she is the author of "The Thrill of the Chaste: Finding Fulfillment While Keeping Your Clothes On!")

"Today, the counterculture's victims are dying with few children to mourn them - at least, few who are willing to speak to parents who put their own desires ahead of their children's. It is the end of a long, bad trip."

(Dawn Eden is apparently a former rock journalist who burned out and found Jesus, and went completely bonkers about it. More about her here: http://gawker.com/news/dawn-eden/
She is certainly bitter about something; maybe it has something to do with the fact that her mother was apparently having sex during the Summer of Love (at least, in the fall) in 1967, as Dawn was born Sept. 3, 1968. And sex, after all, involves an orifice. Certainly, the comment about "few children to mourn them" and not "willing to speak to parents who put their own desires ahead of their children's" raises questions about the nature of her own relationship with her mother. Oh well. What does it all ultimately mean? As a great philosopher once said, "Don't mean sheeit. . .")