"The Dirty F*&king Hippie Caucus was Right" (from Crooks & Liars)

The Dirty F*&king Hippie Caucus was Right
By: John Amato on Saturday, January 13th, 2007 at 1:20 PM - PST

Glenn Greenwald on Rod Dreher's conversation:

I had a heretical thought for a conservative - that I have got to teach my kids that they must never, ever take Presidents and Generals at their word - that their government will send them to kill and die for noble-sounding rot - that they have to question authority.

On the walk to the parking garage, it hit me. Hadn't the hippies tried to tell my generation that? Why had we scorned them so blithely?

Barbara O'Brien has a wonderful piece posted on this—although I was ten when Nixon got elected in '68:

But then our hearts were broken in Dallas, and less than two years later Lyndon Johnson announced he would send troops to Vietnam. And then the young men of my generation were drafted into the meat grinder. Sooner or later, most of us figured out our idealism had been misplaced. I was one of the later ones; the realization dawned for me during the Nixon Administration, which began while I was a senior in high school. Oh, I still believed in liberty and democracy; I felt betrayed because I realized our government didn’t. And much of my parents’ generation didn’t seem to, either.

The counterculture was both a backlash to that betrayal and to the cultural rigidity of the 1950s.

http://www.crooksandliars.com/2007/01/13/the-dirty-fking-hippie-caucus-was-right/
*

Right on.

:hippie:

Right about a lot of damn things.

The chorus of condemnation came from entrenched republicon crony interests, that stood to lose stature and money if the Hipsters were allowed to show how Wrong and Greedy they were (and are).

as science now tells us we're killing our immune systems by washing too much with anti-bacterial soap.

:rofl:

The false "dirty" label was just to further demonize us to the straights.

But, I'm sure you knew that already.

HELL YES!

born between 1955 and 1964 were the yuppie boomers, the generation that was too young for Vietnam and only knew the hippies as degenerates their parents complained about for hours at a time at the dinner table and during the evening's TV fare. On the whole, they were much, much more conservative than that first cohort and benefited from the educational and business infrastructure that hadn't quite been ready to deal with the eldest of the first cohort. They have done a bit better financially, since they escaped 10 years of having pension contributions stolen every time they changed jobs, of the worst of the OPEC induced oil shock going through the economy causing double digit negatives for working people.

By and large, they just didn't get it.

The bulk of Stupid's support has come from this cohort. Coming of age slightly before and during the Reagan years, they barely remember a country without homeless women and children and with jobs that paid even the lowliest workers a living. The Reagan years were positive years, boom years (although most never saw any of it) and some sort of moral restoration that wrested the country's conscience from those scruffy, unwashed, loudmouthed louts called hippies.

It's about time they started to come around. I am happy to see it happen.

I was born right in the middle of your "yuppie boomer" age group, and there are plenty of us who don't fit your description. However, you are right about some of our generation. I was twenty when Reagan was elected in 1980, and it was a very discouraging time for a lot of reasons. Young Republicans were a major force on campuses, and Young Democrats were sparse. Nonetheless, plenty of us held onto our beliefs. I called myself a Socialist way back then and I call myself a Socialist today.

I mean the socialist part. Though back then I was a Democrat and am still registered as such but my personal philosophy is socialist.

I've always felt sad that I missed the time of the hippie and while I dress in urban camoflage, I know I'm a hippie at heart. In the last few years I've realized that I live the life I had hoped to have with the hippies. I'm a pagan living in a communal family situation surrounded by freaks and acid heads(I myself don't do it anymore because I had one too many bad trip, man) and a guy we convinced to come off the street and come live with us (though we have trouble convincing him not to occasionally go camping which is what he calls it when he sleeps on the streets). I get to go to Rainbow gatherings on occasional and have spent more than one Labor Day week at Burning Man. One of my partners says he's never met anyone less enthralled by the cult of the authority figure and I think he's right.

One of the great things about my living situation is that there is security. We have three to four paychecks coming in so none of us have to work the overtime that seems endemic to our society. And the ones who aren't working outside the house are keeping the hearth clean and cooking the meals. It's like Ozzie and Harriet and Ozzie and Harriet.

what we did and what we learned. The '60s were a time of horror--of the slaughter of two million people in Southeast Asia by the land of the free, home of the brave; the assassination of three major peace-minded leaders in the space of five years, John Kennedy, Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King, each of them at a moment of decision-making and power that could have stopped the Vietnam War; of the ascendancy of genocidal presidents, LBJ and Nixon; of the failure of our democracy and its full-scale takeover by war profiteers who were never demobilized after WW II and just grew into fatter and fatter leeches on our country.

And that is just to mention part of the emotional trauma that was the '60s. I was 16 when JFK ran for president. I worked in his campaign. By the end of the '60s, I had seen all of my political heroes shot and killed. And I think that this dreadful reality that lay beneath the '60s--the reality that no peace-minded leader with any power could remain alive--colored everything else that happened, good and bad. The '60s saw the sudden--and rather amazing--simultaneous rebellions of women, blacks, gays, Native Americans, young people and other groups who had been traditionally suppressed, and placed in strict cultural confines--whether it was girdles and bras and housekeeping for women, or the "a-political" universities that youth were supposed to attend, or the poll tax and segregation for black citizens.

And I think all of this--and much more--happened because of the underlying horror of the massive slaughter in Vietnam and the assassinations at home. 1963 was the "trigger year," so to speak. I was one person--a very confined, repressed schoolgirl--at the beginning of 1963, and, by the end of 1963, while I wasn't a hippie, EVERYTHING HAD CHANGED. All strictures on me were off, inside, in my own mind, in my own heart. (It was also my first year of college.) Two years later, I, a privileged white girl from California, would be traveling to Georgia and Alabama to join the civil rights movement. How that transition occurred is probably worth a novel or two, but I do know this: It had to do with DEATH, ending everything that went before. We were a generation without a past. Our parents' lives and politics and outlook--the comfortable lives of the '50s (comfortable for some--for white people)--had FAILED US. They could not keep a good leader alive--OUR leader, JFK, with whom young people greatly identified. And the patriotism of WW II turned into the horrendous genocide of Vietnam, which they also could not stop, and didn't seem to object to. They couldn't see the difference between the poor of Vietnam--and their poor people's desire for self-determination--and Hitler and Stalin. And so we rejected them, and rebelled, and EVERYTHING changed.

But, you know, it was wrenching and extremely traumatic, at every level. That is not the best way for change to happen. Change should occur more gently, as the result of democratic processes. Change in the '60s was sudden, like a ripping of the veil of illusion. I think it was hardest for boys, who were facing the Draft, and had to make life and death decisions that they were ill prepared for. But it was also hard for the non-Drafted and for girls--and also for the many adults around who sympathized with the young and opposed the war. American culture--and all of its political and economic assumptions--was ripped to shreds by this war and by the assassinations that accompanied it. As Charles Dickens said, of the French Revolution, "It was best of times. It was the worst of times." And maybe it's silly--or useless--to say that I wouldn't wish it on anybody, but I think people who are tempted to nostalgia need to understand this about the '60s. It was both the best and the worst, and the worst should not be underestimated.

People think of the Beatles and the hippies and "love, love, love" --the remarkable birth of an alternative culture and new ideas. And yes, those things were amazing and wonderful. Thank God humans are adaptable, and new generations are born to think new thoughts and move human evolution along. But 55,000 US soldiers were being sent to their deaths, and babies and innocents of every kind were being burned to death with napalm and blown to bits with bombs, by the hundreds of thousands. And American families were being torn asunder by the conflict--sons and daughters rejecting their parents and their roots, in bitter fights and estrangements. And none of us had any tools for these small and epic battles. "Conflict resolution" didn't exist as a phrase, or a psychological specialty. We had to find our own way, all of us, as if we'd been transplanted to Mars.

The country we were born to was not the country in which we reached maturity. That old country was gone, gone--with all of its false peacefulness and hypocrisy, and all of its good intentions. For there were good intentions--almost every parent of every family in the US in the '50s had the intention of a better life for their children than they had had. We were given luxuries and opportunities unprecedented in human history. But I think that we came to a sort of collective conclusion that if the price of those luxuries and opportunities was burnt babies in Vietnam, no thank you--we would find another way.

We never did find another way--and that is the tragedy of the '60s. The military aggression budgets stayed locked in place. The Corporate Rulers and War Profiteers took over. We failed as a generation who had faced the worst that our country could do, and who had turned on it with a fury, but also with the inexperience and inconsistency of youth. We couldn't pull it together into a real revolution.

Some parts of the social revolution succeeded. And the horror of Vietnam did influence foreign policy for a while. The antiwar movement, I'm pretty sure, prevented Nixon from nuking Vietnam, which is something. It also had some long term impacts for the good on Latin American policy, but only after multiple horrors were inflicted, some--like Guatemala--as nearly as bad as Vietnam. But the STRUCTURAL things that were wrong with the country--that made Vietnam possible, and that prompted the assassinations of JFK, RFK and MLK, in my opinion--were never addressed. And these are, 1) the failure to demobilize our military economy after WW II--so that now the War Profiteers NEED war and manufacture wars for profit; and 2) the rise of the multinational corporations and their unaccountable power over all news and opinion, and all US policy.

We are now seeing the result of the failure of my generation to solve those two endemic problems--these two undemocratic forces controlling our government, which are now so entrenched that people can hardly see them any more. They think that trillions of dollars in military spending is normal, and that rightwing corporations "counting" all our votes with "trade secret," proprietary programming code cannot be rejected, because they drink corporate coffee, and eat corporate food, and hold corporate jobs, and see corporate logos everywhere, as if America = Corporate.

I will allow you nostalgia for the Beatles and the Mamas and the Papas, and some of the other greats of the '60s. We did have the best popular music ever written--and it was music that was as stimulating to the mind as to the heart. It WAS "the news." And you can praise the hippies, if you want. They were right about everything--including "Make love, not war!" But please know that you are a new generation and that nothing can match what you are going to do now, which is to succeed where we failed. I believe that you will. And I hope you make great music, too, to accompany and inspire American Revolution II, the real revolution.

THANKS for posting you insights and experiences. :thumbsup:

I find all of your posts to be the posts I would have written if I could write as well as you.

You haven't added to your journal since 12/30/06

Please, Oh Please save your work

an AWFUL time to come of age in, you're lucky you missed it for the most part.

Third generation Democrat, folks were against the War in Vietnam. I knew what was going on.
I knew we were in trouble when the first shot of the Reagan Revolution was the union busting of the Air Traffic Controllers.

I am not better off financially. I have no pension and no job and I'm part of that highly educated formerly middle class bunch that numbers in the millions in this country.

And I'm educated in one of those fields that they say can't be sent overseas, so I'm baffled as to my inability to get a job. I think there are just too many baby boomers and it was too competitive for us, and they keep cranking out lawyers like there's no tomorrow. About two thousand kids pass the bar twice a year in Texas,making 4,000 new ones looking for jobs.

I became one.

Anyway, what generation is he speaking of? He was 10 in 1968, but HIS generation was drafted? At what, age 12?

MY generation was drafted. College, 1967--1971.

I remember hearing that song "19" in the '80s & it making me remember how scared I was until I got my 4-F.

I remember a couple of really scary days at the Oakland Induction Center.

I remember buddies coming back, wounded in mind or body or both.

If you'd have asked me then, what things were going to be like in the year 2000+? I never. never, ever would have guessed they'd be as effed up as they are now.

I had no idea what we were up against. The entrenched wealth, the 'chicken-hawks', the media mind control, the way the word 'dirty' seems to always precede the word 'hippie' especially among pseudo-hipsters.

I really hope things are changing. I kind of think they are, but I'm always leery of the 'burn'.