The nutzoid column of the week: Dawn Eden on "The Summer of Love"

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. . .")

had his disciples doing the Dances of Universal Peace. Many of those who danced are still with us, and are spiritual leaders in the Sufi Ruhaniat Society. Mr. Natural is said to have been based on Murshid S.A.M.

As for this woman--I find it interesting that she assumes that only "loose hippies" didn't have children. I was not a hippie, and married late in life, having opted by choice NOT to bring children into this world.

I know Dawn Eden's parents gave her a stupid name. She could have changed it at any time after she turned 21. After 21, all the ways you think your parents fucked up your life become your own damn responsibility. Change em or accept em as part of you.

Why the hell they allowed this bitter little piece of baggage to write about a time and place she had no way of knowing about is a puzzle to me. What can she possibly have to say about it? Middle aged journalists in business suits who went there to report on it missed the whole point. You had to be there and you had to be part of it to understand it. Otherwise, you were writing about clothes and drugs and wild gyrations during concerts and missing the heart of what it really was.

It would be like my writing about the WWII years. I wasn't there. I'm really not qualified to describe anything about it. The best I could possibly do is cobble something together from the accounts of folks who were there.

And Dawn didn't even bother to do that much.

Spare me from sex phobic Christians, too, by the way.

On PBS, about the 1967 festival. Great stuff, but too short (45 minutes). Jimi, Janis, Eric Burden, Otis Redding, The Who, Mamas and Papas, and even The Association (a little out of place). Maybe Dawn ought to lighten up and listen to some of the music. Of course, she doesn't mention the war, the assassinations, the civil rights movement and other "minor" events. As for the women's movement, she is completely flipped out - everybody should procreate, but not have sex???? It was a great time - not perfect, but I will take our vision of America over George Bush's. Hell, I will take Lyndon Johnson's vision big time over George Bush's.

Dawn reminds me of Dr. Laura. Screwed up and wants to take others down with her into her twisted world. If it wasn't a warped version of Catholicism, it would be the Unification Church or something similar for her.

it's playing again Monday @ Tuesday - great footage & interviews...hope you can check it out -

Does she have the least understanding about what the feminist movement was acting against? Does she understand that grown women were treated like children? Does she understand that without the social changes of the 1960's she would not be writing her column?

Did she ever have to hide under her school desk because of a nuclear attack alert test?

As far as lunacy goes, The Summer of Love has nothing on "duck and cover"

Why isn't Dawn Eden married and the mother of several children by now? Why isn't she at home where she belongs, ironing her husband's shirts and tending to the younguns, rather than collecting a hefty paycheck to write inane op-eds about things of which she she knows nothing? There's a passel of these tiresome women, forever churning out bitter screeds about how feminism will ruin your life, while they reap the rewards of it in their own careers and personal lives. The host of another blog I like says that they do this out of internalized sexism and also so that they can be exceptional as in: "All other women are like this but I'm different. That's why I possess the special knowledge to tell the rest of you what to do. Even though I have no intention of doing it myself."