I saw the play Hair yesterday and where we all went wrong?

I went to a local production of the play Hair yesterday. I spent much of the play reminiscing. I whispered to my 16 year old that "Yes, we actually danced that way." The outfits and dancind brought back embarassed memories. I wore those clothes, I listened to those songs, and I thought we were the age of aquarious. Even though I went to Berkeley eight years after this play, the influence of this mindset shaped my political views.

What many don't understand is that we thought we were the majority. We thought we just needed time to change the world. We were dismissive and arrogant. While I was hanging with the liberals at Berkeley, some of the RW liberals were starting a movement that would control American politics for a generation.

David Brock was at Berkeley at the same time that I was. He saw the protests and lack of debate very differently than I did. Rove, Norquist, Falwell, et al were out beginning the dominance of the Young Republicans and the Moral Majority. I remember hearing about these organizations and just laughing at them. I had no idea of the roll they would play in politics in the future.

So, I think we made mistakes in thinking that we didn't have to listen and pay attention to the new movements. We were arrogant and thought we could sit back and not continue to be activists. I see the same thing happening to the Republican right wing right now. They are arrogant and have ignored the dissident voices.

Go see Hair or rent the movie.

Was Rove and that bunch wanted to control the world. The Hair people wanted to show love, experience things and help each other. In the end one was definitely a more dangerous movement

However, I don't remember anyone perceiving the danger they represented.

Country Joe McDonald performed. Most sang along with the songs.It was fun.

Regrettably, my guarded health prevents me from attending this year. I was hoping to shuttle my son down to see it with Grandma, but she had absolutely no desire to see Hair. I mean ZERO interest in it!:shrug:

Bummer missing Country Joe McDonald, but I saw him in that amphitheater almost forty years ago to the day (June 1967). I attended the Magic Mountain Music Festival and saw the Doors, Canned Heat, Country Joe and The Fish, the Byrds, Jefferson Airplane, the Sons of Champlin, The Miracles, Wilson Pickett, The Seeds, Blues Magoos, Tim Hardin, Sparrow, Moby Grape, Grass Roots, and the Fifth Dimension in that magical location. 15,000 people attended; a modest crowd until you squeeze them into the amphitheater! By all accounts, it was indeed magical. It was so magical that it was the first and last concert held there, and rock 'n' roll was banned from the amphitheater.

I wish I had been there during those times. Just in cast this is your Mom's concern, there is no nakedness in this version and they didn't sing a few of the songs that they felt were not OK for families. I didn't find it any more risque than Rent or other popular productions.

Actually, I don't think the play showed people being dismissive or arrogant. I thought it showed a lot of people from different walks of life trying to make sense of other points of view. It's really very Shakespearean. I saw a production in Seattle right before we invaded Iraq, and everyone walked out of the theatre in total silence afterwards, with a very grim sense of foreboding.

We didn't see what was coming.

but I don't think arrogant is the right word.

and I dismissed the new movements as crazies.

our parents again. That's where we went wrong. We lost our rebelliousness.

in the majority. As far as starting to listen to parents again! I think you should ask parents if that is the case. If anything kids today are even more independent and want to do it their way. The problem is that too many kids want to party and have a good time but they don't care about social issues the way many kids did during the 60s and part of that reason is because there are no consequences. In the 60's and early 70s we had a draft and that's one BIG reason why kids and young adults were politically active. Today college students, as an example, know that they aren't going anywhere--and too many of them (and others) don't give a darn because it doesn't effect them.

The one that failed to get McCarthy nominated in '68, or the one that got McGovern nominated in '72, only to see hinm thoroughly trounced by that loathsome pig, Nixon?

the left that tried to install McCarthy in 68 as the presidential nominee and succeeded with McGovern in 72 was basically annihilated with McGovern's loss. But during Nixon's reign, the Republican Party succeeded in purging its liberal wing — the Rockefeller Republicans took a back seat to the up-and-coming Reaganite wing. Meanwhile, over on the Democratic side, though many conservative Democrats fled the party after the Civil Rights era, there was still a notable conservative wing to the party — indeed, that moderate, center-right wing continues to this day, especially in the South.

In terms of long-term effect, what exactly did the New Left accomplish? I hesitate to think of a single thing. Civil rights and the Great Society were primarily instituted under LBJ, a man that the New Left universally loathed for his expansion of the Vietnam War. Meanwhile, the New Left's contemporaries on the right changed the face of the Republican Party. It's counter-intuitive, at first, but when you really think about it, the great success story of the late 1960s, in terms of long-term effects, appears to be conservatism, not liberalism.

as is the OP. It's so strange that I've never thought about the lack of any real accomplishments on our side in quite that way. I'm not sure if it was arrogance, or overestimating the intelligence of ordinary people. I know that I was completely unprepared for the country's acceptance of Nixon's lies and schemes.

K&R for the OP

In a society free to learn new things and adapt their moral codes to things learned there is always progress. As we learn we adapt what we learn to our social condition. But not everyone learns these things in the society at the same time. Not everyone places the same values on the importance of things learned as everyone else. Thus resistance accumulates to change due to progress.

This resistance is present at all times. Normally the ever changing nature of society will overwhelm the resistance to certain things if it is accepted by a large enough group of people within the society. And if there is no source reintroducing the notion into society it will fade away.

But within our society we have many institutions that are not based on a progress approach to the world. Many of these institutions are based on tradition or dogma. And this creates a constant reaction to progress. If progress cannot overwhelm and marginalize these notions they may resurface in the form of protest or political activism. If the threat that progress poses to a group is sufficient it can even give rise to that group deciding to discard the social contract and attempt to force their view on everyone else through whatever means are available.

Normally this back and forth is seen as the political pendulem that many refer to. But the pendulem does not swing freely. It is forced back and forth by active people participating in social change. So we sit here waiting for the pendulem to swing back not realizing that we have to go get the darn thing and drag it back ourselves.

Compare our modern society with a century ago, an era with no labor laws, civil rights amendment or even women's suffrage. Despite the constant resistance of the right, the tendency over time is to move toward a more-liberal government. In fact, barring massive, catastrophic social change such as the Fall of Rome or the Mongols' sacking of more or less all of Asia (and the reactionary forces that arise as a result of such changes), it's pretty much been true for all of human history that we tend toward a more-liberal, not more-conservative, society.

Always has and always will as long as the society remains relatively intact. But sometimes events come along that cause the resistance to rise up and attempt to smash the infrastructure and put in their vision. And that is when massive losses of progress can happen.

Yippies become Yuppies??? Not all of them of course.

Did we decide the Democratic Party should become more
"upscale" and deal with the needs of upper incomes ?

Is this why it appears we have no convern that one
half the country does not vote??? Did we abandom them,
after all while some few of them fall into the upperclasses
(disgusted with both parties)--the majority of them
are poor.

In other words did we change our value system??

There has always and probabley always will be moere
Democrats than Republicans. One-Half the country
does not vote.

It seems like the hippies of the 1960s traded in their ideals for a Beamer in the 1980s.

It's one of their favorite propaganda points. I regard it as recycled resentment, and little more, since I know so many fine people who went back to the garden, and remained -- organic, off the grid, and humble in the best sense of the word.

Of course a few people mutated grotesquely and became republicons, but not that many....

They may have adopted the attitudes or dress as part of the style of that times, but I think those who truly believed in the movement, stuck to the ideals of that movement.

The play itself, and all those who emulated both the fashions and the attitudes, were about the 'mainstreaming' and stylizing and not the counterculture. I regard the retrospectives as fascinating historical revisionism. How is it possible for the mainstream to call itself a "counterculture"? The fashions, including "love beads," were available at Sears. The style became a mainstream marketed product even before the 'counterculture movement' was franchised in many cities in the blue collar rust belt. In Detroit, we still called such people 'Beatniks' in 1966. The terms 'hippie' and 'flower children' had yet to arrive.

It should probably be noted that the oldest baby boomers were 21 in 1967. :evilgrin:

...So much of it was just another superficial pop trend.

It was actually part & parcel of not mainstream....

... ("Who Do You Trust?") which was also "off Broadway" (at the Little Theater) until late 1962. People standing motionless in the nude onstage was part of the "hook." Just because most high school kids didn't catch on until it was all peddled to them by the entertainmant media, doesn't mean it was the high school kids' invention. 99.44% (Ivory Soap) of the people who "fondly remember" being hippies ... weren't. When I was 7 years old, I wore a cowboy costume. It didn't make me a cowboy. Wearing love beads and smoking pot didn't make anyone a hippie.

It was regarded as "avant garde" - which is the self-congratulatory label the academic/artsy part of the mainstream uses. (It's a marketing term.)

No matter how "sincere" ... and there's LOTS of sincerity ... 1967 was when it went mainstream. It's easy to be "sincere" when the parents are paying for tuition, room, and board. Hell, I grew a pony tail, wore love beads, smoked pot and wore a dashiki in the early 70s, too. From the time I first read Kahlil Gibran, through the time I listened to Rod McKuen, and including the time I grooved on The Who ... I embraced the style and attitudes as well.

Actually, you have to wonder if he wonders if that character did shape our political world. (I hated the punk.)

Who actually wanted food and clothes and a house and to go to school. And we saw the crime wave of the 80's and realized that we had to create structure and discipline if we didn't want our little angels to end up in the hoosgow. In that process, way too many people went waaaaay too far to the right! Maybe the next generation will be a little more level-headed.

and change. Many of us are the exact age our parants were, when they were our age. We shudder when we hear some of their imprints coming through our mouthes.

The 1960s were a beautiful, though often troubling, time. I associate the film "Hair" with hippies. It's good to read "HIPPIE," by Barry Miles, and look back at that period. The hippies were nice.

Earlier today, I had to go to a store. On my way home, I was at an intersection, and looked across at a fellow sitting in the vehicle next to me. It took me a second to realize that he was a retired town cop, who used to give me a hard time when he mistook me for a hippie. Now he has long (but thin) hair, in a pony tail, and a beard that was in a thin braid. Had I read this thread before going to the store, I would have yelled out, "I can't tell if he's a boy or a girl!" We can joke with each other in a way we never could in decades past.

(the other side of hippy, the generation following) to respective member of legal team, to deputy - I still had the desire to curse the cops and call 'em pigs when they were unfair. The man doesn't get it. Instead, I learned to hold my tongue and reason a bit.

Braided beard???? I didn't know you could do that. :silly:

:hi: :hug:

I was listening to a new release by Neil Young (an old concert that should have been released long ago). The song "Old Man" came on. My son started laughing, and telling me that I was the grumpy old man from the song. And I was wondering how in the heck things changed so quickly?

"We were arrogant and thought we could sit back and not continue to be activists."