The Diggers refused to talk to Joan Didion as she tried to gather material in 1967 for the essay that became the famous "Slouching Towards Bethlehem." They discerned (correctly) that she was part of the mainstream media's agenda, demonizing the hippie counterculture, according to Louis Menand in his New Yorker article, "Out of Bethlehem/The radicalization of Joan Didion."
Didion presented her article as an investigation into what she called “social hemorrhaging.” She suggested that what was going on in Haight-Ashbury was the symptom of some sort of national unravelling. But she knew that, at the level of “getting the story,” her piece was a failure. She could see, with the X-ray clarity she appears to have been born with, what was happening on the street; she could make her readers see it; but she couldn’t explain it....
Didion came from a family of Republicans.... [I]n 1960, she began contributing to The National Review, William F. Buckley’s conservative weekly. She wrote pieces about John Wayne, her favorite movie star, and, in the 1964 Presidential election, she voted for Barry Goldwater. She adored Goldwater. It was hardly a surprise that she found Haight-Ashbury repugnant. Her editors at the Post understood perfectly how she would react. They designed the cover before she handed in the piece....
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56 comments:
I love that phrase - "demonizing the hippie counterculture"
Yeah, right. In other words, telling the truth about them (narcissistic, jobless, promiscuous, loud, irresponsible, self-destructive, unemployed, unemployable, drug-addled, lazy, hygienically challenged, etc, etc.) and, yes, they come off as the demons they were.
The worst of the hippies, the Weathermen and the Black Panthers, were avowed terrorists and murderers.
But, yes, groovy, dude!
The article let the cat out of the bag. The 1960swere not a big drug fueled party. Only 1% had taken LSD and 4% had smoked marijuana. The stories still pretend the young were all druggies. We were not any such thing.
The feature of the 60s was Viet Nam insanity under LBJ determined to run his own private war for no good reason but Texas pride.
Thank God Richard Nixon saved our asses. But the image of Nixon behind LBJs war and my generation being dedicated to drug use still gets repeated like the truth cannot ever come out. But it did.
It must have been really hard for hippies, having all the media against them.
Conservatives have no idea what that is like.
The Post cover recalls the merrymaking hippies that opened and closed Antonioni’s Blow-Up the year before.
It was especially unfair because "hippies" made such an effort to become less demonizable.
In the Post article Didion mentions a fledgling commune near Malakoff Diggings in Nevada County, California; that commune improbably still flourishes today.
I really like Joan Didion's writings from that time. Slouching and the White Album. She was one of the Big Kids who were more mature and able to resist the pied piper and go about their lives without erratic zigzags. Unfortunately I was not.
A journalist already having a point of view before doing research on a subject isn't a problem as long as they are open to the possibility their point of view is inaccurate and can change accordingly.
George Harrison pretty much said the same thing after going to Haight Asbury. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_I-ThafU1e4
"She suggested that what was going on in Haight-Ashbury was the symptom of some sort of national unravelling."
And it was. We are reaping the results today with the worst political class in American history.
@BAG The Weathermen and the Black Panthers were not hippies. Hippies were more like the Grateful Dead followers. That cover reminds me more of A Clockwork Orange, which was published in 1962.
Hippies would be despised today by the left on account of their unhealthy desire for human freedom.
Carol at 7:10 gets it exactly,
@Chuck -- respectfully disagree. They were the worst and most extreme wing of the hippies, but they were hippies nonetheless. Probably, should add the Manson family too up there at that ranch in Northern Los Angeles.
Little-known facts from Woodstock:
34. Nine out of ten festival-goers smoked marijuana on site and 33 were arrested on drugs charges.
35. Two people died at Woodstock - one man from a heroin overdose and a teenager in a sleeping bag who was killed when a tractor ran over him. The driver was never traced.
36. For the weekend of the festival it had become the third largest city in New York State. But due to lack of basic amenities, Governor Nelson Rockefeller declared it a disaster area. The health department documented 5,162 medical cases, including 797 instances of drug abuse. But Time magazine called it 'The greatest peaceful event in history.'
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/tvshowbiz/article-1204849/Forty-far-facts-knew-Woodstock.html
Stanley Anne Dunham Obama, baby. Groovy before her time.
traditional guy actually wrote: "Thank God Richard Nixon saved our asses" without irony. Or maybe there IS irony there and he is being humorous too because, surely, no God worth considering serious would have anything to do with replacing one with the other. There is little difference between LBJ and Nixon when it came to narcissistic, lying idiots in the White House. Hippies are an improvement over those two.
Remember the "Flaming Youth" movement of the 1920s? The parents of the Flaming Youth were appalled. Even though some of the mothers had been Gibson Girls in their day, very modern--wearing sleeveless bathing suits and shaving their armpits. Hotcha cha!
She suggested that what was going on in Haight-Ashbury was the symptom of some sort of national unravelling.
Well, however right or wrong Didion was about the bigger cultural picture, she was right about what was happening right in front of her. Haight-Ashbury may have had it hippy-dippy glory years, but as the sixties turned into the seventies the Haight became a drug ghetto whose squalor & violence made the hippies decamp to more rural environments. There, they could live their lives away from the urban decay they had done much to create in SF.
Haight-Ashbury ultimately recovered, of course, as the rising tide of gentrification could not let such a valuable piece of real estate go to waste.
but as the sixties turned into the seventies the Haight became a drug ghetto whose squalor & violence made the hippies decamp to more rural environments.
They came to Boulder, Colorado, where I lived, and ruined it. They swiftly became a voting majority and ran for seats on the town council and turned what had been a very pleasant little cowboy/farmer-university town into a hippie-ville that very soon came to resemble the Haight at its squalid drug-infested nadir. Then the more enterprising counterculture crusaders grew up and got rich and enacted greenbelt legislation that raised property values to stratospheric heights that turned Boulder into a preserve for rich progressive elites like themselves.
I already summed up Woodstock, in two parts.
Racism at Woodstock..
Sexism at Woodstock..
I am Laslo.
@matt... Nixon made the decisions that ended the Draft, ended American military involvement in Vietnam Nam with POWs returned, and he literally told the Russians to back off while he stopped the slaughter of all of the Jews in Israel then under a two front sneak attack that they were losing as their ammunition ran out and he ,created the EPA and the OSHA . He saved our asses so many ways that finally that so many good deeds could not go unpunished.
Didion came from a family of Republicans ...
Well good golly Miss Molly! How despicable can one get?
What good ever did come out of Haight -Ashbury?
"What good ever did come out of Haight -Ashbury?"
Murder, She Wrote?
I am Laslo.
"There is little difference between LBJ and Nixon when it came to narcissistic, lying idiots in the White House."
As we bemoan the lack of history teaching in the College Board AP standards, it was nice of you to give us an example of how bad it can get.
The term hippy is just like yuppy. Describes everyone and no one, the extremes of people's relationship to—guess what—money and power among the young.
I learned more about Menand from his article than I did about Didion. He on high from his prestigious perches of the New Yorker and Harvard bemoaning the inequities of class and social structure without a hint of irony or self-awareness. Menand omits the third leg of the foundation of an inequitable hierarchical society, one he has spent his entire life assiduously pursuing—Prestige. Yes prestige, the highest quality to be achieved by the morally preening left.
Academics thrive in Either-Or scenarios. Renegades appear when the system fails but only a small percentage of drug users are addicts. Bullshit. A truly huge percentage of the imprisoned are impaired by alcohol and/or drugs at the time of their crimes. Yet moral failing is a mere excuse for scapegoating the "real" victims.
Menand is busy sustaining leftist shibboleths and creating new one, the latest of which is the needless imprisoning of the victims.
All to take the people's attention from the fact that this is now the left's monster.
“I thought it was gonna be all these groovy kinds of gypsy people with cool shops making works of art and paintings and carvings, but instead it turned out to be just a lot of bums, many of them who were just very young kids who came from all over America and dropped acid and gone to this mecca of LSD. ….It certainly showed me what was really happening in the drug cult. It wasn’t what I thought with all these groovy people having spiritual awakenings and being artistic. It was like any addiction. So at that point, I stopped taking it actually.. the dreadful lysergic. That’s where I really went for the meditation.” -- George Harrison.
"The area is named after the intersection of two streets, Haight and Ashbury, and as we approached, the driver said he wouldn't drive down the street itself, he'd park among the side-streets. It seemed a little odd but we didn't argue. We got out of the car, the acid kicked in and everything was just whoah, psychedelic and very... I mean, it was just completely fine. We went into a shop and noticed that all these people were following us. They had recognised George as we walked past them in the street, then turned to follow us. One minute there were five, then ten, twenty, thirty and forty people behind us. I could hear them saying, 'The Beatles are here, the Beatles are in town!'
We were expecting Haight-Ashbury to be special, a creative and artistic place, filled with Beautiful People, but it was horrible - full of ghastly drop-outs, bums and spotty youths, all out of their brains. Everybody looked stoned - even mothers and babies - and they were so close behind us they were treading on the backs of our heels. It got to the point where we couldn't stop for fear of being trampled. Then somebody said, 'Let's go to Hippie Hill,' and we crossed the grass, our retinue facing us, as if we were on stage. They looked as us expectantly - as if George was some kind of Messiah."
So, basically, the real America has been run by an insane hippie boomer cult since '68. Figures.
Consider that in 1975, the film One Flew Over the Cuckoos Nest won the five most important academy awards. The core of the movie was that the inmates of an insane asylum were a little odd but mostly okay, but the people that ran it were sadistic psychopaths who were only concerned with staying in power.
When I was growing up, i hated all the hippies. I thought they all just caused strife and confrontation. What an angry, angsty time. Yuck.
They discerned (correctly) that she was part of the mainstream media's agenda, demonizing the hippie counterculture...
Really? Correctly? Haven't the hippies done everything required to demonize themselves?
The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism:
Throughout recorded time, and probably since the end of the Neolithic Age, there have been three kinds of people in the world, the High, the Middle, and the Low. They have been subdivided in many ways, they have borne countless different names, and their relative numbers, as well as their attitude towards one another, have varied from age to age: but the essential structure of society has never altered. Even after enormous upheavals and seemingly irrevocable changes, the same pattern has always reasserted itself, just as a gyroscope will always return to equilibrium, however far it is pushed one way or the other.
The aims of these three groups are entirely irreconcilable. The aim of the High is to remain where they are. The aim of the Middle is to change places with the High. The aim of the Low, when they have an aim -- for it is an abiding characteristic of the Low that they are too much crushed by drudgery to be more than intermittently conscious of anything outside their daily lives -- is to abolish all distinctions and create a society in which all men shall be equal. Thus throughout history a struggle which is the same in its main outlines recurs over and over again. For long periods the High seem to be securely in power, but sooner or later there always comes a moment when they lose either their belief in themselves or their capacity to govern efficiently, or both. They are then overthrown by the Middle, who enlist the Low on their side by pretending to them that they are fighting for liberty and justice. As soon as they have reached their objective, the Middle thrust the Low back into their old position of servitude, and themselves become the High. Presently a new Middle group splits off from one of the other groups, or from both of them, and the struggle begins over again. Of the three groups, only the Low are never even temporarily successful in achieving their aims. It would be an exaggeration to say that throughout history there has been no progress of a material kind. Even today, in a period of decline, the average human being is physically better off than he was a few centuries ago. But no advance in wealth, no softening of manners, no reform or revolution has ever brought human equality a millimetre nearer. From the point of view of the Low, no historic change has ever meant much more than a change in the name of their masters.
I would remind the lefty readers at Althouse that Orwell had actual, real experience with revolution. Risked his life. Shot a rifle at fascists. Orwell was not a Madison Radical.
I lived in Berkeley in the years just after the article. Pressure to not pay attention to the decay and decadence, or to declare it cool, was overwhelming. Hard to forget three-year-olds running around naked as their parents nodded off.
Didion was very sly in her accounts of cultural upheaval and change. She could preform a tricky balancing act between reporting and giving away the show. Sometimes you could not figure out her real, her personal feelings that seemed to say one thing but point to another. Her joan Baez essay was one where she let the mask slip and her distain was clear, there were others but that one stuck with me. Althouse does a similar trick in shorter bursts!
Disdain not distain
Blogger tim in vermont said...Hippies would be despised today by the left on account of their unhealthy desire for human freedom.
Exactly, most people, including most here, don't know much about the hippies, instead upsing some vague definition like, "everything I don't like about liberals." But in reality, to the extent that hippies fit into the American political scene at all, it's not as quintessential liberals, but as wayward libertarians.
They didn't want to run your life, they wanted freedom to run theirs.
"They didn't want to run your life, they wanted freedom to run theirs."
Sorry, that may be how they sold themselves in order to recruit, but the 40 year long march through the institutions gave away the real game.
Blogger tim in vermont said...Hippies would be despised today by the left on account of their unhealthy desire for human freedom.
Partly true, but partly wrong. The hippies simply adapted to the times - at least the smarter ones did. They cut their hair, got law degrees or academic gigs and continued to peddle their distorted values. Bill Ayers and Angela Davis both became college professors. Many of the hippies became today's Left.
But you Yes the spirit was much more free back then. You didn't have these Matress Girls or other professional victim types.
@Qwinn, which puts me in mind of a favorite song from those times:
"Some man's come he's trying to run my life
Don't know what he's askin'
When he tells me I better get in line
Can't hear what he's sayin'
When I grow up, I'm gonna make it mine
These ain't dues I been payin'
How much does it cost
I'll buy it
The time is all we've lost
I'll try it
He can't even run his own life, I'll be damned if he'll run mine, sunshine"
Still true.
A lot of discussion here on who exactly the "hippies" were. I always thought of "hippies" as the peaceful, mellow, laid back freaks who just wanted to drop out of society, smoke weed and be silly. The violent radicals might have looked a bit like hippies with their long hair and freaky clothes, but were quite different in type, and dangerous--like the YIP and Weathermen and such. And then there were the nonviolent but politically motivated Left, who also looked freaky, may have done their drugs like the hippies and had similar politics to the violent radicals, but worked through the system and now largely run it.
It's easy to confuse those groups, though, as they often looked alike and agreed on some things (to the extend the "drop out hippies" had any political leanings, they were probably more Left, or libertarian, and their disregard of conventional norms and institutions probably endeared them to the violent radicals even if they were too peaceful for their tastes).
Strictly visually, that is a great image.
The photo looks a lot like Daniel Day-Lewis' character from Gangs of New York.
"The worst of the hippies, the Weathermen and the Black Panthers, were avowed terrorists and murderers."
True, but the best of the hippies was Steve Jobs.
The most defining characteristic of the hippie culture was its mindlessness. Second to that came exploitation, in various forms but predominantly exploitation of confused young females by confused but effectively predatory males. Somehow a good part of the media and nation found it cool. Also diverting. Detroit had just blown up in a bloody riot, there was a war on people could not understand, a President had been assassinated and we got transfixed by a bunch of white people taking drugs and talking nonsense. There were not many black hippies. The rebellions confronting them were far more serious, and far more justified. Lurking in the background of that (literal) clown on the cover of the Post is the headline offering the Detroit police chief's take on the riot, the triggering event (though not the cause) of the destruction of one of our great cities.
Being a hippie was another thing that white people liked.
"True, but the best of the hippies was Steve Jobs."
And that's still true.
The Silicon Valley culture is bohemian. They pride themselves on their countercultural social attitudes.
The fact that Apple Computer now has a gay CEO helped to shoot down some of those proposed RFRA laws.
Plus hippiedom wasn't original.
"What are you rebelling against?"
"What ya got?"
Chum.
Hippies needed to hide their behavior from the public, it was abhorrent.
I have always thought that our hostess and Meade in their respective youths both identified to a degree with the hippie culture. See for instance Althouse's comment on the picture of the young Bernie Sanders a few weeks ago, and both Althouse's and Meade's occasional nostalgia for their art-sie younger selves--not that they are not still art-sie. (I love your photos.)
But they both grew up.
"But they both grew up."
No, we didn't.
“…discussion here on who exactly the "hippies" were….”
Interesting how many different views on that. As a thought experiment I wonder if in 50 years people will debate the membership of “the tea party” or who made up “occupy wall street” or who supported “#blacklivesmatter”.
It is noteworthy how many people born in the 80s or 90s want to be hippies,( and more than just in dress or hair and attitude) so there must be some good vibes that people want to replicate. And even if the peace and love and freedom was not in the original incarnation- I think it’s nice that the kids want to revive that.
Well, your bodies are aged and ugly now, so you may not want to admit it, but you have grown up, or at least grown old.
If you haven't matured intellectually, that's your own fault. I really never got the attraction of Peter Pan. Who the hell wants to be a child? At all let alone forever? Really moronic. For worse than "what is X" which in fact I quite like.
People your age who have "never grown up" should be kicked.
I don't think I was ever a hippie, but to be honest there are whole sections of the late sixties and early seventies that are just a blur.
I hope I had fun.
You are right. You didn't.
Growing up in the late '80s and early '90s, our impression of "hippies" was more a matter of style--long hair, beads, tie dies, sandals, and psychadelic music (plus drugs! But specific drugs, like LSD and pot, not crack). Kids didn't seem to emulate the violent radical edge.
This was a time (late '80s, I mean) when nostalgia was for all things '60s (just as in the '70s it was all things '50s, and in the '90s all things '70s, etc. Meaning everyone should be into the '90s now). What I found more interesting than the hippie counterculture stuff was the counter-counterculture--the "squares" and Nixon types, who'd watch Nancy Sinatra specials and Ed Sullivan, maybe grow their sideburns a bit but still be acceptable in an office environment. They were very much a part of the culture of that time.
Two things about 1960s hippies and long hair (on men):
-long hair meant you weren't in the military.
-long hair meant you probably didn't have a job.
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