Hippie Counterculture and Commercialization

While reading this week’s section on the Countercultural Movement, I was surprised by the negative attitudes, sarcasm, and bitterness apparent in much of the writing. We always seem to think of the Hippie culture as fun, free, happy, and loving, but in doing so we tend to forget about the larger issues with which the Hippies were dealing. They were protesting against war and the draft, and for civil liberties and free speech; they were taking the brunt of the first wave of our country’s war on drugs; and they were facing the negative stereotyping against them, the prevalence of poverty among them, and the tendency toward materialism and commercialization around them.

Country Joe McDonald’s “I Feel Like I’m Fixin’-to-Die Rag” has powerful lyrics and has become one of the most memorable anti-Vietnam War songs of the era. Yet its tone is very acerbic and cynical, as in the various lines, “Put down your books and pick up your gun / Gonna have a whole lotta fun … You know that peace can only be won / When you’ve blown them all to kingdom come … And you can be the first one on your block / To have your boy come home in a box,” and, of course, the entire chorus. The songs of the Free Speech Movement were ironic in their own right, but somehow in a more subtle manner. The energetic anger that comes through in Country Joe’s lyrics, however, is anything but subtle: if you weren’t paying attention to the war before, you would certainly be in for a rude awakening upon hearing this song.

Not all of Country Joe’s songs seem to be this full of vinegar; in fact, his “Talking Non-Violence” is very reminiscent of the Free Speech songs in its rhetoric of Civil Disobedience (as found in Dave Mandel’s “Battle of Berkeley Talking Blues”). It also brings to mind Martin Luther King Jr.’s powerful demonstration of forgiveness and literally turning the other cheek in the lines, “You’ve got to love that man beatin’ you on the head. / Love him till his hate’s all dead.”

The negativity truly shows itself in Emmett Grogan’s narrative on the San Francisco Human Be-In, in the excerpt from “Ringolevio.” The Be-In sounds wonderful by all other accounts: thousands of peaceful participants, famous rock bands, LSD-laced turkey sandwiches, Timothy Leary persuading the crowd to “Tune In, Turn On, Drop Out,” Allen Ginsberg chanting and reciting, and a mass exodus to the beach to watch the sun set over the Pacific. Grogan recollects someone else’s remarks about the event as being along the lines of, “How wonderful it was with all that energy in one place at the same time. Just being. Being together.” It sounds like a perfect moment in history—so why the negative attitude? Throughout his narrative, Grogan made comments about “watch[ing] them pretend, wondering how long it was going to take before people stopped kidding themselves.”

Finally, he reveals the cause of his disgust: the HIP merchants were making a fortune off the Hippie counterculture, even ruthlessly exploiting the young people arriving in San Francisco to take part in the cultural revolution. The Haight-Ashbury district was becoming a tourist attraction; news mongering was drawing more people in without providing them with food, shelter, or jobs; and the Hippie fashions and hairstyles that were meant to be a statement against the norm were being commercialized and marketed to a mass consumer base. I had no idea that the commercialization and commodification of Hippie culture had occurred so soon. Today, Hippie clothes are the norm—every major department store sells tie-dies, paisleys, flower prints, peace signs. Yet this trend seems to have started almost concurrently with the Hippie era itself! Grogan makes an excellent point when he states that the Diggers, in organizing and operating Free Food, the Free Store, the Free Clinic, and other free workshops, were “doing things that were, at least, pertinent and to the point of some community need.” Yes, one aspect of the Hippie counterculture included the clothes and other commercialized goods, but a far more important aspect was the overarching vision for a truly different way of life. And I believe that that, too, has remained with us to the present day.

Free Speech & the Constitution

You would think that of all the rights for which people were fighting during the '50s, '60s, and '70s, the ones explicitly guaranteed by the Constitution would not be among them. Yes, we now interpret the wording of the Constitution in such a way as to render rights fought for by the Feminist and Civil Rights Movements “explicit” also, but you can almost understand why there was, at one point, debate on whether “man” meant all humans or merely white males, given the context in which our Constitution was written. However, I cannot understand how “Congress shall make no law … abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble ….” could ever be interpreted in any way other than the freedom to speak, write, and peacefully congregate. The fact that there is a section in our anthology on the Free Speech Movement indicates that this impossibility of misinterpretation (or blatant disregard) was, in fact, possible. Of course, before even reading this section, more recent events in our history have already shown that the most basic and fundamental rights guaranteed by the Constitution can be reinterpreted and simply ignored at will by the administration.

In fact, I found it interesting that Richard Kampf’s lyrics in “Hey Mr. Newsman” include the lines, “Don’t know if I’m subversive, just want to say what I please / Strange how us subversives / Keep fighting for democracy.” This sounds sadly familiar—shortly after 9/11, a report was issued on how to identify possible subversives (McCarthyism, anyone?). Among other things, the list of traits to look out for included: if they homeschool their children (I was homeschooled!); if they own guns (isn’t that a Constitutional right, also?); if they have a larder stocked with more than a month’s worth of food (so Costco must be subversive, too); or if they are overly familiar with the Constitution. So knowing too much about your own government is suddenly a sign that you are a suspect, a terrorist, a subversive. This country has not come far since Kampf’s era.

Lee Felsenstein’s “Put My Name Down” touches on the same topic in the lyrics, “What do we want, why the mess? / The Constitution, nothing less!” How outrageous that U.S. citizens have to fight and go through all the hardships described in these pages simply to perform actions that are already guaranteed them in our own Constitution: speaking freely and gathering peacefully. In “Battle of Berkeley Talking Blues,” Dave Mandel adds a positive spin in places, while still commenting on the same dilemma, as when he states, “Free speech is coming cause some spoke out … / To get our rights we’ll have to shout…” Another line in the same song conjures up the long history of such protest in our country: “Civil Disobedience … an essay come alive … education in action.” With these lyrics, the hundred-year-old writings of Thoreau become relevant and immediate—as they did for Martin Luther King Jr. and the rest of the Civil Rights Movement in the south.

In Felsenstein’s Introduction to the song booklet, he urges its readers to “Sing them loud and sing them often. You will be helping to fight the battle for Constitutional rights.” I simply love the idea of songs being a real part of the battle, and it does have a certain ironic logic to it: if speech itself is under contention, what better way to fight back than to sing out loud about it?

Environmental Literature

Generally while I'm reading the assigned literature for the week, I make notations in the margins to comment on/remind myself about interesting sections, and I mark the page by tabbing the corner. When I'm done reading the entire selection, I can easily go back through it and find the tabbed pages in order to figure out what I should write about. This week, however, when I flipped back through the assigned selections, my method didn't help me to narrow down what I should write about -- literally every other page was tabbed.

This only goes to illustrate how fascinated I am by the writings of this era on the environment, the natural world, living in harmony with nature, the importance of ecology, and the interconnectedness of all living things (including, some would say, streams, rocks, mountains, forests, etc). In the introduction to the section on Environmental Literature, there is a quote by Tom Bissell, in which he comments on the "tradition of reflection upon nature and a stubborn activism upon its behalf ... from Henry David Thoreau to John Muir to Rachel Carson." I believe this tradition is exactly what inspires and moves me so much, although I have never been able to identify it as environmental before now. I grew up on a nearly self-sustaining homestead and was instilled with a great love of and respect for nature, so it was also natural for me to find and adore authors from Thoreau to Carson, as well as some of the others in this anthology: Gary Snyder, Edward Abbey, and N. Scott Momaday included.

I first read Silent Spring as a teenager, and even then I recognized the power and beauty of Rachel Carson's rhetoric. She writes vivid, lingering descriptions down to such fine detail; it almost feels like watching a film pan slowly over a serene countryside, dwelling thoughtfully on various aspects of the landscape, picking up all the sounds and smells as well as the sights along the way. The connection she builds between the reader and the scene she paints is so sincere, it comes as a tragedy when she reveals the consequences of careless human actions in this idyllic setting. It is no wonder that her book literally changed the world.

Having never read Peter Matthiessen before, it was a pleasant surprise to find many sentiments and rhetorical strategies in his Wildlife in America as are found in Silent Spring. Matthiessen, too, seems to care deeply about the tiniest details of the environment he writes about, down to the fate of the last microscopic speck of eggshell from last of the now-extinct Auks. There was one line that struck me as unusual yet undeniably true in this excerpt: "There is some comfort in the notion that, however Homo sapiens contrives his own destruction, a few creatures will survive in that ultimate wilderness he will leave behind..." It may sound incredibly fatalistic, but I have actually had similar thoughts before. When I start to get overwhelmed by the destruction humankind is wreaking upon the Earth, I like to think that, whatever we do, the Earth itself will prevail. We may very well wipe ourselves off the face of the planet, and, unfortunately, we may take quite a few species with us, but we simply cannot destroy all life; it would be quite egomaniacal to think that we are that powerful.

This is not, of course, to say that I think we should just give up conservation or caring what we do to the environment. In fact, on a purely selfish level, we should realize that damaging any part of the Earth will somehow manage to come back to haunt us personally. As Edward Abbey put it, "All living things on earth are kindred."

Anne Sexton the Feminist

I was very pleased to see that Anne Sexton was included in our reading selection this week. The indomitable Anne Sexton is a shining example of the feminist spirit in the postmodernist era. She displays a heavy dependence upon oral tradition and the spoken word in her poetry—along with almost every major aspect of feminist tone and style from that profound period of American history. As was the case with the section on the Beats, I enjoyed the poems included in our anthology (especially the profound The Addict), but my favorites were not included here. I believe her most poignant poem is Self in 1958, but Her Kind is also an excellent example of her best work and strong feminist stance.

Sexton’s poems simultaneously express biting wit, repressed fury, and excruciating loneliness, along with the private, “confessional” tone popular with the Beats. In fact, Sexton’s contemporary was Allen Ginsberg, who often contemplated in his own poems her apparent fear that human feeling and natural wonder at the world were being stifled to the point of nonexistence. Sexton picks up this line of thought and carries it forward in a distinctly feminist tone with Self in 1958—her own reaction to the uniform “plasticness” of the people and the world around her, and to her life as a woman trapped in a stifling gender role. In this poem, Sexton seems to yearn for a real world, a real life, and freedom, but she is not able to even summon the emotions necessary for such an awakening anymore: “I would cry / … if I could remember how / and if I had the tears.” She is bearing witness to the so-called “death of feeling,” a fear that the drive toward power, outward success, and the accumulation of wealth were stifling the truth of domestic feelings and personal emotions. Sexton is trapped in an unreal world; perfect in all appearances, but actually a sham—a cover-up so powerful that it becomes ultimately inescapable. She is the fragmented woman described by Betty Friedan, experiencing the “schizophrenic split”: angelic outside and monstrously torn apart inside.

In her other poems, Sexton continues to write powerfully as a response to the pressures of gender role conformity. She uses a kind of heated irony and dark humor (demonstrated piercing in Her Kind), and she often reveals the Freudian influence of imagining a horrific inner life, which she couples with confessional, “therapist’s couch” overtones (painfully illustrated in For My Lover, Returning to His Wife). She is also beautifully talented at utilizing her own, personal “voice” in natural American vernacular and intimate sounding speech (portrayed with heartbreaking exquisiteness in The Truth the Dead Know).

In an important contribution to the emerging admiration and respect for women in the literature world, Anne Sexton gives a brutally honest, painfully self-aware account of a woman’s life in “picture-perfect” 1950s and ’60s suburbia. Opening the secret gates that kept the female sex locked into a mold of male-envisioned womanhood, Sexton reveals complex layers of excruciating confusion, stifled emotion, and suppressed needs: “What is reality / to this synthetic doll / who should smile, who should shift gears, / … and have no evidence of ruin or fears?”

Vietnam and Protests

Of course, reading anything about the Vietnam War is always a wrenching experience. Frustration and anger that we were there at all, sorrow for the soldiers who fought there, pity for the civilians who had their lives torn apart… And now, there’s the vague feeling of déjà vu, thinking about a new country being destroyed, more soldiers senselessly losing their lives, another “holy war without allies,” as Susan Sontag so aptly put it. I guess she was right; “America is just crazy enough to try to do it.”

The list of questions that Sontag answers in her essay “What’s Happening in America” is still very relevant today. I wonder what kind of responses it would elicit? The first question, “Does it matter who is in the White House,” will be answered soon enough. What about “How serious is the problem of inflation?” I’d say very serious, as the current recession demonstrates, but the administration’s response of continuously doling out MORE money is the exact opposite of helping the situation. More inflation will only make the economic bubble larger, and it will burst all the harder. Later questions, “Where do you think our foreign policies are likely to lead us?” and “What, in general, do you think is likely to happen in America?” are harder to answer. Finally, perhaps the most difficult question to transpose to today’s world: “Do you think any promise is to be found in the activities of young people today?” We do not have the major countercultural movements of the ’60s, or at least, now they are more integrated into the mainstream and not as radical – or, I would say, as effective. There is promise in the number of young people who have discovered the logic of Libertarianism, and in the number who chose to speak out against the wrongs our government is committing. However, there is also a distinct lack of promise in the vast number of young people who are lethargic about what is happening in the world today, who know nothing and want to know nothing about politics, economics, the environment, civil liberties, or anything else that should concern us all. Sontag mentioned that “if the Bill of Rights were put to a national referendum as a new piece of legislation,” it would fail. I recently heard that people randomly stopped on the streets of D.C. refused to sign a petition because it was too radical – it was the Declaration of Independence with the first line removed.


There is also that rare and lonely section of literature on the Vietnam War that is uplifting, in its own way. My favorite piece in our reading this week was the excerpt from “The Free Speech Movement” by David Lance Goines. His humor is inspiring, given the subject, and his actions and ideas are both hilarious and pure genius! You simply have to respect someone who responds to his draft notice with a letter that starts, “Gentlemen: Please remove me from your mailing list…” By far the most astounding (and audacious) act Goines performed was the series of letters he wrote to the draft board under the assumption that if you keep your file out and moving, “sooner or later, they will lose it!” And it worked! This is absolutely the best draft-dodging story I have ever heard. Now I want to read not only Goines’ book, but also the one by C. Northcote Parkinson that inspired him to this incredible feat.

Finally, no collection of Vietnam memoirs would be complete without including “The Things They Carried” by Tim O’Brien. The chapter in our text (“The Man I Killed”) is not my favorite from O’Brien’s book, but it is certainly effective. What always strikes me about O’Brien’s writing is how easily he glides back and forth between truth and fiction, and—even more striking—that it is impossible to tell which is which. His point, of course, is that it doesn’t matter: whatever we experience can be explained with deeper truths than fact alone can provide. Perhaps that really is the only way to begin to understand something as awful in U.S. history as the Vietnam War.

LSD, Shrooms, & Other Fun Stuff

I remember being six years old. It was the mid ’80s and I lived in the small, cedar-paneled, wood stove-heated home that my parents had built by themselves on their 40-acre homestead in north Idaho. Our indoor plumbing consisted of a kitchen sink and a huge cast-iron claw-foot bathtub; toilet facilities would be located in an outhouse about 20 yards down a path until I was nearly 11. We had, however, recently acquired electricity, and in the afternoon my parents would play records of some of their favorite artists to get my brother and me to lay still on the pillows and cushions scattered across the wood floor and relax, if not actually nap. A few of the artists I still love to listen to who were introduced to me at this early age were Cat Stevens, Joni Mitchell, The Grateful Dead, Bob Dylan, The Beatles, John Denver, and The Moody Blues. I can still remember singing along gently to the hypnotizing and mystical songs of The Moody Blues, chanting that lyrical-sounding name—“Timothy Leary…”

How little did I know the associations I was invoking.

Timothy Leary seems such a mythical figure now: a guru in the world of hallucinogenic drugs and a master in the art of tripping. Reading about his mansion at Millbrook and the League for Spiritual Discovery feels like reading a work of outrageous fiction—people really did this? This was real? The approach they took to drugs is incredible. People today take drugs to escape or just to have fun; Leary and his League took them to achieve something, to gain understanding. Under the influence of hallucinogens such as LSD or shrooms, the associations with Buddhism and Hinduism come naturally—the intrinsic connection to every particle in the universe; the feeling of enlightenment; the awareness of the presence in animals, tree, rocks, water. To experience this is one thing; to take something away from that experience and incorporate it into the rest of your life is really quite amazing.

Sure, detractors may read Diane di Prima’s account of that Thanksgiving Day at Millbrook as proof of blatant neglect, irresponsibility, or dangerous ignorance. After all, she lets her three-year-old son taste beer—but did you know that in many cultures there is no stigma against children drinking light forms of alcohol? The group accidentally allows a reporter to ingest a huge amount of LSD—but did you read the article about the CIA actually intentionally testing LSD on unsuspecting civilians? And Leary had randomly “dumped half the [LSD] powder” into a can with some vodka and “sloshed it around” as part of his supposedly scientific testing—but didn’t everyone there come of their own accord and know what they were getting into? I firmly believe that people in this country should be free to do to their own bodies whatever they desire. That includes accepted and legal things such as tattooing and piercing, semi-accepted and legally contended things such as abortion, and underground and currently illegal things such as ingesting whatever drugs one chooses. The so-called “war on drugs” has only made drug lords more powerful and the acquisition of drugs more expensive and dangerous than it should be. Have we all forgotten the immense folly of prohibition?

One example of a perfectly harmless drug that has been ludicrously elevated in its illegality to the same status of LSD is, of course, the magic mushroom. I think Andy Lechter had an excellent point when he suggested in Shroom: A Cultural History of the Magic Mushroom that the greatest threat to mushroom users is the danger of picking the wrong kind of mushroom—a danger that could easily be remedied or at least drastically reduced if mushrooms were readily available on a legal market. I’m sure the same goes for many drugs, even those considered by some to be incredibly dangerous. But think of it: would you rather have a friend or relative taking their chances with heroin purchased in a grimy back alley or in a regulated pharmacy? To me, at least, the answer is clear.