A Happening - Bittersweet Adolescence of a Nation
( A review by Pam Hanna)
This book took me weeks to read, not because it was dull but because the copious footnotes at the end of each of the 14 excellent articles demanded investigation. The essays complement one another to present a more complete and cogent view of the antecedents and realities of the counterculture than any other volume I have yet seen on the subject. Counterculture names, say Braunstein and Doyle "…hippies, freaks, Flower Children, "urban guerillas" "orphans of Amerikka" – underscores the degree to which Sixties cultural radicals had a revolving-door approach to identity, appropriating and shedding roles and personas at a dizzying pace." In these pages the roles and personas in cultural politics, race, sex, the media (especially music, film and fashion), drugs, feminism, environmentalism and alternative visions of community and technology are thoroughly investigated.
"Unlike subcultures," says Marilyn Young in the foreword, "…a contraculture aspires to transform values and mores of its host culture. If it is successful…it BECOMES the dominant culture." I don’t believe anyone would maintain that the counterculture of the ‘60s has become dominant, but its influence on our present culture is more vast and all encompassing than much of the media would have us believe.
"The Sixties were centrally about the recognition on the part of an ever-growing number of Americans, that the country in which they thought they lived – peaceful, generous, honorable – did not exist and never had." The society they found themselves in was instead, "… morally bankrupt, racist, militaristic, and culturally stultifying." Against the climate of the Vietnam War and race riots in the South, these essays note that the era was one of post scarcity abundance. Intentional poverty was adopted consciously by a generation that was appalled by the waste of human and material resources. They wanted to figure out how to "…live a completely new life as far outside the boundaries of the State and commercial marketplace as they could get." Dropouts could live on the leftovers of this affluent society. The San Francisco Diggers’ motto was "create the condition you describe." Says Doyle, "For the Diggers the word "free" was as much an imperative as it was an adjective. They realized it with free housing, legal services, a medical clinic, film screenings, free [open] churches, and free stores with food, clothes, and household utensils – all donated and gathered from the surrounding community. The Mime Troupe and other street theater groups drew people in to create "happenings," freaking freely on the streets and public parks, de-legitimizing violence and racism, while the White Panthers staged a "total assault on the culture." Peacefully.
"If we make peaceful revolution impossible, we make violent revolution inevitable" said JFK and his words reverberate across cultural boundaries today. But hippies didn’t WANT to become the next coercive power structure in some kind of psychedelic fascism. They wanted a "free frame of reference."
Braunstein observes that the post-scarcity abundance or the era fueled a new drive toward leisure and play. Against a system of "lifelong competitiveness, materialism and avarice…LSD and other mind-expanding drugs incapacitated the discriminating faculties of the brain that placed objects and images in hierarchies of value." David Farber adds that LSD and other hallucinogens were used as "…an agent in the production of cultural reorientation...a new set of cultural coordinates." My only beef with the book is in Philip Deloria’s "Counterculture Indians and the New Age" and it’s not even a criticism of the essay (which I found among the most brilliant and absorbing) but of scholarly research in general. From personal knowledge, I know that there are egregious errors in what Deloria’s sources reported about New Buffalo and Lorian. Scholarly research breaks down when such sources are trusted, and Deloria gives an excellent example of this in the much-repeated death speech of Chief Seattle - who never uttered it. They were written by a white screenwriter from Texas for a 1972 TV script on pollution. Hippies and New Agers reinvented the Indian without careful reference to the source. And of course the image became marketable.
"Playing Indian," says Deloria, "…had a tendency to lead one into, rather than out of, contradiction and irony" and "…people are simultaneously granted a platform and rendered voiceless." In his excellent essay on communes, Timothy Miller notes that they were "…enormously, endlessly diverse." "The ultimate culprit, perhaps, was that sacred American icon, individualism. The time had come, communitarians believed, to give up the endless pursuit of self-interest and begin thinking about the common good. They wanted the country to start moving from "I" to "we." "It all added up to a vision of nothing less than a new society. The new communitarians were out to save the world and made no bones about it."
Miller’s essay segues nicely into the last in the book on alternative technology, environment and the counterculture by Andrew Kirk. Buckminster Fuller’s geodesic domes were used extensively in the Drop City commune in Colorado as well as "..composting toilets, affordable greenhouses, and organic gardening techniques along with alternative energy technologies." And don’t forget that the first computer hackers, Steve Jobs & Steve Wozniak, were longhairs who smoked grass. It’s not that there were no mistakes, ineptitude and downright stupidities in this deliberately unorganized "happening" of the ‘60s and ‘70s, but that what was good about it is still good. We’re still out there. Here. Hippies didn’t disappear and they didn’t become corporate CEOs either. Instead, nearly all became teachers, health care workers, artists, organic farmers, social workers and the like. "Cultural creatives" of the present, for instance, are either hippies of yesteryear or their heirs in some way.
"They are still out there, well into a third generation, coming together by the tens of thousands once a year at the Rainbow Gatherings. The hallucinogenic age, while tamed in some respects, has survived and mutated and reproduced." This is the closest thing to the whole story that I’ve seen yet. Put it on your reference book shelf.
No comments:
Post a Comment