This book review is interesting—more than any other critique of the 60s counterculture, this one seems to draw the correct conclusions about how the counterculture is sort of irrelevant while the 60s were significant. The world changed a lot in the 60s, but it was the civil rights movement and the Great Society that did it more than the counter-culture. The review sets up and knocks down all the goals of the counterculture: Ending the war? The influence of the counterculture on changing people’s opinions on that is controversial, and it seems that it might have hurt as much as helped. Free love? Its seeds of destruction were in the fact that it was so sexist. (Though the partial birth of feminism from the ashes of the counterculture is nothing to sneer at, but for the sake of this argument, let’s say that feminism was a unique movement.) Tuning in and dropping out? Yeah, that was never going to work. I find myself only halfway convinced by this—let’s just say the counterculture was overrated. The review mentions Thomas Frank’s tedious arguments about consumerism and how it took over the counterculture, but I find myself wholly unconvinced there’s a there there. Consumerism is an ill-defined idea. Is it consumerist if money changes hands? Or if it’s a lot of money? Is it selling out to make any money, or are you morally pure so long as you don’t make enough to live on? Shaming people about enjoying material things or making a decent living strikes me as a cheap substitute for taking on economic injustice—ensuring a living wage for everyone is hard work, and it’s a lot easier to cruise around calling people sell-outs for how they dress, how much money they make, or what electronic gadgets they own.
But let’s be fair: The counterculture had a huge impact on what would become the environmentalist movement, even if it is expressed all too often with blatant consumerism that makes Thomas Frank roll his eyes and foam at the mouth. Buy a Prius, save the planet. But you know, the people who demonize basic materialism in the first place only have themselves to blame for that—we’re a nation that feels guilty about enjoying our things, so we want the pleasures of materialism to be padded with some feel-good-ery to assuage the guilt. If we just understood materialism for what it is, and weren’t so dead set on yelling, “I’m no materialist!”, we probably wouldn’t be in a predicament where corporations are essentially shilling to us about how this product will cure us of shallow consumerist tendencies. Still, we needed a jumpstart on environmentalism, and the counterculture gave us that.
But I digress. The question is why is the counterculture historically overrated in terms of actual impact on society and politics? There’s a lot of reasons, and the most obvious is that there’s just a lot more Baby Boomers than the rest of us. All people, regardless of generation, like to feel that we were part of something important and hip, but the Boomers have the numbers to perpetuate a fantasy that all people have into the official fantasy of hip coolness that dominates the national imagination. Actual participation in the counterculture is irrelevant to this—people probably prefer the contact high aspect to actual historical participation anyway.
But I think the main thing is that the counterculture has become the stand-in for the larger changes to society that happened during the 60s. Which brings me to where I really disagree with this reviewer:
DeGroot’s claim that large numbers of people still use the ’60s counterculture as a scapegoat seems exaggerated to me,….
Leaving out the rest, because that’s not what I’m taking issue with. I think that the counterculture is a huge scapegoat, and that conservatives and reactionaries of every sort have deliberately conflated the counterculture with other changes at the time (including feminism, civil rights, the Great Society, the loss of the Vietnam War) because it gives them a way to criticize these important and substantial changes that most Americans are protective of without, you know, coming out and attacking the changes.
Look at this picture that was on Limbaugh’s site, for instance:
You see pictures like this a lot, pictures that imply that the Clintons were free love hippies who toddled around the U.S. in a VW van dropping acid instead of being the studious Ivy League types devoted to their careers that they actually were. Why lie like that? Well, because castigating them for what’s actually bothering the Wingnutteria—that the Clintons are Democrats who inherit the legacy of the Great Society, that they are part of a buttoned-up liberalism that is pro-choice, feminist, and anti-racial discrimination—wouldn’t work very well. Over and over again, you can fill this in. An attack on a counterculture that has essentially disappeared is a stand-in for an attack on the lasting legacies of the 60s. Someone ranting about hippies is probably ranting about civil rights or anti-poverty programs or the belief that the U.S. should be circumspect about our military engagements.
80 Responses to “The counterculture that didn’t inhale”
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It certainly was evident in McCain’s attacks on Hillary a while back over her sponsoring of a Woodstock museum or something like that. Even his weak joke about it–I didn’t get to go to Woodstock because I was tied up at the time–shows the disdain that conservatives in general have toward the counterculture. Never mind that the majority of their political figures were getting deferments for ass boils or hiding away in the Texas Air National Guard or simply pursuing other interests–they’re the party of patriotism while we’re the dirty fucking hippies.
Stop putting “actually” so much.
One reason I find the remnants of “The Counter Culture” to be tedious is the tendency of those who bought into it to be fundamentally puritanical in their behavior.
I find them to be the most insufferable of the babyboomers in any number of ways, but I really don’t think we needed to replace rigid and self-assured systems of thought with COUNTERCULTURAL rigid and self-assured systems of thought.
If you look at anecodotes from the time, this puritan streak was there all along - macrobiotic diets forced on children and malnourished back to the land farmers who missed the role of animals in agriculture to food co-ops imploding over the basic need to have a cash register because it was too capitalist, to LLL/attachment parenting zealots insisting there is only one right way to parent (even if their children were “telling” them otherwise).
This is, of course, one of Hillary’s serious deficiencies IMHO - she falls right into the absolutist traps that many of her generation do (and yet they deny they are like their “backward” parents because they were “countercultural” after all!). Then she gets called on it and looks lame.
Actual participation in the counterculture is irrelevant to this
It would have to be, because an extraordinarily small percentage of people participated in the counterculture, unless you count listening to Jimi Hendrix. But that actually brings me to another factor that I think explains it - the aesthetics of the counterculture were, indeed, pervasive among the boomer generation, even if all they did was put up a poster in their dorm room. Or even if htey didn’t even do that, but saw the aesthetics everywhere else. And I think those visual and aural memories make the actual counter-culture seem more pervasive than it was.
Ms Kate, I completely agree w/r/t the puritanism, which hasn’t gone away at all in too many left-leaning countercultures.
Amanda, I think this ties into what you write about the antipathy toward materialism…several Salon Letter writers claim, and I agree, that the hippies’ biggest failing was to withdraw from “the system,” especially the political system, leaving a vacuum into which the right rushed before too long.
I wonder if the hippies’ white suburban post-war upbringings, being he first generation widely raised in nuclear-family households, had a lot to do with their detachment…
I’m at the tail-end of the Boomers. I experienced the ’60’s as a pre-teen.
I’m struggling to come up with something interesting, profound (if I’m lucky), and thought-provoking - but I’m drawing a blank.
It’s still too weird to make much sense of it, even after all these years.
“What a long, strange trip it’s been…”
“Stop putting “actually” so much.”
Actually, I think you’re wrong…
“Stop putting “actually” so much.”
?? Twice in the whole essay, but (yes) in the same paragraph, ok. Man, tough frickin’ crowd.
Maybe we’re asking the wrong question when we asked how much of an impact the counterculture had. How much impact did hippies influence the average American who wasn’t a participant. Maybe not that much. If anything, the backlash might have been more influential than the counterculture.
In some sense, the counterculture itself was more of a historical phenomenon than a movement, per se.
The baby boomer cohort was so large that any prevailing social trends in that group have been very conspicuous within the larger society, simply in virtue of this huge percentage of the population coming of age in a very short time.
If we want to understand the impact of the counterculture, it might be better how those experiences shaped the later lives of the participants–rather than what ideas or accomplishment came out of the counterculture phase.
Contrast the prominence of baby boomers as a genration to the so-called “generation X”–which was so much smaller and less conspicuous that Douglas Copeland had to make a case for its existence after the fact.
It wasn’t the counterculture, it was the civil rights movement, the new wave of feminism, the anti-war movement, it was the…
You can parse it all you want. For those of us old enough to remember the America of the 50s, and the America of the 70s, it is clear there was an absolute sea change in attitude that occurred. And it all came down to a questioning of authority. Prior to this there was a dominant cultural narrative which was sexist, racist and corporate. All of this has been under continual assault since.
The 60s were all that and a nickel bag. That’s why everyone still argues about it. Culturally, politically, socially, it’s never been the same in America.
The hippies won. They are too modest to take credit.
I wonder, what do you think “tuning in and dropping out” was supposed to mean?
the hippies’ biggest failing was to withdraw from “the system,” especially the political system, leaving a vacuum into which the right rushed before too long.
Very likely, but didn’t that happen when Democratic President Lyndon Johnson — the anti-war candidate, or at least the one who called Goldwater a war nut — escalated the war in Vietnam? I know great quasi-hippy Robert Anton Wilson “swore never to trust any of the bastards again,” and from that time until his recent death he never did vote for anyone who might win.
This book review is interesting—more than any other critique of the 60s counterculture, this one seems to draw the correct conclusions about how the counterculture is sort of irrelevant while the 60s were significant. The world changed a lot in the 60s, but it was the civil rights movement and the Great Society that did it more than the counter-culture
That’s how I feel, basically. There seems to be a narrative out there that not only did the counter-culture movement die too soon, but that it didn’t deserve to die; that if someone was looking to bring about radical change in the world, the counter-culture was the movement to emulate.
To me it was an elitist, utopian, and really pretentious movement and when the majority of the members of the counter-culture realized it, they began to step back while the true believers who held onto the dream became The Weathermen, Charlie Manson, and various obscure communist groups.
Also, I think that consumerist culture is a powerful weapon for brining about change; in the 70s it was disco music that helped homosexuality be brought into the mainstream (or at least become at least a little more acceptable) not a person with a protest sign. Billie Jean King beating the living crap out of Bobby Riggs did a lot more for feminism then any silly “direct action” did.
You can parse it all you want. For those of us old enough to remember the America of the 50s, and the America of the 70s, it is clear there was an absolute sea change in attitude that occurred. And it all came down to a questioning of authority. Prior to this there was a dominant cultural narrative which was sexist, racist and corporate. All of this has been under continual assault since.
I wonder how much of this is due to the Boomer cohort *writing* the dominant cultural narrative of that time period. It’s easy to see the 60s as a time when America began to question authority when it coincides with one’s adolescent and postadolescent years.
Mrs Nice Guy here:
Nobody: A lot of those postwar households were struggling single-parent households, both because of the war (either dad didn’t come back, or he came back with PTSD, what they called “shell-shocked” then). And some of them were single-parent because it had just recently become not entirely unthinkable for people to dissolve really unsuccessful marriages by divorce.
So I don’t know that I believe your etiology. Because so many of my friends were from struggling single parent households that I just can’t picture us as a bunch of lucky little Dick-and-Janes.
The other reason it’s worth questioning how prevalent in its time the 60s counterculture was is that *every* form of political or artistic activity since gets compared to it (on its terms) and found wanting.
It wasn’t the counterculture, it was the civil rights movement, the new wave of feminism, the anti-war movement, it was the…
You can parse it all you want. For those of us old enough to remember the America of the 50s, and the America of the 70s, it is clear there was an absolute sea change in attitude that occurred. And it all came down to a questioning of authority. Prior to this there was a dominant cultural narrative which was sexist, racist and corporate. All of this has been under continual assault since.
The 60s were all that and a nickel bag. That’s why everyone still argues about it. Culturally, politically, socially, it’s never been the same in America.
The hippies won. They are too modest to take credit.
Or, just to throw out a theory, all of mainstream of society was going through a major paradigm shift and the hippies were merely the knee-jerk by product of it.
At my college, there is a club called the Gay Straight Alliance that advocates gay marriage, out reach to closeted and emotionally troubled kids, gay acceptance etc.
There is also a much smaller, much more radical, pro-homosexuality club called Who Has Privileges that opposes gay marriage, for a contrived, petty reason* and opposes the Human Rights Campaign because they are sponsored by Nike. They recently crashed a gay marriage debate between the College Republicans and Democrats, by standing on the stage between the debaters holding up a sign that said “bigot” and refusing to move even after the president of the College Dems begged him.
To me, the Gay Straight Alliance represents a lot of mainstream America during the 60s, progressive, cautious, and goal-oriented while WhoHasPrivileges.org represents the hippie movement; knee-jerk, radical, and unfocused.
When the dust of history settles, who do you think will play the bigger role in bringing gay marriage to America.
*“We see the movement as a concern solely of white, middle class, gays and lesbians. As queer activists, we are concerned with not only the oppression of gay and lesbian people, but also transgendered people, racial minorities, and poverty. The gay marriage movement is virtually the only visible gay political movement and Who Has Privileges? aims to change that by challenging the idea that married heterosexuals should be granted certain privileges and civil rights that are denied to everyone else. This is the basis for our opposition to Amendment #2.”
To me, the Gay Straight Alliance represents a lot of mainstream America during the 60s, progressive, cautious, and goal-oriented while WhoHasPrivileges.org represents the hippie movement; knee-jerk, radical, and unfocused.
When the dust of history settles, who do you think will play the bigger role in bringing gay marriage to America.
I forgot to add my point;
As homosexuality, and the idea that gays should have rights equal to straight couples becomes more mainstream, the extreme fringe of those ideas (like WhoHasPrivilages) will become proportionately larger, and more vocal. When the media looks back to the movement, they’ll pay attention to those who where the loudest and most flamboyant (no pun intended) and look over the less attention-hungry people who probably where more politically successful. Also skipped over is all the progressive-minded but politically apathetic people who, in their social circles, stigmatize those with homophobic attitudes, but other than that they’d sit on the couch eating cheetos.
it is clear there was an absolute sea change in attitude that occurred.
And now those attitudes have fossilized in large part, as this cohort has aged and self-validated.
I suspect this is behind the huge generation gap in voting patterns, with 45 and under forming the Obama voting bloc.
Kids, remember to always work WITHIN the System. That’s how responsible, progressive social change occurs, and is occurring now. This great Country of ours didn’t get where it is today as a result of bright young people like yourselves “dropping out” and questioning everything. Our fine Democracy is all about change, and when you become a part of that process, you’ll be the kind of responsible Americans your Moms and Dads can always be proud of. Don’t forget to vote!
It wasn’t the counterculture, it was the civil rights movement, the new wave of feminism, the anti-war movement, it was the…
Not to be too pedantic about it (sorry, this is my period, I’m a historian, I can’t help it), but while I don’t dispute for a second that those things (especially the first two) were hugely transformative, they were part of the “long” 1960s - some of the most important civil rights activism and litigation took place solidly in the 1950s (Brown v. Board and Montgomery bus boycott, anyone?) and some of the most important feminist organizing took place in the 1970s. Historical change doesn’t always line up so neatly with the years that end in zero, or with a given generation. Many of the leaders of both the civil rights movement and the feminist movement were much older than the Boomers. I think the Boomers sometimes like to take too much credit.
However, I do think that the sexual revolution that began in the 1960s and continued through the 1970s has had an enormous impact on lifestyle, culture, politics, and families. I think the pill had more to do with that than the counterculture, but they were both important, and it changed so much in this country.
I kind of find it funny how while the hippie and student protest movement burned out completely within the course of about 5 years, Lawrence Welk, the corniest, most square person ever born, managed to stay culturally relevant throughout the radical 60’s and last up until way into the 80s.
If anything, it shows you to never overestimate old people’s unquenchable thirst for bland, inoffensive music.
Many would claim the American Revolution as a progressive movement, given that it resulted in the Bill of Rights. It’s difficult to imagine how violent revolution would be construed as working within the system.
The “Counter-Culture…
Gee… I lived it. I was at the Pentagon in 1967. Lived in the Haight Ashbury. Sold the Berkeley Barb and Tribe on the street corners. sheltered a deserter for three years.
There was this image that we saw of ourselves in the media and then there was the reality of our lives.
Dropping out.. What did we drop out from? Participation in an Imperialist war. Malvina Reynolds had a song “Little Boxes”. We tried hard to not be crammed into those little boxes. we in the words of Mario Savio “Put our bodies against the wheels.”
Flower children… Shit we hated that label, even hippie was one we only took on begrudgingly.
People viewed what we were about, ahistorically in a way we did not. we saw the connections to the “Diggers and Levelers”, to the utopian communities that formed in 19th century America.
Our culture was related to a bohemian culture that went back a hundred years prior, to poets like Rimbaud and forward to the Beats and folkies who immediately preceded us.
Like Kerouac’s Dharuma Bums some of us were on a spirit quest. Many of us were queer and gravitated to places like San Francisco, Greenwich Village and other hip enclaves in search of a place where we would be free.
Many of us called ourselves freaks because that was what we were in our homes of Buttfuck small towns with smaller minds Amerika.
We read, we expanded our minds, we dropped out of old religions and some of us became existential atheists, others started the neo-pagan goddess worship religions.
Before there was Earth Day there was People’s Park and the Native American occupation of Alcatraz Island.
We looked at visionaires like Buckie Fuller and Paolo Solari. Started bookstores, and organic food markets. Opened restaurants, became artists, writers, musicians, teachers and social workers.
We went on from the New Left to start the Eco-Movements because we had read “Silent Spring” and “the Population Bomb”. Publish things like “The whole Earth Catalog.
Gay Liberation and Second Wave Feminism was our doing as well.
But we were a minority and a small one at that. So many of the sins of our generation that are stuck upon us were not of our doing.
The whole generation was not part of the counter culture. Indeed those of us who tried to remain one with our ideals found our lives squeezed by housing cost, hard mean drug laws, peeing in the bottle, dress codes etc.
Yet the counter culture still exists. You can find it in the parts of town where the queers and painters live along side the tattoo artists, writers and chopper builders.
The straight looking person with the subversive grin and the slight askew attitude at work and several holes in their ears who dresses to the letter of the dress code but not exactly the spirit.
We gather at times at Burning Man or with the Rainbow Tribe. we still go to see Joan Baez and Arlo Guthrie and all the old rockers who still tour on occasion.
We keep our heads down and our powder dry for these are hard time to be old and different in and our bodies take a long time to heal if a cop hits us with a night stick at a demonstration.
More of us are writing down our stories. Some are doing oral histories and we are angry at the lies that have been told about us.
Nuh-uh. No one ever really questioned authority until I was a teenager in the ’90s. You ever hear of a little band called Nirvana? What, you still listening to Donovan?
But really, I’m sick of the Boomer circle-jerk. I can’t believe you think you’re a modest bunch. Why do the lilly-white hippies get to claim the Civil Rights movement when that was planned decades in advance quietly by Black women? Why do Boomers get to claim Feminism while they fight tooth and claw to hang onto Second Wave feminism as the one true calling? Why do they get to claim the ‘tune in, drop out’ stuff when our weed is SO much better?
For whatever they may have given us, they also gave us the Reich Wing, a deflated Left, global warming, huge national debts, near global nuclear annihilation, terrible white flight and black ghettos, etc, etc. Almost any intractable problem that my generation has to mop up is directly a result of Boomer BS, whether its counter-culture or counter-counter-culture we’re talking about. If you want to claim the Beatles, you gotta eat the other stuff too.
An attack on a counterculture that has essentially disappeared is a stand-in for an attack on the lasting legacies of the 60s. Someone ranting about hippies is probably ranting about civil rights or anti-poverty programs or the belief that the U.S. should be circumspect about our military engagements.
Girl, I haven’t even bothered to read any comments, just wanted to say that this is so, so true.
Betsy:
Yup. And I was going to note that one of the frustrating things about the conflation of the counterculture with “the sixties” is that it encourages us to think of the decade as synonymous with its last three or four years.
Because so much of the most interesting social change of that era dates from the late fifties and early sixties on the one hand and the early to mid-seventies on the other, when we imagine “the sixties” as the era of hippies and Vietnam war protests, we miss a lot — and we misunderstand even that short moment, because we see it in a historical vacuum.
I agree with a lot of what Amanda wrote but I wanted to add something in defense of the Boomers:
I think of the boomers for the most part as a product of the New Deal. They were the strongest middle class in history with access to a higher quality public education system then previous generations. I think what was so amazing about the boomers and the counterculture was a large mass of people trying different things, questioning authority, and broadening their horizons. When I talk to my parents about their times in the 60s, so much of their experience was about become more educated, more politically and socially involved and more sophisticated and cosmopolitan about the wider world.
I think subsequent generations have had much less of that including my own. Personally I think the Rights steady dismantling of our public education system is to blame for the most part. They saw what an informed, passionate youth movement could be and they did not like it and set about not allowing it to reoccur.
I also there was a populist aspect to the movements of the 60s with the intellectual Left actually engaged with more people. Since the 60s there has been a shift with intellectuals on the Left. I think there was a move toward becoming more academically cloistered. Think of the kind of populist take on Existentialism and Marxism in the 60s vs. say French Post-Structuralism, which may have started in the 60s but has dominated so much academic discourse since then and is inaccessible to many people despite its importance. I think part of the Left lost its way for a while there and that’s also part of how we ended up in our current right wing nightmare.
” The world changed a lot in the 60s, but it was the civil rights movement and the Great Society that did it more than the counter-culture”
Groan. No, those were changes that happened in America. America may have changed a lot in the 1960’s; the rest of the world, not so much.
The counterculture permeates popular culture to this day, and it’s silly to suppose otherwise. It’s not just music and hair styles. Christ, before the 60’s or the 70’s, divorce required proof of infidelity in many if not most states. Microbreweries started. Running shoes and premium ice cream appeared. (I’m CERTAIN that nearly no readers of this blog ever indulge in cannabis.)
My generation wasn’t so much the cause of the cultural change as its exemplars and beneficiaries. The changes had been in the works since WWII, as a cursory examination of the literature of the time will reveal. The late sixties was mostly a particularly gaudy flowering phase of a long-term trend.
A decade ago or so I read an article suggesting that one of the most enduring products of hippie culture was the personal computer (and a great deal of the software behind it). Have you ever looked at pictures of computer pioneers, now or then? Lots of hair there, jeans and t-shirts. Sandals, even.
It’s absolutely true that only a small fraction of the boomer generation participated in the counterculture, and, not unsurprisingly, most of those who were straights then are Republicans now. So? Let’s not get clumsy with all-or-nothing generalizations.
Either I’m painfully out of it, or the article (and book) are.
I don’t see the 60s counterculture much used as a benchmark on the *left*, these days. I think it’s deeply symbolically important on the *right* — as in that Hillary picture, which is frankly incomprehensible to me. The fact that conservatives call dailyKos posters “dirty f*ck*n hippies” is both hysterically funny and a marker for some wild cultural insecurities.
I mostly agree with epistemology: the counterculture *won*, to a considerable degree, and that’s why it seems to have disappeared to those of us on the left — while people on the right are still fighting it.
Doctor Science: I think the 60s counterculture is used as a benchmark in two very different ways by the left and right.
As you pointed out, the right wants to keep fighting the particular ideological conflicts of the 1960s. My impression is that parts of the left use the 1960s not as an ideological benchmark, but as a process benchmark - i.e., the measure of successful activism is how many people you can get to show up at your protest march.
Then there’s the center, which uses the 1960s as a cultural benchmark and whines about how there’s no great music any more.
Counterculture is the boogeyman of the cultural conservatives in the same way that stagflation is the boogeyman of the economic conservatives. Both were unusual events related to an almost unique set of circumstances. And conservatives have made fear of both the basis for every unjustified assault on American liberty and equality ever since.
Support rights for women, African Americans, or Latinos and the riots and annoying hippies will spring out of the ground like toadstools. Support higher taxes on the wealthy and regulations to support workers and stagflation and gas lines will reappear by magic.
Just to point out the positive end of the counterculture, the idea of “alternative lifestyle” (not its euphemism for gays and lesbians) was first suggested by the counterculture and has given us a much broader range of social options than were available before.
SuzyQ’s reminiscences and Adam N’s comments pretty much coincide with my experiences then, and my impressions now. Often forgotten is that many of those whose primary focus was on using drugs, wearing exotic clothing, and — for a while — pretending to “drop out” of conventional society, were consciously and sometimes angrily apolitical.
I myself was and am fairly political, and also have maintained a fairly straight appearance, mostly because I had always, even as a kid in the fifties, felt so estranged from the society that I decided that changes in externalities weren’t necessary.
The distinction between hippies and politicals was often very sharp. I vividly recall an apparent counterculturist reassuring a middle-aged, quite straight-looking couple, that HE and those like him were quite different from anti-war activists demonstrating nearby. HE and those like him were making what he thought a more fundamental revolution in culture. The couple seemed quite heartened to hear this.
Yes, it was the civil rights and anti-war movements that made the most substantial changes in formal politics. The womens’ and gay movements, which one might better call, the movement for gender democracy, did, and still do, put forward even more fundamental challenges. The mere formal equal rights for women are important, but they are like the formal abolition of feudal obligations in eighteenth and nineteenth century Europe. It took a century or so more to actually realize the democratic values that the turn from feudalism implied. Gender democracy is as great a historic change, and is by no means realized.
This is one of the prime reasons why I value the Pandagon Blog.
we saw the connections to the “Diggers and Levelers”, to the utopian communities that formed in 19th century America.
Our culture was related to a bohemian culture that went back a hundred years prior, to poets like Rimbaud and forward to the Beats and folkies who immediately preceded us.
I think this is very much the key to understanding the significance of “the counterculture”. The point is not that EVERYONE was a hippie, or that these things were playing out in the livingrooms of middle America, or that said movement was politically significant in a broad-spectrum way.
Very few people try to argue that Thoreau, Whitman, and the Transcendentalists actually caused the abolition of slavery or any of the other significant political changes in the latter half of the 19th century. We see them as significant artists and thinkers, and we see their influence in certain social movements that eventually influenced the overall cultural tide of that era. They were also, by their very nature, a fringe bohemian movement — your average 19th century farmer or craftsman wasn’t “dropping out” to live in a shanty on Walden Pond. This is also about what you can say for the 60’s counterculture.
One more thing: I see the direct influence of the counterculture on pop culture much more than on anything directly political. My grandmother has a fit seeing me put on jeans for anything fancier than gardening; while my boss, just a few years younger than her and definitely part of the Boomer zeitgeist, just walked by my desk in jeans and a polo shirt.
Part of what made the counterculture so interesting is that it did not represent withdrawing from the fight so much as continuing the fight in a different form. Many participants in the counterculture argued that the problems facing society were not going to be solved through political mobilization or organization alone. They saw the roots of these problems as being deeply embedded in the culture. To challenge those causes, and to begin to resolve those problems, required a more deep reaching cultural change–developing new values that rejected those that had created the society in which they lived. If you don’t like the society in which you live, make a new one.
Were there excesses and failures: of course. Did many people smoke dope, have sex, and listen to rock ‘n roll because it was fun: absolutely. But, I would argue that there is a case to be made that the counterculture also “changed everything” in ways that are hard to quantify because they are so far reaching.
I might not go so far as to say that the hippies won, but I would certainly argue that they didn’t lose, and that they were definitely not irrelevant.
As I understand it, the “counter-culture” was a rather different thing from the New Left, and that most hippies thought that leftist protest and organization, liberal or radical, were a joke and a waste of time. Better, they thought, to simply seize freedom by dropping into the interstices, seeking the untamed places. Doing your own thing in your own time.
That is, go live in a van on some mountaintop somewhere. You can always cut your hair and go straight if it doesn’t work out.
I’ve had a sneaking suspicion that there’s a stronger connection between the hippies and the the extremist religious right of the last 20 years than anyone wants to admit. The hippies were profoundly sexist and viewed all civic engagement with disdain. They favored closed communities with an alternative ethical systems, which were rather stiff and puritanical, as others have pointed out. And patriarchal.
Who were the first serious home-schoolers? Who thought maniacal “spirituality” would be the appropriate counter to a sick, materialistic culture? Who holed up in rural compounds, evading taxes and licenses?
Who were whiter than white?
I went to episcopal summer camp in the mid-70s and all the counselors affected hippie styles; guitars and camping were used to inculcate a much more fundamentalist religion than anything I got in real church back home.
What about the “Jesus Freaks” of the 70s? The first commercial Christian rock (look up the Band “Love Song”, for instance). “Eleven long-haired friends of Jesus in a chartreuse microbus” from “Convoy” (an interesting tune, politically, both conservative and radical and counter-cultural at the same time).
The hippies did suceed, but not in its early Haight-Ashbury Whole-Earth catalog incarnation. It morphed in the 70s….
anyhow, it’s a half-baked thesis still, but I think there’s something to it….
Wapsie is right. Feminism, which as I said, is a profoundly progressive historical development, came, as an organized expression, out of women’s frustration with sexism in the civil rights and anti-war movements. There was very open and explicit conflict and struggle about this in 1968-1972. The Marxist-Leninist groups, among their other irrelevancies, were mostly anti-feminist. I remember asking a member, (now I think he’s the maximum leader) of the trotskyite Spartacist League, what he thought of feminism. “It’s a frenzy.” This was in the summer of 1967. Other parts of the left were open to feminism, and the New American Movement, founded in 1972-1973, was very clearly feminist.
Jonathan Hohensee,
Without knowing more of the situation than you describe here, it seems to me that you can reach a very different conclusion: that the crazy, radical, unreasonable group Who Has Priviledges is opening up a space within which the College Democrats’ position — in favor of same-sex marriage — can be seen as a moderate, centrist, reasonable compromise.
Politics in this country, almost by definition, will nearly always end up at some kind of centrist compromise. The question is, “in the center between what?” And if all you have in your politics and political culture is lunatic, hateful, reactionary wingers and reasonable, sensible people saying, “Now, now, let’s not do anything rash,” what you end up with is…what we have now — an incredibly right-wing politics and political culture where the only options are (from an international perspective) center-right and pseudo-fascist.
To get back to the issue of queer rights: Human Rights Campaign wouldn’t be what it is today (FWIW) without the crazy, rude, provocative ACT-UP.
there’s a stronger connection between the hippies and the the extremist religious right of the last 20 years than anyone wants to admit
Yup.
I’ve actually been thinking about this a bit over the last few days — I got into some wikipedia tangent reading about the Jesus Movement, which was an offshoot of the counterculture and had a HUGE influence on evangelical Christianity, especially of the megachurch variety.
I was also reading about The Farm, one of the more successful ‘back to the land’ communes — they were against birth control and homosexuality early on, and are still anti-choice within their own organization (women who are part of The Farm are forbidden to have them). This is one of the groups that started the ‘natural childbirth’ movement, which fundies are every bit as excited about as hippies are.
A lot of this stuff transcends politics, and at the very least, the Right owes as much to the counterculture as the Left does.
I think the “counterculture” is more a media construct of the era than a genuine phenomenon. And I’ll add my support for Amanda for noting that blaming the “counterculture” is a stealth effort to attack the genuine movements (civil rights, feminism, etc) that are tied in the public mind to that era.
Crucial ingredient of the counterculture: prosperity. It’s a lot harder to drop out if you can foresee that it will condemn you and any kids you may have to lives of really unpleasant poverty. I was just postboomer, andwhen I went to college all the slightly older folks were complaining about the “grim preprofessionalism” that pervaded the younger generation. Nowadays, the idea that college might be for anything other than giving you a toehold on middle-class life — say, about learning to think, or experiencing personal growth or finding a subject you could love and learn about for the rest of your life — seems long gone.
Nowadays, the idea that college might be for anything other than giving you a toehold on middle-class life — say, about learning to think, or experiencing personal growth or finding a subject you could love and learn about for the rest of your life — seems long gone.
Which is especially sad because universities were not invented to give people toeholds on middle class life, they were invented to teach people to think and help them devote their lives to the study of academic subjects.
It was, in fact, the 60’s and 70’s which created this idea that all middle class people get to go to college, and if you are not already middle class, attaining a bachelor’s degree will get you there. I’m not sure if it was the draft, or the beginnings of the information age, or what, but pre-60’s people went to college like people nowadays go into doctoral programs and/or business school.
Counterculture? Isn’t there always a counterculture?
Let’s look at the 20th century:
Suffragettes
Flappers and Youth Jazz Culture
Wobblies and Communists and Labor Organizers
More rowdy wartime youth culture as cities bulged
Beatnicks and proto-goth hair-ironing folkies
(insert 60s counterculture here, with massive numbers of affluent youth able to play)
Punk Rockers
etc.
I’m not entirely sure that’s the case. The GI Bill created the expectation that a much larger chunk of the population could go to college (reinforced by the post-sputnik push for technical education). But then the destruction of US manufacturing and other blue-collar work, which really took hold in the 70s and 80s, made it possible to use college graduation as a weeding-out mechanism for entry to the middle class.
Then the imposition of college as a criterion (which meant the money and/or other resources to spend 4 years doing something other than making a living) helped hide the decline of primary education…
Crap, forgot about the GI Bill for a second.
Then replace “It was, in fact, the 60’s and 70’s…” with “It was, in fact, the immediate post-WW2 era…”
I’m seeing a couple people here that seem unaware that the Boomers of the counterculture didn’t actually invent bohemia. There was a counterculture before and after the 60s, and overall, I find the countercultures around jazz in the 20s and 50s, and the ones around punk in the 70s and 80s to be a lot more interesting than the Pentagon-floating one of the 60s.
Wapsie, it is important to keep in mind that the evangelicals you’re talking about intentionally appropriated the countercultural aesthetic and language as a strategy to bring young people and hippies into the fold. (See Lisa McGirr, Suburban Warriors: The Origins of the New American Right) So while I agree entirely that most hippie communities were as patriarchal as the rest of society, I don’t think they can really be held responsible for the rise of evangelical Christianity. The evangelicals would have used whatever aesthetics and ideals were hip; that was part of their strategy.
On a totally self-centered note, I have to say, it warms the cockles of my historian’s heart to see people passionately debating arguments about cultural and political history. Yay! Maybe I’m not completely irrelevant!
“the progressive-minded but politically apathetic people who, in their social circles, stigmatize those with homophobic attitudes, but other than that they’d sit on the couch eating cheetos.”
Here here! Us heroes finally get our due.
IMHO, the biggest “accomplishment” of the counter-culture was its role as a bogeyman and rallying point for the right wing in the wake of Goldwater’s humiliating defeat in 1964.
Ronald Reagan got into the California Governor’s mansion and, eventually, the White House by blaming the hippies et al. for all of the country’s problems. Were it not for the counter culture, Reagan would now be remembered as a mediocre B-movie actor.
I don’t agree that it died. I think it became much more main stream.
The 60’s counter-culture embraced pot as a drug of choice. Around 80 million Americans have tried it. That’s a little over 25% of the population. Most people think it should be decriminalized.
The 60’s counter-culture embraced environmentalism, and that’s arguably the most important result of the 60’s.
The 60’s counter-culture embraced organic food and alternative health, and that’s become main stream enough that they sell organic food at my chain grocery store.
The 60’s counter-culture embraced alternative religions and spiritual experiences and you can’t swing a dead cat without hitting a Wiccan or a Buddhist in Des Moine.
The 60’s counter-culture also embraced charismatic Christianity (aka “the Jesus movement”) and that charismatic movement gave rise to both Christian rock and “relevant” Christian churches for young people.
The 60’s counter-culture embraced Eastern culture and art, causing widespread adopting of lots of bits and pieces, like yoga and Buddha yard art and mandalas.
The 60’s changed everything. I find Boomers annoying in lots of ways, but they really did change the culture in lots of good ways.
Dawn (who wasn’t born until 1969)
Are you kidding? The entire world changed in the ’60s. Many African and Asian colonies won their independence. People were tearing shit up in Latin America. And, in Western Europe, activists were giving American protestors a run for their money. Not to mention that they got long-lasting results: universal health care, small gaps between rich and poor, and sane foreign policies.
I doubt that “the counterculture” is really so separable from the more concrete and deeper changes that took place in the ’60s and on that general momentum.
It may be fair to say that the CC was a product of that momentum rather than a driver of it. The whole hippie thing and related stuff was and is actually an attempt to take the best promises of liberal/progressive society at its word. Of course people looked for easy applications of the basic propositions of liberal humanism–why not? Insofar as “consumerism” is involved it preceded as much as sprung from the CC, defining its worst characteristics. What was the alternative, illegal drug culture, after all, but an extension of the legal drug culture of alcohol, prescription and OTC meds peddled endlessly by Madison Avenue, etc?
MAD Magazine, argulably an early harbinger of the CC, pretty well documented all these continuties as they happened; I suppose most of us have seen the classic “Conformist/NonConformist/MAD Nonconformist” article? That was written/drawn before 1960, IIRC.
Well, my break is ending. Back to the daily grind the hippies hoped to escape…
Perservere, ammari!
“IMHO, the biggest “accomplishment” of the counter-culture was its role as a bogeyman and rallying point for the right wing in the wake of Goldwater’s humiliating defeat in 1964.
Ronald Reagan got into the California Governor’s mansion and, eventually, the White House by blaming the hippies et al. for all of the country’s problems. Were it not for the counter culture, Reagan would now be remembered as a mediocre B-movie actor. ”
The funny thing is that as governor he enabled no-fault divorce, which is one of the biggest rallying points against “the hippies” on the right today, AND he signed an abortion law that was one of the precursors to Roe v. Wade.
Not to mention that he has one more divorce and one more out-of-wedlock child than many hippies.
Yes, the counterculture existed before and after hippies of the boomer generation and I definetly agree with Amanda, that it was far more sophisticated and culturally interesting at other times.
As someone above pointed out ts roots are in the late Romantic Decadent/Symbolist movement in France (Rimbaud, Baudelaire) as well as the American Transcendentalist movement. Much of the avant garde of arts in the 20th century is tied in with counterculture, from Cubism, the lost Generation, DADA, Underground Weimar Berlin, Abstract Expressionism. The Beats in America to me have always been a very watered down version of one of the 20th century’s greatest counterculture individuals and one of it’s greatest writers, Jean Genet. The hippies were pretty lame compared to this enormous cultural legacy they were tapping onto. Afterwards the punk movement, as it evolved from the Velvet Underground to Television, Patti Smith, Richard Hell, and the Talking Heads, is musically far more interesting then the vast majority of 60s counterculture music…to me at least.
Oops forgot to add…
While I agree that the counterculture was far more interesting and culturally sophisticated at other times other then the 60s, the scale and the cultural effect of the 60s is still very much worth noting.
From what I gathered from friends’ parents, teachers, and profs who lived and participated in the political movements/counterculture was that the “counterculture” was not a monolithic movement…but a phenomenon of many fragmentary groups with some similarities…and many differences.
Interestingly enough, the parents of friends who did participate in the counter-culture and anti-war protests are just as, if not more fed up by the puritanical holier than thou attitude among many in their generation than those of subsequent generations. They see this attitude as the same hypocritical attitude held by older generations that they objected to…and protested against when they were adolescents/young adults.
Umm…..not exactly as someone else already noted. One thing that needs to be added that college/university used to be the bastions of the socio-economically privileged and/or the extremely academically inclined.
While this was mitigated somewhat with the GI Bill, several relatives and friends who attended college during the ’50s and ’60s recounted how college-bound high school graduates tended to fall into two groups…..the very wealthy whose parents could get them a place at their alma mater (i.e: GW Bush….legacy admissions on steroids which was socially accepted at many private schools…especially the Ivys until the late 1960s.) or those who graduated in the top 10% of their high school classes.
One thing that needs to be added that college/university used to be the bastions of the socio-economically privileged and/or the extremely academically inclined.
Yes, that’s a big part of what I meant when I said that before the 60’s or therebouts people went to college like people nowadays go into doctoral programs or business school. Which is the socio-economic elite and the academically inclined.
You can see the ubiquitous BA as a good thing (college educations being accessible to almost everyone) or as a bad thing (college educations being warped into something they were never meant to be).
I certainly don’t think it’s classist or elitist of me to say that the university was designed to be a place where academically inclined people learned to think liberally/intellectually and specialized in academic subjects they could devote the rest of their lives to.
the opoponax,
Did not mean to critique on the basis of your being classist or elitist.
My critique of your quote was that it gave more credit and seriousness to undergraduates of that era that none of those I’ve met who attended college in that period would feel was warranted. If anything, the impression I got from their accounts was that with a very small exception, most of the undergrads of the 50’s and 60’s were less serious in general about studies and life than later generations because of the larger population of overentitled students from socio-economic privileged families who went there because “it was the thing to do” and not because they were interested in learning anything.
Though such overentitled students still exist…the campus climate and the severe reduction in legacy admissions compared with the past means that on the whole, their attitudes are not as prevalent as they once were.
Amanda wrote:
“There was a counterculture before and after the 60s, and overall, I find the countercultures around jazz in the 20s and 50s, and the ones around punk in the 70s and 80s to be a lot more interesting than the Pentagon-floating one of the 60s.”
Yes. There was a fairly clear continuity from the beats of the fifties into the broader movements of the sixties. And, I think it was to the political movements more than to the counterculturists, who never seemed to read much. And, yes, the beats were implicitly metapolitically critical, even if some of them, like Jack Kerouac, were formally right-wing and Catholic, and Allen Ginsberg hung out with flower children.
I remember reading ON THE ROAD in high school in Ohio, and feeling it in a sense that wasn’t developed politically, but which did develop me politically
went there because “it was the thing to do” and not because they were interested in learning anything.
Though such overentitled students still exist…the campus climate and the severe reduction in legacy admissions compared with the past means that on the whole, their attitudes are not as prevalent as they once were.
Which is funny, because that overentitled academic apathy is exactly how I would describe the vast majority of every student at my alma mater. Most of whom were not at all well off, and many of whom were the first people in their families to get to attend.
But the attitude in general, in my generation, is “you go to college to get this piece of paper, without which you can’t get a good job, so therefore I’m going to sit here and take up space until someone hands me said piece of paper, because I want to make a lot of money someday.” I was one of a very tiny minority of students who were actually there to, you know, learn about stuff.
I’m probably over-romanticizing the reason people went to college before the degree-mill system existed, though.
I haven’t seen it put that way before, but I think you’re right. It’s not that the counterculture of the 1960s was driving the social changes (how could they have been primary drivers of the Civil Rights Movement that took place a decade earlier?) but that it was the first and most visible generation to be able to take advantage of those social changes.
That also gets to the heart of what drives me so nuts about the frickin’ Baby Boomers: many of them really do act as though they drove those social changes when in fact (as others have mentioned) things like women’s liberation and gay liberation sprung from the sexism and homophobia that people encountered in “socially conscious” movements. Here’s a quick glance at just one example, the women’s rebellion inside the SNCC.
I’m probably over-romanticizing the reason people went to college before the degree-mill system existed, though.
Yep. Don’t forget, the whole concept of a girl going to college to get her “Mrs. Degree” dates from at least the 1950s, if not earlier.
It does drive me nuts, though, when Baby Boomers who went to land-grant colleges back in the day when they were free of charge complain about these materialistic kids today who are all concerned about making money after college just so they can pay off their (median) $20,000 in college loans.
What I was describing was the perception of many boomer-aged friends, teachers, and relatives was that college, especially the elite private ones tended to be regarded by most of the students who were socio-economically privileged as little more than country-clubs/playgrounds.
While pre-professionalism and the increasingly mercenary attitude towards getting “the parchment/paper” is disturbing in its own right, it at least showed that most entering college frosh are far more serious about their reasons for attending college/university….and thinking ahead about life than previous generations of socio-economically privileged college students.
If anything, I regularly get shocked comments from parents, relatives, and many boomer-aged acquaintances that subsequent generations of high-school and college students are considering more factors and thinking further ahead than they did when they were young.
As bad as the consumerist mentality towards higher-ed has become, a large part of that is due to socio-economic changes which made the BA/BS degree increasingly mandatory for most jobs that provide any promise of reaching the middle/upper class and the skyrocketing cost of getting such a degree…even at State university systems.
I was also part of a minority of students who were serious about learning.
Incidentally, my alma mater had a student culture which frowned about any open expression of this consumerist degree-mill mentality towards grades/higher ed. Some of this was the radical-left political orientation of the student body…and a part was classist elitism as most of the student body came from upper/upper-middle class backgrounds.
Unfortunately, all that meant was that this attitude was hidden or expressed in other ways such as the large numbers of students who were there to get the degree to gain radical-left progressive activist cred to join activist groups/NGOs and/or those who went through the motions of being radical left on campus and a few years after graduation before “selling out”* and joining the corporate workforce.
* Their words….not mine. Personally, I did not buy into that ideology as I knew a part of that attitude was borne of socio-economic privilege that scholarship students like myself did not have at the time.
a large part of that is due to socio-economic changes which made the BA/BS degree increasingly mandatory for most jobs that provide any promise of reaching the middle/upper class and the skyrocketing cost of getting such a degree…
Yep.
For what it’s worth, my criticisms are mainly with the system, not really with the students. Though I still think people should at least try to take college semi-seriously and use that empty time (which is what it is if you’re only there for the piece of paper) to frickin’ DO SOMETHING with themselves.
I also think I have a somewhat privileged vantage point, since I was funneled into the gifted system as a very small child and groomed for academia practically from the moment I set foot in a classroom. It was pretty easy for me to go into college with an academic mindset, because that was expected of me. Whereas somebody who worked damn hard to get to college and really wants to make a pile of money to send back home to Haiti or support their mom or even just to get a firm toehold in the middle class isn’t necessarily going to think, “Hmmm, now should I major in comparative literature or urban geography?”
the opoponax,
Though I understand and even am a bit sympathetic with this mentality, ultimately, higher ed is also about allowing students to make their own decisions regarding their education, if they are not interested, it is really their loss. So long as they do not attempt to deprive their classmates of their educational opportunities…it is their right…however misguided it may be.
In additional to socio-economic changes, I also believe this is symptomatic of the long-standing anti-intellectual tendencies of American culture that was referenced by Alexis De Tocqueville in “Democracy in America”. What do you think?
On the other hand, I am fed up with one aspect of this consumerist/degree mill mentality towards higher education: the overentitled upper/upper-middle class students and their boomer-aged helicopter parents who bully K-12/college/university instructors through tactics ranging from temper tantrums to threatening legal action to change a grade they do not like, no matter how well-deserved.
Though some may feel this is a necessity, I see it as little more than a rehash of the socio-economic elite’s tendency to throwing their weight around at the expense of other more harder working classmates to gain unearned privileges. In short….it is little more than academic extortion that should never be tolerated in the interest of academic integrity and fairness to all students.
Interestingly enough, this mentality was completely alien to mom and female relatives who attended university in 1950’s/’60s Taiwan when I asked them about it.
If anything, they found the idea of attending college solely to find a spouse to be a frivolous idea, especially considering how competitive college admissions were in a period when there was only 3-4 universities and that one’s admission was solely determined by a national college exam given by the Republic’s education department.
From what they told me, the purpose of attending university was to learn as much as possible from one’s professors/courses and then parlay that towards a career…especially considering how most were attempting to improve what was a perilous economic situation for most.
This was one reason why they had such a hard time comprehending why college students in the US spend so much time partying on weekends, launching protests, or doing anything other than delving deeper into their academic coursework. As far as they were concerned, American college students were too laid back compared to themselves and their classmates.
This is such a silly argument. The overt expressions of social movements lag the actual changes themselves. Most of the counterculture hopped on the train after it was moving. It was already becoming commercialized and marketed by 1970.
What’s being discussed here is only one popular manifestation of a complex social era that was not encapsulated within the artificial borders of one decade. The changes that were wrought in the sixties didn’t suddenly bloom out of nothing on New Years Eve 1959.
This from one who lived through it and has pictures of myself with bad hair and non-existent fashion sense.
Any time there is a culture there is a counter culture. Without this counter balance there would be to progression.
Usually the counter culture consists of art, literature, music. I am sure history buffs can point to any time..any place and highlight the counter culture…
of course..sooner or later..what was the counter..becomes the culture…then comes a new wave of challenges.
(selfish, only read first ten comments)
While the Mouse and Disco folks may have at me for this, I think that the modern neo-pagan movement is a direct descendant of the hippies and the counterculture. And since I credit that for informing my feminism and green politics, I think that’s good.
I also agree that you can’t take the counterculture out of the civil rights struggle, etc. I mean, what do they call SNCC, for instance? And don’t call them all middle class suburbanites; the hippies I grew up with were mostly working class kids who liked to fuck, get high, and screw the man and his fascist war. (A pretty simple and appealing manifesto…)
OK guys, which is it going to be: The counterculture was all overrated, or there was a major paradigm shift?
Of course there was an enormous shift in attitudes regarding race, sex, government, music, drugs, sex society, corporations, etc. I claimed facetiously it was the hippies, but it wasn’t caused by anything. It happened; it was not overrated. Arguably the modern conservative movement is little more than a reaction against the changes that were wrought.
Were the changes lasting? Yes. Were they instant and complete. That is just silly. Most of what has been said above denigrating the counterculture could have been said about the Civil War: It didn’t achieve racial equality, it provoked a backlash, etc.
And equating the Boomers with the 60s counterculture is nonsense. The Boomers, as depicted, represent the culture. What the 60s did was allow a reexamination of many cultural assumptions. It is not an accident that the civil rights movement, the feminist movement, drugs, sex, music, etc. all took a progressive turn in the 60s. The zeitgeist was such that everybody’s complaint was heard with fresh ears. But there was an openmindedness that is sorely lacking today.
Amanda’s apparently tired of hearing how much more exciting it was to live then, but what would she rather hear from her elders: What I did in the war? I look forward to her defense of the early days of internet blogging to the next generation. (And I will support her as this too is game changing.) But the country was making an almost unique turn toward the progressive in the 60s. If you don’t think it was significant, ask any stakeholder in the status quo at the time. As I said, the modern conservative movement has waved goodbye to Edmund Burke, and now has the hippies as their focus and bête noire.
Ungrateful punks. You kids can’t even roll a proper joint.
The 60’s counter-culture also embraced charismatic Christianity (aka “the Jesus movement”) and that charismatic movement gave rise to both Christian rock and “relevant” Christian churches for young people.
The counter culture did not create charismatic Xianity. I was in the Haight the summer of 1968 when all the mind fuckers, the trolls scooping up the burn out runaways came through.
Charlie Manson was no different from the Children of God or Jim Jones or the Jesus freaks.
In our more enlightened 1970 parents were able to use deprogramers to rescue their children from these cults
That was absolutely my observation at the time. People later joked that the “Jesus Freaks” were the natural consequence of smoking pot while listening to Jesus Christ Superstar, and IMHO that was only half a joke.I also think that one of the most enduring cultural transformations of the 60s was the rise of popular music as both a rallying point and a marker, a crucial element of self-identification — as the current custom of “Friday Random 10″ illustrates. It’s kind of boggling to me for Amanda to talk about how the counterculture is “irrelevant”, when Austin is one of its capitol cities. And it is still a *counter*-culture, because Austin is definitely counter to the culture of the state around it.
So others have noticed a link between hippies and certain more noxious evangelical Christian movements.
I also think there’s something to the anti-modernist and anti-government stance of the hippies.
Betsy, I was too young to be there, and my reading about the period is scattershot to say the least. I’m wondering, however, how much you can really pin on “intentional appropriation.”
Could it rather be that once that hippie trend broke out from among the ranks of earnest white privileged youth, and started to touch rural and working class whites, that i began its accomodation to social-conservative and proto-fascist movements?
I suggest this, knowing several boomers who went from hippy/protester in their youth to Christofascist in middle age….
…and having flirted with off-the-grid, back-to-the-land concept myself ca. 1990 (emerging out of a certain elite West Coast campus). I saw reactionary tendencies in the gen-X “freaks” (we actually called ourselves this) I knew; there was especially a lot of easy communication between them and redneck “survivalists” — and a pointed lack of concern (verging on disdain) for real issues of class, race, and gender. We were howling down “PC” louder than the campus Republicans were.
There was a major paradigm shift that was not a product of the counterculture itself. The counterculture expressed the shift but did not generate it.
1960s counterculture =/= the Civil Rights Movement, Women’s Liberation, Gay Liberation, etc.
And when I say “counterculture,” I’m using the common definition of it, which is the hippies. That’s the other thing that drives me nuts in these discussions — there were and are multiple countercultures, some of which overlapped, some of which did not, but a lot of people act like there was one big counterculture that all did the same thing and that it was driven by the people who went to Woodstock.
It also drives me nuts that people usually pretend the dark side of the counterculture didn’t exist. Woodstock and Altamont happened within six months of each other. The Manson Family is just as much a product of the counterculture as the Chicago Seven.
“I also think there’s something to the anti-modernist and anti-government stance of the hippies.”
Unfortunately, it wasn’t just the hippies that were into this. There was a new left current that embraced anti-governmentalism too. When I finished college I went out and got a job, eventually, in what turned out to be a quasi-law-enforcement capacity, child protection. I had conversations with other leftists who were very wary about this. I pointed out to them that I had had a small role in breaking a child pornography operation, and pointed out too, that this was an example of that oppressive institution called patriarchy, and that government took an ambiguous, but generally progressive approach to it.
“I also think there’s something to the anti-modernist and anti-government stance of the hippies.”
Unfortunately, it wasn’t just the hippies that were into this. There was a new left current that embraced anti-governmentalism too. When I finished college I went out and got a job, eventually, in what turned out to be a quasi-law-enforcement capacity, child protection. I had conversations with other leftists who were very wary about this. I pointed out to them that I had had a small role in breaking a child pornography operation, and pointed out too, that this was an example of that oppressive institution called patriarchy, and that government took an ambiguous, but generally progressive approach to it.
Ungrateful punks. You kids can’t even roll a proper joint.
May this be the “get off my lawn” of the new era? I sure hope so.
Erika @52 -
The colonies which were made independent in the 1960s (particularly the British ones) were riding on the coat-tails of the work done by Gandhi in India during the nineteen thirties and forties. The Indian colonies were granted independence primarily because the alternative was to have another war (even more bloody than the 2nd world war) in order to retain India as part of the British Empire. However, the people of India didn’t get things all their own way - one of the last things the British did as they left was poison the metaphorical well by splitting the colony into three (India, Pakistan, Ceylon). It’s now four, because Pakistan couldn’t administer what later became Bangladesh with the bulk of Northern India in between the two of them. But have a look at the border between India and Pakistan, and you’ll see a feud which is probably going to foment for centuries - if either side doesn’t just get fed up and start launching their nuclear weapons at the other in order to ease the tension.
The Indian independence movement sparked a lot of others, and the British, being well and truly aware they had far too much happening at home to be bothered with trying to keep their empire, decided to give in gracefully, and withdraw. Other colonial powers, who had been sticking it out with the hope that the British (or the US) would support them, soon realised this wasn’t going to happen, and they started pulling out too - generally taking with them all of the important infrastructure, and a lot of the country’s wealth. Britain originally started the Commonwealth back in the late 1920s, as a way of shutting up the politicians in Canada, Australia, South Africa and New Zealand, who kept making disgruntled comments about wanting to have at least some say in where their troops got to do the dying (the muck-up at ANZAC cove, as well as several other battles of WW1, certainly led to a loss of colonial support for the British military machine). They kept it as a way of maintaining a few different trade treaties, some of which had been in place since the era of Charles the Second (1600 or so… have a look at the early history of the Caribbean nations to get an idea of what the story was).
Those trade treaties were then abandoned without even looking back when the UK was offered the chance to get into the European Common Market (as it was then - it’s now the EU), and led to some rather severe consequences for a lot of Commonwealth nations as a result. The most usual one was the loss of a previously guaranteed market for a commodity which had become a core component of the national economy (for Australia, this was wool - our wool market didn’t start to pick up again until the 1980s or 1990s).
So yes, there were a number of colonies who gained their independence during the 1960s. In all, twenty-one different nations were recognised as members of the Commonwealth of Nations during the 1960s. However, the Commonwealth didn’t stop adding members until approximately 1995… so not all of the liberations of colonies happened then.
I’d still argue the fuss and bother of the 1960s was mainly a manifestation of knock-on effects from earlier eras, and that a lot of the “big changes” of the era were actually things which had started earlier, or were still ongoing from earlier eras. Don’t underestimate the two World Wars as a big leveller of perceived cultural chasms. Atheists aren’t the only ones who tend not to be found in foxholes - I have a strong suspicion you wouldn’t find many bigots in them either. Being treated as an equal during the war would have made it a lot harder for the black soldiers to come back home and pick up the subservient role again. Being treated as worthwhile during the war made it difficult for many women to put down the welder’s mask and the reins of the household, and step back into the “submissive wifey” spot.
“The CC expressed the shift but did not cause it.”
I think that’s mostly fair; I just want to add that first of all, it was a valid expression of the “shift,” secondly, that the “shift” was in fact an authentic and organic outgrowth of the basic American ideology emerging from the best trends of the Enlightenment, and this includes the strengths of the CC, awhile its weaknesses also stem from deeply American roots. And finally I think we shouldn’t underestimate the ways the CC helped to foster and transmit some of the bes, arguably “deeper” and more fundamental, expressions of the basic trend to take the American dream seriously, such as feminism.
And who can imagine modern life without rock music?