Strange memories on this nervous night in Las Vegas. Five years later? Six? It seems like a lifetime, or at least a Main Era—the kind of peak that never comes again. San Francisco in the middle sixties was a very special time and place to be a part of. Maybe it meant something. Maybe not, in the long run . . . but no explanation, no mix of words or music or memories can touch that sense of knowing that you were there and alive in that corner of time and the world. Whatever it meant. . . .

History is hard to know, because of all the hired bullshit, but even without being sure of “history” it seems entirely reasonable to think that every now and then the energy of a whole generation comes to a head in a long fine flash, for reasons that nobody really understands at the time—and which never explain, in retrospect, what actually happened.

My central memory of that time seems to hang on one or five or maybe forty nights—or very early mornings—when I left the Fillmore half-crazy and, instead of going home, aimed the big 650 Lightning across the Bay Bridge at a hundred miles an hour wearing L. L. Bean shorts and a Butte sheepherder's jacket . . . booming through the Treasure Island tunnel at the lights of Oakland and Berkeley and Richmond, not quite sure which turn-off to take when I got to the other end (always stalling at the toll-gate, too twisted to find neutral while I fumbled for change) . . . but being absolutely certain that no matter which way I went I would come to a place where people were just as high and wild as I was: No doubt at all about that. . . .

There was madness in any direction, at any hour. If not across the Bay, then up the Golden Gate or down 101 to Los Altos or La Honda. . . . You could strike sparks anywhere. There was a fantastic universal sense that whatever we were doing was right, that we were winning. . . .

And that, I think, was the handle—that sense of inevitable victory over the forces of Old and Evil. Not in any mean or military sense; we didn’t need that. Our energy would simply prevail. There was no point in fighting—on our side or theirs. We had all the momentum; we were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave. . . .

So now, less than five years later, you can go up on a steep hill in Las Vegas and look West, and with the right kind of eyes you can almost see the high-water mark—that place where the wave finally broke and rolled back.”

Maybe, just maybe, unless the lead contamination was a materially inevitable slide that wouldn't permit much of a change of outcome, maybe just maybe boomers could have persisted in sufficient numbers to change the world for the better but settled for one easier indulgence, then another, then another. Hippies to yuppies, so to speak, and then clawing the world to ribbons while time drags them toward the grave.

  • RedWizard [he/him, comrade/them]
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    edit-2
    13 days ago

    I was going to write a reply about Allen Ginsburg, Flower Power, and the nature of capitalism to repackage social movements as commodities and sell them back to the masses, devoid of all its revolutionary potential.

    But I can't for the life of me find the essay that Allan Ginsburg wrote in the Berkeley Barb entitled "Demonstration Or Spectacle As Example, As Communication Or How To Make a March/Spectacle" So that I could quote it and read it myself.

    There is an entire archive of the Berkeley Barb, and yet for some reason I can't find this, maybe I'm searching the wrong terms.

    This essay was what inspired the flower power movement and what led to those iconic photographs of military police with flowers in the muzzle of their guns and protesters standing in front of them in colorful garments.

    Now I'm left on this mission to find an intact archive copy of the full text of that essay he wrote. And it seems that it is not published anywhere, despite the fact that it is culturally significant. It spawned a movement that defined the look and aesthetic that we remember the 60s in early 70s as having. The hippie movement has its roots in this essay.

    Watch I finish this comment and someone posts it like "hey stupid. It's right here. How did you not find this? It was so easy to find."

    • Nacarbac [any]
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      edit-2
      13 days ago

      From the reference on the wiki page, it should be published as part of The Portable Sixties Reader on p208-212 - https://annas-archive.org/md5/1a4c9e7d4519296b4947e5efdd8ef024 - just downloading it to read it myself.

      Edit: That link was a large pdf that failed to download, changed to a more sensible epub.

      • RedWizard [he/him, comrade/them]
        ·
        13 days ago

        I must have been in an end of the workday haze because I did not pick up on that source. But maybe I was looking at a different Wikipedia entry. I don't know. Thank you, comrade!