What no material understanding does to a generation "Hey we did all the drugs and now we're all out of ideas"
Sam bro, same. I have his initials tattooed on my wrist because at some point I wanted to be a rebellious writer.
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."
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.
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!
