This has puzzled me often - how my aging hippie friends that were protesting all over the place during my youth, have just bent over in recent years and let ‘The Establishment’ do what it will with them.
The only real anti-establishment folks now are the real conservatives.
-JT
It wasn’t. We are we’re all too naive.
Very good scene and with some very good observations from Mr. Webb’s character which are still relevant today.
As an aside, I get a kick out of reading the personal trivia section about Jack at the IMDB site that includes that he was big baseball fan (the badge number 714 was based on Babe Ruth’s career home run total), was good friends with Gene Roddenberry, and that he had over 6,000 jazz record albums in his private collection.
You misspelled memories. Or mammaries. Whichever one you meant.
You make great points.
Some things have switched around, and now suddenly I am comfortable using some terms that I previously considered taboo.
Take the word, “Establishment”:
Previously the only people throwing that term around were dirty hippies, annoying cafe poets with blue hair and UC Berkeley professors.
Another one is “Country-club”. Hey, I was IN the country-club. But now I lambaste them, and I feel I’m correct in doing so.
There are lots of other examples.
I was in my twenties during the sixties, smack in the middle of the demographic. Although I remained unpoliticized for another decade, and was never a hippy, the “don’t trust anyone other thirty” meme was internalized. Having served four years in the military, I nonetheless believed we couldn’t win the Vietnam war by hamstringing our forces and refusing to do whatever it took to win. This was the essence of an incompetent establishment, rightly opposed.
Thus, the anti-establishment movement took hold and as later historians acknowledged, “we won.” So academia and government slowly became infiltrated by “us” and we became the establishment.
Eventually, maturity took hold as I and others moved to the right politically, but those coming behind were ‘educated’ out of rational political push-back such that the leftist establishment, particularly the civil service, acquired the ratchet effect, moving ever left but never right. There is no cure aside for an American reset button. But even that may be too late.
I remember the hippies of the 60’s as being non-materialistic, nothing like today’s young adults.
Apparently you missed the part where they all cleaned up and took over the democrat party while cutting the testicles off of those in the Rockefeller wing of the GOP