"On most nights in Newport Beach in 1960, one could find my older sister Diane slouched comfortably on a couch at the Prison of Socrates, a beatnik coffee house where she regularly drank java and read her poetry on open mike night."
Posted on 11/25/2012 2:47:21 PM PST by DustyMoment
And the sixties still Suck.
Why do you say that? What about the 60s suck?
Politics,music,Viet Nam,loss of legal money,erosion of civil rights,return of the communists,lost the farm, cinema,’literature’,just thankful I survived. Though little has improved since.
"On most nights in Newport Beach in 1960, one could find my older sister Diane slouched comfortably on a couch at the Prison of Socrates, a beatnik coffee house where she regularly drank java and read her poetry on open mike night."
By 1960 I had been married 2 years and was running a construction company.
Well Hi Howdy there Blue Ink!
I am a Boomer—couldn’t help it, as my mother refused to carry me for another 30 plus years, so she birthed me back in the 50s. I was raised with the Cuban Missile Crisis, Political Assassinations, revolution in the streets and some great music over the am radio dial. I was a child in the 60s, The last generation of innocence in my opinion.
I was a cub scout, a boy scout, like the Beatles, Rolling Stones, and ALL the great bands out of San Francisco. I was raised in the SF Bay Area, the epicenter so to speak of all the ills. To make matters worse, I was actually born in Berkeley. (Cause dad, a Korean War Vet was majoring business).
I served my country as an armor crewman in Germany, obtained the rank of Sergeant at discharge.
These days I sport a pony tail, make and sell tie dye, listen to the Grateful Dead and am fiercely conservative. I question authority still and believe that the government is lying to me. I want the government and you to leave me alone to live me life as I see fit. And if THAT makes me a “hippie” so be it.
If I am what represents the ill of everything that keeps you from success, then I guess us “boomers” just need to curl up and die, eh?!
Yeah? Didn’t you ever take a daily paper or two and subscribe to magazines, maybe turn on the TV occasionally, discuss things with people, or your wife, listened to the radio?
I am still puzzled that you had never heard of Elvis Presley until we told you who he was.
Heck, I was a hippie who lived largely as a hitchhiker and drifter, and did not believe in the draft at the time, and after I won a permanent deferment from the draft, I enlisted in the Army almost immediately, went to jump school, and then started trying to bribe my way to Vietnam through the clerks.
I was always looking for something to do that was interesting.
No anger, Ansel, sorry.
You have to acknowledge that you are a bit of a gadfly, right? When you light on someone and take a little bite, they are occasionally likely to react with a harmless swipe.
I just think we are playing a game of definitions here. You say you are a hippie and all those other people weren’t-—well, that’s fine.
But the larger questions are whether the cohort of Americans who were born or came of age in the post-War years have radically transformed American politics and society, and whether that cohort was shaped in some way by the anti-establishment/anti-war leftist drugs/sex/rock-n-roll movement so many of us associate with “hippies.”
I know that the people I mentioned are establishment figures now. That is my point. I was trying to suggest to you that during the 60s that type of person was almost certainly radicalized, and was hanging out with “hippies,” and they were not focused on conservation and self-sufficiency and thoughtful living, as were you.
I appreciated your response, Ansel, and apologize for my snappishness.
Please explain. What makes me a freak?
Well, I could discuss some of those topics with you, but I don't see the point.
That's not to say that I think the 60s were the greatest period in American history, I don't. IMO, the 60s were a transitional period between the post WW2 lull, and the events that occurred after the 60s.
I do believe that the 60s saw 2 wars, however, not just 1. Vietnam was the war we all recognize because it was in the news so much. What we fail to recognize is that while Vietnam was going on, there was something of a civil war here at home with the various radical groups on college campuses and the demonstrations in many of the bigger cities in America. That was also in the news a lot, but no one (other than me) has called it a civil war.
As for the music, well, my taste differs from yours. I think that the 60s was one of the greatest periods for music. The 30s and 40s brought us the big bands (who I think were also great), then there was the 60s. After that it was pretty much downhill, although, IMO, there were some standout groups in the years that followed the 60s.
It's a potato, potahto kind of thing.
The thing is that none of those people were ever anywhere close to being hippies, they are driven individuals, ambitious, demanding people, they are seeking power, recognition, influence, wealth, professional success, they were never mild mannered drop outs seeking to escape the system and be left alone and get in touch with nature, life and themselves.
If you want to see people similar to hippies today, then look to those people who are still trying to live outside of the system, who don’t care about money and power, I still prefer the company of the pick-up driving, guitar playing independent drop out types with their gardens and their ‘earth mother’ wives, barefoot kids, and their guns and wood burning stoves, who might or might not wear a ponytail, but have friends who do.
In the 1970s and 1980s I would scoff at the left’s ubiquitous heroic TV figure of the “ex-hippie” who was now an heroic Attorney and so on, as I pointed out to people, those weren’t hippies, they had been ambitious college students who smoked pot, and attended some rock concerts, and had possibly had contact with some hippies, but hippies did not get PHDs and law degrees,and were not among the most driven, competitive, ambitious people in America.
Hippies were baffled by those people, I remember looking at the yippies, and thinking that the 60s were over.
The yippies and their type are what many people today think were hippies, they were the opposite.
Yippies and their similars, were the Cornell Wests, David Axelrod types, man how I despised them, and the corrupt people who created them and empowered them, the judges who refused to maintain order in their court rooms, as the yippies turned trials into circuses, the college presidents who pretended to oppose them, and then let them takeover and reshape the universities, today hippie just means anything and everything related to the 1960s.
In many ways America moved right under the boomers, the left managed their great swath of fatal destruction of America, from about 1935 through 1979, the fatal dagger was the 1965 Immigration Act.
People don’t realize that the Vietnam war was supported by the under 30s more so than any other age group, and that Vietnam was overwhelmingly fought by volunteers, or that in 1972 with the Vietnam war going, the draft going, and all the other wild stuff, the under 30 vote went for Nixon by 52%, or that one of the great Christian revivals emerged from that core street hippie identity which led to the Christian right.
The 1960s were immensely complex and passionate, and it is difficult to neatly package the different elements and endless shades and diversity of the incredibly open and hot blooded times.
All I know is that I went off to college (red-state land-grant in my case) at the same time Obama did and in virtually every liberal arts course I took I heard EXACTLY the same line of crap that he is selling now.
And my instructors, many of them, were recently shaved up and showered off hairy marching smoked-up bead-wearers and they were influencing a lot of young people, me included for a time.
All my former friends who are now in media and teaching and legal/political-type professions never shook it off.
They voted for Clinton and they voted for Obama and they’ll vote for whatever leftist rolls up next, and so will most of their children.
There was NOTHING conservative about the baby-boomer professoriat I saw in the late 70s and early 80s. It was lock-step-lefty brother Ansel and these people were pouring into the academy fresh from the protest marches in the street.
I do not disagree with you that many, many boomers have been disciplined and greatly productive and also heroic in our nation’s times of need.
But the terrific prosperity of the post-War years also led to great waste, sloth, indulgence and gradual debilitation. Woe to us that it now seems the spoils of the boomer years have gone to the despoilers.
Sorry, I misunderstood your point.
Very nicely said, ansell! I wish that I could have described the 60s as eloquently! You summed it up very nicely.
I was born in '53. I only knew about beatniks because of Maynard G. Krebs. And I do think it was an east-coast thing.
Well, good for you. I'm sick of the Boomer-bashing, too. The bashers ignore that it was the "Greatest Generation" that raised us. And about half of us turned out fine.
Blaming everything bad that has happened since 1968 on the "Boomers" is just a substitute for thinking. Individuals act; not great globs of generation-belongers.
I get the impression that you had to have well-off and indulgent parents to be a properly disdainful beatnik. Having to actually work to feed yourself took too much time away from being "cool".
The Beats and their beatnik imitators represented bohemian tendencies that recurred throughout history -- in the Transcendentalists of the 1840s and 1850s, in the Greenwich Village radicals of the 1910s and the expatriate Lost Generation of the 1920s. What made things different in the mid-twentieth century movements is that the country was richer and could afford such rebellions -- or thought it could afford them.
Well said. It is tragic that so many younger folks engage in the "group-think" they were programmed for by their public indoctrinators and haven't a shred of critical thinking aptitude.
Yes, it is tragic. It is not an overstatement to use that word. It is completely up to parents nowadays to teach their children critical thinking.
Now, that has always been the responsibility of parents, but once upon a time they could count on the schools to reinforce their teaching and build on it. That's no longer true and all too many young parents don't have many of those skills to begin with.
I think of the Boomers who claim to be socialists. They have had the luxury of spouting their nonsense while having the opportunity to thrive under a semi-free-market system they knew would be there to provide them a retirement, maintain the infrastructure, and provide them the consumer goods they all seem to love despite their stated beliefs.
The young they've indoctrinated to believe in socialism will probably actually have to live it.
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