University of Virginia Library

Psychedelia

Children from Tacoma to
Tacoma Park watched
Haight-Ashbury scenes on the
six o'clock news, said, "Duh,
psychedelic," and began to
believe in The Revolution.
Hippyism thus spread from its
original Bohemian and
Haight-Ashbury adherents into
the white upper middle class,
with the consequent dilution
of the old counter-culture's
high and unrealistic principles
of Peace, Love, Truth, Beauty,
Acid.

Counter Culture; Principles Of Peace, Love, Truth, Beauty, Acid?

Sixteen-year-old girls,
whose predecessors in 1958
had worn white gloves to the
Prom and wept over the song
Teen Angel, were by the late
Sixties smoking dope twice a
week and listening to the Fugs
in the belief that they were
helping to overthrow capitalist
society. Teenyboppers who
pronounced "coop," "co-op,"
and "coupe" as the same word
became expert at reeling of
such phrases as "genocidal
repression of the enslaved
Third World masses," or, if
they had read a book on Marx,
"running-dog lackeys of the
imperialist power-structure."

Certain works of art became
requisite Marx Brothers
movies because they were
anti-authoritarian, the fantasies
of J.R.R. Tolkien because they
resembled a mystical acid trip,
Stranger in a Strange Land
because it predicted a
communal society based on
love-grok.

Furthermore, the
psychedelic revolution was
soon taken over and exploited
by poster-makers ("War is not
healthy for children and other
living things"), clothing
manufacturers (blousy shirts,
pre-faded jeans, sandals),
money-grubbing acid rock
groups (the song Crown of
Creation said of the older
generation "We cannot tolerate
their obstruction"), and by
whomever else could get on the
hippy gravy-train before its
passengers derailed it out of
boredom.

Possibly this rapid
dissemination of pseudo-hippie
culture among the young has
led to the current death of
activism. How can the
erstwhile revolutionary feel set
off from Middle America when
Republicans grow their hair
long and listen to Elton John
records?

But back to the Sixties. At
that time, middle-class
crypto-revolutionaries, who
earlier had been given material
objects to stave off boredom,
transferred their craving for
something new to political and
social causes. They had little
else to do. They had never had
to get a job, never had to do
chores, never had to work too
hard in school. (It was only
after a kiddy-science major
minoring in Children's lit gave
us a b.j. in a Rockingham
County cornfield that we
started to understand what
primary and secondary
education is all about.) They
picked up their parents' liberal
belief in the capacity of society
to reform itself, and added to
that a craving for power right
now.