Hi Joe,
Just wanted to say I loved your piece on "Ghosts of Tim Leary and Hunter Thompson". I wonder when this country will finally emerge out from under the shadow of the sixties. I was born in 1959, so I have nothing to compare the past 47 years with, but I somehow doubt that America in 1957 was so concerned with the decade 1910-1920, or that ragtime hits were as familiar to teenagers then as Beatles songs are to teenagers today.
Anyway, thanks for an entertaining and insightful -- if somewhat depressing -- read.
Peter
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Peter,
Well, there was truly something important emerging at that time, not just in the US but in many other countries too. There was an absolute conviction on the parts of millions upon millions of people that freedom, justice, and higher morality were not only possible, but inevitable. But mainly freedom. For instance, there were Afghan girls wearing mini-skirts in the markets of Kandahar, which I imagine no young person today can imagine as a reality.
Anyway, such movements had to be crushed at any expense by all governments, given that the purpose of even the best governments is control of people. No one has ever successfully written or described what actually happened then because the experience was so far flung and so varied -- and besides, experience is by definition experiential and cannot be captured.
What we have in its wake are simply cheap commercial exploitations of the Sixties movement, or purposeful rewrites of it by the conservative elements in our nation who viewed it as the end of the world at the time and now describe it as the beginning of all that is wrong today. But even the best of their efforts have not stopped popular fascination with the era. I get many many emails from young people who sense that something more was going on than is commonly told to them today.
And they are right. This country will be out from under the shadow of the Sixties when the last true participant in its human self-realization movement is dead. The last one who can remember.
And on that day I would dare say that, grim as it may seem today, the world will be an even less promising place for mankind.
In art and labor,
Joe
