meshugginah posts

[Greg Montalbano]

Doug sez:

>There is a tendency to look back fondly on the '60s as a golden age,
>through a haze of sentimentality.  On the ground, things were grittier than
>that. Drug dealers as honorable outlaws, hippie youth as noble savages --
>well, that's certainly one facet of a multi-faceted scene. Compare the
>Haight in 1967 and 1972, just to pick an arbitrary but useful frame -- from
>LSD to methamphetamine and heroin, and not very much noble in sight.
>
>Sentimentally yours,
>Doug

Really? I hadn't noticed.

Between the merchandise-hype and the forced-nostalgia media-bullshit, I had
the feeling that any vestiges of "nostalgia" for that period was pretty
much dead and buried.  I think the only real reason anyone might feel a
hazy fondness for that period is the fact that it WAS the time of their youth.

Just as an aside to all the gen-x, gen-y, gen-whatevers on the list who may
be less than impressed by all the tripe dribbled by us oldsters about that
time period -- the main difference between then and now, the part that
makes it all so hard for you to believe, the thing that actually allowed us
to feel as if we were so happy and free and on the verge of something new
and different...
was the fact that we all KNEW we had a future ("future", at that time,
still being a word and concept with positive connotations);  we were in the
midst of (or had just passed) very encouraging events involving civil
rights, sexual equality, (and let's not forget sexual freedom -- you
wouldn't BELIEVE what that was like), and personal involvement in
preserving the planet -- anyone who wasn't looking too closely (and why
would we?  we were young) could easily imagine the trend continuing
indefinitely.
However, there were always the less-impassioned, more distanced witnesses
trying to warn us that it might not be this way (check out, for the record,
Frank Zappa and the Mothers' WE'RE ONLY IN IT FOR THE MONEY -- recorded
"early in 1967 as the result of some unpleasant premonitions...").

And by the way, the drugs back then really WERE a lot mellower and less
threatening than now -- few if any of the neighborhood dealers carried
weapons (or felt the need to! -- I know, it all sounds like science
fiction...)  ...the point I'm trying to make is that we were coming from a
very SAFE, SECURE background, with no major threats to our existence other
than the draft, which in many cases served as an impetus for many of us to
grow up fast & get extremely creative in our attempts to get out of it.