was Re: VLVL (6) Brock

[Dave Monroe]

See, e.g., ...

"The hippies tried to steer it in the right direction
but they were too irresponsible and they tried to
change the institutions too fast for the middle and
lower classes. There was a big backlash. They were
frightened and jealous. That's what Thomas Pynchon's
books are about --the backlash and the resentment
about food stamps on both sides; food stamps put
labels on  people, they were shame-based-- and the
loss of sentimentality among families and lovers. It's
as if the culture had a surgeon come in and cut out
the part of the heart that was the source of feelings
of sentimentality. People had to give up cherishing
each other in order to protect themselves against a
new virulent strain of killer bee humans, the young
barbarians, the preppies, the white male preppies on
Wall Street and their merger and acquisition jobs...."

http://waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l&month=9610&msg=7135&sort=date

--- jbor <jbor at bigpond.com> wrote:
> on 29/9/03 11:39 AM, Don Corathers at gumbo at fuse.net
> wrote:
> 
> > Student radicals, by the way, are not, strictly
> > speaking, hippies. Hippies are by definition
> > apolitical.
> 
> "[B]y definition", are they? My dictionary (Oxford)
> defines "hippie" as an "unconventionally behaving
> person who is (thought to be) using hallucinogenic
> drugs and rebelling against organized society." This
> seems to me to fit the student radicals Pynchon
> depicts in _Vineland_ pretty well, right down to
> that ambiguous parenthetic "thought to be".

However, "student radicals" are precisely not
"hippies," not ultimately politically quiescent by
virtue (or the lack thereof) of having "dropped out"
of of civic/political society.  Which isn't to say
that hippiedom was deficient in politics, the
political, but ... but both, however, certainly in the
60s - 70s (and then some ...) shared a propensity for,
say, classism (e.g., R. Crumb was hardly a hippie, but
he certainly circulated in SF hippie circles, and I'm
recalling here a few panels he wrote/drew about his
disdain for the influx of the lower-class and
less-refined [?!] after The Summer of Love brought all
the drugs and free love to the attention of the
no-longer-wanting-to-be-working class), or, esp.,
sexism (recall, e.g., that poster reproduced in Vol. 2
of Klaus Theweleit's Male Fantasies, or, for that
matter, satires and/or reproductions in, say, J.-L.
Godard''s Weekend or W. Allen's Sleeper) ...

__________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
The New Yahoo! Shopping - with improved product search
http://shopping.yahoo.com