AtDTDA 32: Fantasia on a Fantasia of Thomas Tallis Pt. 1

[Bekah]

A bit late here but I was called to assist my somewhat anti-hippie  
mom (age 84) with post-surgery stuff.   She and my dad raised 6 of us  
- all but one pretty liberal while they were  Rockefeller Republicans  
(an old middle of the road, liberalish thing - not really available  
in today's politics).

Back in 1966 I had just graduated HS out here on the left coast and  
headed up to SF for the Summer of Love in 1967.  I was there only a  
few months before going back to school like a good girl,  but the  
experience changed me and many of my views for life.   Yes,  I'd  
definitely describe myself as a hippie at that point but ex - and  
old-  don't seem to fit, though - I've kept too much for the former  
and not enough for the latter.  I've got stories upon stories of life  
in the city and in this little town later - stories of helping CO's  
get "lost,"  of marches and acid and attempts at getting "back to the  
earth."  There were different sorts of hippies and being anti-war was  
one thing but some were actively attempting to overthrow the  
government (Catalina Island  and other urban communes in LA I knew  
of) while others were heading north to the farms.  Many like myself  
finished school and got married and had kids and did our thing in our  
own little groups.  The "movement" dissipated after the war ended and  
other issues came more to the surface.  My now late husband (Berkeley  
style hippie) worked for the UN and NOAA (gov't weather) and I became  
a school teacher - pretty middle class but non-violent type stuff.   
We raised our kids in the ways we were comfortable and one is similar  
to us in outlook politically,  the other has gone the other way.   Go  
figure ...  but then - I went the other way from my folks who always  
figured I was just rebelling - even at 50 years old - Bekah's the  
rebel.  (lol)

Bekah


On May 10, 2008, at 10:19 AM, robinlandseadel at comcast.net wrote:

> Great dialog, Jill. Natch, I came out of the virulently Anti-Nuclear,
> tree-huggin', candle burnin' end of the spectrum, my mom and
> sis were actin' like it's the civil rights movement and all. No
> wonder Starhawk and them became friends.
>
> My research sprouted up at GTE, where, as a night operator, I
> could read and make money at the same time. So I read Gravitys
> Rainbow again, slower this time, Ulysses---Joyce---for the first,
> Moby Dick, and a lot of Larry Niven. Once I got to research nuclear
> power, I did and found out that the only way you can make money
> at nuclear power plants is by selling Plutonium. Game over.
>
> These anti-nuclear actions were so P.C., the cops didn't do
> anything overt to undermine our efforts. Covert, that's
> another story, but nothing overt. I remember the metallic
> taste/smell of the bright yellow nuclear waste containers the
> bus idled at for the better part of an hour.
>
> Met more Witches than you can wave a broomstick at in Livermore.
>  -------------- Original message ----------------------
> From: "grladams at teleport.com" <grladams at teleport.com>
>> I stand corrected. The camera is a powerful thing. It brings  
>> images of the
>> flamboyant to the masses, and it's propaganda then, to say that  
>> all the
>> hippies were lazy, self absorbed junkies. That stuff sells, just like
>> whenever there's a gay rights parade they love to zoom in on the  
>> chicks
>> with beards and mullets, and the guys with ass cheeks coming out  
>> of their
>> chaps. In my parents' late 30's, dad was a working physicist for the
>> postwar Oak Ridge atomic industries. I only knew pro nuke concepts  
>> as a
>> kid. Now check the Gaia Lovelace fellow by the way on that... As  
>> in ENERGY
>> not BOMBS. Mom and Dad's friends had hippy parties, where they'd  
>> dress up
>> in robes with flowers wigs and protest signs, tape x's to their  
>> foreheads
>> and toss back beers, their own ironic outlet as they probably had  
>> become
>> inundated with images of Vietnam and the general building sickness  
>> of that
>> time. We are from different trees but our roots comingle. I am  
>> going to
>> extend this to the concept of authenticity. I have taken friends  
>> out to the
>> country to visit, city kids, who actually have concern over  
>> whether the
>> food they're gonna eat is organic. 'It was just picked' I feel  
>> like saying.
>> It was probably volunteered from a compost pile! It's a qualilty of
>> authenticity that Tallis wrote about -- and there are people on  
>> this list
>> who "get it" -- about that know I'm not picking on them. Thanks  
>> for the
>> lively thread here by the way!
>>
>> Original Message:
>> -----------------
>> From: Monte Davis monte.davis at verizon.net
>> Date: Sat, 10 May 2008 09:10:42 -0400
>> To: kelber at mindspring.com, pynchon-l at waste.org
>> Subject: RE: AtDTDA 32: Fantasia on a Fantasia of Thomas Tallis Pt. 1
>>
>>
>> Laura sez:
>>
>>>  We never spat at returning vets...
>>
>> As far as research can determine, neither did anyone else:
>>
>> http://www.amazon.com/Spitting-Image-Memory-Legacy-Vietnam/dp/ 
>> 0814751474/ref
>> =pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1210424409&sr=8-1
>>
>> Except: "the only documented instances show members of the VFW and  
>> American
>> Legion spitting on their less successful Vietnam peers" [in VVAW]
>>
>> The bulk of the "vets were scorned and abused" meme comes from  
>> several
>> decades of "stab in the back" propaganda aimed at rewriting  
>> history to show
>> that we had victory in our grasp before the America-hating hippies  
>> and news
>> media snatched it away.
>>
>> (By the same token, the "every WWII vet basked in parades and settled
>> happily into the American Century" was a back-projection; there  
>> were quite a
>> lot of mostly noir-ish books and movies in the late 1940s about  
>> those who
>> couldn't readjust.)
>>
>>
>>
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>

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