From Michael Donnelly at Counterpunch: ‘Still Wavy After All These Years: Flower Geezer Turns 80’, May 30 (h/t Mr. wd). I had no idea that Wavy was such a major counter-culture figure allied with AIM, nor did I know of his charitable work. Some long excerpts:
“Gaia’s MC
I first met Wavy thru early Rainbow Gatherings. I was on the planning team and Wavy was co-MC with Fantuzzi of the annual Peace Pole Pageant. The pageant has representatives from all the various groups giving a five-minute presentation that the entire crowd joins in on. The Hari Krishna’s get five (everyone sings along); the Love Family gets five; the folks who believe the spaceships are about to land get five (“Sure would blow my mind.” ~ Wavy)…and Wavy made it all work.
Later on in the 80s, Wavy would come to Breitenbush Hot Springs, our intentional community/retreat center, with Ram Dass for some ten-day retreats with 170 people. We were in the midst of trying to end the liquidation of the Ancient Forest surrounding the springs. Ram Dass set aside one day of each retreat for a silent hike in the forest. Even after Ram Dass’ stroke, he’d still have the hike when he came. He would have a group of Breitenbushers drive him to a car-accessible trail access point a mile out and when the long, silent line of hikers came around a corner, there would be Ram Dass sitting bundled up in his wheel chair in silence, a Goshawk feather that dropped in his lap woven into his hair.” [snip]
““Peace, Love and Granola” and Native Rights
Wavy has been there since the beginning of the Counterculture. He famously was MC at Woodstock (and the two follow-up Woodstocks). He is still a communard – an integral part of the Hog Farm Commune. A veteran, Wavy was, as mentioned, a fixture at Peace Gatherings.
(Personal note: In 1968 the Hog Farm came to Boulder, and they were for some wild reason allowed to set up in the Commons just across from my dorm, Libby Hall. I went over, and was quite interested in meeting the single traveling hog they’d brought with them. Somehow it managed to poke it’s snout through the pen, and promptly bit me in the left ankle it hurt like holy hell. How’s that for some weird karma? Of course I missed the rest of the Farm activities…)
“Wavy and the Hog Farmers were early supporters of the American Indian Movement (AIM). They colluded in the takeover of the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) HQ in DC back in November of 1972. While there, they discovered plans to “Terminate” the tribes – a land grab disguised as “Assimilation.” The Klamath Nation had already been Terminated (the test case) and others were in the line of fire. The discovery led to massive publicity and the end of the Termination scheme. The Klamath Nation was “Restored.”
”Wavy and his AIM buddy John Trudell then joined in on a number of environmental causes. They again shared a cell with their pal and John’s roommate Jackson Browne and 1900 others at the huge 1981 protest against the Diablo Canyon Nuclear Power Plant.
Flower Geezer extraordinaire: “In 20 years, I’ll be 100!”
John Trudell used to talk about how “White people seem to have few Elders. They have a lot of Oldsters, instead.” But, John saw Wavy as an Elder; as do many Natives and other peace-loving, planetary citizens
On May 22nd, about three thousand gathered to celebrate all things Wavy for his 80th Birthday. Wavy, as always, had set it up as a benefit for the SEVA Foundation, a fabulous group he, Ram Dass, Dr. Larry Brilliant, Dr. Govindappa Venkataswamy and others co-founded. SEVA has carried out over 3.5 million operations curing blindness around the planet, primarily in Nepal. Wavy also got SEVA to initiate forest planting/stewardship projects on five continents, including one on Lakota land here in the Midwest.
So, colorful folks gathered near Santa Rosa, CA for the festivities….”
Wavy acted as emcee for the lineup of musicians, and links to some of the videos recorded at the party. The sound quality is always iffy, no mixing to speak of, but it’s kinda fun watching some of the old Bluegrass Geezers, as well as a couple young ‘uns. If Quiltman and T’s honor song is up, I couldn’t find it.
“First up: Quiltman and T traveled from the Warm Springs Nation in Eastern Oregon to do an honor song for Wavy on the occasion. Typical of Wavy, he asked instead for an Honor/Remembrance song for “my good friend, the great John Trudell; who is now roaming the cosmos, representing Indigenous people everywhere.” [snip]
“I had a wonderful time. It was a diverse crowd – in age and ethnicity. I had many great random conversations with people, many I had never met until then. Often, we talked about the bad rap the Counterculture got from mainstream media right from the beginning. We all reject the media notion that Charles Manson-like creeps represented us, instead of a saint like Wavy.
We’re gonna reclaim our “Peace, Love and Granola” history. This gathering was an important part of it. SEVA, AIM, communes, Eco-Defense, Woodstock, Rainbow…all are components. Wavy Gravy has been an integral part of all.”
Steve Earle did a solo set at the party, as were many assorted rainbow clowns from Wavy’s ‘beloved Camp WinnaRainbow’ (ish, clowns give me the shivers). Tie dye everywhere! Buy a shirt, make yer own! Boogie! ;-) Donnelly reckons that Earle’s Jerusalem may be one of the most hopeful-for-Peace songs ever written.
Don’t ya love the Subterranean-esque kid flippin’ lyrics cards?
But as Wavy did, I’d like to honor John Trudell, his life-long activism in AIM, as an eco-warrior, and for so spectacularly turning poison into medicine after the FBI burned down his house in Nevada. His wife, Tina, three children, and mother-in-law were killed in the fire twelve hours after he’d burned an Amerikan flag (some versions dispute that) on the steps of the FBI building in DeeCee in 1979 following the march he led for justice for Native Americans.
On any given day I might choose a different favorite of his, but this would always be toward the top of the list. It grabs your guts, shakes your heart, and chokes your throat.
You might like ‘Rich Man’s War’ with Jesse Ed Davis, ‘Bombs over Baghdad’ (the lyrics), or any of a host of his other spoken word songs. There are loads of his interviews on youtube, as well.
Bless you, John Trudell, and a million thank yous for all you did for us.
davidly
Greyson Smythe
LeMoyne
juliania2
ohiobarbarian
stephenadavis1
wendyedavis
café babylon 
google-ifying “assimilate the past to destroy the future”, the 1st entry is the wiki on the borg, (star trek next gen, the source of that quote). 2nd: the wiki article “cultural assimilation of native americans.” i haven’t the heart to look at the article. yet.
“They colluded in the takeover of the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) HQ in DC back in November of 1972. While there, they discovered plans to “Terminate” the tribes – a land grab disguised as “Assimilation.” wtf? taking almost all their lands was not enough??? sorry, i’m not surprised but i didn’t know this (inter alia, entre muchas otras cosas, in this post). exactly. the bearers of actual culture/historical memory must be “assimilated.”
thinking not nice tho’ts about this bullshit pre-fab, pre-assimilated, forced collectivization of memory of the dead called Memorial Day. and the fake cultural experiences of collective memory like Rolling Thunder (started in ’87, surprise).
apologies, jason, but your mind operates at 78rpm, just now, mine’s at about 22rpm, so i’m not sure what you mean. in the case of turtle first americans/aboriginals, yes, resistance has been damned near futile. trudeau has apparently shown to have been lying over his promises to the indigenous in canada, at least by all accounts. idle no more stopped long ago, and there’s plenty of indun gossip about chief teresa spence not worth finding again.
but one temporary victory in pine ridge is that some court has stopped more uranium mining there, on the grounds that the EIS was crap or something.
no, stolen lands weren’t enough, and if ihad more energy i’d try to remember even part of the long litany of ongoing genocide, sociocide, and other crimes against tribal people, sacred sites, and tribal sovereignty.
these two links might help, the second being a bit less…sympathetic, let’s say.
http://americanindianmovementehs.weebly.com/indian-termination-policy.html
http://www.aimovement.org/ggc/history.html
i’d put this diary up hoping for something to stave off my blues little bit, but what with pinging first nations and ‘ecocide’ i’d forgotten as a theme, and RL and dying papa bear and the family, i am almost unbearably sad now, and will try to sign off for the night. will you forgive me if i just include raw links you might peruse, not knowing how far down the rabbit hole you may want to drop?
COINTELPRO lives, of course, as do the bia forced ‘tribal councils’ in so many tribes when they were arranged into clans, not monolithic entities, and the briberies or whatever, the bia and energy companies helped creating the comprador classes that still have soooo much power today.
one link concerns pine ridge, comprador dickie wilson and his goon squad, relative to the bogus charges against leonard peltier (fuck, i wish i knew how to type)…if there’s a peter matthiessen one. i just stuck links on this word document. sorry to be such a fragile wench, but…so it goes.
https://shadowproof.com/2012/04/06/please-help-the-hopi-cloud-callers-and-the-dine-save-their-water/
https://cafe-babylon.net/tag/san-carlos-apaches-oak-flats-sovereign-spirituality-stolen-by-john-mccain-friends/
http://bsnorrell.blogspot.com/2016/05/vernon-masayesva-hopi-and-tewa-demand.html
http://bsnorrell.blogspot.com/2016/05/mohawk-nation-news-indian-ring.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_the_Spirit_of_Crazy_Horse
.
“‘BREAKING: US Oil Sands is at this moment bulldozing the beloved Children’s Legacy Camp–a site where we’ve held multiple Intergenerational Campouts and other events over the past three years!’”
(from your link above, w.d.)
here’s a question to ask anyone: are you surprised, do you know, that the USG & some allies would/do exploit hydro-fracking, tar sands extraction, etc., in order to, among other things, *disrupt or destroy the russian economy* by pricing it out of the energy market?
a native would say, of course not. pale face will make ghosts of us all.
brilliant final sentence, jason. the ghost dance:
” When the dance spread to the Lakota, the BIA agents became alarmed. They claimed that the Lakota developed a militaristic approach to the dance and began making “ghost shirts” they thought would protect them from bullets. They also spoke openly about why they were dancing. The BIA agent in charge of the Lakota eventually sent the tribal police to arrest Sitting Bull, a leader respected among the Lakota, to force him to stop the dance. In the struggle that followed, Sitting Bull was killed along with a number of policemen. A small detachment of cavalry eventually rescued the remaining policemen.
Wounded Knee
Following the killing of Sitting Bull, the United States sent the Seventh Cavalry to “disarm the Lakota and take control.” During the events that followed, now known as the Wounded Knee Massacre on December 29, 1890, 457 U.S. soldiers opened fire upon the Sioux, killing more than 200 of them. The Ghost Dance reached its peak just before the Wounded Knee Massacre in 1890. ”
sure it makes sense; all of the bitumen coal oil gets sent out of the country, the ‘all of the above’ lying liars .
that was…wow. put lots of bullets into what you don’t understand. makes me think of sufism, w/ an established tradition of ecstatic dancing but that, i believe, was banned by the ottomans. and other more spontaneous outbreaks of ecstatic dancing (St. Vitus?) in Europe…and maybe elsewhere? contagious laughter is also practiced in some “spirit-filled” churches, as well as dancing. maybe the latter is BS, but hell, they could be home watching the nba finals or whatever instead.
anyway, i’ve been reading Max (ben Mel) Brooks’ “the zombie survival guide,” his follow up to “world war z”. it’s clear in the far more serious wwz the zombie plague/war is a metaphor for the neglect & ruination inflicted on the planet by world gov’ts, esp. you know which, leading to a viral plague & a zombie war. (the movie has none of the social punch of the wwz book. none. very disappointing. that book is basically a survey of global environmental catastrophes under the guise of zombie fiction.) the “survival guide” is more tongue-in-cheek, lots of humour noire, but it’s also clear, though he never exactly says this, that he thinks the world has fucked itself thru the destruction of native cultures in the name of techno-fetishism, the hyper-exploitation of consumerism, the artificial (and false) distance b/n “people” and “nature,” etc., etc. brooks advises studying “how people lived before” for thousands of years w/o electricity, cars, etc. “to recover the life skills our ancestors took for granted, you will need to study for at least 10,000 hours.”
in other news, wsws sardonically notes today that, under NATO’s aegis, german tanks are once again streaking across poland for russia’s border. is it just me, or does that not sound good?
if the ottoman empire banned the whirling dervishes, perhaps they srsly feared their power, as the military and G did wovoka’s power to raise the indun dead. but have you ever watched them? it’s not just that they can twirl and whirl in one direction for lengths of time, but to me: it’s that are able to stop on a dime, then…whirl in the opposite direction without falling to the floor, their internal gryroscopes having failed them. whoooosh.
sufis also keep long knives in their boots, so that may be seen as an additional militant threat.
interesting on max’s book; i confess i am so unused to the zombie genre that i don’t quite grasp what the theme portends. but if i understand yes, the indigenous believe that many of their old ways were sustainable and sane. no, not the ‘noble savage always made wise decisions’ crap.
but some of that reasoning/(backward?)vision the archdruid seems to support/channel.
http://thearchdruidreport.blogspot.com/
yes, it seems that the next nato summit will be in warsaw on july 8 an 8, o my guess is that they’re muscling up ahead of it to show that the new cold war is…reasonable, and they must be ready for a response from: Rooosia!
http://www.nato.int/cps/en/natohq/events_132023.htm
ha ha ha: is ‘anakonda’ polish for ‘anaconda’ the snake?
it’s hard to figure the explosion of zombie BS, esp. in film/TV, except maybe as a cultural meme of intentionally disempowering apocalypticism? fearmongering about one’s neighbors? i’m not really into it, so i don’t know for sure, but new viruses popping up w/horrifying, truly dismaying consequences like the (overblown & hysterical) NYT reporting oral sex spreads zika??? oh god no! if that’s not the end, what is? if one case (sic) isn’t a global trend worth panicking over, what is?????
(btw, latin didn’t originally have or use the letter “k”, only “c”. so in spanish you get “cinco”, not “cinko”. greek doesn’t have the letter “c”, so panic is really panik. look at the big brain on jason!)
nice on the druid thing. we murkins really believe all the bright & shiny gizmos, nirvana is a beeping iphone, or covering the world w/solar panels (better than nuke reactors, for sure) is gonna “fix” everything. i guess the latest thing is using tidal motion & flotation devices to generate energy (better than coal mines, no doubt). but nobody asks: energy *for what*? trips to the mall? anyway, onward & upward! or downward & napward.
ta for the explanation, bigbrainjason. (that made me laugh, thanks) it was thd who’d introduced us to mr. greer and his theories.
your guesses on zombies as a metaphor might be right, i haven’t even seen the recent depictions, just some of those bandaged walking dead critters from far earlier horror films. USians seem to need fear in entertainment and say, extreme sports, though. maybe cuz unacknowledged life fear needs something larger and stronger to defeat?
yep, we live in a gizmo and shiny baubles nation, throw it away when crap needs repaired, or a better one is advertised. it’s a hella thing that so many ferriners want what we have. must be they don’t factor in the destructive forces of out of control consumerism and wars for resource plundering. yanno: the dark side.
Wow. I hadn’t heard about the results of the BIA sit-in way back when, although the community where I lived on Standing Rock had the local story that in 1975 Russell Means was arrested at the boundary of the reservation, taken to the BIA lockup in Fort Yates. Rumors of his the death of a local supporter spread through the community, and that supporter’s teenaged brother burned down the liquor house owned by the BIA police chief’s wife. The young man was sent to prison and was released on probation while we were there. After the burning of a couple of the white-dominated school district’s school buses in town, the young man was singled out as the culprit and arrested. Crazy times there.
But Wavy Gravy is figure for lots of white people as well. Woodstock was an accelerant for the illusion that as the Whole Earth Catalog put it the previous fall:
That is quoted in Kate Daloz’s We Are As Gods: Back to the Land in the 1970s on the Quest for a New America, which just showed up at my local library. Daloz is a kid who was raised on a back-to-the-land community in Vermont.
Tom Wolfe’s book is most likely The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, which primed the US culture for hippies after the police riot in Chicago at the Democratic National Convention. Of course, the media was a collaborative force in creating the mystique of “SuperKids” and setting them up to buy “hippie” paraphernalia. And for Wavy Gravy as a folk hero in Woodstock: the Movie. How else did so many rural and small town folks hear about him? I knew several Southern guys, otherwise good-ole-boys who liked his style but could not pull it off. Kinda weird.
Tom Wolfe created a mythology for a counterculture yet trying to figure itself out. The Chicago Seed in 1970 had a list of recommended reading, obviously for hippie wanna-be’s that included Che Guevara, Guerilla Warfare, Wolfe’s The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Jerry Rubin’s DO IT: Scenarios of the Revolution and other trendy volumes. Magazines and movies, like Woodstock marketed to that counterculture, and when the Kent State massacre occurred, a large part of that counterculture turned to the land. And folks like Wavy Gravy, Ken Kesey, and Stewart Brand tried to keep up with the trend as it was rattling away. And the Superkids, as Wolfe maligned them, had their own kids, got sideswiped by a whole bunch of revolutions — sexual, feminist, gay, Latino, Native American– which affected jobs, marriages, and living situations. And by the 1980s had settled into the anxiety of being prodded to seek Success!, Power! as Michael Korda urged or Looking Out for Number One. And those who carried on, like Wavy Gravy disappeared from notice by anyone but those who were working on the culture instead of consuming the artifacts of the culture.
I’m glad Wavy Gravy is still around. And wish him the best of birthdays ever. Those sorts of things do navigate what the 19th century folks called the ether, don’t they. His short shtick in the Woodstock movie has carried some people a long way. And as best I can tell, he never lost it.
I marvel how these folks became associated with “Boomers” because most of the transformers of the 1960s and 1970s were in fact members of that advertising cohort called the “Silent Generation” or as Daloz points out the very conscious scared-out-of-their-wits teenagers who first adopted rock and roll when consciousness of nuclear weapons was new, and the public was not nearly so comfortable with them.
“…Wavy Gravy is figure for lots of white people as well.” oh, no! wot next???
srsly, there’s a lot here, and thanks for the memories, as well a the notion of boomer ‘super-kids; i don’t remember that from tom wolfe’s ‘acid test’, i guess.
i’ll need to respond in parts since you had me tripping all over the web reading more on kerouac, the beats, ginsberg, etc. then on to stephen gaskin and ‘the farm’, an early intentional community. i was surprised to learn that there are still 150 folks living there after many iterations. gaskin ‘transitioned’ in july 2014, ina may’s still alive it seems.
anyway, as to russell means: i kinda sipped over donnelly’s mentions of him, as during researching some of my AIM-related diaries, i’d run into this sincere castigation of him. essentially the many, many reasons that the AIM governing council issued a press release distancing the group from russell means. i never did finish it, got a little farther yesterday, but there’s a hella lot in it that make one’s jaw drop. some innuendo is there as well, but the sun yung moon stuff and his and a few friends (ahem( activities in nicaragua…ay yi yi.
““He publicly resigned from AIM again in 1984 while he was seeking the Vice-Presidency of the United States on the ticket with Larry Flint of Hustler Magazine.
In 1985, he again resigned from Yellow Thunder Camp in the Black Hills stating, quote, “I’m tired babysitting Yellow Thunder Camp,” and that he was going to go on to other interests. Those interests was to align himself with Ward Churchill, Glen Morris, and Brooklyn Rivera of the CIA-sponsored Miskito Indian faction of the contras, as well, Elliot Abrams, and the Reagan Administration’s war against the Nicaraguan people of which the Miskito Indian people, and all Nicaraguans are the principal victims.”
they don’t mince words about the dineh’s outrage of his portrayal of ‘a medicine man’ in ‘natural born killers’, either. i believe jane hamsher co-wrote the script, didn’t she? ;-) see ya soon as i can.
with all due respect, thd, even after reading your comment numerous times, i can’t tell if you’re kinda channeling old sourpuss hedges’ ‘the sixties activism was a con’ (or close, but bing as i might, hes such a verbose mofo that i can’t find it, not remembering the exact title), or just illuminating the fake hippies as frank zappa did so hilariously back in the days of haight. i can certainly see that marketing the counterculture was a big thing, from neon clothes and posters to the ubiquitous peace symbols (one such i purchased at the san quentin gift shop in ’66 or so, the irony/possible pathos being what it was.
for the beats and others who wrote by way of pinging off huxley, ‘doors of perception’, john lily and others, i reckon the times (including anti-war, or perhaps ‘anti-draft’, and the interconnetedness of all humans…was a turning point in history.
also, as far as i could discover, the Super Kids meme was only wolfe riffing off ken kesey, but i didn’t eel like signing up for free trials of Very Learned Analyses of his works. ;-)
the lyrics
“What’s there to live for?
Who needs the peace corps?
Think I’ll just DROP OUT
I’ll go to Frisco
Buy a wig & sleep
On Owsley’s floor….”
and goddess knows, re: libruls who got mugged in the 80s or whenever, and as much as i loathe electoral comedy: gov. moonbeam and tom fooking hayden are all out for the Anointed One!
Thanks for the two great comments. Yes, Hamsher did write the script. Yes, AIM had the usual movemental problems as best I can tell from the outside. My story is of the impact it had on people, in this case a family member, outside the movement.
Beyond the attempt to market to hippies (any issue of George Leonard’s Look Magazine will do), the point from Daloz’s book that by 1966 for some and certainly 1970 that we were on our own was true an has remained true. None of our parents’ generations prepared us for the post-World War II disruption of “normalcy”. Their deeply buried fear about nuclear weapons when it got expressed was through outbreaks like the insanity of McCarthyism and never got named for what it really was. Living in the apocalypse brought out the revivalists; never consideration of maybe changing some political habits. The Peace movement (thank you, Bertrand Russell) was a blasphemous break with the nationalism of the 1950s. Most of the kids who took up the peace movement had immediate problems with their families.
The other point, and thanks for highlighting it. The real hippies are still in the country. At the Farm in Tennessee, the Hog Farm (wherever it is now) and many other places. Moreover that experience got impressed on a whole lot of now seemingly middle class older people who are still doing interesting things.
Gotta go do an interesting thing. Later.
i thank you for expanding the meaning of, and why you chose those quotes, amigo. there seem to be number of hog farms in various locations, depending on the dates of teh googling. but all over new mexico, of course, in th 60s.
http://www.nmmagazine.com/article/?aid=79903#.V1YVHloUXIU
one was in truchas where we lived for a spell (after we;d gone, but our friend worked for these rather wealthy communitarians (or were we there then; i live in a time warp):
http://americanhistory.si.edu/lisalaw/6.htm
photo caption: ‘Tom Law teaching beginning yoga to newcomers, Law farm, Truchas, New Mexico, 1971. Following the Life magazine article, a steady stream of pilgrims and the curious visited the Law farm.
but oh, yes: wavy: http://www.wavygravy.net/bio/biography.html
sure and we were back-to-the-landers, homesteaded 20 acres carved outta a ranch. fenced it, seeded the dryland by hand, hoped to grow herbs for celestial seasonings (ha!) built a wee small passive solar hogan…and soon discovered we were throwbacks to an earlier time. ay yi yi, the living expenses, and cost of used farm implements! still have the 1947 ford tractor we rebuilt and refurbished/repainted, down to stars on a black field on the ditcher blade.
yanno: hippies. (click for larger)
Yes, Wolfe has his niche in the “new journalism” shtick, didn’t he. Not asking you to reread any of his stuff. A novel is essentially a novel even when it is a form of journalism. Unless it’s classic, once is generally enough.
Well, look at the Port Huron era SDS – Hayden, Todd Gitlin – and look what happened to them. And Whole Earth Catalog Stewart Brand, after a brilliant work (How Buildings Learn) rakes it in with a global business consulting shop. For all the assumptions that permeating business culture would redirect it to more healthy directions, it turns out that Marx had sussed out that capitalists keep ideological watch on their own. Disrupters better not be in the habit of disrupting the fundamental boss-labor political fact, even in minor ways. He shoulda known he was going in it for the money.
Pleased that Wavy Gravy has taken the harder path.
They don’t arrest clowns supposedly was Wavy Gravy’s explanation of his persona. I’m not so sure of that, but at #NoNATO there was a ClownBloc in the permitted march on Sunday. Not sure how they fared when they got to McCormick Place and ran up against the CPD line.
A time in history is right:
1962 – Face-to-face with nuclear war. Historians have found out that had it not been for low-level Soviet officers not retaliating and Kennedy defying his advisers and not rejecting Krushschev’s offer, it could have spirals into launches of something. Not sure the range of what was actually deployed then; a lot of weapons systems were still being developed.
1966 – Media discovers youth are using grass and LSD while their parents are going to Esalen; corporations go nuts for “sensitivity training”
1968 – Tet Offensive, Assassinations, Chicago Police Riot, Paris Uprising, election of Nixon – Year the World Felt Unglued
1969 – Woodstock provided an anarchist vision of freedom, picked up and put in theaters all over the country in the Movie. Big “peace is really possible because look what we did in the mud” narrative going on.
1970 – Kent State – Rolling Stone (yes, that one – Matt Taibbi’s employer) was running regular columns about the coming revolution.
1972 – 1974 – The public delegitimization of the US government. Nixon’s plumber broke into the campaign of a Democratic candidate who the Democratic establishment was undercutting to find what? In the process of pursuing that investigation out comes COINTELPRO, Operation Phoenix, and a lot of other post-World War II skeletons from the closet. The political system looked like surely it would fall apart.
And somewhere in there Richard Alpert (already Turned on, tuned in, and dropped out) becomes Ram Dass. And the alternative religion bookshops explode across the land. Including Columbia SC.
The US of 1958 was totally transformed by 1972, even rural areas, who latched onto country music in the (love the media) “nostalgia craze”. Went nuts over CB radios, 10-gallon hats (or feed caps) and pick ’em up trucks as cultural symbols. When Reagan was inaugurated in 1980, all of that cultural polarization was mostly locked in and thanks to the coup in the Southern Baptist Convention in 1978, nailed down. You see hippies? I don’t see any hippies? They were still there if you knew where to look.
I, by that time, was struggling to raise a family and mucking about with appropriate technology and rural co-op and war on poverty projects. And there were some in the hollows of northwestern North Carolina and southwestern Virginia. (Mother Earth News even moved down near Asheville during that period of time. Briefly, it was a place of pilgrimage. Imagine that.)
Enough for tonight.
nah, if i could still read dead tree, i’d read some more kerouac and kesey again rather than wolfe.
i’ll have to take you at your word about some of the media marketing explosion of hippiedom, cuz for several reasons i wasn’t aware of it. oh, and yes, you must be speaking of wavy’s amigo Baba Rum Raisin (h/t mad magazine). ;-)
are those timeline events yours or deloz’s? either way, i can imagine some of those ingredients underpinned the need for us to lead (ahem) alternative lives that struck us a very legitimate, even with the attendant struggles, even if subconsciously.
“mr. brand; do you ever feel a bit hypocritical that you’ve made a fortune from selling ideas and plans that were meant to be…post capitalist, eco-wise, and communitarian?”
brand: “yes, all the way to the bank, ha ha. Visionaries and remarkable people earn their pay, yanno?”
Here’s a tad of “counter culture” within the continuing vestiges of the Chicano Movement.
_________
Were
Donald Trump, Dick Cheney, and Rush Limbaugh Rightfully Called “Inspectors”?For the many of those among us and who served in the Vietnam War and for those among us and who challenged the Military Draft on Religious Grounds, I pay homage to Muhammad Ali, for having the tenacity of his belief in his Religion as well as America’s Legal Systemic. Further, I pay homage to all those men in the 1960s and moved to Canada to “protest” the War. And thankfully, President Carter–before leaving the Oval Office, absolved all these consequential “protesters” for their political beliefs and their attendant behaviors.
And in contrast, the men who had easy access to medical care in which medical statements were utilized to solicit and succeed in attaining a “deferral” in order to avoid subjecting themselves to the military draft, were prevalent as well. Thus, the general behavior of a deferral was seen, for the most part, as a white privilege and premised on the status of an “inspector.” As such, seeking out women for the purpose of conducting a “body cavity search” and done in order to avoid acquiring the “clap” or in more polite terms, a social disease, is not the “homage” that should be addressed, even though I am doing so in this Commentary.
In closing, the military draft led to many men and who had no desire to participate in a War and where the decision-makers should have known better, and yet, we participated in the War because the “Law is the Law.” But times have changed, and we have Muhammad Ali to thank for this. Take, for example, “racial and ethnics” were universally opposed to the AUMF while European Americans were adamantly in support of the AUMF. Of course, times change and for others, history has a ‘connection’ that cannot be easily “disconnected” and that behavior continues to remain the same for the many.
Jaango
i suppose i understand why you posted this here rather than on the current Open Menu, jaango, including the fact that it’s about a mile long (i’ll make a new one soon). yes, ali was rigorous about ‘not killing brown people for a white supremacist government’ (or close) and “no viet cong ever hurt me!”, wasn’t he? now i hadn’t any idea that racial and ethnics were universally opposed to the AUMF. do you mean congress-critters who’d voted, or will vote when it;s time to reauthorize it?
i loved the hell outta this tweet of his:
MuhammadAli · May 18 “Love is the net where hearts are caught like fish.“