Skinny Dipping in Reality: The Great Hippy LSD Enlightenment Search Party

By Joe Bageant, JoeBageant.com. Posted March 25, 2009.

The hippie generation represented a massive threat to Cold War America, already hell bent on Global Empire, but not acknowledging such. The harder you looked around at America, the more terrible the shock. Slow leaks in the bucket of our national destiny. Within that advanced core of the most optimistic, best educated and most visionary generation America ever produced, belief seeped away. Yet it nevertheless launched the ecological movement, the health food movement, and attempted to open up the closed darkness of American power politics, which made it avant-garde.

Avant-gardes are, by definition, small. Despite the claims of graybeard stock brokers and aging realtors at cocktail parties, the majority of the generation never took part in the movement. They were the same as they are today, concerned more with sports, pussy and bling. Oh, they smoked pot, talked the talk, but that's about all. Thomas Frank documented this very well in The Marketing of Cool. Still, they were more open than the previous generation, and certainly more open than they are now.

Meanwhile, many, if not most, of those dedicated to the movement did not grow so fat and well-heeled as they aged. I can name many dozens who've remained true to their beliefs at great personal cost to their lives and families. A few still live on their humble organic back-to-the-land plots, or spent their lives teaching in school systems that keep on rotting despite their own best efforts, because the schools are themselves part of a degraded Empire of the type against which they fought. Or working in social services or the ecology and earth movement. (Speaking of which, I still hold the Rainbow Family and its gatherers to be among the highest order of men and women in America.) Many, if not most of the true blue hippies now suffer the gloom and depression of any intelligent and soulful person in this age. But they endure. Few of them as there are compared to the 300 million American other-minded souls around them, they endure.

Often at my speaking engagements or readings, I see one or more of them in the audience -- long gray hair, loose fitting sensible well worn clothing, soft eyes, and perhaps an herbal amulet around the neck or in the hair. I look very directly at them from the podium, until that old electric flash of mutual recognition pops. Immediately after the reading or talk or whatever, I seek them out if at all possible (press agents sometimes screw this up). Always there is the big smile and the hug.

And we are again brothers and sisters," as we used to sincerely address each other on the street. And again I have been granted the gift, that brief spark of unquestioned mutual love and goodwill in a darkening time.

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Joe Bageant is author of the book, Deer Hunting With Jesus: Dispatches from America's Class War. (Random House Crown), about working class America. A complete archive of his on-line work, along with the thoughts of many working Americans on the subject of class may be found on his website.

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