Tracking the Changes

The pace of change began to pick up after the soldiers in Little Rock, after Elvis appeared in black and white from the waist up on the Ed Sullivan Show, (white-bread America missing the point that the point was those thrusting hips), and those changes continued and accelerated and gathered momentum as part of the rights of cultural passage from Eisenhower through the sacrificial Kennedy to Nixon, when Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters displaced Dale Carnegie as the arbiters of the ethos.

We all thought the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution actually had something to do with culture, and we were vaguely in favor of that. We downed quantities of peyote and mescaline and LSD and wrestled with insight while watching the dark clouds of enlightenment hanging over angry orange sunrises through bloodshot eyes. There were black and red posters of Che in his beret, and one that said Electric Circus in day-glo letters that shone in the dark.

Beatles, Doors, topless, bottomless, Nixon, Cambodia, Kent State. Coltrane died in sixty-seven. We let a wispy-haired, blue-jeaned, cowboy-booted, Yankee draft-dodger sleep on our floor for a week that summer. He never once took off his leather jacket, even though it was hot. Experience was something that could be occupied, taken possession of, known in its moment-to-moment quality, its texture, its delight and its terror.

Were there any of us of that generation who were not skewed and exhilarated and disillusioned by the simple awareness of ourselves against the backdrop of 1968? Doctor King’s dream moved us deeply, and we felt an enthusiastic agreement when Maharishi Mahesh Yogi said, with one of those distinctively Indian waggles of his head, “If we are blessed with the ability to have desires, why should we not also have the right to try and realize them?”

But the very pretence of revolutionary solidarity itself vanished, as the Woodstock nation mutated into Altamont amid phosphorescent parodies of pop paintings inspired by the mindless minimalismof modern art. It was the end of May, 1969, when the self-consciously and perhaps arrogantly named Art Ensemble of Chicago, having come to the conclusion that the American mid-west was exhausted of creative possibilities, left for Europe.

The beliefs that we might have clung to had been cancelled by the advances of science. We were metaphysical vagabonds, lost souls in a state of confusion. God was well and truly dead. What passed for spirituality was simply an outpouring of words and style; a mixture of pop psychology, recycled hippie philosophy, scraps of Hindu claptrap,* cultural-specific nonsense and Judeo-Christian contradictions.

*Jagganath means lord of the universe. It is one of the names of Krishna in his incarnation as Vishnu. He’s a democratic socialist. All castes are equal before him. And he crushes them, every one.