An illuminating conversation on twitter with @d4doome. I am @richmondie.
@d4doome Woodstock was as much a Greatest Generation thing as a Boomer thing. It's easy to forget that it was mostly the Greatest Generation that unleashed the horrors of hippiedom upon us. The whole counter-culture catastrophe was the product of the Greatest Generation. Case in point:
@MericaCulture In hindsight, Woodstock was like a ritual sacrifice where boomers gathered to offer up their cultural inheritance at the altar of secular materialism in exchange for wanton hedonism.
@richmondie We had some good ideas... Thanks to the pill there was no point waiting till you were married. No reason not to shack up. As a contemporary said, once the dangers of pregnancy and disease went, society stopped holding up its hands in horror, ostracising you or claiming you'd go to Hell.
@d4doome It was an era of social engineering. Some of it well-intentioned. Some of it malicious. Some of it worked. Some of it was catastrophic.
@richmondie That sounds right. The social engineers thought they were Plato's Guardians and they have not gone away.
@d4doome There was a concerted push to destroy marriage. But there was nothing with which to replace it.
@richmondie Also dating. Marriage is just a bit of paper - we shall experiment with alternative living arrangements with free love and bring up children in common. The children are still having therapy. And it had all been done 100 years before in the States. Lots of room to set up a Utopian community.
@d4doome Yep. And yes, so much of the hippie ethos was recycled Victorian/Edwardian era cultism.
I can still hardly quite believe that hippiedom was a house of cards. In the 80s there was a group that travelled about in vans. New Age Travellers? Though my career was taking off, I secretly wanted to join them. But where did you sign up? They vanished without trace - or rather they came to a halt somewhere, got jobs and paired off and had kids.
More here, and links to the rest.
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