N O R T H C O A S T T IM E S E A G L E , AUGTEMBER 2005
Advertising's pre-enlightened days were ending, how
ever. Thomas Frank, in 1994’s The Conquest of Cool, wrote
of “advertising as a cultural criticism" — a movement in and
of itself. Pre-enlightenment, the industry was viewed more as
a science, a pure numbers game, and creativity was given short-
shrift at the expense of a sort of neutral exposition, or social
editorial. As more and more youth dropped out, tuned in and
turned on in response to Timothy O’Leary’s call, advertising
adjusted its rhetoric in a revolution from the inside. Seeing they
were potentially losing the big game, progressive’ advertisers
such as Bill Bernbach had discovered creativity in advertising
in the late 1950s. He realized hip did not evolve from crunching
numbers and following the linear myths of American life, but from
seeking out “anti-advertising" opportunities, i.e., by embracing
the kids and the increasing numbers of adults in American
society who were seeking alternative expression in the 1960s.
Advertising came up fast beginning with the Volkswagen
campaign of 1959 by Madison Avenue's Doyle Dane and Bern
bach. The campaign transformed the former “Nazi" car into
something else — an “anti-car” that made a statement. The car
rejected normality, i.e., big fins and motors, and road hogging
dimensions. What was good (and successful) for cars became
good for an array of products and services, from car rentals to
beauty products to soft drinks; and it hasn't stopped. Nike’s latest
ad campaign is careful to remind us that Steve Prefontaine, the
long distance runner who died tragically young in 1975, was first
and foremost a “rebel." (I knew Prefontaine. He was a drunkard
who ran.)
To meld an understanding between consumers and
producers, it would be left for the technocrats of advertising
to eventually embrace the counterculture by the forces of
co-optation. When Peter Coyote and Emmett Grogan led the
Diggers in San Francisco in the mid-1960s they inadvertently
discovered themselves as news items. By performing in the
street and keeping a communal lifestyle focused on humane
values, they understood themselves to be — as Coyote writes
in Sleeping Where I Fall (2002) — in “a common quest for trans
formation (on) the edge of the counterculture." On December 17,
1967, the Diggers held a “Death of Money” parade in conjunction
rith the Hells Angels and the poet Michael McClure, a highly
publicized affair that featured the first free rock concerts of the
Grateful Dead and Janis Joplin in San Francisco’s Golden Gate
Park. The experience impressed certain suitors in the filmmaking
business as well as the Diggers themselves, who were, Coyote
says, “flushed with our ability to make things happen." They
aecame part of “the emerging countercultural aristocracy.” In that
cauldron Coyote discovered the exhilaration and disgust he felt
tor being singled out and courted by the hip scenarists and journ
alists who were determined to exploit the Diggers.
Coyote is convinced that Peter Fonda and Dennis
Hopper got it all wrong in the movie Easy Rider (1969), which
he advised on, pointing to a failed third act that picked the
counterculture’s bones clean by killing the movie’s heroes.
In the movement Coyote envisioned, violence was out of
character. In the movie it became a gratuitous plot device.The
movie was, he argues, intellectually dishonest, which happens
to be the inevitable result of the romantic impulse of cinema
and its rhetorical character. It was, in Coyote’s mind, counter
propaganda and a “sideshow to the real work of the Diggers
free life amid the desert of industrial capitalism.”
Before Easy Rider, Bonnie and Clyde (1967) found an
audience willing to embrace its two Depression era anti-hero
criminals, whom write Horowitz and Carroll, “appealed to 1960s
fantasies of a mobile youth culture, escaping from adult institut
ions and living more “naturally." The movie, straight out of the
mainstream Hollywood ethos, divided critics. Some thought the
movie romanticized violence. Others saw it as a parable of the
times, raw with new views on sexuality, freedom, and the sweep
af rebellion that had become America as epitomized by “the long
lot summer" of 1967 when riots and protests of the Vietnam War
and racism became pandemic.
By 1967 the countercultures of the antiwar movement,
he hippies, black and academic radicals and the advertising
¡loganeers had melded They were all credited-up and rolled into
>ne alt-Everything, prepared to embrace the newest members
if the alt-lifestyle everybody sought. Tom Wolfe wrote about the
upport black radicals, such as Huey P. Newton, Bobby Seale
ind Eldridge Cleaver gained among the upper class in his
ixpose, Mau Mauing the Flack Catchers in 1970. The Black
’anthers were but part of the convergence of alt-consciousness
nd politics.Enterthe radical feminists of the women’s movement
md the homosexuals. The Stonewall Tavern riot in New York's
Sreenwich Village in 1969 is the line of embarkation for gay
ights. For the first time that year gays fought back when a
corrupt law enforcement apparatus shook them down. Women
bund a solid voice in Betty Freidan’s important 1963 study, The
: eminine Mystique, which led to the National Organization of
¡/omen (NOW) and other groups committed to equal pay and
ights for women.
The rhetorical convergence of the various aspect of the
¡ounterculture was stated succinctly by John Sinclair (circa
1969) in his essay, “We Are a People." Addressed to his
Brothers and Sisters,” the message defined the counterculture
fxperience as more than a protest movement. It had evolved
ito a full-on “liberation movement for total change and total
evolution." Total freedom of the planet was its ultimate goal. In
evolutionary terms the screed called for the overthrow of every-
ling. It is thinly veiled Marxism, speaking of the ownership of
society and the control of goods and services; of inadequate
iducation and capitalism’s utter meanness; of repression and
colonial greed; of exploiters and brainwashers; of a lingering
'axation without representation"; of endless war and the death
lachine; of a homegrown colonization; of secession.
Sinclair’s effort to give meaning to the forces of dialect
a l capitalism is laudable. However, it is unnerving to remember
rhat happened when American youth actually took to the streets
protest of the “death machine" rolling into Cambodia in 1970
o borrow from Bobby Fuller, they “fought the law, and the law
ron" at Kent State and Jackson State. If there were any doubts
ift about society’s transmorgification from World War 2 savior
V A N PUSEN BEVERAGES
ASTORIA, OREGON
325-2302
P A G E 13
providing the freedom to transcend the mundane world of
capitalism ,s New Age by definition
New Age workers are not working to gather bushels of
money, but rather toward peace and understanding. And what's
so funny about that, asked Elvis Costello. They work to impart
wisdom and knowledge, to deconstruct the abstract. It is simply
unfortunate that New Age musician George Winston's music
isn't quite as significant as Costello’s. The New Age is lovely
when you view it through the prism of its rhetorically charged
constructs — “auras," “energy fields," “channels,” "psychic
perception,” ’aliens.” It is a rosy world At its conception, the
New Age “appealed to professional elites because it combined
the countercultural spirit with advanced science," write Horowitz
and Carroll.The New Age became a lasting legacy of the count
erculture because, in final analysis, it is benign.
There are other lasting perceptions of the rights and
wrongs committed by countercultural adherents Christian
fundamentalists, particularly, revile the memory of the 1960s and
its remnants That is why they have fought so hard to gain the
political hold they have at present. Liberals are still bogeymen
among the conservatives. Liberals project a dangerous desire to
be soft on criminals. They have ruined family values and support
same-sex marriages. Liberals hate George Bush because he is
an American. Liberals hate freedom and would give the country
to the welfare-loving horde. Liberals own the media. Liberals are
dividing America and are weak in the face of tyranny and terror
ism, for goodness sake.
On the other hand, and there is an other hand unless
it has been blown off in the most recent war, conservatives are
intractable. Conservatives are hypocritical and two-faced, like
Rush Limbaugh, who denounces and uses drugs. They drink
the kool-aid in Halliburton’s kitchen and love it. Conservatives
designed the torture chambers at Guantanamo and Abu Graib.
Conservatives protect their gun rights while the inner city is a
battlefield. And, by the way, conservatives are divisive and own
the media.
STEVEN LONGSTREET
The din of debate between liberals and conservatives is
a legacy of the counterculture. Until somebody, an enlightened
leader perhaps, comes along with a new and improved brand
to imperial power with fascist tendencies, they were canceled
of
government, the reality will not change. The co-optation of
like a hippie’s bad check. Along with the consensus of Sinclair’s
Congress
by corporate interests will continue as it has since the
“brothers and sisters,” the spirit of constitutional federalism had
roiling of the first hints of U.S. neo-imperialism backed by the
been wiped off the slate. Imperialism, and U S. hegemony arose
bomb. The legacy will remind us that 1970’s Vortex 1 was a
on the wings of the United States’ burgeoning technology sector
state-sanctioned
rock concert for radicals, pure enough to make
and the beginnings of globalization made possible by advances
the
Vietnam
War
palatable for another day. The legacy will
in transportation and communications. Roszak had nailed it all
remind
us
that
radicals
are best kept in a fenced-off “free speech
right. Corporate sponsorship of friendly dictators around the
zone" blocks away from debate among the foreign and domestic
globe became the impetus to seeking power and the friendly
policy apparatchiks of capitalism’s nobility. The legacy gives us
corporate money to gain it. Sinclair’s “people” would never again
hip amid the clamorous call to suffer and die for “freedom,” which
be represented by politicians, even in the utopian dream of the
Kris
Kristofferson said is “just another word for nothing to lose."
New Age, the next step in the evolution of alt-consciousness.
All the words are just other words saying something
Unlike the New Left, with its vestiges in the Students for
paradoxical.
The counterculture began as an absurd and
a Democratic Society (SDS), the Black Panthers and Weather
contradictory moment and progressed to this instant. It was
Underground, all of which collapsed for reasons of class war and
never anything more than a dream; it was never anything more
the murder, imprisonment, subjugation and assimilation of its
than
a dialectical impulse, a promotion and a statement, a
principle proponents, the New Age is happily still with us. Who
rhetorical
flourish. It was genius and guts. It was outlandish
can resist a Tarot reading, a scented candle, a nicely turned
and
criminal
and oft stupid and protected by the United States
vegetarian meal? Who can resist the economy of food co-ops
Constitution.
The counterculture is an old friend who cannot be
and freedom as defined by ecological purity? Good food, good
forgotten or forsaken.
vibes, good times? They are there for those who have the New
Age stuff — a car, say, that is hybrid, or better, a philosophy
of multicultural, multi-ethnic, multi-nationalistic spirituality. A
Terry Simons wrote this essay this past spring for a
profession helps, one that offers the relaxation of meaningful
class taught by David Horowitz at Portland State University,
work and reward enough to find comfortability where it exists.
“History of American Countercultures: 1945-1975." He is a
’returning’ student.
A job that pays well and is unlikely to be outsourced while
f
\
TOO MANY WOUNDS
BY BARBARA DARBY
The time my friends and I sought out and joined the
counterculture movement was a time of many paradoxes for
us. These contradictions involved our generation's hopes for
the future and the abundance of deaths and injuries happening
to that same generation.
The wounds that happened to our leaders and our
friends shattered our view of a loving world. One by one, as each
new ideal was taken away our lives became more meaningless.
We fled from this loss of meaning in our lives and instead of
pursuing success and obtaining the “American Dream” as our
parents had before us, we became part of a new and exciting
counterculture movement.
We became a large voice in the 60s and early 70s and
many of us used this voice in opposition to much of the oppres
sion and injustice that was part of our American society during
these and other times. Some say there was no reason for the
counterculture movement, they say it just happened or was an
extension of the “Beat Generation” of the 50s
The counterculture movement may have originated
earlier, however. The mass exodus of this alternative way of
living in the late ’60s and early ‘ 70s did not just happen It was
caused by the abundance of wounds in our society that over
shadowed our lives during those times.
Our friends were beginning to return from Vietnam
wounded and unable to relate to us the atrocities they were
forced to be involved in. We comforted their return to our
society as much as we could. We also knew they were some
how altered forever by the experience. Some friends died,
gentle people blown to pieces. We felt powerless to change
the direction of what was happening to our lives and country
This is when I believe the greatest exodus into the
counterculture took place We were defeated and it was time
To find our own way. Our country and our generation had
suffered too many wounds. It was a time for our own type of
civil disobedience.
My friends and I read Tom Wolfe’s The Electric Kool-Aid
Acid Test, which was published in 1968. It was about the lives of
Ken Kesey and his friends on a cross-country trip in a psyche
delic bus, and we turned our eager minds and thoughts to that
adventure in the same manner we had devoured the books of
John Steinbeck. This led to our acceptance of the “drug culture"
and we explored and experienced all it had to offer. We hitch
hiked to San Francisco and visited the places where it began
We went to see the Grateful Dead and attended music festivals
where we freely ingested the drugs we brought to share or were
offered by others The best marijuana was sent or carried home
by our friends in Vietnam We had good times and became
accustomed to living with limited resources We were fond of
talking about President Washington’s “hemp" garden or Aldous
Huxley’s LSD trips
Musicians, poets and writers, leaders and creators living
in the 60s and at other times before and since are known to
have used drugs to expand their view of their work and of the
world It is well known that mind expanding drugs brought about
changes in the music and lifestyles of many musicians and poets
during the time of the counterculture movement. Indeed, drugs
were a force that changed the consciousness of many who were
eager to try new and different ways of looking at life
However, those who label drugs as the main reason and
attention of the counterculture miss the truth of those times by a
large margin. The use of drugs did influence the movement and
changed and sometimes led to the enlightenment of many who
took them as well as those who didn’t.
Drugs also led to deepening existing wounds in society
Friends died from overdose and others contracted lifelong
disabilities because of their use. “Straights" just had to and did
put a stop to the unrestricted use of them. They felt drugs eroded
users’ ideas of what and how a capitalist society should be and
behave. Their actions caused much of the paranoia that became
attributed to their smoking of marijuana and the taking of other
drugs. Their attitudes contributed to more violent actions against
American citizens, which caused additional wounds. There were
many in the counterculture movement who never took drugs or
“never inhaled." The counterculture was a way to divorce our
selves from the wounds that were being inflicted on citizens by
other citizens.
By the time the Vietnam War was finally over, we barely
noticed We weren’t watching the nightly news anymore. We
began only to care about what was happening in our immediate
circle of friends and about the highs we could obtain and the fun
we could experience. When the war finally ended we were most
likely with our friends who had returned from it, drinking dime
beers at the local tavern We could be found pausing from our
conversations to join in as the whole crowded room sang in
unison the ballad in which Don McLean told with a poet’s voice
the story of our times, American Pie.
So what about us now? We are still around and many of
us still live with the wounds that have lasted from that time We
still distrust our government and its policies. We fail to fight for
many just causes because we feel they will never be won
through political means. Most of us still live within and take part
in our polluting and consumer-oriented society and we also live
with the guilt of its wastefulness and environmental destruction
Those of us who took LSD still wonder at the enlightenment
about life and death that it gave us We still get very angry when
any injustice occurs.
Some of us still support many of the causes we have
always believed in and our new American Dream is that Peace
will still come Many of us still pause in reflection when trying to
decipher right from wrong and still have trouble finding the
middle ground We will always carry the wounds that caused
the counterculture with us They reside along with the strength
gained from the healing of those wounds and I am hopeful that
this is wha, will be passed on to future generations.
This article has been excerpted from a longer one
Barbara Darby initially published in the July/Augus, 1999 NCTE
She lives in Astoria