mass movements 4

I think the army raises and lowers its requirements depending on the availability of recruits. It would be interesting to know how categories like those with a criminal record or those with poor education do when they are in the army, and how they do when they get out.

I think the national guard was first used overseas extensively by Dubya’s guys because they didn’t want to tax the regular army so much and they certainly didn’t want people to think they might be bringing back the draft. I think once we get back from Afghanistan we won’t be going anywhere for at least twenty, thirty years.

All these Crimean hawks scream for vengeance against Putin, but they all begin by saying, “No boots on the ground.” How about this, in order to punish Russia, we supply Europe with the oil they would normally get from Russia with our oil? Sure, our oil prices would surge, but it would be worth it to aid those freedom loving Ukraines, wouldn’t it? Let’s see McCain and his ilk propose that.

I don’t know when I first heard the word hippie. I think it kind of all began with the Beatles. Their hair wasn’t that long, but they didn’t comb it (remember how shocking that was at the time, guys who didn’t comb their hair?), so it appeared kind of long, kind of cool too.

My little group in Champaign, who dressed shabby, hung out at the student union all day, looked askance at the square world, took up that long hair thing, and when we came across marijuana we took that up too. We thought of ourselves as latter day beatniks, but then word came from the coasts of young people who had long hair and did drugs and they were called hippies, and that looked like us too. We never really took to the name hippie, but that was what other people were calling us, and so what the hell.

Hippiedom started on the coasts and was late coming to the midwest, but maybe I was one of the early hippies in the Champaign community. People would stop me on the quad and have their photos taken with me. I would say pithy silly things and people would go “Ooooo.” It was pretty cool. And you know people around me started growing out their hair and smoking dope, and there was the same music we all listened to, and there were those stupid alternative newspapers that I am embarrassed to admit, we sometimes took seriously. So even though nobody signed a card, we had kind of a movement going.

And at first it was all peace and love. All smoking dope and taking LSD and listening to the Jefferson Airplane and the Grateful Dead, and grooving. All of the outside world was misguided and square, and that included political activists with their bullhorns and noisy demonstrations. But then, like I said, they started to draft us.

And at some point I lived in Berkeley for about four months. Now there was like the headquarters of political hippiedom. I’m sure I’ve told my Berkeley stories, but maybe not, or maybe you’ve forgotten them. Just say the word and I am ready to launch into them. It was a crazy world.

The hippie drugs were marijuana and the hallucinogenics, maybe a little speed, but not like the meth of today, more like diet pills, and that was pretty much it. I remember cocaine coming around as hippiedom was fading out. The thing was when you had marijuana and you wanted to smoke it you invited all your friends, but when the coke users used, they would maybe invite two or three of their coke buddies and then they would sneak away to where nobody else could see them, or ask them for a hit. That was when the regular people were beginning to outnumber the true believers.

I think probably the draft lottery was the death knell of the hippies. A couple odd things. I remember once being around some friends of friends who were frat guys and they were smoking dope, and that didn’t seem right to me, it seemed like dope belonged to us. I remember hitch hiking once and being picked up some long haired teenagers and we were smoking the dope and talking the talk, and all of a sudden they started talking about how they hated niggers. That didn’t seem right. And once when I was in Berkeley waiting in a group for the Berkeley Barb to come out so that I could sell it, I heard someone talking with a southern accent, and I looked around and I couldn’t figure out who it was, and finally I realized it was one of my brother hippies.

Hippiedom had spread out, got diluted, was fading.