Crash Course in California Hippies
by Daniel Tucker
Review: “Slouching Towards Bethleham” originally published in The Saturday Evening Post (1967) and re-published in Slouching Towards Bethlehem: Essays by Joan Didion (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1968)
“San Francisco was where the missing children were gathering and calling themselves hippies.” Joan Didion’s time spent in the Haight-Ashbury district of San Francisco in the spring of 1967 exposed her to a subculture of “children who were never taught and would never now learn the games that held the society together.” What Didion proceeded to do with her time was witness and observe this phenomenon. For the most part, the resulting essay “Slouching Towards Bethlehem” follows a list-form where her witnessing of various events and encounters become fragmented pieces that form an overall portrait. She hangs in a park and watches people do drugs, she hangs in a loft while a band practices, she goes to dinner with someone she meets at a concert, she tries to make contact with leaders and gurus. She gives very little overt editorializing or commentary, save a few blunt clarifying statements like her explanation that what she was witnessing was not “a country in open revolution.”
The absence of a revolution and the presence of lost “children” provide a critical framework in which Didion’s snapshots of hippie life become in-fill. Her judgement is clear and provocative, but she clearly is the conservative voice in the room. She buys into the “games” people play to keep society working and does not believe dropping out should be an option. She also believes that in the absence of an “open revolution” that dropping out should not be an option. Her insistence that dropping out should not be an option for these young people in the midst of the build up to “summer of love” was provocative but lacked alternative directives.
by Daniel Tucker
Review: “Slouching Towards Bethleham” originally published in The Saturday Evening Post (1967) and re-published in Slouching Towards Bethlehem: Essays by Joan Didion (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1968)
“San Francisco was where the missing children were gathering and calling themselves hippies.” Joan Didion’s time spent in the Haight-Ashbury district of San Francisco in the spring of 1967 exposed her to a subculture of “children who were never taught and would never now learn the games that held the society together.” What Didion proceeded to do with her time was witness and observe this phenomenon. For the most part, the resulting essay “Slouching Towards Bethlehem” follows a list-form where her witnessing of various events and encounters become fragmented pieces that form an overall portrait. She hangs in a park and watches people do drugs, she hangs in a loft while a band practices, she goes to dinner with someone she meets at a concert, she tries to make contact with leaders and gurus. She gives very little overt editorializing or commentary, save a few blunt clarifying statements like her explanation that what she was witnessing was not “a country in open revolution.”
The absence of a revolution and the presence of lost “children” provide a critical framework in which Didion’s snapshots of hippie life become in-fill. Her judgement is clear and provocative, but she clearly is the conservative voice in the room. She buys into the “games” people play to keep society working and does not believe dropping out should be an option. She also believes that in the absence of an “open revolution” that dropping out should not be an option. Her insistence that dropping out should not be an option for these young people in the midst of the build up to “summer of love” was provocative but lacked alternative directives.
She does come back to her early provocation near the end of the essay when she explains “At some point between 1945 and 1967 we had somehow neglected to tell these children the rules of the game we happened to be playing. Maybe we had stopped believing in the rules ourselves, maybe we were having a failure of nerve about the game. Maybe there were just too few people around to do the telling.” And she goes on to lament the social atomization resulting from families moving around frequently, getting divorced, etc.
Her critique was hinged on the idea that people had responsibilities but ignored the fact that what people were responsible towards might not be worth taking care of. I love this essay for all the themes and characters it reveals and explores, and I totally agree that dropping out was not and continues not to be the answer, but I must disagree with her fundamental conservatism and longing for the past. Society is too complex to stand still.
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