Didion as Prophet

As we discussed in class, Didion’s Slouching Towards Bethlehem carries a prophetic tone for the close of the ‘60s and the birth of the ‘70s, as is emphasized by the title essay’s consistent reference to Yeats’ poem. The title essay of the book (of which is my focus for this blog) depicts the Haight-Ashbury district in the prelude to San Francisco’s Summer of Love, a “cold spring” in which young people from all over the country descended upon the district and participated in the drug culture and what many perceived to be an optimistic countercultural movement. Didion, however, offers a harsh, dismal account of what she observes, focusing on the deterioration of a people and a country that appears already at the onset of the movement before real calamity actually struck. And the case for this is ironic, as is seen in the opening of the essay when Didion recounts the state of the nation:

“It was not a country in open revolution. It was not a country under enemy siege. It was the United States of America in the cold spring of 1967, and the market was steady and the G.N.P. high and a great many articulate people seemed to have a sense of high social purpose and it might have been a spring of brave hope and national promise, but it was not, and more and more people had the uneasy apprehension that it was not.”

This passage is incredibly striking to me, as it implies that there was no precedent or trigger for what arose that spring and summer in 1967; in fact, the country maintained what many people would claim to be a comfortable state—perfect conditions for what these people saw as being able to attain the American Dream. Yet the youth and the hippies who congregated on the streets of the Haight-Ashbury district that spring rebelled against the hypocrisy of America and the empty signifier of the America Dream. It may not have been a “country in open revolution,” but it was a swelling of youth dissatisfied with the ways of the nation. This is something Didion neglects to touch on, but then again, her outsider’s perspective is much welcomed and needed, for the image projected by the insiders of the subculture, as well the image projected in retrospect by people today, is a romanticized vision that does not accurately account for the paranoia on the streets and the five-year-olds in “high kindergarten.” We tend to look back fondly on the “hippie ‘60s” and consider it a sacred moment in our country, a time characterized by “peace, love, and freedom.” And yet, Didion is one of the few voices to remind us that this was not the reality. She reports on the dark, horrific happenings of the youth and the loss of values that came from the runaways and the drug use, and thus aligns her vision of the era with inevitable doom, contrary to the hope most often associated with countercultural movement. Such is why Yeats’ poem proves to be a powerful echo, for while the state of the nation gave little indication of what was to erupt in San Francisco that spring and summer (again, as seen in the opening of her essay), the Summer of Love saw “things fall apart” and “mere anarchy loosed upon the world,” thus foretelling the beast that slouched to uproot the comfort of the nation.