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Orgasm of History: 50 Years Summer of Love
Jul. 6th, 2017 08:16 pm
The truth is that the hippie "movement" was, and remains. the most enigmatic, inexplicable, ambiguous, and intoxicating societal upheaval in modern American history. Like the Paris Commune, The European revolution of 1848, and the California gold rush of the following year, it is what the French writer Yves Fremion called an "orgasm of history": a sudden eruption of something completelly unprecedented, unclassifiable, and transformative. And because the eye of this weird hurricane was in San Francisco, this city has become a shrine(or mausoleum) to it.
The Summer of Love was infinitely complex. It had a bright, hopeful, even heroic side, but also a dark and tragic one. Some of the young people who flocked to the Haight 50 yesrs ago found not paradise but a psychic or physical nightmare. A lot of had shit went down. The final scene in John Didion's classic piece of reportage "Slouching Towards Bethlehem" features a five-year-old girl whose mother has been giving her LSD. The Summer of Love was the season of the '60s when heroin and violent crime began to replace grass, acid, and gauzy talk about love. It is foolish to sentimentalize it.
But it is equally shortsighted to demonize it, or deny its transformative effects. For a brief time, half a century ago, San Francisco was the center of the strangest cultural revolution America has ever seen. We are still sorting out its meaning and its consequences.
