Letters to the Editor
Leeandra Nolting
Published Letters: 177 Editor's Choice: 10
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to silenced
[Read the article: Through a bong, darkly]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]On a few of your points...
--People were mainly reacting against the way they were raised.
Well, duh.
--They were raised, by and large, by parents who had been deeply traumatized as children by the brutality of the Depression and then deeply traumatized again as adults by the brutality of WWII.
Again, duh.
--The WWII generation expressed their post-traumatic psychology through rampant paranoia and a punishing desire for control over everything -- sex, politics, the media, everything.
Some people's parents did, some didn't. Dr. Spock and his "permissive" guides to parenting (which really were a hell of a lot less controlling than what previous generations used to raise their kids) were blamed by Richard Nixon for the student protests.
--The number one medication for the WWII generation was ALCOHOL.
I think this is still the #1 most-abused drug.
--They didn't even think drinking was bad for you. There was no 12 step program yet.
Uh, people have known drinking to excess was bad for you since forever (the book of Proverbs has some choice words for drunks), and A.A. was founded in 1935.
--The women were victims, and the men were silent, except when they struck out in anger against each other or their wives or their children.
Again, true for some families, not true for others.
--Damaged WWII veterans ruled over a mainstream postwar culture that didn't allow damaged veterans to admit they were damaged -- because heroes can't ever be sad or regret anything they did to become heroes.
Did you ever see the movie "The Best Years of Our Lives"? It was all about damaged WWII veterans and their difficult re-adustment to civilian life. It was mainstream enough to win the 1946 Best Picture Oscar.
--The hippies were a reaction to THAT.
And also good old-fashioned rebellion for rebellion's sake against parents, something that's been going on since Aristotle.
--The mainstream culture was about alcohol and tobacco, about damaged people pretending to be fine, about paranoia and control, about manly brawling and about domestic violence being regarded as a private matter between a man and his wife.
It was more the feminists who changed the last matter than the hippies.
--It's impossible to understand the hippies and their issues without taking off those red, white and blue colored glasses and taking a good hard look at the many problems of the post-WWII generation that raised them.
Again, duh.
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apologize if someone has beat me to it...
[Read the article: Through a bong, darkly]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]...but Joan Didion wrote about the ephemrality of the hippie movement way back in 1968. Anyone else read "Slouching Towards Bethelehem"?
Basically, her analysis of the hippie movement was that it was a bunch of kids trying to a build a whole new society, based on "love," from scratch, but that said society would fail because the kids in it were too self-centered to raise up the next generation. The "love" they were celebrating was the fun kind that made the babies, but not necessarily the self-sacrificing kind that raised said babies to adulthood.
While visiting some hippies in their crash pad (an abandoned warehouse in the Haight), she meets a little boy named Michael, a child whom everybody is sorta-kinda watching but nobody appears to be raising. He's the three-year-old son of one of the hippie girls, and he does not yet talk. (Uh, a three-year-old who hasn't learned to speak probably isn't grooving on his own thing. He needs to have his hearing tested.) One of his favorite toys was joss sticks. (Uh, things that are on fire do not make the best toys for toddlers. That's not being all establishment, that's just common sense.)
At the end of the essay, Michael accidentally starts a fire one morning while everyone is asleep and burns his arm fairly badly. Luckily the fire gets put out before anyone else is hurt. Later that same day, Michael's mother catches him trying to chew through an electrical cord, but no one else notices because they are too busy trying to retrieve some drugs that were accidentally dropped down a grate.
And of course, any movement that's made up of people like another hippie Didion interviewed--a boy who ran away from his square, oppressive home life because his mother made him...wait for it...IRON HIS OWN SHIRTS FOR THE WEEK before he was allowed to go out on the weekend (the oppression! the horror!) will probably be too lazy to actually change the system permanently.
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yeats/didion
[Read the article: Through a bong, darkly]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Yup. She gave credit where credit was due.
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in fairness, matt lauer would have sucked as an anchor as well...
[Read the article: Was Katie Couric railroaded?]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]It wasn't because she was a woman that Katie Couric wasn't a very good news anchor. It was because she was the wrong personality for the job. She was great for the Today show, but not good for the CBS Evening News.
Lesley Stahl and Christiane Amanpour are both female reporters for CBS, and neither lack the requisite gravitas or experience in hard news to be a good anchor.
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Flannery O'Connor said it best way back in the early 1960s...
[Read the article: Act like a man (who knows what that means)!]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]"On the subject of the feminist business, I just never think, that is I never think of certain qualities as masculine or feminine. I tend to divide people into two categories: the Irksome and the Non-Irksome without regard to sex. Yes, and there are also the Medium Irksome and Rare Irksome."
On the whole "males are optional" thing--he's right, they're more "optional" than females in a nuclear family. The biggest difference between men and women is that women can physically bear children and men can't. Of course, women can't bear children entirely without men, but men willing to be sperm donors will probably always be easier to come by than women willing to be surrogate mothers.
That said (and despite what Brightstar, Parson Jim, etc. say), MOST women would prefer to have and raise children with a husband than have some other family arrangement.