Where Aquarius Went (Hitchens on Hippies)

New York Times ^ | December 19, 2004 | CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS

[MississippiMasterpiece]

Love him or hate him...agree or disagree...Hitchens is one of the best essayists of our generation...and I'm still in awe of his drinking abilities.

[umgud]

I've left the Age of Aquarius? I've entered the Metallic Age.

Silver in my hair
Gold in my mouth
and lead in my a$$

[rellimpank]

--graying and greasy ponytail trailing off the balding pate---laugh of the day---when I see one of these I know who he voted for--and that he probably works for a school system--

[NeoCaveman]

I hate hippies.

[Skooz]

bump for later

[wildcatf4f3]

bump

[buck61]

that lib. atheist needs to do what Pat Buc. sugessted the other night on MSNBC. GO BACK TO BRITON and stop telling Americans how to live and run our country.

[BunnySlippers]

I am a BIG fan of Hitchens and surely the 60s [70s] need to be skewered ... but this is not one of his better essays. Looking for better and a more caustic Hitchens.

[woofie]

I am an old hippie and proud of it....well sort of

[woofie]

If you look back to the founding document of the 60's left, which was the Port Huron statement (also promulgated in Michigan), you will easily see that it was in essence a conservative manifesto. It spoke in vaguely Marxist terms of alienation, true, but it was reacting to bigness and anonymity and urbanization, and it betrayed a yearning for a lost agrarian simplicity.

[mtbopfuyn]

"--graying and greasy ponytail trailing off the balding pate"---laugh of the day---when I see one of these I know who he voted for--and that he probably works for a school system--

Or UT.

[annyokie]

I love Hitchens. He's one of the few good Libs.

[BunnySlippers]

Maybe. But your take on this was not the gist of the "hippie movement".

[Snardius]

the anti-globalization movement has started to reject modernity altogether,

Proof that no matter how hard you try, you'll never educate all of the people. The "anti-globalism movement" is the bastard child of the hippies of the sixties.

Some join because they gain power and acceptance among others like them who refuse to respect authority. And others join so they can have sex with girls who would never give them the time of day without the foreplay of rebellion.

[woofie]

Almost all of us baby boomers in the sixties went along with the leftist status quo ... Some grew out of it , some stayed left unquestioningly and a lot simply went nuts

[bubman]

Liberals hate Hitchens more than conservatives do. What Liberals fear most is to be exposed for what they are. He tells it like it it and libs despise him for it. Liberalism needs to masquerade itself as something else in order to advance their pseudo marxist dream of an equal society where bourgeois aspirations (capitalism) and moral certitude (faith/god/religion) would be eliminated in the name of "equality" (for us no doubt but not for them!)

Give em hell Hitchens

[bubman]

Read Robert H. Bork's

"Slouching Towards Gomorrah-Liberalism and American Decline."

Amazing book.

[dennisw]

best essayists of our generation...and I'm still in awe of his drinking abilities......

While sucking down Rothman's. He was amusing on Laura Ingram a few days ago.

[WilliamofCarmichael]

To the extent that the decade had a moral seriousness that could be transmitted forward, this inhered in the partly spontaneous opposition to an unjust war in Indochina

Perhaps the greatest service the 2004 election performed IMO was that truth emerged in the general public three decades after the Vietnam War. Yet, this writer assigns to the "love generation's" lies about the War the status as the only "moral seriousness" of that era. Those lies cost lives -- tens of thousands of lives.

Had it not been for the "partly spontaneous" and mostly led by communists opposition -- aided and abetted by North Vietnam's "most valuable guerrilla," the American press -- the war would have ended years earlier and with the victory U.S. troops and allies earned. Go figure. What's this writer's problem?

the Apollo mission [showed] us our fragile, blue planetary home from outer space, thus promoting (first) "The Whole Earth Catalog" and (second) a mentality that despised the science and innovation necessary for the taking of that photograph in the first place.

There's something telling about that.. oh! Yes! It's, liberalism is a mental illness.

[Malesherbes]

I saw it too. Pat Buchanan is the only debater I've ever seen get the best of Hitchens. He kept calling him an "ex-Trotskyite," and Hitchens lost his temper (the worst thing a debater can do.)