Maggie's Farm

I'm not quite sure how the Barrister defines "short lived".

My observation is that the hard core psychedelic poster phase lasted about five or six years. It then became more mainstream as the culture tried to run on through a miasma of a subterranean drug culture. The culture was changed permanently, and for the worst.

Today marijuana is the number one cash crop in the United States so the "hippie" influence was pervasive,infectious, and shows no signs of diminishing in it's cultural impact. It has evolved but it's roots are deeper today because it is now multi-generational.

Cocaine importation is as high as it has ever been and the government admits it only intercepts about 15% at best.
Heroin is now mainstream middle class. Ecstacy and meth are huge.

All of this drug activity is the engine for an underground economy variously estimated at between 400 to 600 billion dollars.
I do not believe we'll see a change in this now 40 year old culture until the Baby Bummers are gone. I do not think history will judge that generation kindly.

I can't say I disagree with your "broom" grooming of society but it will be a long time com'n. The Baby Boomers are reaching retirement, at least the leading edge of the Boomer Generation, but the Boomers are now THE force in society.
Their voting patterns, spending patterns, the amount of wealth and power they control is THE FORCE. It will be another 25 years before their power wanes sufficiently to be supplanted by one of the numerous follow on generations. It's just the way the wheel goes 'round.

There is also the crucible the follow on generations must survive, and how they survive it as to what direction the US will follow. So far those follow on generations are computer savvy but more alienated from society than any generation in history. How they will deal with the challenges of wars and economics is a big, big guess at this point.

So now the House (unless it already has in the bill) have to define what a permanent base is. That should be pretty nifty.

If the base belongs to the host country, which is always the case, how can it be a 'US" base? It may be a base that is home to such and such a US outfit but the host country can order us out any time it feels like it.

It's such Democratic bull shit. They haven't done a damn thing but throw sand in the gears since they took Congress. Democratic Socialist Dysfunctional Party. The best thing going for them is Nancy Pelosi's boob job.

And if Harry Reid isn't the quintessential pencil neck geek then none exist. What is his neck size(not that it matters ) but it looks like about a size 11.

The Summer of Drugs
Forty years ago, dirty, stinky hippies converged on San Francisco to "turn on, tune in and drop out."

This summer marks the 40th anniversary of the so-called Summer of Love. Honest and intelligent people will remember it for what it really was: the Summer of Drugs.
Forty years ago hordes of stoned, dirty, stinky hippies converged on San Francisco to "turn on, tune in, and drop out," which was the calling card of LSD proponent Timothy Leary. Turned off by the work ethic and productive American Dream values of their parents, hippies instead opted for a cowardly, irresponsible lifestyle of random sex, life-destroying drugs and mostly soulless rock music that flourished in San Francisco.

The Summer of Drugs climaxed with the Monterey Pop Festival which included some truly virtuoso musical talents such as Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin, both of whom would be dead a couple of years later due to drug abuse. Other musical geniuses such as Jim Morrison and Mama Cass would also be dead due to drugs within a few short years. The bodies of chemical-infested, brain-dead liberal deniers continue to stack up like cordwood.

As a diehard musician, I terribly miss these very talented people who squandered God's gifts in favor of poison and the joke of hipness. I often wonder what musical peaks they could have climbed had they not gagged to death on their own vomit. Their choice of dope over quality of life, musical talent and meaningful relationships with loved ones can only be categorized as despicably selfish.

I literally had to step over stoned, drooling fans, band mates, concert promoters and staff to pursue my musical American Dream throughout the 1960s and 1970s. I flushed more dope and cocaine down backstage toilets than I care to remember. In utter frustration I was even forced to punch my way through violent dopers on occasion. So much for peace and love. The DEA should make me an honorary officer.

I was forced to fire band members and business associates due to mindless, dangerous, illegal drug use. Clean and sober for 59 years, I am still rocking my brains out and approaching my 6,000th concert. Clean and sober is the real party.

Young people make mistakes. I've made my share, but none that involved placing my life or the lives of others at risk because of dope. I saw first-hand too many destroyed lives and wrecked families to ever want to drool and vomit on myself and call that a good time. I put my heart and soul into creating the best music I possibly could and I went hunting instead. My dream continues with ferocity, thank you.
The 1960s, a generation that wanted to hold hands, give peace a chance, smoke dope and change the world, changed it all right: for the worse. America is still suffering the horrible consequences of hippies who thought utopia could be found in joints and intentional disconnect.

A quick study of social statistics before and after the 1960s is quite telling. The rising rates of divorce, high school drop outs, drug use, abortion, sexual diseases and crime, not to mention the exponential expansion of government and taxes, is dramatic. The "if it feels good, do it" lifestyle born of the 1960s has proved to be destructive and deadly.

So now, 40 years later, there are actually people who want to celebrate the anniversary of the Summer of Drugs. Hippies are once again descending on ultra-liberal San Francisco--a city that once wanted to give shopping carts to the homeless--to celebrate and try to remember their dopey days of youth when so many of their musical heroes and friends long ago assumed room temperature by "partying" themselves to death. Nice.

While I salute and commend the political and cultural activism of the 1960s that fueled the civil rights movement, other than that, the decade is barren of any positive cultural or social impact. Honest people will remember 1967 for what is truly was.

There is a saying that if you can remember the 1960s, you were not there. I was there and remember the decade in vivid, ugly detail. I remember its toxic underbelly excess because I was caught in the vortex of the music revolution that was sweeping the country, and because my radar was fine-tuned thanks to a clean and sober lifestyle.
Death due to drugs and the social carnage heaped upon America by hippies is nothing to celebrate. That is a fool's game, but it is quite apparent some burned-out hippies never learn.

Ted Nugent

Mr. Nugent is a rock star releasing his 35th album, "Love Grenade," this summer.

More '60s Historical Revisionism

As I wrote in a recent column, how baby boomers remember the sixties often determines how they view the world today. If they’re nostalgic over the fortieth anniversary of the “Summer of Love” in San Francisco’s Haight/Ashbury district and believe that changes in American culture resulting from the sixties have been largely positive, they probably consider themselves liberal and vote Democrat. If they have a generally negative view of those changes, they probably consider themselves conservative and vote Republican.

Most middle and high school textbooks offer a generally favorable view. No surprise because they tend to be written by boomers who are now liberal/left history professors. The following paragraph from Prentice Hall’s “American Nation” - the most widely used text in American middle schools - is a good example:

Many young Americans became involved in the counterculture movement. Like the Beat Generation of the 1950s, members of the counterculture rejected traditional customs and ideas. Young people protested against the lifestyle of their parents by trying to be different. They developed their own lifestyle. They liked to wear torn, faded jeans and simple work clothes. Women wore miniskirts. Men often wore beards and let their hair grow long. Many listened to new forms of rock music. Some experimented with illegal drugs. Members of the counterculture adopted new attitudes and values. They criticized competition and the drive for personal success. They questioned some aspects of traditional family life.

I already debunked the claim that “Some . . . experimented with illegal drugs” as historical revisionism. Drug use was in fact widespread, habitual, highly destructive of countless American lives, and has been ever since. (So did Ted Nugent in a piece yesterday.) An assertion that the counterculture “questioned some aspects of traditional family life” is just as laughable. They did far more than “question some aspects.” They scorned and trashed nearly all of them.

It would be more accurate to say that the counterculture staged a full-scale attack on the very institution of family that is the basic unit of any society, and that the results have been disastrous. Consider just one function of family common to almost all cultures everywhere - that of marriage. Every successful society has regulated it - most by encouraging monogamous, lifelong coupling between one male and one female which recognizes/sanctifies the basic life-creating function of human sexuality. Marriage creates the nuclear family, which generates children, nurtures them, and thereby sustains the culture itself. The nuclear family is the best environment in which to raise those children while it also prolongs the life span and general health of mothers, fathers, grandmothers and grandfathers who remain faithful to it. Research studies prove it.

The counterculture’s “Sexual Revolution” has resulted in a divorce rate of more than fifty percent, and that figure doesn’t take into account cohabiting couples who join and then split with dizzying frequency. An offshoot of the Sexual Revolution - the “Gay Rights” movement - has further eroded traditional family life with its all-out push to redefine marriage itself, separating it completely from its primary procreating function.

The family has been so weakened that one in three children today are born to single mothers. Among blacks, it’s three out of four. The “Women’s Liberation” movement claimed “A woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle” - as if fathers were superfluous. The effect of fatherlessness is seen most tragically as increasingly violent crime among unsupervised young men. Without positive male role models in the form of fathers who protected and supported their wives and children, the young men (especially young black men) didn’t learn respect for women either. Their hip-hop subculture treats them as if they were sex slaves.

The biggest issue pushed by the Women’s Movement - another counterculture creation - has been abortion. Liberal women’s groups spend most of their political capital promoting abortion. Feminists, as they call themselves, seem to believe that American women cannot lead fulfilling lives unless they’re able to abort their babies. More than forty million have been aborted since abortion was legalized - first in liberal states, then in the whole nation by 1973.

The counterculture’s assault on the American family occurred simultaneously with the Johnson Administration’s “War on Poverty” initiatives. Fatherless families were subsidized heavily and they proliferated for decades, pushing them further into poverty rather than lifting them out of it. The results have been nearly lethal for the “traditional family life” as the history books call it. The black family had been making steady gains for a hundred years before the Johnson Administration attempted to “fix” it. Now it’s in the roughest shape since before Emancipation.

The sixties counterculture arbitrarily tossed out lessons learned from millennia of human experience and “liberated” itself from all societal constraints as if that were a wonderful thing. Talk about hubris! Liberal Democrat baby boomers think all this has been terrific. History textbooks written so far seem to agree with them.

By Tom McLaughlin