Forget the fashionable 1960s politics of anti-materialism, the tired socialist rhetoric about the nobility of the downtrodden oppressed classes, these unwashed individuals were not socialist revolutionaries. Most of the young people who gravitated towards Desolation Row had chosen a lifestyle that was as close to poverty as their limited funds and lowered standards of hygiene could get them, but they mostly came from normal suburban homes. Even if they didn’t, in this enlightened welfare state they could generally never really be as destitute as they tried to look. The poverty of these ‘hippies’ was mostly voluntary.
However, as George Orwell noted, in “Down and Out in Paris and London”, it’s possible “…to discover the great redeeming feature of poverty: the fact that it annihilates the future. Within certain limits it is actually true that the less money you have, the less you worry.”
Orwell’s pre-WWII Depression generation had good reasons to be worried about the future. So did the IOW1970 generation. It was a generation from which many of us ‘dropped out’ attempting to escape our very justifiable fears about a future that might suddenly cease to exist. This was the height of the cold war toe-to-toe stare down with the USSR, and we were all afraid of the MAD doctrine – Mutually Assured Destruction – which meant complete thermonuclear annihilation for all of us, at any time, with almost no warning, regardless of which side blinked and pushed the armageddon button first.
Some of us just wanted to not give a shit anymore when whoever was in charge of either of the MAD buttons blinked.
Recent Comments