The Aging of Aquarius According to the winter 1997 edition of Enlightening Times, a local New Age publication: "Neptune enters Aquarius in early 1998. This is a very powerful change in the collective. Many astrologers, myself included, have likened this next seven years to the sixties and are eagerly awaiting it. Our view of reality is in for a shift." by Dave Burnett photos by Jill Nussbaum Would that the Enlightening Times was right, and the sixties were indeed coming back. American society is long overdue for another cultural revolution like the sixties, that mythologized era when the youth generation asserted values and behaviors that challenged and gradually undermined a conservative, hierarchical establishment. Their rebellion against moral and cultural authority liberated social values regarding sexuality, politics, and the role of youths in America, while reinterpreting deeper American beliefs in individualism, egalitarianism, and -- ultimately -- capitalism and materialism. Individuals who celebrate the values and events manifested during that decade, and who (like our astrologers) fantasize about a similar revolution, must admit the unrepeatable particularity of historical events which fostered that cultural upheaval. The Civil Rights movement and the Vietnam War, which provoked the mass alienation of youth from the status quo and their parents' generation, were unique to that decade. Since then, no causes have inspired comparable dissent to motivate and unite the youth generation, as the mass cultural and political movement of the sixties did. Would-be rebels awaiting the tide of revolution can comfort themselves for now by vicariously basking in the glorious triumph of the sixties. Interested parties are enthusiastically directed to the new Special Collections exhibit, on Alderman Library's second floor, entitled "The Psychedelic Sixties: Literary Traditions and Social Change." The presentation, curated by Exhibits Coordinator George Riser, opens April 1. It traces the intellectual roots and cultural flowering of the counterculture (and, marginally, the New Left) of late 1960s America. Illustrated with original manuscripts, books, posters, albums, handbills (and rolling papers), the exhibit presents a century of history, beginning with the Transcendental-ists of the mid-nineteenth century and culminating with the Woodstock festival. I applaud George Riser for assembling a comprehensive collection of materials which illustrates the development of the American counterculture from marginalized literary circles to nationalized social movement. Riser recognizes that the intellectual roots of the counterculture could be traced further into history, to include the principles of freedom expressed in the American Revolution, for example. Nonetheless, this exhibit convincingly reveals substantial thematic continuities that link different eras of the American counterculture. Its deep literary roots challenge the easy conclusion that countercultures arise strictly in reaction to the mainstream. More superficial accounts have characterized the Beat and sixties counterculture simply as reactions to 1950s conformity, for example, rather than recognizing the influence of intellectual precedents. The Transcendentalist case, which displays first editions of works by such landmark thinkers as Emerson, Whitman, and Thoreau, sets the exhibit's tone, conveying the principles of individualism, nonconformity, idealized youth, and cultural revolution presented in these works. Emerson preached to the young; Thoreau "dropped out" of society in his Walden experiment and foreshadowed elements of the Civil Rights movement with "Civil Disobedience"; and Whitman faced scorn and censorship for his now-revered Leaves of Grass. Emerson and Nathaniel Hawthorne, another notable Transcendentalist, were among the visitors to America's first commune, Brook Farm. Prior to the late sixties, the "counterculture" essentially comprised an elite group of sympathetic intellectuals, a literary rather than cultural movement. The Beats, for example, were a group of friends -- Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, William Burroughs, and Neal Cassady, principally -- who only retrospectively were read by mass audiences, when youths searched for established material from the counterculture. Often derogatorily called "Beatniks," and assigned any number of diabolic characteristics by the mainstream press, the Beats appear actually to have remained a small and selective group. The Beats were inspired by earlier writers in the rebellious transcendentalist tradition. Ginsberg's HOWL sparked the Beat movement, Kerouac's On the Road popularized the style, and Burroughs's Naked Lunch shocked and titillated while successfully challenging moral paradigms and censorship laws. These three perhaps best represent the Beat mentality. Kerouac's sensual and romantic description of alienated youth contrasts with Burroughs's horrific autobiographical study of drug addiction. According to Riser, the true crossover between the Beats' literary fifties and the countercultural sixties was the cross-country journey undertaken by Cassady, Ken Kesey, and the Merry Pranksters in 1964. Famous first for writing One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, Kesey was a legendary Psychedelic Sixties figure for pioneering the recreational use of psychotropic drugs. Neal Cassady was the most notable of Kesey's followers, the Merry Pranksters, who took a legendary cross-country trip in a Dayglo-painted school bus named Furthur. Kerouac and Cassady's cross-country driving trip inspired On the Road and countless subsequent road trips of similarly fanciful intent undertaken in the sixties. This trip became "the best-known adventure of an adventurous decade," memorialized in Grateful Dead songs and inspirational for the Beatles (Magical Mystery Tour), the Who with their Magic Bus, and the "thousands of old VW buses and old milk trucks" which helped relive the experience later that decade and beyond. More than just road trips, Riser says, "it was Kesey and his Pranksters who originated nearly every aspect of the new 'Hippie' aesthetic -- the bizarre dress, the communal lifestyle, psychedelic drugs, light shows, and self-expressive rock-and-roll music." (Ken Kesey will be speaking at the university on Sunday, April 26th, at 3:30 p.m. in Wilson 402.) The Furthur trip united east and west when the Pranksters arrived at Timothy Leary's pseudo-scientific institute in New York, devoted to studying the psychological and spiritual complexities of LSD use. Leary coined the phrase "Tune in, turn on, and drop out," and for his efforts to proselytize LSD Nixon labeled him "the most dangerous man in America." Kesey's recreational and Leary's academic perspective towards drug taking conflicted, though Kesey's exuberant attitude obviously improved the future popularity of marijuana LSD. Both shared the intent of liberating the human mind from conventional psychological limitations to consciousness, a step beyond the Transcendentalists' goal of freeing the mind from social limitations to consciousness. In the burgeoning psychedelic culture of the Haight-Ashbury district in San Francisco, the Oracle newspaper grounded the community, while across the Bay, the Berkeley Barb chronicled the counterculture from a university perspective. This phrase taken from Oracle perfectly illustrates the ensuing division between the hippie counterculture and the New Left (cultural and political movements, respectively, though actually the two often harmonized and overlapped). Some important figures had gathered to discuss "the problem of whether to drop out or take over" society. This exhibit addresses both the "take over" politics and "drop out" counterculture of the sixties revolution: several cases discuss the Civil Rights movement and Vietnam, social protest, and radical groups, while others treat the hippies, drugs, rock music, art, and Woodstock. The Civil Rights section includes works by Martin Luther King, Langston Hughes, Malcolm X, Eldridge Cleaver, and Stokely Carmichael. The moderate and pacifist organizations of the NAACP and King's Southern Christian Leadership Conference, among others, constrasted with the militarized and separatist black power organizations of the Black Panthers and the Black Nationalist Movement. The Vietnam War section includes a facetious book called 1001 Ways to Avoid the Draft and Joseph Heller's Catch-22, a satire focusing on the "cruel absurdities of war" which embodied the anti-war sentiment of the counterculture. The poignant significance of this war is reinforced by a draft card and reproduced war-fatality telegram. Perusing the books included in the hippie section is a lesson in the era's social polarization along generational and cultural lines. These rifts became wider as the counterculture moved further from the mainstream (the older generations, particularly) in the late sixties. The mainstream felt genuinely threatened by the scope and serious intent of the youths' rebellion. Books of various sorts arose to meet the growing American fascination -- or horror -- with "the hippies." Several texts in this case, such as Free People and Hippie Hi, celebrate the youth movement with sympathetic stories and endearing photos of loving personable kids. These are predictable: the hippies embody peace, love, and community ... "that quality of openness and sharing that permeates their life." Other books indoctrinated curious wannabes to hippie culture: the apparel, the lingo, the lifestyle. Another brand of literature portrayed the hippies as degenerate miscreants intent on destroying the moral fabric of America. The Great Hippie Hoax claims, "Stripping the petals off the Flower Children reveals them to be floundering in a cesspool of sex, half-crazed with weird drugs, parasitic, selfish, diseased, and above all -- coldly calculating!" Various authority figures, aided by several "reformed" hippies, testify to the depravity, irresponsibility, immaturity, and gratuitous hedonism of this subculture. The university community should take particular interest in examining artifacts from U.Va.'s activist years during the late sixties. Radical students mobilized in those years over social and political issues, through several alternative newspapers and direct action. The excitement culminated in May 1970, following Nixon's decision to invade Cambodia and Kent State (where National Guardsmen killed four students at a protest). Thousands of U.Va. students assembled and marched over several weeks' period, effectively closing down the university. An extraordinary photo in May Days: Crisis in Confrontation, on exhibit, shows riot police racing across the Lawn pursuing student protestors. Another photo shows police assembled near the Mayflower van that transported 68 students to jail that night. At one point, over two hundred police officers from across the state were on hand at the university to preserve order and suppress dissent. President Edgar Shannon, under equal pressure from students and the public, took a stand in supporting students' anti-war stance, for which the media and alumni lambasted him for "caving in to the radicals." The exhibit concludes with Woodstock artifacts and posters and handbills, miscellaneous materials which indicate important non-literary extensions of the counterculture into music, art, and lifestyles. In San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury district, one still finds the psychedelic poster art which here advertises such classics as the Jefferson Airplane and the Grateful Dead. My favorite piece is a handbill announcing a "be-in" held in a San Francisco park on October 6, 1966, the day LSD became illegal. The pronouncement claims the right to pursue alternative lifestyles, recalling the Declaration of Independence with proclamations such as this: "We hold these experiences to be self-evident, that all is equal, that the creation endows us with certain inalienable rights, that among these are: the freedom of the body, the pursuit of joy, and the expansion of consciousness." I should qualify my endorsement of the Psychedelic Sixties exhibit by recognizing the rather formal and entirely hands-off nature its given its context within an academic institution. The strictly intellectual perspective will generate an inappropriately dispassionate perception of the subject matter. Inappropriate because the counterculture should be felt more than analyzed, appreciated rather than understood, given its intrinsic emotionalism, idealism, and hyperbolic expressionism. To some extent, rationalizing the counterculture misses the point, particularly regarding the anti-intellectual and drug-induced aspects of hippie culture. For those who truly care about the ideas and values of the sixties, the counterculture, the New Left, the Beats, etc., this exhibit will inform but ultimately only inspire further exploration into the wealth of recorded material on these subjects. Besides dispassion, I also discourage the patronizing urge to disavow the purported eccentricities or excesses of the counterculture, because this judgment interferes with a truer appreciation of the ideas and behaviors developed during that era. I encourage people to read these texts themselves, to understand first-hand what people said and felt then. The entire Tatum Collection of the U.Va. library, from which most of this exhibit's books are drawn, offers more than ten thousand texts relating to the counterculture. Unfortunately, these remain sequestered within Special Collections, though one may read them under supervision on the premises. For more accessible works in library stacks, search under "Hippies -- United States" or "Beat Generation" in Virgo, for a start. Unfortunately, I also anticipate that "The Psychedelic Sixties" cannot hope to reach its most impressionable and important audience, given its location within a conservative and adult university. The contemporary youth who "carry the torch" of these countercultural values -- modern hippies, most obviously, but also more recent punk, rave, and goth subcultures, among others -- would most benefit from this lesson in history. Understanding that countercultures have existed in this country in various manifestations at least since the mid-nineteenth century, could hearten and inspire alienated youths. Among the countercultural literary classics sampled in this exhibit, students could latch onto these texts to channel their misdirected intellectual energies, to read what "alternative" philosophers and social commentators have said about this country and its values. Hypothetically speaking, how would any of the countercultural figures presented in "The Psychedelic Sixties" regard this exhibit? Certainly many would scoff at the overly-serious, antiseptic presentation, and cringe at the muted-lighting-and-plush-armchair feel of Special Collections. One or another of them might write a novel or incite a riot if they heard the exhibit was censored to avoid anything controversial. A pertinent mention of the Fuck You press relating to the New York Beats was ruled down for propriety's sake. Fuck propriety, this is the counterculture!

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