"Boys have historically been trained to think that they needn’t obey rules or work hard because..."

"... men used to be able to drop out of high school and still earn wages comparable to better-educated women, thanks to jobs in fields like manufacturing, construction and travel. That’s not the case anymore."

Time for everyone to recognize the great gift of the women's movement:  Everyone needs to buckle down, work hard, and follow rules. 

No wonder they had to drop the word "liberation" from "women's liberation movement." Who could have imagined, circa 1970, that what we'd end up with was grim drudgery for all?

Except the guys won't play along, will they? Consider the strategies. An obvious one is to scale down, never marry, never have children, and live a circumscribed life with a not-too-challenging job, and enjoy however much sex you want via online dating services. Meanwhile, the women can work for their entire lives as hard as they worked in school, just keep going and going, shoehorn in a couple children, work harder and harder to pay for everything they need, including childcare. Work work work.

Grim!

If I were a young woman, I'd be tempted into exactly what I was tempted into when I was a young woman: a life that values beauty, love, and freedom over work. I'm thinking of the hippie movement and — a book I read in the 1970s — "Your Money Or Your Life" (which I see is "Revised and Updated for the 21st Century" — not sure what that means).

"Shushing the Baby Boomers."

I linked to this January 2007 NYT piece in the previous post, and I've linked to it before — here and here. Is Obama a Baby Boomer or not? If Obama the solution to the Baby Boomer problem or part of the problem? Obama's ambiguous generationality. Much to say there.

But I've just got to make a separate post to call attention to the historical artifact that is Robert Grossman's illustration depicting Barack Obama leaping over 6 little figures who represent the Baby Boomers:

Imagine if... women bought cars!

An ad from the May 5, 1967 issue of Life Magazine:



"You'll discover that even driving down to buy bread can be kicks. You'll find yourself saying 'I'll pick you up' even when it's Helen's turn to drive. Or Ed's.'"

I love the use of the word "kicks." It's almost as if our little lady is getting in some of those drugs we've been reading about as the Summer of Love rolls in.

The mid-calf skirt is suddenly a mini skirt, but it's only 1967, and if you're as old as I am, you know what that meant — your stocking tops and even your garters might show:



ADDED: The anti-drug song "Kicks" was a hit in 1966. If you ever worry that you don't know how to dance, I guarantee you that 20 seconds into this "Kicks" video you will be able to dance as well as Paul Revere & the Raiders.

The hippie commune where "birth control was frowned upon, and abortions were prohibited; childbearing was seen as a natural, beautiful and wholly spiritual undertaking for a woman."

The Farm... it's still around.

I was amazed to see that article in The Daily Mail (in the news because there's a new documentary movie), because just a week ago I referred to The Farm here:

Meade says there was a hippie pro-life movement. He remembers hippies urging women not to have abortions and saying give your babies to us and we'll give them back to you whenever you want. I don't remember that iteration of hippie values, I don't know how the urging would have been done in pre-internet days, and my Googling fails again as I try to research the hippie pro-life movement.

Later, Meade told me the place was called The Farm, and I read about it in Wikipedia.

God — "one of most popular words in urban dictionary."

"Did you know that the word god has over 500 definitions?" That's definition #6 (of 647, as of just now).

1. God 1805 up, 425 down
An entity whose opinions on the consumption of pork has been a matter of hot debate amongst the world's religions...

2. God 392 up, 110 down
Universal scapegoat.

When people can't justify their actions through reality, they justify their actions through God

3. God 22594 up, 9000 down
A guy who talked to some Jewish guys, some Christian guys, and some Islam guys, and accidentaly caused more people to die than anyone else in human history. And people wonder why he doesn't talk much to us anymore.

4. god 1301 up, 539 down
dog backwards.
person1:"Hey look its god"

person 2: "No thats a dog"

I arrived at that page in Urban Dictionary because I Googled "God Dog." It's a song title. Here's the song, by The Incredible String Band. If you were in existence back in the 1960s, maybe you had "5000 Spirits Or The Layers Of The Onion," "Hangman's Beautiful Daughter," and "Wee Tam and the Big Huge" (which you can buy — in one $35 boxed set — at Amazon, along with all your other Black Friday items). Me, I still have all of that on vinyl, and yesterday Meade dug up some old live-concert CD — old, but not as old as the vinyl — and got the iMac playing "God Dog," because we'd just been out on a long Thanksgiving walk with our (borrowed) dog-named-after-a-God Zeus:



She will not learn language/nor will she bear scorn/but she is the best little dog
that ever was born.

That song and another song on Meade's live-concert CD had lyrics about unborn babies, and I said that abortion rights ideology — which says that any given pregnant woman holds the sovereign power to determine the humanity of the entity within — has eclipsed the old cultural expressions magnifying the unborn child. "God Dog" has "I have lain in the womb of the rocks cold and chill/while she speaks in my heart with the voice of the hill." And the other song — sorry I haven't successfully Googled the lyrics — spoke of an unborn baby safe and warm within the womb, which made me think about how the womb isn't — within abortion rights ideology — a safe place to be anymore. It's a place where your humanity depends on the will of the Goddess of the small universe you still inhabit. She, being autonomous and free, has the power "to define [her] own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life." In that legal landscape, there are no wandering hippie minstrels singing songs about unborn babes.

Meade says there was a hippie pro-life movement. He remembers hippies urging women not to have abortions and saying give your babies to us and we'll give them back to you whenever you want. I don't remember that iteration of hippie values, I don't know how the urging would have been done in pre-internet days, and my Googling fails again as I try to research the hippie pro-life movement. As I'm writing this paragraph, Meade phones in from Frautschi Point, where he's walked with Zeus. He's returning my call, which I made to get permission to publish the photograph (above). I don't extract the needed reminiscences about hippie times when there were subcultures in the counterculture. I was stranded in the north country (Ann Arbor) and he'd sojourned into the backwoods of North Carolina.

I can see from my window that it's blustery in the backyard, and it must be raw out there on the Lake Mendota landscape. Are Meade and the god dog cold? Meade laughs and says little. The god/dog — who will not learn language/doesn't talk much to us anymore — says nothing.

"My daughter has repeatedly brought home books from the school library that I have a problem with. I'm a feminist and I'm anti-censorship. I'm lost."

So wrote a woman at Ask Metafilter:

Yesterday, for the THIRD time, LittleTaff brought home a fairy tale... this time Rapunzel. Objectified women with little or no agency, basing marriage decisions on the appearance or wealth of the men, and WITCHES!!!!

After the second version of the Little Mermaid came home, I had a phone interview with the head and told her that I wasn't happy about the way women were portrayed, that I could see some historical merit in the books, but thought they were more appropriate for older children... but also that the Disney version of the Little Mermaid had no literary nor historical merit and did the school need some fundraising for books. (I'm on the fundraising committee. )

We were just talking about the Disney "Little Mermaid" yesterday, specifically the song "Part of Your World" — remember the singing "dads" — and my son John emailed me a link to his Ask Metafilter answer to that worried woman:

Really, [the Disney "Little Mermaid"] has no merit? Listen again to the song "Part of your World." Do you not hear the feminist themes in that song — about "bright young women . . . ready to stand?" What could be more feminist than a young woman expressing her interest in scientific discovery — "what's a fire, and why does it burn?" (The lyrics are fresh in my mind since I sang it in karaoke the other day along with a female friend.) I'm sure there's a great feminist critique of the movie to be made. But do you really want to prevent your daughter from seeing anything that could potentially be the subject of such a critique?

You seem to assume that you've seen all the truth that exists to be seen in your world, and educating your daughter is just about transmitting these truths to her. On the contrary, it matters relatively little whether your child shares your views. What matters more is equipping your child to deal with the world in her own individual way.

So I say, let your daughter be exposed to all of this. I'll bet she can handle it. Focus on talking to her about it instead of trying to create the perfect parental filter (considering that the filter is never going to last anyway). You might even learn something from her in the process.

You can probably tell I didn't filter my children's reading/watching. And I can't remember my own parents ever saying one thing about my choices — even my choice to watch just about anything that was ever on television (when they themselves rarely watched television). (My parents spent nearly every evening sitting around talking to each other. Not reading and talking. Just talking!)

Speaking of controlling your children, I was just listening to one of my favorite old Lovin' Spoonful songs "Younger Generation" (video and lyrics at the link):

Why must every generation,
Think their folks are square?
And no matter where their heads are,
They know mom's ain't there....

Listening to it now, I'm not sure whether it's a sincere expression of a desire to let children range free — "I must be permissive... all my deepest worries must be his cartoons" — or making fun of hippie-style parents who don't know where to draw the line:

Hey, Pop, my girlfriend's only three,
She's got her own videophone,
And she's taking LSD,
And now that we're best friends,
She wants to give a bit to me,
But what's the matter, daddy,
How come you're turning green?
Can it be that you can't live up to your dreams?

Crazy dreams! (And yet, today the little girl does have her own videophone.)

At tomorrow's debate, Candy Crowley is "going to react organically to what’s happening."

She "understand[s] that [she's] there." She's "not a fly on the wall." 

You got a problem with that? Apparently, both campaigns do. They were expecting a fly on the wall! They contracted for a fly on the wall.

Why did Althouse post this item?
	The blog has a theme today: candy!
	She loves to use the blog tag "insect politics."
pollcode.com free polls

ADDED: What does it mean to react organically? That's old hippie talk. There was a time when everything was "organic" or "so organic." Wow. No exclamation point after "wow." It was just... wow. It was so hard to think back then. When everything was... like... organic?.

But how does an organ react? The stomach aches, the heart attacks, the lung wheezes, the bladder loses control.

A kiss-in should be a love-in or it shouldn't be done at all.

Protests express opposition and therefore usually anger. Expressing love is inconsistent with anger. So if you're going to use a gesture of love for protest, you've got a special problem. Appropriating an expression of love for hostile purposes is a dangerous matter. It's what makes rape so horrible.

Think about it. Most of us love sex but if we were beset by a hostile assailant, we would prefer a punch in the face to sexual intercourse.

I'm looking at pictures from the Chick-fil-A kiss-in. These were people who wanted to demonstrate support for same-sex marriage. (I agree with them on that issue, by the way.) As their form of protest, they chose kissing — individuals of the same sex, kissing in restaurants that are associated with opposition to same-sex marriage. So the idea was, go where you think you are not loved — even though there's no evidence that Chick-fil-A treats gay customers with less respect and friendliness than straight customers — and do something you think will upset them.

Now, restaurants generally don't want anybody making out, so you've chosen behavior that would be disruptive to a restaurant's business whether the kissing couples are same or opposite sex. The form of expression is offensive and not like the old civil rights demonstrations where black people sat at lunch counters and were not served. They simply acted like customers — good customers — and the only reason it worked as a demonstration was that the store only served food to white people, the policy the protesters very successfully demonstrated was wrong. Kissing at Chick-fil-A does nothing to show what's wrong about anything Chick-fil-A is doing. It's just displaying hostility to the place.

And it's displaying hostility with kissing. So what have they done? They've perverted kissing, which should be an expression of love. Ironic, considering that the gay rights movement seeks to dispel the belief that homosexuality is perverted.

It's a challenge to protest with gestures of love. It can be done, but it can't be done with hate or love is not love. We think of hippies and their love-ins (and be-ins). I don't remember those demonstrations involving targeting any person or business. Yes, those hippies upset the squares — the straight people — and through what they claimed was love they made themselves dislikable to people they knew would be bothered by the way they acted, but that just goes to show how hard it is to use love to express something other than love.

ADDED: Here's a sign in a photograph chosen to top a favorable presentation of the kiss-in: "We're Here/We're Queer/& We're Not Eating." See how different that is from the old lunch-counter sit-ins? These 2 men are flaunting their taking up space in a commercial establishment without being customers. They are kissing as a way of saying: We're hostile to you.

The second sign says "I [heart] my boyfriend just as much as you love your spouse!," but the man is failing to demonstrate the equivalence between him and his boyfriend and "you" and your spouse because unlike the black sit-in protesters, they are not behaving like the people they want to say they are equal to.

The civil rights sitters-in behaved like ordinary customers, causing the store to behave in a way that onlookers could see was ugly. But since a straight couple doesn't go to a restaurant and stand around kissing without buying anything, the 2 men are not demonstrating sameness, but difference. An onlooker's reaction could be: No, you are not like me and my spouse because we only go to restaurants to buy food, and when we do, we treat everyone around us with respect, and when we kiss we do it in an appropriate setting and only to express love. Again, I see a terrible irony: They've sent the message of perverted love.

IN THE COMMENTS: As my whimsy leads me reminds us: "Judas perverted kissing when he betrayed Jesus."

I was thinking about Jesus when I wrote this post. Not in the context of Judas betraying Jesus with a kiss, but Jesus telling us to love our enemy. If someone strikes you on the face, instead of striking back, turn the other cheek, an invitation to the assailant to strike you a second time. That's how much love Jesus expects from you. That's a demonstration of love to the onlooker, who receives the message, the kind of demonstration that was made — to brilliant effect — in the civil rights era.

Anti-Walkerites on the eve of the recall performed an "Om the Dome" ritual at the Wisconsin Capitol.

"Oma Vic McMurray, who runs a home childcare center and has been active in the effort to recall Gov. Scott Walker, instructed the crowd on breathing techniques and led a practice group 'Om.'"

McMurray says the community chant was meant to be a time to "consciously connect on a spiritual level so that we could raise the energy and have faith that this will be a good week for Wisconsin."

Connie Nadler says she felt the symbolism of the moment. "It was quite touching. I was at the connecting point where we were stretching to reach and connect to the other end of the line. The Capitol police were there and were real encouraging. People rushed from the street to help" complete the circle.

Reminds me of Allen Ginsberg at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago 1968:



And, especially since a building was involved, it takes me all the way back to 1967 and "Levitate the Pentagon"....

[A] group of hippies was trying to exorcize the Pentagon. The brainchild of Abbie Hoffman, the plan was for people to sing and chant until it levitated and turned orange, driving out the evil spirits and ending the war in Viet Nam. The Pentagon didn't move.

Related: "What do you think Abbie Hoffman would do to stop the Koch brothers?"

Is "liberation" an outdated word?

Yesterday, I wrote "Wouldn't it be a kick in the head if it turned out feminism served, above all, the interests of commerce and not individual liberation?"

In the comments, Leslyn said:

I don't give a flying fuck if it does. I care that it serves my individual "liberation." An outdated word. Young women (and men) are past the time of needing liberation. We have moved into empowerment.

If that also serves commercial interests (which it does), that's a nice side-effect.

I found that sad and strange for reasons that Palladian expressed a bit later:

What a bunch of grim comments. We were given our incredibly brief, beautiful lives above the soil, and what have we done with them? Worried about careers and taxes and other meaningless nonsense.

Tomorrow isn't promised to us. Death is eternal. What matters is love, and beauty, and survival.

I dream of this edifice of falsehood crashing to rubble at our happy feet.

Do what you need to survive, so that you can live in love and beauty as long as you can. Nothing else matters at all.

Let's think about liberation. What happened to that word over the years? Around 1970, everyone said "women's liberation" or "women's liberation movement," and then "liberation" was dropped. Why?

The Oxford English Dictionary has as its "1b" definition: "Freedom from restrictive or discriminatory social conventions and attitudes." The history of "liberation," used this way, goes back to 1798:

1798 Analyt. Rev. July 35 The consequences from the liberation of women reasonably to be expected, are, such as seldom fail to ensue, when any individuals, or societies, or classes of mankind are restored to their natural rights.

1888 Rep. Internat. Council Women 441 You can obtain the complete liberation of women only by working for the liberation of humanity.

1911 A. G. Chater tr. E. Key Love & Marriage vi. 203 Real liberation for women is thus impossible; the only thing possible is a new division of the burdens.

1971 Black Scholar Jan. 58/1 Those in the struggle have to deal with black separatists because they stand today as a potent obstacle to full black liberation.

1976 Listener 8 Jan. 4/2 Sexual repression and totalitarianism, on one side, and sexual liberation and revolution, on the other.

1984 A. Maupin Babycakes ix. 40 It was no longer a question of butch vs. femme, liberation vs. oppression.

2001 Genre May 37/1 Gay activists in this country and around the world were using the pink triangle as a symbol of activism and liberation. 

Isn't it interesting that the quotes are all about women until 1971, when you get "black liberation"? Did women flee from the word when black people moved in? Did "liberation" begin to sound too radical? Did the OED 1b meaning, upon encountering race, merge uncomfortably with the 2a meaning — "The action of freeing a region or its people from an oppressor or enemy force; the result of this"?

Did burgeoning sexual connotations undermine the word's usefulness? This isn't liberation in the sense of sexual liberation, the women's liberation movement wanted men to know: This isn't about sex (you're not getting more); this is about money (we're getting more). Was it something about gay people moving into the feminist territory and the women needing to draw a distinction? Women's movement leaders openly fought off what they called "the lavender menace":

[Betty] Friedan, and some other straight feminists as well, worried that the association [with lesbianism] would hamstring feminists' ability to achieve serious political change, and that stereotypes of "mannish" and "man-hating" lesbians would provide an easy way to dismiss the movement. Under her direction, NOW attempted to distance itself from lesbian causes – including omitting the New York chapter of the Daughters of Bilitis from the list of sponsors of the First Congress to Unite Women in November 1969. 

Get the sex out... get the left-wing revolutionary connotations out. Let's not say "liberation" anymore. If you think the word is outdated, that in itself is significant. Why don't you want to talk about whether the individual is escaping from restrictive or discriminatory social conventions and attitudes? Don't be afraid. I want to talk about whether we are liberated or whether we've followed a path of enslavement — serving the interests of commerce.

As I said in yesterday's post: It was right when we were questioning devoting our lives to commerce — when "turn on, tune in, drop out" was fascinating — that a movement came along and injected women — half the population — with highly commercial ambition. That fed the gigantic engine of the economy for the next 4 decades. And now, the professional, highly organized, intensely busy woman is celebrated in our culture, and the hippie is a figure of fun.  And yet... what matters is love, and beauty, and survival. Live in love and beauty as long as you can.

IN THE COMMENTS: Meade said:

Fear of flying fuck.

The Hilary Rosen flap shows the way to a new bipartisanship premised on the value of single-earner households.

Yes, Hilary Rosen disrespected Ann Romney, who, she said, had "actually not worked a day in her life." Fine. Everybody learned that the American people think it's important to acknowledge the work that women do when they choose to forgo careers and stay home with the children.

But now that this door is open, let's walk through it. There is much more here, and I'm only going to begin to talk about it in this post. I have already talked about the less-noticed issue of respecting men's choices. It shouldn't be simply a matter of women getting to choose to stay home. This is a household economics decision. Traditionally, it's been the woman who stays home in the single-earner family, but in modern America, each family has the power to decide who will bring in the money, and it may be preferable for the man to be the one to contribute to the family in the non-monetary ways. This is something I will talk about much more in future posts.

What I want to concentrate on in this first post, initiating my "single-earner household" tag, is the way it's not just for traditionalists. I want to challenge liberals, left-wingers, feminists, progressives — all those folks — to see why they should want to actively promote the single-earner household.

Single-earner households benefit the environment. You believe in global warming? Prove it! A 2-earner household has a much larger carbon footprint. 2 adults travel to work each day, they buy extra consumer goods (such as work clothes), they rely on fast-food, they take their children to day care. They need to do these things to get along. Yes, they pull in more income, but with more income, they buy more things, and these things must be manufactured, which emits carbon into the atmosphere. A single-earner family sticks with that smaller income and buys less. The stay-at-home spouse works hard to stretch and conserve that income, so that the family's needs are met. In fact, these needs can be better met, as the home spouse cooks meals from scratch, teaches and plays with young children, and so forth.

Here's "The Tightwad Gazette." It's all about using ingenuity to make it possible for a family to live on a single income. Why should we all have to join what they used to call the "rat race"? Is life about having a job? Some people need jobs, but why have we come to believe that every adult must have a job?

Let's form single-earner households. We talk about economics all the time, but why don't we economize — at the personal level?

I've concentrated on environmentalism here, but there is so much more to talk about. For example, unemployment. If the single-earner household movement were to flourish, we wouldn't need so many jobs, and we wouldn't need to drive ourselves so hard. Then there are taxes. If you're living alone, filing as an unmarried person, you've probably noticed how much less you would pay if you added a spouse. And what about feminism? If the woman stays home, maybe the man will leave her some day — leave her for a younger woman! — and then what will she do, not having developed her career? The women's movement made a big deal out of warning us about that danger, but something I want to examine — not here, but in later posts — is the way this women's movement came along just when we Baby Boomers in the 1960s were inspired by the hippie movement, which tipped us off that life might be about freedom and not about taking one's place in the conventional workworld. Wouldn't it be a kick in the head if it turned out feminism served, above all, the interests of commerce and not individual liberation?

I'll end this post now, but I'm beginning a conversation. I want to reject the idea — which Obama himself propounded — that the single-earner household is a luxury available only to a few lucky people. Let's consider the possibility that it is available to most people and what we need is to understand when it works and how to make it work.

"A rapidly increasing stream of New Age believers – or esoterics, as locals call them – have descended..."

"... in their camper van-loads on the usually picturesque and tranquil Pyrenean village of Bugarach."

They believe that when apocalypse strikes on 21 December this year, the aliens waiting in their spacecraft inside Pic de Bugarach will save all the humans near by and beam them off to the next age....

Further, rumours persist that the country's late president François Mitterrand was transported by helicopter on to the peak, while the Nazis, and, later, Israel's Mossad, performed mysterious digs there. Now the nearby village is awash with New Agers, who have boosted the local economy, though their naked group climbs up to the peak have raised concerns as well as eyebrows. Among other oddities, some hikers have been spotted scaling the mountain carrying a ball with a golden ring, strung together by a single thread.

Meanwhile, the aliens inside the Pic de Bugarach are saying: Do we really need to take these nearby humans? Can't we gather some further away humans? These people seem like idiots.

What's wrong with these kids today?

Todd G. Buchholz and Victoria Buchholz complain about "The Go-Nowhere Generation":

The likelihood of 20-somethings moving to another state has dropped well over 40 percent since the 1980s... The stuck-at-home mentality hits college-educated Americans as well as those without high school degrees. According to the Pew Research Center, the proportion of young adults living at home nearly doubled between 1980 and 2008, before the Great Recession hit. Even bicycle sales are lower now than they were in 2000.

Why don't people pick up and move to the places where the jobs are? Everyone's heard of North Dakota. Why don't they go there?

In the most startling behavioral change among young people... an increasing number of teenagers are not even bothering to get their driver’s licenses. Back in the early 1980s, 80 percent of 18-year-olds proudly strutted out of the D.M.V. with newly minted licenses, according to a study by researchers at the University of Michigan’s Transportation Research Institute. By 2008 — even before the Great Recession — that number had dropped to 65 percent.

Isn't that what the Boomer generation told them to do? Cars are bad. They are destroying the planet. Then, when they avoid driving, we scold them for being — what? — sedentary? unambitious? incurious?!

Perhaps young people are too happy at home checking Facebook. In a study of 15 countries, Michael Sivak, a professor at the University of Michigan’s Transportation Research Institute (who also contributed to the D.M.V. research), found that when young people spent more time on the Internet, they delayed getting their driver’s licenses....

If they were supposed to believe that movie — "An Inconvenient Truth" — that was showed to them by one public school teacher after another, why aren't we celebrating them now for their teeny tiny carbon footprint? Just give them a tiny room and a computer with high-speed internet, and they'll be perfectly happy.

But Generation Y has become Generation Why Bother....

Etc. etc. These kids today! Speaking of "Why Bother," why did we boomers bother to teach them to sneer at aggressive capitalism, consumeristic acquisitiveness, and driving powerful cars if we were going to turn around and whine about their not competing vigorously enough?

Notice how popular the word “random” has become among young people. A Disney TV show called “So Random!” has ranked first in the ratings among tweens. The word has morphed from a precise statistical term to an all-purpose phrase that stresses the illogic and coincidence of life. Unfortunately, societies that emphasize luck over logic are not likely to thrive.

I blame the Baby Boomers, my generation. We propagated doubt that you could work hard and get ahead. Random? That sounds like hippie talk to me.

In the mid-’70s, back when every high school kid longed for his driver’s license and a chance to hit the road and find freedom, Bruce Springsteen wrote his brilliant, exciting album “Born to Run.”

Hello? Have you ever listened to the lyrics on "Born to Run"?! Yes, movement is involved in running, but it was scarcely an optimistic attitude. Springsteen had us running from the "death trap," the "suicide rap" that was the "runaway American Dream." That home town of yours supposedly "rips the bones from your back." Yeah, that's exciting. Hell is exciting. Springsteen wanted to go for a ride on his motorcycle — his "suicide machine" — and then "die with you Wendy on the streets tonight." Yeah, those were the days!

"We originally called it soylent pink."

Lunchtime for the kiddies.

The government official who called it that doesn't know his movies very well. Or... at least I hope he doesn't know his movies very well.

"We looked at the product and we objected to it because it used connective tissues instead of muscle. It was simply not nutritionally equivalent [to ground beef]. My main objection was that it was not meat."

So the problem is not that the meat is the meat of the human animal.

By the way, "pink slime" is a movie reference too. Remember "The Green Slime"? That was back in the day when "green" seemed evil and gross. It was 1968, during that brief shining moment when American culture abounded with hippies, but the environmentalists had not yet arrived. I'm thinking of hippies, because I remember how "The Green Slime" was recommended to me at the time: "All the heads are seeing 'Green Slime.'"

Speaking of heads and reindulging in the green-or-pink slime of American pop culture in the 1960s, here's the bathroom scene from The Monkees movie "Head." Don't worry. It's a slime-free, meat-free bathroom, but don't open the medicine cabinet...



... and remember nobody ever lends money to a man with a sense of humor.

"i think its totally awesome but the guy talks about money and making a living too much."

"sounds like he does this for money more than as his passion and thats really sad because this looks like an awesome place."

That comment, giving grief to this tree-house-building guy...



... is typical of the way everybody's always trying to keep the hippie down.

"Truth and love must prevail over lies and hatred."

Vaclav Havel, RIP.

An avowed peacenik whose heroes included rockers like Frank Zappa, he never quite shed his flower-child past and often signed his name with a small heart as a flourish.

What emotion does your youth culture valorize and what social form does it envision?

William Deresiewicz takes inventory.

For the hippies, the emotion was love: love-ins, free love, the Summer of Love, all you need is love. The social form was utopia, understood in collective terms: the commune, the music festival, the liberation movement.

The beatniks aimed at ecstasy, embodied as a social form in individual transcendence. Theirs was a culture of jazz, with its spontaneity; of marijuana, arresting time and flooding the soul with pleasure (this was before the substance became the background drug of every youth culture); of flight, on the road, to the West; of the quest for the perfect moment.

The punks were all about rage, their social program nihilistic anarchy. “Get pissed,” Johnny Rotten sang. “Destroy.” Hip-hop, punk’s younger brother, was all about rage and nihilism, too, at least until it turned to a vision of individual aggrandizement.

As for the slackers of the late ’80s and early ’90s (Generation X, grunge music, the fiction of David Foster Wallace), their affect ran to apathy and angst, a sense of aimlessness and pointlessness. Whatever. That they had no social vision was precisely what their social vision was: a defensive withdrawal from all commitment as inherently phony.

And what of these kids today? Are we going to call them the "hipsters?" Deresiewicz prefers "millennials." He diagnoses the emotion as niceness, which doesn't seem hip at all. (Not that hippies were hip.) Is niceness an emotion? Deresiewicz toys with "post-emotional," then comes up with "the affect of the salesman." And that's not very nice at all. What "social form" do these little jerks get? Deresiewicz assigns them: small business. 

Our culture hero is not the artist or reformer, not the saint or scientist, but the entrepreneur. (Think of Steve Jobs, our new deity.) Autonomy, adventure, imagination: entrepreneurship comprehends all this and more for us. The characteristic art form of our age may be the business plan.

See how that goes with "the affect of the salesman"?

Today’s polite, pleasant personality is, above all, a commercial personality. It is the salesman’s smile and hearty handshake, because the customer is always right and you should always keep the customer happy. If you want to get ahead, said Benjamin Franklin, the original business guru, make yourself pleasing to others.

This is not meant as a compliment. Deresiewicz is not a fan of "the bland, inoffensive, smile-and-a-shoeshine personality — the stay-positive, other-directed, I’ll-be-whoever-you-want-me-to-be personality — that everybody has today."

ADDED: I like Deresiewicz's writing style and he has a lot of nice observations, but something's obviously missing — something expressed by the "these kids today" tag I just added. In every generation, there's a mix of conventional and rebellious type individuals. The millennials he describes sound very similar to the people beatniks, hippies, and slackers rebelled against. There are rebels among the millennial generation too. Look at all the protests these days! Look at all the young people who are looking to the government to deal with the joblessness. How cheerfully entrepreneurial are they?

Keeping track of digits.

This picture — over at Sartorialist — of a young woman reading a book in an outdoor café reminds me of something that happened yesterday. See? She's casually slouching in a big fuzzy coat. I assume that's fake fur. So... I was traipsing about on State Street yesterday, looking for something red to wear. (I'm going to the football game tomorrow. I've never gone to a football game!) And I wandered into a shop I like, where I often try things on and, in fact, I often buy things. Many times, over the years, I've dropped $300, $400, even $700 at a time on skirts/tops/jackets/whatever. I check out what's new, and there's a nice fuzzy coat, the sort of thing that seems as though it might be fun to wear slouching about in a café. It might amuse the students and my colleagues if I walked the law school hallways in that. I glance at the price tag. $395. It fits. It looks cute. It could be "me." La la la. Kind of retro hippie. I'm getting a Janis Joplin vibe. I overhear a salesperson say the words "four thousand dollars." Holy fuck. There's another digit on that price tag! I pretend I didn't just realize the coat cost 10x what I thought as I maneuver myself to the point where I can return that pelt to the hanger. Would I ever pay $4,000 for a coat? Maybe. I did buy an Armani suit that one time. But yesterday wasn't one of those times. Yesterday was the day I bought a red scarf — in "cashmink" — which is not something that entailed the participation of any goats or weasels.

"Between the Law School and the Ross School of Business you’ll find Dominick’s... which has been serving students and the area’s aging hippie population ever since the ’60s..."

From a NYT "36 Hours in Ann Arbor" piece. As an aging person who really did frequent Dominick's in the 1960s when I was a young hippie, I'm glad to know it's the first place an outsider dropping in for the essence of Ann Arbor ought to eat.

I haven't been back to Ann Arbor since the 1970s, but I spent an awful lot of time in the geographic zone around Dominick's. I didn't go to the law school, which is right there. I went to the School of Architecture and Design, which used to be right next to the law school, and I lived in East Quad for 2 years. And just over to the left is Krazy Jim's Blimpy Burger. I worked there.

It's cool to see that Krazy Jim's is still around:

Now serving the 5th generation of Blimpy Addicts, we grind our own beef fresh from choice Western chuck. Then our friendly, personable staff throws the rounded balls of meat onto the grill, smashes them flat with a spatula and cooks your burger to crumbly perfection.

Ha. I remember when Jim used to grind up a huge vat of meat and we stood around in the walk-in refrigerator using ice cream scoops to transform it into those meatballs. Krazy Jim's didn't make it into the NYT's recommended 36 hours. Who knows why? Some kind of rule against greasy food?

"A Mendocino County woman who transformed her home into a bear bohemia with wading pools and specially prepared banquets..."

"... of corn meal and peanut butter sandwiches will not do jail time for doting on her hairy friends, but she will remain exiled from her property."

[Lynne Gravier, 77], known to almost everyone as the "Bear Woman," has been feeding bruins and other animals for decades, but nobody realized the extent of her devotion until neighbors began complaining. Last Aug. 24, seven fish and game wardens raided Gravier's home. They stumbled on what was essentially an animal hippie commune and shack-out pad.

In all 15 loafing black bears hung out with Gravier inside the house and on her deck, and lumbered around the compound like kings at a feast. Gravier named her oafish friends things like Smiley, Goofy, Connie, Biggie and Wombat. She admitted setting up a kiddie pool for wallowing. She fixed peanut butter sandwiches for her guests, sometimes mixing in glucosamine to ease the arthritis pain in older bears.

Some 6,000 pounds of rolled and cracked corn was delivered every month from a ranch supply house. Gravier stored the food in a 40-foot-long shipping container that she used as an ursine food dispensary.

Knight-errantry was not in evidence among the hulking chowhounds, who turned Gravier's home into a reeking outhouse. The cabin-style home was piled high with filth by the time of the raid and immediately condemned by county authorities.

Gravier also fed 18 cats, three dogs, 40 peacocks and a steady stream of visiting turkeys and deer.

And yet it took decades for the neighbors to begin complaining? And then, in the end, she gets no real punishment, after animal lovers protest the prosecution on behalf of the well-meaning lady. According to the neighbors, her loving ministrations were turning bears into problem bears that break into houses, chase sheep, and end up needing to get killed.

Bothersome bears are a particularly volatile issue in this cattle- and pot-growing town of 1,300 near the South Fork of the Eel River, in the heart of redwood country.

Pot-growing, eh? Seems like you can get away with breaking all kinds of laws these days... at least if your criminality has enough of a hippie vibe.