Will Herberg's 1967 rant against hippies, published in National Review, spearheaded some of the hippie caricatures that continue to this day:
The corporate mental life of the hippies would seem to be rather vacuous. They do show some talent for organization (after all, they’re all Americans, aren’t they?), but the thinking they do, if indeed thinking it can be called, is more like orgiastic love-spluttering than coherent thought. Unlike the more pretentious beatniks of yore, they do not claim to be producing a new and esoteric kind of poetry or music; they just want to be left alone to wallow in their “love-ins” and their nature “happenings.”
In the context of the last decade, I have to say that some of these utopian dreamers are a pleasant relief to defenses of torture, surveillance and constant war. And today's hippies have internalized the 1960s and moved beyond them. We have close to majority support for marijuana legalization, for example. And even hippie-hatred has entered an ironic era. Think of Cartman. He channels our discomfort and also makes a joke out of it:
(Hat tip: Alex Seitz-Wald; image via Chait)
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