Your "Jesus weeps" got me thinking yet again about "Slouching towards Bethlehem", not Yeats' but Didion's.

I wonder how the youth vote would relate to her articulate cutting cynico-realism. Looking back at 1967, is it a condemnation of those old folks who are still blinkered and misguided as they were in their drug-addled free love youth and unable to see the new reality, or a prophecy of the new ones who will find themselves as mockable one day only too soon, or both as she seems to posit with:

“Barbara is on what is called the woman's trip to the exclusion of almost everything else. When she and Tom and Max and Sharon need money, Barbara will take a part-time job, modeling or teaching kindergarten, but she dislikes earning more than ten or twenty dollars a week. Most of the time she keeps house and bakes. "Doing something that shows your love that way," she says, "is just about the most beautiful thing I know." Whenever I hear about the woman's trip, which is often, I think a lot about nothin'-says-lovin'-like-something-from-the-oven and the Feminine Mystique and how it is possible for people to be the unconscious instruments of values they would strenuously reject on a conscious level, but I do not mention this to Barbara.”

Being our parents indeed. And children too. And everything we hate and love at one time. And then there's the piece I think of better as "Too Long at the Fair". and between the two what to me feels like a melancholy summation of east coast/west coast and I glom onto Sandy Denny's demise as well (She Walks Through the Fair), a hopeful future of a genius singer combined with substance abuse and abandoned child and freakish final blow to the head. Do others resonate to such cynicism as I do?

So they want their own Woodstock, Chicago Convention, Haight-Ashbury and I suppose they've had their Vietnam though with much lower body count. How do you explain that the first ones were overrated and we're still suffering hangovers from much of these bashed ideals, still debating Great Society and agrarian revolutions and the population boom and even Marx-in-the-rice-paddies (aka the subtle slowly-horrifying implications of Pol Pot's "return to Year 0"). Having a bunch of bodies in one place will feed a "revolution", but revolutions aren't beasts to be tamed - it's like the 120 year flood that wipes out the levees and the banks and runs mud through Main Street and even into the basement at the bank. But it runs through the main feed store and brewery and grain silos and everything else too. Sure, you can kick off your shoes and stroll barefoot with pants rolled up to your knees and feel fine - and then the pain sets in, the rescues, the body counts, the smell of rotting sewage, the sagging buildings that have to be demolished... Yeah, it's a free speech movement, but sooner or later someone puts an eye out, and then the fun begins.