was leaning over the hash. “You and Jay are a little late with Flower Power,” Edward said. “While you were busy defending the country from enemies foreign and domestic, that crap came and went. Right, Wayman?”
I could only nod.
“When we first got here, a bunch of hippies were living in Laguna Canyon,” Edward said, as if presenting a parable. He recounted how the civic authorities didn’t like the freak colony, claiming it created a bad image for the town, had no sanitation, and the inhabitants paid no taxes on their ramshackle homes. The canyon dwellers were served with eviction papers. “At the appointed hour, not only the Laguna Beach cops but the Orange County sheriff ’s deputies arrived with lights flashing and paddy wagons to do the dirty deed,” Edward said. “A few of the more enlightened profs from UC Irvine showed up, too, to serve as witnesses, along with some students. Their hope was that the public eye would keep the Orange County sheriff ’s boys from doing what they’re famous for. Fat chance.”
Pump glanced up and started to say something, but Edward rode over him. “The Canyon freaks had decided non-violence was the route to take. They were going to preach peace to the peace officers. The hippies started chanting ‘Ommm’ as the cops approached with drawn clubs. Didn’t seem to have much effect. People got kicked, punched, clubbed, dragged off, busted. Even one of the Irvine profs, Shoemaker in philosophy, was arrested. Police brutality was the talk of the town for a week, then everybody forgot about it. There’s your power of non-confrontation.”
Jay slid onto the deck from the rail and stood. “I bet there weren’t so many freaks around in those days. That’s why the pigs could get away with it.”
Edward snorted. “That’s not the reason. Then or now, it’s —”
“More and more people have turned on to what’s happening,” Jay cut him off. “Woodstock’s just the beginning. If good vibes aren’t the answer, tell me why a million of us were there? Where’d they come from — the moon?”
“Best estimate I heard was half a million,” Edward corrected him. “Don says the crowd was hard to get a fix on. People were arriving and leaving continually.”
Pump placed the knives on the deck and hauled himself to his feet. “So nobody really knows how many —”
“I heard they had to close the fucking freeway to the area, Eddie, because so many people were trying to get there,” Jay persisted. “More than a million would’ve attended if they hadn’t shut down the roads.”
“I don’t dispute that popular music is popular,” Edward retorted. “But music is something that’s bought and sold. The bands weren’t performing for free. Maybe the audience for rock music is even larger than the people merchandising it knew. That doesn’t make Woodstock any challenge to the establishment.”
CS&N were imploring:
Speak out, you got to speak out
Against the madness.
You got to speak your mind
If you dare.
Pump leaned against the porch rail beside Jay. “It’s about beliefs, man. What you believe in.”
“Values,” Jay seconded.
“Values?” his brother jeered. “When did you pay any attention to values?”
“Look around you,” Jay declared. “We’re spending a pleasant evening breaking the law. What we’re doing isn’t hurting anybody. We fight the power by just doing our thing. They can’t arrest everybody.”
“Can’t they?” Edward said.
“If nobody does what they say, they can pass all the laws they want. They can’t control us anymore.”
I marvelled again how the hash didn’t seem to slow the others’ abilities to function. My mind, buoyed in a cocoon woven of gossamer threads, was finding it hard to concentrate on their argument.
“Everything we’ve been rapping about tonight,” Jay said, “protests and busted heads — the big stuff? If people don’t obey, the bad shit won’t go down. What can the Man do? That’s what Woodstock is about.”
Edward sneered. “‘Suppose they gave a war and nobody came,’ is that it?”
“Something like that,” Pump said.
I felt I should contribute to the discussion, but my brain wouldn’t work properly, couldn’t establish contact with the outside world. I tried to clarify my feelings about Woodstock. The event in upper New York State verified for me, as I had mentioned earlier to Edward, that we had become a significant component of the population rather than a minuscule fringe. The excitement I experienced when I read about or saw pictures of Woodstock was like the rush sparked by the Columbia University strike the spring before last, where SDS played a central role. Or by the determination of the protesters at the Democratic National Convention that summer. Or by the San Francisco State strikers last fall. Or when, this year, the ever-expanding opposition to the war resulted in more and larger peace marches. Or when the Harvard strike erupted in April. When People’s Park was occupied in May. Each of these examples of resistance indicated a swelling momentum for change, yet except for Woodstock they involved comparatively few people. By far, most students on a campus or citizens on a street pursued their customary, short-haired, conformity-restricted lives. Woodstock, in contrast, was massive.
Nevertheless, I agreed with Edward that good vibes weren’t about to affect anything. People could put a daisy into the barrel of a National Guardsman’s rifle, like at the Pentagon demonstrations, all they wanted. If the trigger was ever pulled, they’d discover vegetation is no impediment to a bullet. The war would end only when enough people were in the street saying the war was immoral, when significant numbers of GIs refused to fight, when enough potential draftees split for Canada or Sweden so that the White House understood the war was lost on the home front. Of course, this equation hinged on the NLF not being defeated, but to date the insurgents had proven able to hold their own.
“I can’t believe my own brother would believe a lot of hippie-trippy bullshit,” Edward said in a mock-rueful voice. “I expected better from you.” His comment set off a further exchange between the three.
I inventoried what, if anything, was positive about the freak world. The war, I was convinced, was a symptom of deeply rooted disease, a system that depended on processing its own citizens through the meat grinder of school, jobs, debt, and war for the sake of the Great God Profit. The backing of any brutal dictator — in South Vietnam or anywhere in the world — as long as he claimed to be anti-Communist or pro-U.S. investment was a by-product of the meat grinder, of the worship of the dollar. My liking for the hippies was their refusal to be part of these crimes. Whatever their personal contradictions, inconsistencies, and faults, the freaky people wanted something more life-affirming than a chance to mindlessly consume, or an existence based on the pursuit of personal wealth at any cost.
For all my disparaging of the love-peace-and-flowers types, I believed a monument should be erected to the Unknown Hippie: a statue of a young man and young woman in appropriate attire. It took a lot of courage to be the only hippie in your sis-boom-bah high school, or in your red-white-and-blue small town, or to be out on the road passing through unfriendly territory. When I first arrived on the Gold Coast, plenty of restaurants and other businesses would refuse to serve people with long hair. In Orange
