Revisionist history...

This last Saturday, hoping this meant it had run out of Hitler footage, I watched the History Channel's special called Hippies, smoothly narrated by Peter Coyote.

Every so often, some documentary-pimper like PBS, the History, or Discovery channels, reacting to the Iraq war, current civilian disquiet, and our shriveling civil rights, will try to revive part of the rotting 60's corpse. Vietnam! It was just like Iraq! Hippies! They weren't anything like us! Like a sap, I'll watch whatever gummed-together program is offered, and I'm usually left scratchy-eyed and sorry I did.

Peter Coyote should have turned down the narrator gig. Several years back he published a well-received book called Sleeping Where I Fall, that chronicled his time in the West Coast counter-culture. It's an interesting account, since he was involved in several scenes out there--the Diggers, street theater, and communes--and knew a number of the big players. More interestingly though, his book doesn't hew to the current narrative: buncha crazy kids in San Francisco, LSD, free love, bad trips, fried brains, Charles Manson, dead Kennedys, dead Janis + Hendricks, ::pop:: goes The Dream. Sadly, this documentary repeated the same old, same old.

I'm glad my parents aren't alive now to be annoyingly patronized as The Greatest Generation, instead of the complicated people they actually were. I have a pretty good idea idea of how they would have viewed revisionist sludge like Band of Brothers, et. al. My mother gave up nylons and wore leg make-up, knitted up ski-masks and made orange peel candy for the troops. Sometimes too, she took to her bed in a depressive funk, terrified my father was dead, somewhere in the Pacific. My father floated around on a troop-transport ship, eye-balled spy photographs, got stung by jelly fish, went to Peiping (Beijing) when the city fell, ate monkey brains, saw no action, had a terrific time, and sailed home two years after the war was over. Other than a delight in Big Band sounds, my parents didn't indulge in nostalgia.

Hippies gave us several good squirts of nostalgia though: shots of body painting, daisies being poked into gun barrels, naked people in the mud, fervent blasts from White Rabbit, before it concluded with the expected thud. Woodstock died, man, a 30 year-old post-doc in sociology announced to us couch potatoes at home. I've heard this crap before, and I always want to ask, Did you think we'd all stay in our Vermont geodesic domes forever, weaving hammocks and playing flutes?

Fact is, we grew up, like people do.

There was a lot more to the counter-culture than a bunch of West Coast hippies, but, like all complexities, it doesn't film well. Doubts, nuances, and ambiguities rarely do.

Me, I'm glad I can still tell wild honey from sheep-shit. Lots of folks can't.