Summer Of Love ('67)

I used to admire Jerry "Moonbeam" Brown and Muammar al-Gaddafi. This was before I ever held a job or raised a family. I remember voting for Jesse Jackson in the primaries. The Beatles' 'Revolution' and the Stones' 'Street Fighting Man' were favorite anthems. I don't quite know when the change occurred. For a long time I didn't pay much attention to what was happening in Washington or in the world. Once I came back to it, the fight was already on.

There was a certain romance to those early days. America was our straw man that we could set a match to any time we wanted - to warm ourselves; to celebrate fire - without really changing anything fundamental. America was America, rock solid, leader of the free world. We fed our own egos by tearing pieces off of her, sitting around a campfire on some far-off tropical beach with the blue moon rising over the water, smoking splits.

There's no romance now - only the hard work of getting Sisyphus' stone back up to the summit. Thank God that so many of us have awakened from the stupor and are willing to roll up their sleeves. What's amazing is that so many others are still stuck back there in the 60's and 70’s; that their views haven't changed even in light of all that's happened. It speaks of a Peter Pan syndrome; a kind of pathology that resulted in stunted development of a sort.

I can’t believe that Jerry doesn’t know exactly what he’s doing. He’s a pol first and foremost – and a smart one at that. He thinks he can rekindle that old Haight Asbury illusion in enough others, if not in himself. Maybe in California the smoke is still rising from that ‘Summer of Love’ (’67) disaster as to give the impression that there’s still somebody out there who gives a s**t. And Jackson surely found his niche: extortion. And Gaddafi found his: oppression. I can’t really blame them. Not everybody can afford the luxury of idealism. People get it where they can. The afore mentioned wing nuts have done rather well for themselves - even if they did it at our expense.

But what’s Obama’s excuse. Surely he sees not much profit in standing with the old guard of commie losers. Maybe he’s just plain stupid – but that’s a stretch. Maybe he’s so twisted by hatred, he can’t think straight. Maybe he’s always been carrying that cross of race. Maybe he now sees the opportunity of ditching it for once and for all. But in order to do so, he’s got to put white people in their place. That’s not as easy as he thought – even for the most powerful man in the free world.