Sat Eve Post 5-4-68

Where the scene was:


Weird picture: Ol' Mia looks like she's working herself up to stab her devil child at the urging of a giant-headed Yogi. Do it, Mia!
Half the Beatles is daid, but Yogi (the Yogi?) is still around. From his wiki:

After the September 11, 2001 attacks, Mahesh Yogi started issuing cautions, in weekly satellite press-conference and webcasts, about the prevailing directions of societal change in the world. The solutions to current world problems he proposes include creating large, permanent groups of TM-Sidhi practitioners performing their programs to create the so-called Maharishi Effect.

With reference to an on-going project to create a Maharishi Effect for the Netherlands, where Maharishi Mahesh Yogi has lived since the early 1990s, he stated on June 21, 2006 that what "is unfolding right now is the 'supreme level of evolvement of life on earth'"

In the Netherlands. Keep up the good work, Yogs.

The Speaking out column this week is by a shockingly youthful Daniel Patrick Moynihan:


Moynihan: "Yes." Hippie.

It's actually an interesting piece, chock full of American Apocalypse. Vietnam, of course, but also bigotry at home and rioting in the cities, was causing Americans to withdraw their consent "from the understandings and agreements that have made us one of the most stable democracies in the world" and making the U.S. an "outcast nation."

Moynihan ties all the violence rather weirdly to the atmosphere of mistrust spawned by Kennedy assassination conspiracy theorists:

A master symbol of this crisis of confidence is the apparent, ever-widening belief among the citizenry that the assassination of President Kennedy remains unexplained. It is as certain as things are likely ever to be that the Government has told the truth about that event. But it is also certain that it told the truth badly. . . .

With this uncertainty in the background, the espousal of violence and violence itself mount on every hand: private crime, organized crime; civil disorder at home to the point of insurrection, violence abroad on a scale unimagined. . . .

Annnnnnnh (that's a buzzer). No more Moiny, because somewhere in here he quotes (if only to note how often it's being quoted--remember, this is 1968) Yeats's "The Second Coming." You know: "Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold" and blah. In fact, the two-minute wait is waived and Yeats' overly wanker-friendly poem gets instant elevation to my little list.

Joan Didion's column on Huey "P." Newton, "Black Panther," oddly echoes Moynihan. It's one of Didion's best, a showcase for her suicide-note style, and was collected in her mega-boffo-blowin'-out-the-doors bestseller whose title quotes from the same damn Yeats poem, Slouching Toward Bethlehem. In the piece the button-cute Didion coyly admits that while

I had always appreciated the logic of the Panther position, based as it is on the notion that political power begins with the barrel of a gun . . . and I could appreciate as well the particular beauty in Huey Newton as "issue." In the politics of revolution everyone is expendable . . . ,

she's still uneasy. Participating in a group interview of the jailed (awaiting trial for the murder of a cop) Huey, Didion says she

did not get the sense that he had intended to become a political martyr. He smiled at us all and waited for the tape recorder, and then he smoked and talked, running the words together because he had said them so many times before, about "the American capitalistic materialistic system" and "so-called free enterprise" and "the fight for the liberation of black people throughout the world." His lawyer was there, too, and Eldridge Cleaver, the Black Panthers' Minister of Information. (Huey Newton was still the Minister of Defense.) Eldridge Cleaver wore a black sweater and one gold earring and spoke in an almost inaudible drawl and was allowed to see Huey Newton because he had press credentials from Ramparts [that's, I say that's the David Horowitz-era Ramparts, son--ed.], but I doubted that Huey Newton's political sophistication extended to seeing himself that way; the value of a Scottsboro boy is easier to see if you are not yourself the Scottsboro boy.

All heart, ain't she?

Finally, as usual, an ad:

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