"Hunter S. Thompson- The Hippies" - читать интересную книгу автора (Thompson Hunter S)

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The Hippies
By Hunter S. Thompson
The best year to be a hippie was 1965, but then there was not
much to write about, because not much was happening in public
and most of what was happening in private was illegal. The
real year of the hippie was 1966, despite the lack of
publicity, which in 1967 gave way to a nationwide avalancheтАФin
Look, Life, Time, Newsweek, the Atlantic, the New York Times,
the Saturday Evening Post, and even the Aspen Illustrated
News, which did a special issue on hippies in August of 1967
and made a record sale of all but 6 copies of a 3,500-copy
press run. But 1967 was not really a good year to be a hippie.
It was a good year for salesmen and exhibitionists who called
themselves hippies and gave colorful interviews for the
benefit of the mass media, but serious hippies, with nothing
to sell, found that they had little to gain and a lot to lose
by becoming public figures. Many were harassed and arrested
for no other reason than their sudden identification with a
so-called cult of sex and drugs. The publicity rumble, which
seemed like a joke at first, turned into a menacing landslide.
So quite a few people who might have been called the original
hippies in 1965 had dropped out of sight by the time hippies
became a national fad in 1967.





Ten years earlier the Beat Generation went the same confusing
route. From 1955 to about 1959 there were thousands of young
people involved in a thriving bohemian subculture that was
only an echo by the time the mass media picked it up in 1960.
Jack Kerouac was the novelist of the Beat Generation in the
same way that Ernest Hemingway was the novelist of the Lost
Generation, and Kerouac's classic "beat" novel, On the Road,
was published in 1957. Yet by the time Kerouac began appearing
on television shows to explain the "thrust" of his book, the
characters it was based on had already drifted off into limbo,
to await their reincarnation as hippies some five years later.
(The purest example of this was Neal Cassidy [Cassady], who
served as a model for Dean Moriarity in On the Road and also
for McMurphy in Ken Kesey's One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest.)
Publicity follows reality, but only up to the point where a
new kind of reality, created by publicity, begins to emerge.
So the hippie in 1967 was put in the strange position of being