Hippie Hippie Shakedown

Chapter 9

When it comes to inappropriate names, Summer of Love has to be right up there with Joy Division, the name the Nazis reportedly gave to the sections of concentration camps that housed the guards' sex slaves.

For one thing, it was not just a summer event. The countercultural happening that swept through San Francisco and beyond began with an April1967 planning announcement by concert promoter Chet Helms, aka Family Dog, creating the Council for the Summer of Love.

It still goes on today in the burned-out minds of its rapidly fading survivors, remnants of the thousands of teens who ran away to find Love in San Francisco, only to wind up wasted on a street whose name sounds like Hate.

Where, indeed, was the love in the San Francisco of Helms and other Summer of Love organizers, of whom so many have died young? Helms would later boast on his website that the event "sowed the seeds of a compassionate idealism which still lives in the hearts of many of our own and subsequent generations." He pointed to the organizers' efforts to feed the runaways.

Other Summer of Love chroniclers note that the Haight Ashbury Free Clinics, founded in the summer of 1967, still help the needy today. The irony is that there would have been no need to feed those runaways, nor to care for so many drug abusers, alcoholics and venereal-disease victims, had Helms--who succumbed to hepatitis C at 63--and his compatriots, not encouraged youths to flood San Francisco. And for what, exactly? Drugs, to be sure, and "free love"--free as opposed to...Thanks to the Pill and a counterculture that defined rebellion as annoying one's parents, thousands of youths became guinea pigs in a kind of mass experiment propagated by prurient Beat Generation relics such as Helms, Allen Ginsberg (died at 70, hepatitis and liver cancer) and Ken Kesey (died at 66, liver cancer).

They were told that they would overcome the superficial consumerism in which they had been raised, reaching a higher spiritual level by uniting their minds to drugs and their bodies to willing takers.

Instead, they themselves became products to be consumed--victimized by pushers, treated as sexual objects to be disposed of, or corrupted into predators ...

In following their leaders' urging to do their own thing, they found themselves locked in a society that gave them all the restrictions of communal life--poverty, squalor, and social pressure to self-destruct--and few of the protections. At the celebrated Be-Ins and Love-Ins, the mob ruled, while--like those Playboy cartoons of orgies where one person's orifice is indistinguishable from another's--the individual was subsumed.

Supporters of the hippies' objectives argue that they and future generations benefited from the dismantling of repressive Eisenhower-era values that restricted sex to marriage.

Well, say what you will about a culture that presumed women found their highest fulfillment in motherhood, but one doesn't see many repressed housewives panhandling on modern-day Haight Street.

One does see lost geriatric flower children with stringy hair and rotten teeth who contracepted or aborted the children who could have taken care of them in their old age.

Years after the Summer of Love's Bay Area invasion, a more moneyed class of Californians popularized a term that parallels what the hippies accomplished: garbage in/garbage out.

The true measure of the success of the Love-In is the love that came out. Today, the counterculture's victims are dying with few children to mourn them--at least, few who are willing to speak to parents who put their own desires ahead of their children's. It is the end of a long, bad trip. By Dawn Eden dawneden.com

Jewish Conversion Story

Dawn Eden, celebrity blogger and Deputy News Editor for regional editions at the New York Daily News, was doing a book signing for her new book "The Thrill of the Chaste" at the National Catholic Prayer Breakfast last week when she sat down with LifeSiteNews.com for an interview.

Her life story as she revealed it in snapshots is a fascinating and captivating chronicle of rebellion. In the 1990's as a rock journalist and unobservant Reform Jew, Eden says she thought herself the quintessential subversive, in a lifestyle of sexual liberty amid the excitement of the music world.

As Eden puts it, "I was brought up in a fairly secular, Jewish home...I did not continue observance after my bat mitzvah and it was not anything that was stressed to me outside of the annual Passover Seder and family get-togethers at holidays." "I thought that I was this great rebel," she related, "because I was writing about rock 'n roll and having sex with whomever I pleased and I was going to work at my job at Kim's Video on St. Mark's Place wearing fishnet hose and vinyl boots."

Her self-assessment was altered radically when, on the recommendation of a musician she interviewed, she discovered famed Christian author GK Chesterton. Eden explains:

"Back in December 1995, while doing a phone interview with Ben Eshbach of an LA band called the Sugarplastic, I thought I would ask him something more erudite than the usual rock-journalist questions, so I asked what he was reading. He said that he was reading GK Chesterton's 'The Man Who Was Thursday.' So, I thought, well, I'll impress him and I'll go out and read it. I picked it up, not knowing what I was in for."

Chesterton, she said, presented the heroes in the book as rebels who "discovered that what they were ultimately searching for was the very thing that they thought they had been rebelling against God." "I saw that Chesterton was presenting Christianity as the ultimate rebellion which was very jarring for me because I had defined myself as being countercultural," she said. "This turned my worldview upside down," Eden went on, "because I had thought that Christians were conformists," said Eden. "It felt strange for me to have this idea planted in my head that to be Christian was to be creative and subversive."

Although the seeds of Christianity may have been planted at that time, Eden's embracing faith did not come to fruition until nearly four years later, in October 1999.

"I had a faith experience that changed my views on God, taking me from accepting him as an intellectual proposition to accepting Him personally into my heart. Because I had read the New Testament -- and had absorbed all the Chesterton and CS Lewis I could find--feeling God's presence for the first time drew me into faith in Jesus."

Baptized nondenominationally at a Protestant church, Eden was not eager to adopt Chesterton's Catholic faith--a family member who was a lapsed Catholic convert warned her it was "unbiblical."

However, her new convictions bore fruit in a manner that began attracting the interest of Catholic blog readers, as she started blogging about being pro-life.

"I started to get more vocal about it because I liked being subversive and to me it seemed to me one of the greatest ways to be rebellious was to be pro-life," Eden told LifeSiteNews.com.

As Eden's Christian convictions grew and her notoriety from her Dawn Patrol blog publicized it--leading to her granting interviews to such disparate publications as the American Chesterton Society's Gilbert magazine and the salacious gossip site Gawker--her then-job as copy editor with the New York Post became tenuous.

She was asked by her boss more than once not to mention her job at the Post in interviews if she noted her Christianity. In addition to her faith, her pro-life convictions also got her into trouble at the Post.

"I was copy-editing a story about so-called 'miracle babies' as the story called them who had been created through in-vitro fertilization," she recalled, "and I felt the need to stress the fact that, in this IVF episode described in the story - there was a death." She added, "The story said that a woman had three embryos emplanted and 'two took,' resulting in 'miracle babies.' I didn't think the babies were such miracles if one baby died in order to create them, so I took away the 'miracle babies' term. After the phrase 'two took,' I added, 'one died,' and I noted that embryos are routinely destroyed in the process of in-vitro fertilization. I'm not proud of making those changes," Eden adds. "It was the cowardly thing to do. I should have asked that the editor make them, and if the editor refused, I should have refused the story and risked being fired. As it was, I was so angry after three years of working at the Post and seeing how the newspaper avoided telling readers the facts about life issues, that I tried to slip the changes under the radar."

The reporter, Susan Edelman, was outraged when the story came out, Eden said. Eden apologized to the editor and was told that she would have to sign a letter taking responsibility for what she did, but she was not fired. At that point, incensed that Eden was retaining her job, Edelman printed up Eden's blog entries against Planned Parenthood and those calling abortion "murder."

Eden recalls that she prayed for strength during the ordeal and even though not Catholic, she took solace in the story of another media personality and pro-lifer who had suffered for his faith--St.Maximilian Kolbe.

Kolbe, who was killed in Auschwitz, volunteering to take the place of a stranger who was condemned to death, was an inspiration for Eden and she told LifeSiteNews.com she felt that he could hear her from heaven and pray for her.

"I talked with him like I would speak with a friend and I asked him if he would pray for me," she recalled. "As soon as I did that, I felt a sense of calm in the midst of a storm. I had this feeling that no matter what happened to me, I was going to be all right."

A few days later she was fired--but even then, she felt grace in the midst of all the antagonism directed at her by her employer. "I had been praying that if I was fired that I wouldn't break down and cry," she said, "because I cry at the drop of a hat and I didn't want them to feel vindicated in firing me by thinking 'Oh, she's crazy anyway, she broke down.'" God answered her prayers. "I was very calm as the editor in chief, Col Allan, was firing me and I actually felt that I had to warn him in some way that he was doing something wrong," she related. "So, when he announced that he was firing me, I said to him, 'Sir, you are older than I am and you have had more experience in this field than I have and I am sure that from where you are sitting, you are doing the right thing. But, from where I am sitting, it is the wrong thing.'" "He pushed himself up on his desk," she recalled, "and his face got red and his forehead tightened, and he shouted at me, 'You are a liability' and ordered me out of the office."

The firing dampened neither her spirits nor her spunk. As she departed the offices of the paper she shouted to a colleague what was to become the front-page headline a few days later. "So, I had to put my stuff in the proverbial cardboard box, and as I was walking out, I shouted to the deputy copy chief the headline for next Sunday's front page, because I knew that it was the Trump wedding - 'Milt, for Sunday - 'The Lady is a Trump.'"

Sure enough, that headline not only graced the front-page of the New York Post marking the Donald Trump wedding but was also reproduced as far afield as the Sydney Morning Herald in Australia.

The day after her ouster from the Post she was approached by George Gurley, a reporter from a smaller New York newspaper well-read by the city's media folk, the Observer.

"He didn't know about my firing," she recalled, "but he...said he wanted a story on me because I was a right-wing Christian at the New York Post." Quick as ever, Eden replied, "Well, I've got a better story for you than that because I am the one who got fired from the New York Post for being a right-wing Christian."

Soon the news of her being fired from the Post was on the front page of the Observer. The editor of the Post's major rival The New York Daily News saw the Observer story and that resulted in Eden's current employment with the Daily News--presumably for her headline skills rather than her political stances, since the News' editorial page is resolutely pro-choice.

It was also through the firing, Eden told LifeSiteNews.com, that "W Publishing Group got in touch with me and asked me if I would like to write a book and I suggested 'Thrill of the Chaste'."

Eden went from believing she would never again be able to work in journalism again to having a major new job and a book deal.

Shortly thereafter she entered the Catholic Church believing God had answered her prayers in a miraculous way and that, as she puts it "I felt that St.Maximilian was praying for me."

She started inquiring into Catholicism, she said, just after her being fired. "I realized that if I am going to be taking a hit for life, I might as well be with the Church that has been taking hits for life for 2000 years--you can quote me on that," she told LifeSiteNews.com.

Her Christianity has not diminished her fondness for rebellion and being subversive. "Just a couple of nights ago," she reminisced with a mischievous smile, "I went to an alumni/student roundtable at NYU and some of the people at the roundtable were media people--one of them was a reporter for Newsweek." The Newsweek reporter asked her what she wrote about on her blog, to which Eden replied, "Well, I write about my faith and values and chastity and about pro-life issues--that is very important to me."

Explains Eden, "Of course, to a Newsweek reporter or to your average NYU student, it's probably like saying, 'I write about killing small children and boiling them.' Because that is how they think of it. Poor analogy, I know, since it's abortion that kills children, but pro-choicers have that same kind of revulsion to hearing someone say they're pro-life, that you and I do when hearing someone say they're pro-choice. So, it was kind of funny to see how these people's expressions very carefully didn't change when I said that." By John-Henry Westen.

Is Modern Music Base and Hypnotic?

Roger Kimball in his book The Long March: How The Cultural Revolution of the 1960s Changed America, said all rock n' roll "offers is a prefabricated Dionysius ecstasy, blatantly sexual, conspicuously nonrational."

Asked later if there was no pop music he liked personally and found palatable, he replied, "Sure. I grew up with rock music. But what is palatable is not necessarily good for you. I think that Bob Dylan is a clever songwriter--pretentious, vastly over-rated as a poet, clever. John Lennon and Paul McCartney were very clever songwriters. Not in the league of Cole Porter, and certainly not in the league of Gilbert and Sullivan, but clever. There are many other clever rock songwriters. But my objection to rock focuses not on the tunes but on the basic intent of the music, which I believe amounts to prefabricated Dionysius ecstasy. I believe, in other words, that Allan Bloom had it right in The Closing of the American Mind when he argued that rock is a potent weapon in the arsenal of emotional anarchy. In some ways this is a very old argument.

"In essence, it is a Platonic argument. In The Republic, Plato argues that music is such a powerful stimulant of the emotions that the state should be cautious about what sorts of music it encourages. Some modes of music, he thought, encouraged noble emotions, other forms encourage base emotions. Aristotle did not put the matter quite so starkly, but he, too, recognized that music was a powerful educational force that could be used and misused.

"Rock music is now ubiquitous, of course, and to some extent we all tune it out. But its basic message--what makes rock rock--is not the sweet strains of Paul McCartney's "Yesterday" but the amplified percussive assault that addresses not the head or heart but lower organs. Again, this is a complicated question that deserves a complicated answer; the biggest question is whether music can shape one's basic emotional responses. I would say, yes, it can.

"Does it then follow that music can corrupt as well as nurture the emotional life of individuals? Again, I would say yes. Hardly a new idea: consider what Nietzsche has to say about the baneful influence of Wagner. If civilization is about nuance, restraint, discrimination and order, rock is none of these things."