You are the weirdest damn Dead fan I’ve ever met. Smaller journalists would be writing for “real outlets” if they were any good. Constant appeals to authority.
We’ve got the most bitter about love song ever written in “Hallelujah” being used as a common wedding song and you think people take the time to understand what they’re hearing? That they ever get the point? Hell, that they care what the point is?
"People". That's a broad brush.
"The People" have always been ignorant and dangerous.
Go back and read the Federalist papers and their fear of the "mob" (not unwarranted in light of Jan. 6).
One of my favorite historians was Richard Hofstadter, who fell out of favor in the 1970s and 1980s when leftist historians saw him and the other consensus historians as "sellouts," fast forward a few decades and he looks awfully prescient - he didn't romanticize the Populists like Kazin and other writers, he understood when they talked about democracy, it was against the urban elite and in favor of people like themselves, the "true Americans."
The Paranoid Style in American Politics
Anti-Intellectualism In American Life
The Age Of Reform
One of the myths of the Grateful Dead is they were 60's hippies who just wanted to do drugs and hang out.
They're actually part of a continuum with the 1950s "Beatniks," hung out with Neal Cassidy (of
On the Road fame), friends with Ken Kesey (
One Flew Over the Cookoo's Nest). Started out as folk musicians, then turned on and tuned out (drugs were initially courtesy of the CIA, then Owsley (aka
Kid Charlemagne) turned on the world. House band for the Hell's Angels. Hardest working band in showbiz, played 200+ dates a year, built up a brand without hit records or marketing through sheer hard work.
What they really reflected was a combination of the Puritan work ethic and the libertarian streak that underlies American individualism, along with a strong "family" ethic (in their case, a large extended family that they supported).
