So it’s the 50th anniversary of the so-called “Summer of Love”. Me? I was too young to remember much about that summer except that “Impossible Dream” team, but this article in The Weekly Standard reminds me that, outside of some damned good music, the whole San Francisco – Haight/Ashbury thing was all pretty much bullshit.

Even a Beatle who saw it first-hand thought as much:

George Harrison and his wife visited San Francisco at the height of the Summer of Love. They wanted to see Haight-Ashbury. They walked the streets and quickly drew a crowd of flower children. Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band had been released just weeks before and, as was said, blown minds the world over. And here was one of its creators come to bestow a Beatle blessing on the counterculture of the Haight. The perfect alignment of man and moment, prophet and place: The photos taken that day, writes the rock music historian Joel Selvin, “became the single most enduring image from the city in the Summer of Love.”

From behind Harrison’s famous heart-shaped sunglasses, however, things looked different from what he’d been reading in the press.

“I went there expecting it to be a brilliant place,” Harrison said years later, “with groovy gypsy people making works of art and paintings and carvings in little workshops. But it was full of horrible spotty drop-out kids on drugs. . . .

“I could only describe it as being like the Bowery: a lot of bums and drop-outs, many of them very young kids who’d dropped acid and come from all over America to this Mecca of LSD. It certainly showed me what was really happening in the drug culture. It wasn’t what I’d thought — spiritual awakenings and being artistic — it was like alcoholism, like any addiction.”

The Harrisons wandered toward the park. The crowd grew and pressed in. When Harrison declined a joint from one of the hippies, he sensed a rising air of menace. “You’re putting me down, man,” said the offended flower child. Harrison’s limo appeared and his party ducked in, headed for the airport to fly to L.A.

“That was a turning point for me,” Harrison said. “That’s when I went right off the whole drug cult.”

You look back at that time and it’s hard not to see that, outside of The Beatles, who were the real deal) everything else associated with “The Sixties” nothing like Scott MacKenzie’s tune would have you think. And, as that Weekly Standard article says, we’re still dealing with its aftermath in terms of the socio-political.

If you really want to think of “The Sixties” as a political movement, with the “Summer of Love” as its apex, while lots of sociologists mark its beginning with JFK’s assassination and its end with either Kent State or Richard Nixon’s resignation, it’s my view that the end of “The Sixties” finally came with Hillary Clinton’s loss to Donald Trump last November. Think about it: Hillary was really just another Sixties feminist running on the oh-so-high-minded ideals of that era: equality, fairness – all that bullshit crap. Heck, if you wanted to see what happened to the “Women’s Movement” of the “The Sixties” all you had to do was look at the people knocking on doors on her behalf – all older women who still believed the dream and the possibilities of the “Age of Aquarius”. Unfortunately (actually, fortunately for the country) people didn’t buy the message because they didn’t buy the messenger.

Old legends take a while to die hard, I guess.

As Paul Mirengoff notes in this Powerline blog piece, not everything that summer of 1967 was about love and peace. And it’s not as if the lessons of peace and love had much of an impact – if it had, you wouldn’t have had that most violent of years, 1968.