The saga of the Me Decade begins with one of those facts that are so big and so obvious (like the Big Dipper) no one ever comments on them any more. Namely: the thirty-year boom. Wartime spending in the United States in the 1940's touched off a boom that has continued for more than thirty years. It has pumped money into every class level of the population on a scale without parallel in any country in history. True, nothing has solved the plight of those at the very bottom, the chronically unemployed of the slums. Nevertheless, in the city of Compton, California, it is possible for a family of four at the very lowest class level, which is known in America today as “on welfare,” to draw an income of $8,ooo a year entirely from public sources. This is more than most British newspaper columnists and Italian factory foremen make, even allowing for differences in living costs. In America truck drivers, mechanics, factory workers, policemen, firemen, and garbagemen make so much moneyâ$15,000 to $20,000 (or more) per year is not uncommonâthat the word “proletarian” can no longer be used in this country with a straight face. So one now says “lower middle class.” One can't even call workingmen “blue collar” any longer. They all have on collars like Joe Namath's or Johnny Bench's or Walt Frazier's. They all have on $35 superstar Qiana sport shirts with elephant collars and 1940's Airbrush Wallpaper Flowers Buncha Grapes & Seashell designs all over them.
Well, my God, the old utopian socialists of the nineteenth centuryâsuch as Saint-Simon, Owen, Fourier, and Marxâ
lived
for the day of the liberated workingman. They foresaw a day when industrialism (Saint-Simon coined the word) would give the common man the things he needed in order to realize his potential as a human being: surplus (discretionary) income, political freedom, free time (leisure), and freedom from grinding drudgery. Some of them, notably Owen and Fourier, thought all this might come to pass first in the United States. So they set up communes here: Owen's New Harmony commune in Indiana and thirty-four Fourier-style “phalanx” settlementsâsocialist communes, because the new freedom was supposed to be possible only under socialism. The old boys never dreamed that it
would come to pass instead as the result of a Go-Getter Bourgeois business boom such as began in the U.S. in the 1940's. Nor would they have liked it if they had seen it. For one thing, the
homo novus,
the new man, the liberated man, the first common man in the history of the world with the much-dreamed-of combination of money, freedom, and free timeâthis American workingmanâdidn't
look
right. The Joe NamathâJohnny BenchâWalt Frazier superstar Qiana wallpaper sports shirts, for a start.
He didn't look right ⦠and he wouldn't â¦
do right
! I can remember what brave plans visionary architects at Yale and Harvard still had for
the common man
in the early 1950'S
.
(They actually used the term “the common man.”) They had brought the utopian socialist dream forward into the twentieth century. They had things figured out for the workingman down to truly minute details, such as lamp switches. The new liberated workingman would live as the Cultivated Ascetic. He would be modeled on the B.A. -degree Greenwich Village bohemian of the late 1940'sâdark wool Hudson Bay shirts, tweed jackets, flannel trousers, briarwood pipes, good books, sandals and simplicityâexcept that he would live in a Worker Housing project. All Yale and Harvard architects worshipped Bauhaus principles and had the Bauhaus vision of Worker Housing. The Bauhaus movement absolutely hypnotized American architects, once its leaders, such as Walter Gropius and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, came to the United States from Germany in the 1930's. Worker Housing in America would have pure beige rooms, stripped, freed, purged of all moldings, cornices, and overhangsâwhich Gropius regarded as symbolic “crowns” and therefore loathsome. Worker Housing would be liberated from all wallpaper, “drapes,” Wilton rugs with flowers on them, lamps with fringed shades and bases that looked like vases or Greek columns. It would be cleansed of all doilies, knickknacks, mantelpieces, headboards, and radiator covers. Radiator coils would be left bare as honest, abstract sculptural objects.
But somehow the workers, incurable slobs that they were, avoided Worker Housing, better known as “the projects,” as if it had a smell. They were heading out instead to the suburbsâthe
suburbs
!
â-to
places like Islip, Long Island, and the San Fernando Valley of Los Angelesâand buying houses with clapboard siding and pitched roofs and shingles and gaslight-style front-porch lamps and mailboxes set up on top of lengths of stiffened chain that seemed to defy gravity, and all sorts of other unbelievably cute or antiquey touches, and they loaded these houses with “drapes” such as baffled all description and wall-to-wall carpet you could lose a shoe in, and they put barbecue pits and fish ponds with concrete cherubs urinating into them on the lawn out back, and they parked twenty-five-foot-long cars out front
and Evinrude cruisers up on tow trailers in the carport just beyond the breezeway.
p
By the 1960's the common man was also getting quite interested in this business of “realizing his potential as a human being.” But once again he crossed everybody up! Once more he took his money and ranâdetermined to do-it-himself!
In 1971 I made a lecture tour of Italy, talking (at the request of my Italian hosts) about “contemporary American life.” Everywhere I went, from Turin to Palermo, Italian students were interested in just one question: Was it really true that young people in America, no older than themselves, actually left home and lived communally according to their own rules and created their own dress styles and vocabulary and had free sex and took dope? They were talking, of course, about the hippie or psychedelic movement that had begun flowering about 1965. What fascinated them the most, however, was the first item on the list: that the hippies
actually left home and lived communally according to their own rules
.
To Italian students this seemed positively amazing. Several of the students I met lived wild enough lives during daylight hours. They were in radical organizations and had fought pitched battles with police,
on the barricades
, as it were. But by 8:30 p.m. they were back home, obediently washing their hands before dinner with Mom and Dad and Buddy and Sis and the Maiden Aunt. When they left home for good, it was likely to be via the only admissible ticket: marriage. Unmarried sons of thirty-eight and thirty-nine would still be sitting around the same old table, morosely munching the gnocchi.
Meanwhile, ordinary people in America were breaking off from conventional society, from family, neighborhood, and community, and creating worlds of their own. This had no parallel in history, certainly considering the scale of it. The hippies were merely the most flamboyant
example. The New Left students of the late 1960's were another. The New Lefters lived in communes much like the hippies' but with a slightly different emphasis. Dope, sex, nudity, costumes, and vocabulary became symbols of defiance of bourgeois life. The costumery tended to be semi-military: non-com officers' shirts, combat boots, commando beretsâworn in combination with blue jeans or a turtleneck jersey, however, to show that one wasn't a uniform freak.
That people so young could go off on their own, without taking jobs, and live a life completely of their own designâto Europeans it was astounding. That ordinary factory workers could go off to the suburbs and buy homes and create their own dream housesâthis, too, was astounding. And yet the new life of old people in America in the 1960'S was still more astounding. Throughout European history and in the United States up to the Second World War, old age was a time when you had to cling to your children or other kinfolk, and to their sufferance and mercy, if any. The Old Folks at Home happily mingling in the old manse with the generations that followed? The little ones learning at Grandpa's and Grandma's bony knees? These are largely the myths of nostalgia. The beloved old folks were often exiled to the attic or the outbuildings, and the servants brought them their meals. They were not considered decorative in the dining room or the parlor.
In the 1960's, old people in America began doing something that was more extraordinary than it ever seemed at the time. They cut through the whole dreary humiliation of old age by heading off to “retirement villages” and “leisure developments”âwhich quickly became Old Folks communes. Some of the old parties managed to take this to a somewhat psychedelic extreme. For example, the trailer caravaners. The caravaners were (and are) mainly retired couples who started off their Golden Years by doing the usual thing. They went to their children, Buddy and Sis, and gingerly suggested that now that Dad had retired, he and Mom might move in with one of them. They get the old “Uhh ⦠sure”âplus a death-ray look. So the two old crocks depart and go out and buy what is the only form of prefabricated housing that has ever caught on in America: the house trailer, or mobile home. Usually the old pair would try to make the trailer look like a real house. They'd park it on a plot in a trailer park and put it up on blocks and put some latticework around the bottom to hide the axles and the wheel housings and put little awnings above the windows and a big one out over the door to create the impression of a breezeway. By and by, however, they would discover that there were people their age who actually moved off dead center with these things and went out into the world and rolled. At this point they would join a trailer caravan. And when the trailer caravans got rolling,
you had a chance to see some of the most amazing sights of the modern American landscape ⦠such as thirty, forty, fifty Airstream trailers, the ones that are silver and have rounded corners and ends and look like silver bullets ⦠thirty, forty, fifty of these silver bullets in a line, in a caravan, hauling down the highway in the late afternoon with the sun at a low angle and exploding off the silver surfaces of the Airstreams until the whole convoy looks like some gigantic and improbable string of jewelry, each jewel ablaze with a highlight, rolling over the face of the earthâthe million-volt, billion-horsepower bijoux of America!
The caravaners might start off taking the ordinary tourist routes of the West, but they would soon get a taste for adventure and head for the badlands, through the glacier forests of the Northwest and down through western Mexico, not fat green chile relleno red jacaranda blossom mariachi band caballero sombrero Tourist Mexico but western Mexico, where the terrain is all skulls and bones and junk frito and hardcheese mestizos hunkered down at the crossroads, glowering, and cows and armadillos by the side of the road on their backs with their bellies bloated and all four feet up in the air. The caravaners would get deeper and deeper into a life of sheer
trailering
. They would become experts at this twentieth-century nomad life. They would begin to look back on Buddy & Sis as sad conventional sorts whom they had left behind, poor turkeys who knew nothing of the initiations and rites of passage of trailering.
The mighty million-volt rites! Every now and then the caravan would have to seek out a trailer camp for a rest in the rush across the face of Western. America, and in these camps you'd have to plug a power line from your trailer into the utility poles the camps provide, so as to be able to use the appliances in the trailer when your car engine wasn't generating electricity. In some of the older camps these poles were tricky to use. If you didn't plug your line in in just the right manner, with the right prong up and the right one down, you stood to get a hell of a shock, a feedback of what felt like about two thousand volts. So about dusk you might see the veterans sitting outside their trailers in aluminum-and-vinyl folding chairs, pretending to be just chewing the fat at sunset but in fact nudging one another and keeping everyone on the alert for what is about to happen when the rookieâthe rheumy-eyed, gray-haired old Dad who, with Mom, has just joined the caravanâplugs into the malicious Troll Pole for the first time.
Old Dad tries to plug in, and of course he gets it wrong, tries to put the wrong prong in on top and the wrong one on the bottom, andâ
bowwwwwww!
â-he gets a thunderbolt jolt like Armageddon itself and does an inverted one-and-a-half gainer and lands on his backâ
and the veterans, men and women, just absolutely crack up, bawl, cry, laugh until they're turning inside out. And only after the last whoops and snorts have died down does it dawn on you that this poor wet rookie who plugged in wrong and has just done this involuntary Olympic diving maneuver and landed on his spine with his fingers smoking ⦠is a gray-haired party seventy-two years old. But that's also the beauty of it! They always survive! They're initiates! hierophants of the caravan who have moved off dead center! Various deadly rheumatoid symptoms disappear, as if by magic! The Gerontoid Cowboys ride! deep into a new land and a new life they've created for themselves!
It was remarkable enough that ordinary folks now had enough money to take it and run off and alter the circumstances of their lives and create new roles for themselves, such as Trailer Sailor. But simultaneously still others decided to go â¦
all the way
. They plunged straight toward what has become the alchemical dream of the Me Decade.
The old alchemical dream was changing base metals into gold. The new alchemical dream is: changing one's personalityâremaking, remodeling, elevating, and polishing one's very
self â¦
and observing, studying, and doting on it. (Me!) This had always been an aristocratic luxury, confined throughout most of history to the life of the courts, since only the wealthiest classes had the free time and the surplus income to dwell upon this sweetest and vainest of pastimes. It smacked so much of vanity, in fact, that the noble folk involved in it always took care to call it quite something else.
Much of the satisfaction well-born people got from what is known historically as the “chivalric tradition” was precisely that: dwelling upon
Me
and every delicious nuance of my conduct and personality. At Versailles, Louis XIV founded a school for girls called Saint-Cyr. At the time most schools for girls were in convents. Louis had quite something else in mind, a secular school that would develop womenfolk for the superior
race guerrière
that he believed himself to be creating in France. Saint-Cyr was the forerunner for what was known up until a few years ago as
the finishing school
. And what was
the finishing school?
Why, a school in which the personality was to be shaped and buffed like a piece of high-class psychological cabinetry. For centuries most of upper-class college education in France and England has been fashioned in the same manner: with an eye toward sculpting the personality as carefully as the intellectual faculties.
At Yale the students on the outside have wondered for eighty years
what went on inside the fabled secret senior societies, such as Skull & Bones. On Thursday nights one would see the secret-society members walking silently and single-file, in black flannel suits, white shirts, and black knit ties with gold pins on them, toward their great Greek Revival temples, buildings whose mystery was doubled by the fact that they had no windows. What in the name of God or Mammon went on in those thirty-odd Thursday nights during the senior years of these happy few? What went on was â¦
lemon sessions
!âa regularly scheduled series of the lemon sessions, just like the ones that occurred informally in girls' finishing schools.
In the girls' schools these lemon sessions tended to take place at random on nights when a dozen or so girls might end up in someone's dormitory room. One girl would become “it,” and the others would rip into her personality, pulling it to pieces to analyze every defect ⦠her spitefulness, her awkwardness, her bad breath, embarrassing clothes, ridiculous laugh, her suck-up fawning, latent lesbianism, or whatever. The poor creature might be reduced to tears. She might blurt out the most terrible confessions, hatreds, and primordial fears. But, it was presumed, she would be the stronger for it afterward. She would be on her way toward a new personality. Likewise, in the secret societies, they held lemon sessions for boys. Is masturbation your problem? Out with the truth, you ridiculous weenie! And Thursday night after Thursday night the awful truths would out, as he who was It stood up before them and answered the most horrible questions. Yes! I do it! I whack whack whack it! I'm
afraid
of women! I'm afraid of you! And I get my shirts at Rosenberg's instead of Press! ( Oh, you dreary turkey, you wet smack, you little shit!) ⦠But out of the fire and the heap of ashes would come a better man, a brother, of good blood and good bone, for the American
race guerrière
. And what was more ⦠they loved it. No matter how dreary the soap opera, the star was
Me
.
By the mid-1960'S this service, this luxury, had become available for one and all, i.e., the middle classes. Lemon Session Central was the Esalen Institute, a lodge perched on a cliff overlooking the Pacific in Big Sur, California. Esalen's specialty was lube jobs for the personality. Businessmen, businesswomen, housewivesâanyone who could afford it, and by now many couldâpaid $220 a week to come to Esalen to learn about themselves and loosen themselves up and wiggle their fannies a bit, in keeping with methods developed by William C. Schutz and Frederick Perls. Fritz Perls, as he was known, was a remarkable figure, a psychologist who had a gray beard and went about in a blue terry-cloth jumpsuit and looked like a great blue grizzled father bear. His lemon sessions sprang not out of the Manly Virtues & Cold Showers Protestant Prep-School tradition of Yale but
out of psychoanalysis. His sessions were a variety of the “marathon encounter.”
q
He put the various candidates for personality change in groups, and they stayed together in close quarters day after day. They were encouraged to bare their own souls and to strip away one another's defensive façade. Everyone was to face his own emotions squarely for the first time.
Encounter sessions, particularly of the Schutz variety, were often wild events. Such aggression! such sobs! tears! moans, hysteria, vile recriminations, shocking revelations, such explosions of hostility between husbands and wives, such mudballs of profanity from previously mousy mommies and workadaddies, such red-mad attacks! Only physical assault was prohibited. The encounter session became a standard approach in many other movements, such as Scientology, Arica, the Mel Lyman movement, Synanon, Daytop Village, and Primal Scream. Synanon had started out as a drug-rehabilitation program, but by the late 1960's the organization was recruiting “lay members,” a lay member being someone who had never been addicted to heroin ⦠but was ready for the lemon-session life.
Outsiders, hearing of these sessions, wondered what on earth their appeal was. Yet the appeal was simple enough. It is summed up in the notion: “Let's talk about
Me
.” No matter whether you managed to renovate your personality through encounter sessions or not, you had finally focused your attention and your energies on the most fascinating subject on earth:
Me
. Not only that, you also put
Me
onstage before a live audience. The popular est movement has managed to do that with great refinement. Just imagine â¦
Me and My Hemorrhoids
⦠moving an entire hall to the most profound outpouring of emotion! Just imagine â¦
my life
becoming a drama with universal significance ⦠analyzed, like Hamlet's, for what it signifies for the rest of mankind â¦
The encounter sessionâalthough it was not called thatâwas also a staple practice in psychedelic communes and, for that matter, in New Left communes. In fact, the analysis of the self, and of one another, was unceasing. But in these groups and at Esalen and in movements such as Arica there were two common assumptions that distinguished them from the aristocratic lemon sessions and personality
finishings
of yore. The first was: I, with the help of my brothers and sisters, must strip away all the shams and excess baggage of society and my upbringing in order to find the Real Me. Scientology uses the word “clear” to identify the state that one must strive for. But just what
is that state? And what will the Real Me be like? It is at this point that the new movements tend to take on a religious or spiritual atmosphere. In one form or another they arrive at an axiom first propounded by the Gnostic Christians some eighteen hundred years ago: namely, that at the apex of every human soul there exists a spark of the light of God. In most mortals that spark is “asleep” (the Gnostics' word), all but smothered by the façades and general falseness of society. But those souls who are clear can find that spark within themselves and unite their souls with God's. And with that conviction comes the second assumption: there is an
other order
that actually reigns supreme in the world. Like the light of God itself, this
other order
is invisible to most mortals. But he who has dug himself out from under the junk heap of civilization can discover it.
And with that ⦠the Me movements were about to turn
righteous
.