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| Much like their forebears at Woodstock... |
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| ...Occupy Wall Street protesters elevate America's level of political and cultural discourse -- not to mention hygiene. Source. |
The more I hear about the Occupy Wall Street mob, with their overrunning of public places, turning parks into garbage dumps and open-air elimination, the more I compare them to their hippie/yippie/SDS forebears -- and the more a paragraph from Leo Rosten's 1970 classic A Trumpet for Reason kicks around in my head. I couldn't rest until I'd thumbed through my autographed copy and found, on p. 51, Rosten's pithy comments on the deliberate cultivation of filth by radicals:
The glorification of dirt is a clinical signal of psychological disturbance. I feel sorry for the hippies who cannot know the psychological price they pay for this infantile regressing to the anal level. The "corruption and chaos" they reject, in their search for Arcadian innocence, is -- alas -- transported within themselves. Their hell is inside them. It is folly for adults to glamorize the hippies' weird cult. It is cruel to idealize mental illness as a new "youth culture."
Any less true today than it was 41 years ago?
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