"The importance of Liking Yourself is a notion that fell heavily out of favor during the coptic, anti-ego frenzy of the Acid Era - but nobody guessed, back then, that the experiment might churn up this kind of hangover: a whole subculture of frightened illiterates with no faith in anybody."

Seeing "Easy Rider" at age 25 during 1992 was, it turns out, a substantially different experience than it was at age 22 during the exceedingly cold winter of 1989.

I sat late into an unnaturally mild October night to watch the movie on cable yesterday, three years and a half-continent away from the drafty house I first saw it in. It’s odd to be referring to events so recent as if a chasm of time had opened between then and now, but at that time, I was getting ready to leave college three classes shy of a degree and heading to the town I grew up in, to take on a summer job as a career. I was broke and scared shitless and wanted nothing more than to convince my roommate that the adventures of Cap’n America and Billy were the road for us to follow, heedless of the real-life facts of the matter, which would have meant travelling America in a huge mid-seventies Gran Prix with an eight-track tape player and only a copy of Funkadelic’s "The Electric Spanking of War Babies". It seemed likely at the time, and still does, that our combined neuroses would have held us captive in the car, unable to find America or ourselves (or maybe force us to find too much of ourselves), so we dismissed the plan, especially after watching the Cap’n and Billy left for dead by the hicks, and headed to our respective post-college fates.

I can’t remember what I thought then of the movie, really. Just the aborted plan to travel cross-country and the call from the bill collector that caused me to miss a good chunk of the movie towards the end - Cap’n and Billy and the two whores dropping acid in the New Orleans graveyard and the campfire scene the above quote is from.

(Somebody (and I wish I could remember who so I could give them credit) wrote of that scene that there was little doubt "he was speaking to us...the Sixties had been and we blew it" (the quote is paraphrased, but the italics were the authors, as I remember it).)

It seems odd to see the hippies in the movie - even such current ultra-cool screen idols as Jack Nicholson and Dennis Hopper (well not Dennis Hopper, but he spends most of the film as paranoid as smoking a buttload of dope will make you) have such a sense of optimism. "These kids are gonna make the crops come in," sez Peter Fonda at the commune watching a bunch of greasy college-age kids acting out their idea of freedom while wearing mod designer clothes and forgetting that they’re planting in sand. I mean, what were they thinking? going into hick towns looking like that ? Or is it only the fact that this movie (and Deliverance) have been so much a part of my consciousness - as a child growing up substantially after the fact of the sixties - that I know better than to hang out in small towns looking like I don’t belong. Was it still a fact to be learned back then? I think not, white civil rights workers were being killed and beaten in the south during the decade before Easy Rider’s 1969 release - and a Dead Kennedys record contains a entertaining and frightening story of being accosted for being different in small-town America in the 80s...

Or is it this sense of optimism? This optimism, though, this is not a sense of optimism I think anyone in my generation knows. Witness the aborted trip above - never got off the ground, did it? Reality quickly impeded on any dreams we had. Nearly everyone I know dreaded departure from college (or high school - whichever was the last point they got the summer off) and refused to get any sort of 9-5 job for fear of compromising their morals, or some such thing. (Me too, me too). Even the people I know who took long trips cross-country, or travelled Europe, or who spent long times unemployed and drunk to "find themselves" knew (I think) that it wasn’t in the interest of turning society around. It was only delaying the inevitable decision - what were we going to do with our lives - and the knowledge that whatever we chose would prove to be wrong twenty years down the road.

It’s an argument I have often - is it better to be blissfully unaware of the pain of existence or to be a tortured and angst-filled pseudo-intellectual? Hunter was right, we have no faith in anything, least of all ourselves, it seems. What’s keeping this generation from rising up and doing...well, doing something anyway? Lack of a cute name, like the ineffectual and self-absorbed (and this is calling the kettle black from someone my age, I know)Boomers or the Moderns? People keep trying, Douglas Coupland - one of us - calls us "Generation X". Time called us "the Nothing Generation", I think. Slacker is a movie that describes lifestyles we all seem to know...but no name sticks. Maybe that’s the problem.

A schoolmate of mine once did way too much acid. I saw him that night, walking around late, explaining endlessly to anyone he could corner how wondrous he found Nietszche and how he could see molecules in our faces, but it was okay, because he loved us anyway. There was only a thin corona of iris around his pupil, and finally he was grabbed and forcefully pulled into a car by a group of his friends.

I mention him because I remember him as being both acid-damaged and unnaturally fascinated with Elvis. No easy task in a place where almost all of my friends brought Elvis into conversation daily and had dropped at least once. He went so far as to put together an Elvis revue, of which he was the star, doing a fair Elvis impersonation - the early, slim and dangerous King, unusual for an impersonator, although I think my classmate tended to costume himself in Las Vegas-era jumpsuits - historically incorrect, but probably only because Young Elvis didn’t yet have the money or imagination to clothe himself in such a manner, but certainly he would have if he did. We weren’t close, so I didn’t keep track of him after we left school, but I ran into him in a suburban bar one summer and he told me he was a Karaoke host. I found it ironic at the time, one amateur Elvis giving hundreds of others their first taste of the ability to be the King that anyone seemingly has...

...until someone told me last week - a good source - that given the current growth rate of Elvis impersonators, the year 2000 promises that one out every twelve American males will be an Elvis.

So this where I get to sound the (another) death knell for society - Hunter was right but for one point. We have no faith in anything, except Elvis. I wrote elsewhere once that Elvis was not only more popular then Jesus, but that he had more hit records and more black velvet likenesses... here’s the final nail in the cross/coffin! People who imitate Jesus are put away in institutions (or, since the Reagan years, allowed to wander the streets), but people who imitate Elvis can make a career of it!

You certainly did blow it, Captain America.