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placard, You don't need magic to fight the franchising. A lone, sad-faced
clown bore a banner with a white dove in a red heart.

In Golden Gate Park, an emcee asked the crowd a series of rhetorical
questions to rev them up: "How many people were here in the sixties? . . .
How many are here now? . . . How many don't know? . . . How many don't
care?" A musician announced, "We were told not to have amplifiers, but
we decided to break the law today." Hog Farmer Sharon Share-alike
offered her roll of hard candy to novelist Herb Gold, which immediately
aroused his fear of dosing. He asked, "These really are Life Savers, right?"

The Summer of Love reunion continued at the I-Beam, a disco on
Haight Street. On stage, I compared the decades:

In the sixties, marijuana was ten dollars an ounce. In the eighties, it's
three hundred. In the sixties, teenagers used to hide their pot
smoking from their parents. In the eighties, parents have to hide it
from their kids. In the sixties, the favorite chemical drug was LSD. In
the eighties, it's Ecstasy. In the sixties, Ken Kesey wasn't allowed to
donate blood because he had ingested acid. In the eighties, there
are those who are afraid to get a blood transfusion because of AIDS.
In the sixties, Lenny Bruce got arrested for saying "cocksucker" on
stage. In the eighties, Meryl Streep got an Academy Award for
saying it in Sophie's Choice. Now, almost the entire audience at a
Grateful Dead concert is younger than the number of years the band
has been together--but these kids have less deconditioning to go
through than we did. They have less innocence to lose.

When a group of students and other protesters, including Abbie
Hoffman and Amy Carter (the president' s daughter), won their case
against CIA recruiting on campus by using a "necessity defense,"
attorney Leonard Weinglass told me that the turning point for the

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