Another Roadside Attraction by Tom Robbins
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Evangelical Hippie Dippie-dom

I can remember this stuff; so by definition I suppose I wasn't there. But I must have been near enough to notice. Robbins’s modern (well, 1971) re-telling of the Gospel in the genre of the Age of Aquarius brings back memories of a softer, kinder time when all the world had to worry about was a crook named Nixon rather than a psychopath like Trump.

Not just the characters and their illicit herbal remedies, but Robbins’s baroque New Age language as well captures the mood of the day:

“Amanda and John Paul were seated on a painted log and garlanded with chrysanthemums that had been recently liberated from a suburban lawn. The lovers refused stew and wine but accepted bowls of tea. After toasts, Amanda's son—dressed in a tunic of rabbit fur and yellow brocade—was fetched from the nursery van to meet his new father and to kiss his mother good night.”

This was indeed an era of purported sensitivity and ‘mindfulness.’ Economics, for a brief period, seemed to lose its hold on the world. What mattered was that mysterious inner core touched by cheap drugs, garish clothes, and communal living. Life had become a search for “this arithmetic of consciousness that more simple men call the ‘supernatural’... Language grows a bit sticky in areas such as these... the realm of High Mystery”

Well, really it was about style: “it is style that makes us care,” says an intellectual hippie. Style, conformity to non-conformance, makes one cool. It is of course merely unlimited affectation on a budget. So religion gets a makeover. Still the same elements as the old one though: reality is somewhere else and it’s possible to think yourself there. Faith for the faithless.

The weirdest part of course is that back in the day it was the crazy hippies who were all about freedom from governmental authority and religious expression. By any definition they were evangelical, announcing the new Good News to the establishment. The red necks and other Deplorables were mainly into secular patriotism and the ‘projection’ of American power. Today, the evangelicals are the ones holding the guns and using them as well as the old time gospel to attack the establishment.

It strikes me as more than likely that the (by now) primeval call of hippiedom has transformed itself into the shouts at Trump rallies. How strange is the style of democratic politics - so variable, yet so constant in its evangelical political fervour.

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