as a more moderate "pragmatist", who doesn't like hippies.  Maybe he doesn't realize (yet) that he's a radical.  Maybe we should take up a collection - buy him some birkenstocks.

... often being denounced as "hip capitalists" who were co-opting the counterculture. Wenner prided himself on being a tough-minded entrepreneur, not a stoned hippie, and called his company Straight Arrow Publications.

After the demise of 1970s radicalism and the urban "underground press", RS became known for its political writing.

MTV originally started out as a kind of video RS, with a green/alternative/counterculture slant. However, this positioning didn't attract enough corporate advertisers, and after a few years MTV Networks Inc. was sold to Viacom, which made it into the purely commercial sewer channel it is today.

Was a change in consciousness fueled by many things, including the literature and poetry of the day (hard to believe, isn't it?), movies, music, working class kids going to college for the first time in large numbers, TV (they really did broadcast some serious and thought-provoking programming in the 50s and early 60s, as well as upsetting footage of racial horrors in the South) and, yes, psychedelic drugs, which I think had a very powerful and mostly positive impact on the era. Everything was being questioned and exploration was everywhere, in every area of endeavor.

So when the Viet Nam war escalated, everything was in place for a long and varied confrontation with the war machine and all the thinking that supports it.

At the core of the movement was a very strong streak of anti-materialism and anti-consumerism. To me, overcoming this orientation was one of the most effective ways corporate culture wormed its way back into prominence. If you are addicted to consumer goods, you won't be questioning much, you'll just be shopping and buying into the whole paradigm.