My reactions after reading "Wear Your Love Like Heaven."
I bought a few copies of Randy Shields' book, "Wear Your Love Like Heaven," and read through one of them today. This is, I gather, an edited selection of essays Randy Shields has posted here over time (including some quite recently; one mentions the Deepwater Horizon rig explosion).
Randy is, of course, OPOL; One Pissed Off Liberal, who blogs here. In fact, it's dedicated to all of his friends here, and his son.
OPOL's writing is easy going, something I always admire in an author. It's only too easy to over-edit, to tie one's writing up in knots, and he avoids that trap well.
This book is about hippies. It's an overview of OPOL's memories and thoughts on the history of that time, what it meant, what people thought it was about.
I felt the book implied something that I don't recall OPOL stating outright; that the term "Hippie" has become demeaned, that it has come to be seen by many as some kind of historical fluke, some sort of unforgivable and ultimately forgettable period of self-indulgence.
What OPOL is more direct about, is that this really was a kind of failed rebellion, an attempt to seriously change how our country operates on a structural level. He notes at one point that not everyone agrees it was failed, though he seems to think otherwise to at least some extent, and I can only agree.
I found it kind of emotionally tearing reading this essay collection. It reads like a eulogy, to some extent, although it's clear that he's trying to present it as a remembered manifesto (lest we forget!)
The photographs are really well selected, and I'm sorry that the world is not a place, at least currently, where OPOL can republish this book in a higher quality format, though it's a well made perfect-bound paperback and I do not mean to criticize the printer.
One of the things I think is most important about this book is that it reminds us that it wasn't all sex, drugs, and rock and roll. Some of it was more dangerous than any of that.
Some of the early photographs are of people with haircuts and dress styles we might laugh at now, if they were not brave souls marching and protesting the Vietnam War, and occasionally getting the shit beaten out of them by the gendarmes, for no legitimate reason.
So threatening, these children.
Some of them died. Well, a lot of them died, in Vietnam. But I've never quite gotten past the fact that I live in a country where the police occasionally shoot politically protesting teenagers down in the street.
And I never quite get past the fact that teenagers still do it, at times. Even not really knowing, not really, not quite for sure; that they will not get clubbed to death, for daring to exercise their Constitutionally guaranteed rights.
It's a good book. You should buy it. And buy an extra to give to one of today's teenagers, too.