For Now

I once knew a lady who worked, really worked, at having fun. Doing anything, being anywhere, that was supposed to be fun, she would burble every five minutes: “Isn’t this fun! I’m having fun! What a joyous romp!” Inevitably, it soon ceased to be any fun at all, because fun isn’t something you talk yourself into.

That long-vanished lady reminds me of the counterculture, which stopped being fun about a week after it started but kept the illusion going for years— thanks to media-momentum. After all, there were all those recording companies, sitar manufacturers, underground newspaper publishers, merchants of rhinestone studded roach holders, revolutionaries, incense magnates, tie-dyers, poster printers, greedy mystics, waterbed tycoons, concert promoters, smack pushers and all the other funpeddlers; and there were all those bored children, deprived by American education of any interior resources, eager for fun. So the hustlers hustled, the marks bought, and the media went ape.

I once knew a lady who worked, really worked, at having fun. Doing anything, being anywhere, that was supposed to be fun, she would burble every five minutes: “Isn’t this fun! I’m having fun! What a joyous romp!” Inevitably, it soon ceased to be any fun at all, because fun isn’t something you talk yourself into.

That long-vanished lady reminds me of the counterculture, which stopped being fun about a week after it started but kept the illusion going for years— thanks to media-momentum. After all, there were all those recording companies, sitar manufacturers, underground newspaper publishers, merchants of rhinestone studded roach holders, revolutionaries, incense magnates, tie-dyers, poster printers, greedy mystics, waterbed tycoons, concert promoters, smack pushers and all the other funpeddlers; and there were all those bored children, deprived by American education of any interior resources, eager for fun. So the hustlers hustled, the marks bought, and the media went ape.