Slouching Towards Bethlehem blog post
Slouching Towards Bethlehem by Joan Didion is an unconventional collection of essays which show Didion’s views of the world in the time of California’s hippie movement. Didion’s essays focus on drugs, addiction, violence, rebellion, and loss. The essays also seem to jump around a lot, skipping from topic to topic with no clear transition which is not dissimilar to the characters within those essays. Didion reveals a clear difference between how the people she speaks with see life and how she sees it which shows what she thinks about the human condition. Joan Didion’s Slouching Towards Bethlehem uses irony and motifs of children to express the constant need for humans to rebel and the self-destructive nature of those rebellious counter cultures.
The essay I am focusing on is “Slouching Towards Bethlehem” because it intrigued me with its loose structure and commentary on California’s hippie movement. Didion, an educated writer, interviews dropouts, runaways, and addicts which gives two very different perspectives on this movement. We see Didion’s perspective where she sees the consequences of society’s atomization and drug culture, and we see the perspectives of the people who take part in the movement who believe they are creating a counter-culture to combat the problems society faces by turning towards a new way of life. Didion uses examples of how children are affected by this movement to show the views that the people that take part in the drug culture express. Didion visits a five year old on acid and states “I start to ask if any of the other children in High Kindergarten get stoned, but I falter at the key words”(128). In this encounter, the child sees her life constantly on drugs as normal, but Didion is left speechless at the thought of it. The parents of this child normalize giving her such dangerous substances because it is seen as ‘groovy’ and rebellious. Didion also describes another child, Michael. “ Michael is three years old. He is a bright child but does not yet talk”(95). Didion, as a writer, stresses the importance of words, and this child is at a severe disadvantage because he cannot use them. Didion continues this motif of children throughout this essay to show the true victims of this culture. They are lured into a culture that causes rape, violence, and addiction by anti-establishment rhetoric which promises freedom and enlightenment.
Didion clearly states her view of this movement when she says “They are less in rebellion against the society than ignorant of it, able only to feed back certain of its most publicized self-doubts, Vietnam, Saran-Wrap, diet pills, the Bomb. They feed back exactly what is given them”(123). Didion sees the irony in this movement and uses a list of popular culture examples of things the hippie movement ironically denounces. What is the difference between diet pills and ‘macrobiotic’ dieting? Why call for the end of the Vietnam war while sustaining a scale model of Vietnam on Haight Street with drug culture? Didion also examines how this rhetoric is fed to children and consumed by them without question, exposing humanity’s need to rebel. The rebellious culture that causes kids to run away from their homes has the same values of self centeredness and greed present in the culture they ran from. Humanity has a tendency to stay in this self destructive cycle of longing for change and rebellion, but sustaining the problems and negative values that have always been ingrained in its culture.
The irony of this counter-culture movement and its consequences are what show Didion's view on the meaning of life and the human condition. Humanity has its set principles, and any attempt to rebel against them will just create a new culture where those same principles are present behind a new façade. This cycle is self destructive and ultimately creates harm when trying to create peace. We try to create change but, if unchecked, we can become that which we abhor.
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