Slouching Towards Bethlehem

Is a chronicle of all the new systems being created in this vacuum era.

Deadeye is a pot smoking man sleeping in until 3 pm with a house full of strangers “trying to set up this groovy religious group – ‘Teenage Evangelism’.” (STB 87)

Deadeye has a clear evangelistic gaze and the reasonable rhetoric of car salesman. He is society’s model product. I try to meet his gaze directly because he once told me he could read character in people’s eyes, particularly if he has dropped acid, which he did, about nine o’clock this morning. “They just have to remember one thing,” he says. “The Lord’s Prayer. And that can help them in more ways than one.” (STB 107)

The Warehouse, which is where Don and a floating number of other people live, is not actually a warehouse but the garage of a condemned hotel. (STB 95)

These are people who abandon society and creating their own communities. This is the new order for relationships, society.

… we move from the Warehouse to the place where Max and Sharon live with a couple named Tom and Barbara. … everyone is pleased to show off the apartment, which has a lot of flowers and candles and paisleys. Max and Sharon and Tom and Barbara get pretty high on hash, and everyone dances a little and we do some liquid projections and set up a strobe and take turns getting high on that. (STB 97)

Female order in this society

Barbara is on what is called the woman’s trip to the exclusion of almost everything else. When she and Tom and Sharon need money, Barbara will take a part-time job, … but she dislikes earning more than ten or twenty dollars a week. Most of the time she keeps house and bakes. “Doing something that shows your love that way … is just about the most beautiful thing I know. Whenever I hear about the woman’s trip, which is often, I think a lot about nothin’-says-lovin’-like-something-from-the-oven and the Feminine Mystique and how it is possible for people to be the unconscious instruments of values they would strenuously reject on a conscious level, but I do not mention it to Barbara. (STB 113)

Here the women still hold onto ‘traditional patriarchal dictated’ values and reject the pursuit of money however they think they are choosing these values rather than simply following the values that have been implanted in them. Moreover, unlike Woolf who instructs the women of her generation Didion, does not mention it to Barbara.

Arthur Lisch with “a pretty Dickensian picture of life on the edge of the Golden Gate Park, [with a] “riot-on-the-Street-unless” pitch.” (STB 99)

Arthur Lisch is a kind of leader of the Diggers, who, in the official District mythology, are supposed to be a group of anonymous good guys with no thought in their collective head but to lend a helping hand. (STB 99)

“The Connection” on of Arthur Lisch’s associates,

He reaches into his cape and pulls out Mimeographed sheet announcing a series of classes at the Digger Free Store on How to Avoid Getting Busted, Gangbangs, VD, Rape, Pregnancy, Beatings, and Starvation.

She keeps pointing out the inconsistencies in all of these people’s private lives and values and their political ones.

Chester Anderson is a legacy of the Beat Generation … whose hold on the District derives from his possession of a mimeograph machine, on which he prints communiques signed “the communication company”. It is another tenet of the official District mythology that the communication company will print anything anybody has to say, but in fact Chester Anderson prints only what he writes himself, agrees with, or considers harmless or dead matter. (STB 100)