Social Experiments, with Joan Didion

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Art by Elliot Skow

In 1967 Joan Didion went to report the hippie scene in San Francisco. The most famous moment in “Slouching Toward Bethlehem,” her famous essay, comes near the end: Didion is shown a five year old girl, and told that for a year “her mother has given her both acid and peyote.” The essay’s last paragraph is also about hippies and their children:

Sue Ann’s three-year-old Michael started a fire this morning before anyone was up, but Don got it out before much damage was done. Michael burned his arm though, which is probably why Sue Ann was so jumpy when she happened to see him chewing on an electric cord. “You’ll fry like rice,” she screamed. The only people around were Don and one of Sue Ann’s macrobiotic friends and somebody who was on his way to a commune in the Santa Lucias, and they didn’t notice Sue Ann screaming at Michael because they were in the kitchen trying to retrieve some very good Moroccan hash which had dropped down through a floorboard damaged in the fire.

However noble the ideals behind their choices, these kids, some barely teenagers, were fucking up their own and their children’s lives—Didion mostly leaves this opinion unsaid. (The Hemingway lesson: detached and clinical statements of simple facts can evoke horrors.) At one point she does open up:

We were seeing the desperate attempt of a handful of pathetically unequipped children to create a community in a social vacuum. Once we had seen these children, we could no longer overlook the vacuum, no longer pretend that the society’s atomization could be reversed...At some point between 1945 and 1967 we had somehow neglected to tell these children the rules of the game we happened to be playing....These were children who grew up cut loose from the web of cousins and great-aunts and family doctors and lifelong neighbors who had traditionally suggested and enforced the society’s values.

How to satisfy basic human needs, and then how to flourish, are hard if not impossible to learn alone from scratch, and must be learned from an ongoing human community whose practices contain, however inarticulately, workable answers—is this Didion’s thesis? Maybe that reads more into what she says than is there.

Sigrid Nunez, or at least the narrator of her novel The Vulnerables, to whom she bears a remarkable resemblance, is skeptical that the scene was as bad as Didion made it out to be. Would hippies in the Haight who were dosing a five-year-old really have proudly displayed her to a “straight” journalist? The same hippies whom come off as extremely suspicious of outsiders? Maybe they were “showing” Didion things they thought she wanted to see, as a joke. (Didion, born 1934, old enough to recoil from 60’s radicalism; Nunez, born 1951, young enough to sympathize.) Nunez writes,