A Commercial Opportunity

I don’t remember when the Summer Solstice parade in Santa Barbara morphed from a largely organic, hippie celebration of the sun and the beginning of summer, to a commercialized “event.” I remember attending the parade when it was young, unique, different, weird, sometimes outrageous, and seeing more recent versions that have been sterilized for out-of-towners.

Yes, there is still plenty of bare flesh to be seen, wild costumes, painted faces, body art, head pieces, but where the parade ends at Alameda Park, there is a sign announcing an ATM machine, and booths selling handicrafts, hats, jewelry, posters, and t-shirts; there is Area 51, a local band, playing on a professional stage with a mixing board; and, though the organizers call it a “garden,” it’s really an aluminum pen where overpriced beer is sold. Lines for beer and food – ranging from gyros to Jamaican jerked chicken to Chinese to Mexican – are long and slow moving. In fact, before one can buy a burrito one must stand in line to buy tickets – ten tickets for $10. One quickly has the sense that this celebration of the sun is really a barely disguised commercial opportunity. But we’re all used to that now, right? It’s the same reason the Christmas season starts on Halloween’s heels.

Judging by gray hair, worry lines, knee braces and faded tattoos, many have come to Solstice to relive the 1960’s, when the young were in their ascendancy and almost anything seemed possible, including significant changes to the American capitalist order. In addition to questioning why the United States was bombing the shit out of Vietnamese peasants, young folks questioned our economic and social arrangements, why almost every facet of American life had to be organized around the dollar and cutthroat competition.

Others in attendance, considerably younger and in the full flower of Youth & Beauty might be here to get a taste of what those heady years were like. Although it’s sunny and warm, many young women are wearing knee high leather boots or ungodly ugly UGG boots with short-shorts or short skirts. Packs of shirtless young bucks are on the prowl, flexing their muscles and six-pack abs, impervious to dangerous UV rays. Area 51 is jamming some funk, the beer is flowing in the pen, and plenty of tickets are being converted into tacos and sandwiches and ice cream.

The ATM sign bothers me and I can’t stop thinking about it -- symbolic, to me anyway, of everything that has gone awry in Santa Barbara and the rest of the nation. Perhaps I’m just bitter, pining for a hometown that never was. Boom or bust my working class circumstances haven’t changed. I was born too late to catch the apex of the 60’s, some of the hope and optimism that died with the Kennedy’s and Martin Luther King and Malcolm X and the election of Richard Nixon. I missed the high water mark described by Hunter S. Thompson in Fear & Loathing in Las Vegas. I didn’t see the great wave crash, but I did watch it recede.