(Credits: Far Out / YouTube Still)
Mon 23 March 2026 1:30, UK
Joan Didion’s 1967 essay ‘Slouching Towards Bethlehem’ reads like walking through a daze, as she encounters a most eccentric cast of wayward characters that, as suspected, indicate a darker, less discussed side of the hippie idealism that defined the counterculture.
For Didion, San Francisco was the epicentre of a cultural shift that she suspected had done more harm than good, particularly for the youth culture in America. “San Francisco was where the social haemorrhaging was showing up,” she wrote, “San Francisco was where the missing children were gathering and calling themselves ‘hippies’. When I first went to San Francisco, I did not even know what I wanted to find out, and so I just stayed around a while and made a few friends.”
During her wandering through the city, she met ‘Deadeye’, a former Hell’s Angel-turned-wannabe religious guru, and the Grateful Dead, when she showed up in Sausalito at one of their rehearsals. She describes the “little girls” that follow the band, “The same little girls who used to hang around saxophone players, girls who live on the celebrity and power and sex a band projects when it plays”. More than anyone else, Didion encountered a number of teenage runaways, who had recently fled their homes across America to chase some unknown spiritual quest towards enlightenment, of which they believed the culture of San Francisco possessed.
After one fraught encounter, in which the writer was trying to locate Chester Anderson, a printer associated with the Beat Generation circuit, she is met with apprehension by her source, who tells her where he lives but emphasises that she wants no involvement in her pursuit. In writing, Didion quotes the Buffalo Springfield song ‘For What It’s Worth’, a sign of the times: “Paranoia strikes deep / In your life it will creep”.
The Stephen Stills-written song was released a year prior, in 1966, in the midst of the Sunset Strip curfew riots in Los Angeles, when Buffalo Springfield was the house band at the Whisky a Go-Go on the Strip at the time, and witnessed firsthand the rallies that occurred, with Stills chronicling how thousands (including Jack Nicholson and Peter Fonda) showed up to protest the enforcement of a curfew. The song captures an early shift in tensions between young people and the police and, as a result, it foretold the building tensions that Didion saw mirrored in San Francisco.
Didion also quotes a Krishna song, ‘Naradi Muni’, as she travels to speak with disciples of the Swami AC Bhaktivedanta. “Do you know who is the first eternal spaceman of this universe?” the song asks, “The first to send his wild wild vibrations / To all those cosmic superstations?” Another song permeated her consciousness as she continued to search through San Francisco: Herman’s Hermits’ 1966 tune ‘No Milk Today,’ “a song I heard on many mornings in 1967 on KFRC, the Flower Power Station, San Francisco”.
“No milk today / My love has gone away… The end of my hopes / The end of all my dreams,” she quotes from the sombre song, which tells the story of a milkman noticing that the protagonist has lost his lover, therefore no longer requiring his deliveries, “The bottle stands forlorn, a symbol of the dawn,” the Hermits sing. For Didion, the song echoes the disillusion of San Francisco’s romanticised ideals. Arriving in the city with little knowledge of what she would find, hopes and dreams pale in comparison to the grim realities she found herself at the centre of, and above all, she is fixated on the children she finds, all very evidently lost in their pursuit of a sense of self, “Less in rebellion against the society than ignorant of it”.
In the people she meets, Didion confronts “the reality which still eluded the press: We were seeing something important,” as she wrote, continuing, “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 atomisation 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.”
Originally published in The Saturday Evening Post in 1967, ‘Slouching Towards Bethlehem’ stands as a central criticism of the era, foreshadowing the increasing violence and disarray that would permeate California later in the decade.
