Like rolling a stone down a hill and being surprised by what happened next. This Joni Mitchell interview is getting a lot of play for knocking Bob Dylan down a few pegs. Never been a fan of mumbles, and to her credit Mitchell was one of the less atonal musicians of the 1960s. After she had finished savaging the Minnesota Minstrel, the Canadian songstress took a shot at Madonna:

Railing against the "stupid, destructive" era we live in, Mitchell took aim at the Material Girl. "Americans have decided to be stupid and shallow since 1980. Madonna is like Nero; she marks the turning point."

Hmm. And I'm the embittered reactionary. Mitchell's vituperative rant suggests what I've suspected for sometime, that many of the cultural Jacobins of the 1960s are appalled by the culture they helped create. Free love morphing into cold promiscuity, liberation of old moral restraints becoming a license for anarchy in social relations. Ortega y Gasset, whom reactionaries like me are fond of quoting, observed:

When all these things are lacking there is no culture; there is in the strictest sense of the word, barbarism. And let us not deceive ourselves, this is what is beginning to appear in Europe under the progressive rebellion of the masses. The traveler knows that in the territory there are no ruling principles to which it is possible to appeal. Properly speaking, there are no barbarian standards. Barbarism is the absence of standards to which appeal can be made.

That was in 1930. Those who lack standards tend to become "stupid and shallow." What Gasset saw in the streets of Europe eight decades was only a prelude. The fascist worship of force and will was replaced, or reformed, a generation and a half later into another form of will worship. The fascist in jackboots, and barefoot hippie, would seem to be opposites, one advocating violence and the other peace. Yet both reject reason and surrender to emotion. The fascists whom Gasset abhorred were a bit more organized, and submitted their wills and desires to that of an absolute leader. Their goal was power over others. Organization and ambition gave them the ability to seize much of Europe for a time. Had they succeed western civilization would likely have died. For all the economic strength of North America, we are intellectual dependents on European thought and mores unto this day. A non-European West would have been something akin to the Byzantines. Back to Gasset:

Under Fascism there appears for the first time in Europe a type of man who does not want to give reasons or to be right, but simply shows himself resolved to impose his opinions. This is the new thing: the right not to be reasonable, the "reason of unreason."

The fascist's direct assault on liberal civilization, was also an epistemological attack on the preceding Age of Reason. The counter-culture of the 1960s, peacefully, picked up the emotionalism of the fascists. While highlighting some of the more contested cultural dogmas of the era, premarital sex being the most famous, the counter-culture preached freedom. It was not freedom from the state, those among them capable of articulating political positions leaning heavily to the Left, but freedom from the hum-drum necessities of earning a living and respecting private property. The Five Man Electrical band expressed this anarchism rather, er, eloquently:

So I jumped on the fence and yelled at the house, Hey! what gives you the right
To put up a fence to keep me out or to keep mother nature in
If God was here, he'd tell you to your face, man you're some kinda sinner

Ms Mitchell was in a similar vein when writing:

They paved paradise
And put up a parking lot
With a pink hotel, a boutique
and a swinging hot spot

Little be it for me, here, to defend the mediocrity of most of post-modern architecture, which lurches from banality to crude stunt-making. A pink hotel may not be an improvement over whatever was paved over, but some people clearly regarded it as so. Paradise to some is paved over. Land usage debates aren't really the point. It was a cri de coeur against industrial civilization, and its impositions on "free spirits." Previous generations had regarded such "spirits" as shiftless wanderers, they became in 1960s the new ideal. Doing what you feel like is certainly liberating. Living a life on the spur of the moment, however, becomes its own trap. The long-term is rejected as restrictive. I want it now. I want it my way. It's not selfishness, though it is often mistaken as such, as no self can possibly develop from so short-term a mentality. The hippie was "stupid and shallow" to begin with. Those who came after Joni Mitchell simply cashed in on the stupidity. They're continuing to do so.