Bad Moon Rising
Ed Gorman
“A hippie is someone who looks like Tarzan, walks like Jane, and smells like Cheetah.”
“Good morning! What we have in mind is breakfast in bed for 400,000.”
“We are not about to send American boys nine or ten thousand miles away from home to do what Asian boys ought to be doing for themselves.”
“There’s a bad moon on the rise.”
Four dead in Ohio.”
JESUS CHRIST WAS NOT A HIPPIE
In the summer of 1968, the good Reverend Cartwright, last seen setting himself on fire while attempting to burn a huge pile of Beatles records, purchased six billboards around town to make sure that believers and nonbelievers alike got the message that Jesus Christ had not been like hippies during his time on earth.
Three weeks earlier, an eighty-six-year-old woman had written the local newspaper to defend our resident hippies from the slings and arrows of those who hated them. She said that given how the adults had screwed up the world there just might be a chance that these young people had some ideas worth listening to. Further-and you can imagine the bulging, crazed eyes of the good reverend as he read this-further, as a lifelong Christian she was pretty sure that if Jesus Christ walked the earth today he would walk it as a hippie. Not, I assumed, in Birkenstocks, but you get the idea.