American Insanity

Fugitives

The Last Great Dream had its HQ in San Francisco

Bohemians became hippies and then marketed the crap out of their filthy lifestyle

Jack Kerouac sold a million pairs of Levis and many more cups of cappuccino.

I never wanted to be a hippie, not while I lived in New York in the sixties. Hippies were unkempt, if not dirty. They didn’t work and they only spoke gibberish, you dig man? When I arrived in San Francisco, though, the hippie seemed to be a different creature; he or she had a job in construction or at the post office, with hair in a tidy ponytail, wearing clean overalls and work boots. I saw that I couldn’t beat them, so I joined them. They were younger than I by a decade or so. They played a mean game of softball on Sunday mornings in Chenery Park; on Sunday afternoons they tie dyed T-shirts with the slogan “Eat the Rich” above an icon of a skull and crossbones to show they meant business. Of course, hippies also smoked weed. Not only did they smoke it but they also grew it in the hills and the valleys above the city, sold it in bulk, transported it across the country and reaped the rewards, which they used to buy land hand over fist. Entrepreneurial and adventurous, they opened …

Essay

An Unnatural History of the Armadillo

They travel together in thundering herds, and freeze in headlights like deer on the highway

Antonio Rodriquez was given super-strength by a mad doctor — at the price of looking like a ’dillo

A colossal armadillo drawn by Jim Franklin lifts up a highway strip in its mouth as though it were a ribbon, flinging cars and trucks aside

By Michael Lind

Like many Texans who reach their seventh decade, I find myself thinking a lot about the armadillos in my life. Many a time I have been with a ’dillo at its demise — or, to be precise, a short period after its demise, swerving in my car to avoid its remains after it was hit by a truck or car and smeared across a highway in the Lone Star state. I have been close to ’dillos in their prime — for example, during the G-8 Economic Summit in 1990, held in a Houston arena where, not far from President George H. W. Bush and British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and their peers, I sat and watched the armadillo race that was held in honor of the global leaders. And while I have not been present at the birth of armadillos, I have known and cared for their young. When I was in junior high school during the 1970s, to earn a Boy Scout merit badge I did some work at Austin’s Natural Science Center, which combined museum exhibits with a small zoo. Among the animals I looked after were four young …

American Insanity

The Front Porch

An Unnatural History of the Armadillo