Last Whole Earth Wayback Machine

Periodically I pull out my big fat copy of The Last Whole Earth Catalog and peer back into my youthful history, into what on this day I must call the history of my white privilege.  The particular privilege I enjoyed in my youth was certainly never available to people of color in the day, and today it isn't even available to most white kids: it was the privilege of economic security so assured that I could choose not to work, not to aspire, to waste my time and not worry about the effect of that malingering on my future. 

Last Whole Earth youth culture was a mix of love-ins, hippie-by-mail culture, and ultimately going to an experimental college where almost everyone's aspirations were pretty similar to my own.  But the catalog allowed all sorts of other weird stuff to enter the mix. 

When I perused the volume a couple of days ago, the first item my eyes alit upon was an entry for a Craftsman half-inch heavy duty drill costing under $50, which led me to look immediately for its equivalent on Amazon today: looks like the comparable item costs about $250, which doesn't seem a bad scaling for fifty years.  I was struck by its having been Sears house brand at the time, more or less the equivalent of Amazon's house brand products (though the latter have all been shoddily made in my experience), with the Last Whole Earth Catalog itself acting as the mystical soul-transmigrator which transmits essence of Sears to essence of Amazon. 

In fact, a lot of my high school infatuation with the Catalog probably sprang from a similar obsessive infatuation with the fat Sears catalogs that came to our house before Christmas (I was mesmerized by the toy section, of course, but also by the pages of fishing equipment that I never had the least use for); and the Amazon algorithms strive for the same serendipitous associations the Catalog achieved by means of its amateurish yet sublime editors and reviewers.

My second draw at the well brought something more sinister to light, the draw that libertarianism had for scruffy as well as fascistic baby boomers.  Ayn Rand and Milton Friedman are cited with approval by the reviewers (and by Stewart Brand, the presiding host of the book) as saying true things about power and the economy. 

In retrospect, that bias might help to explain both the half century of growth in the tech sector, and the kind of libertarianism now practiced by Trumpist baby boomers who probably have some nostalgia for their excesses of the 1970's when they're not attending evangelical services or target practice.  The judgments of that era, like those of today's know-nothings, were from the gut and very prone to flush the good (such as civil rights and poverty reductions achieved) out with the visibly bad  (Vietnam as seen by both hippies and fascists).  We really must be more thoughtful than that now.