My mother is a real free thinker hippie iconoclast type. I’ve written extensively about my hippie Whole Earth Catalog meets Silicon Valley progressive technologist upbringing if you’d like to get a taste.
Her generation’s history of counter culture and inevitable rise to power has many cautionary tales we’d do well to review. The limits of starry eyed optimism and the cold hard calculations of power play out in every generation, especially as they age.
I recall her support of Ross Perot in the 92 election only to find us swept up as a country in the Clinton victory. The Clinton repurposing of a 1977 Fleetwood Mac song as its campaign anthem remains a vivid aesthetic memory from my young childhood.
Don’t stop thinking about tomorrow
Fleetwood Mac “Don’t Stop”
Don’t stop, it’ll soon be here
It’ll be better than before
Yesterday’s gone, yesterday’s gone
The oddest element of this memory is that while the Clinton victory song may have won as core memory, the deeper aesthetics of the losers have a more visceral hold. My mother’s favorite song was actually used as Ross Perot’s campaign song.
My mother can really belt out the pain and agony of Cline’s lyrics “crazy for trying and crazy for crying and I’m crazy for loving you.” I can sing it too thanks to the mimicry of childhood.
Maybe I’m crazy too. Maybe we all are. Because Perot, Patsy and my mother got to the punch of the Clinton victory and America’s love affair with thinking about tomorrow.
I knew you’d love me as long as you wanted
“Crazy” Patsy Cline (written by Willie Nelson)
And then someday you’d leave me for somebody new