On the other hand, the alternative press was not ignorant of the Haight's darker sides:

Pretty little middle-class chick comes to the Haight to see what it's all about & gets picked up by a seventeen-year-old street dealer who spends all day shooting her full of speed again & again, then feed her 3000 mikes & raffles off her temporarily unemployed body for the biggest Haight Street gang bang since the night before last.

"Rape is as common as bullshit on Haight Street."

The Haight culture devolved after 1967, the Summer of Love that, among other things, witnessed the birth of the Class of 1989. With teen exploitation flicks and Madison Avenue cashing in on the hippie fad, with even a Gray Line tour through the Haight-Ashbury, the movement exploded beyond the bounds of its neighborhood, destroying itself in its own grasp with success yet somehow managing to spread an influence far beyond the San Francisco Bay. The greatest hippie event of all took place two years and 3000 miles away from the Haight's height, at Woodstock, and alternative thought echoed through education and the media.

In 1966 California elected Ronald Reagan governor because it was afraid of what was happening to society; in 1974 it elected the Zen-reading Jerry Brown, because it had finally come to imagine the potential of leaders "who could put aside political expediency when their Phantom Captains had discerned the perfect solution to a problem."

But aside from Garry Trudeau's daily cartoon lament over the fall of youthful idealism, that social daring has waned. Brown's eventual dethronement, though beyond the scope of Perry's book, was like the disillusionment with the Haight itself (California and America both turned again to Reagan), a disillusionment inevitable when hopes began so high. Where a society had once been entranced with the promise of youth, it--including the young--became obsessed with the mere appearance of youth.

Perry, now an editor at the yuppified Rolling Stone, has captured the outline of a moment of American spiritual rapture. If you read the book with a glass of electric Kool-Aid, you might be able to grasp the whole picture.