Hippies

Christopher Hitchens wrote up Eleanor Agnew's "Hippies," a memoir in which the author analyzes how world-historic events turned into iconography suitable for Madison Avenue marketers. I like the modulated irony of his conclusion:

Meanwhile, though, the anti-globalization movement has started to reject modernity altogether, to set its sights on laboratories and on the idea of the division of labor, and to adopt symbols from Fallujah as the emblems of its resistance. Conservatism cannot and does not, despite itself, remain static. It mutates into something far more reactionary than anything from which the hippies were ever fleeing.