CSPAN is great on weekends, it’s all history, with lots of historians giving lectures on various topics and, being historians, they tend to be pretty good story tellers. That is until the sociologists show up. Nothing kills a good story like a sociologist. Instead of a rousing narrative you get heaps of arcane social science jargon. I stare blankly. It’s a panel on Haight Ashbury. Groovy, I had thought, feed my head. I turned off the Trump news to watch old hippies with Ph.D’s in history they earned to keep out of Viet Nam telling stories about the Dead and the Airplane and the Human Be In. And these panelists certainly look the part. Not a tie in the bunch. They apparently were even there, some of them. There’s some inside Deadhead references. But no stories. Instead, they are bumming my trip with sociology. Total buzzkill. Acid, incense and balloons reduced to data points. Valid data points, sure. Important perspectives, yes. But what a long, dull trip this hour has been. I like to read about this multi-disciplinary approach to history in books, sure. Hell, I am surrounded as I type here by a library of tomes like that. Sometimes at a party a stoner will crack one open and his glazed eyes will glaze over. You actually read this shit my guitar player asked incredulously after finding a some absurdly academic history of the Andrew Jackson administration tucked under the couch. I spluttered. I thought drummers couldn’t read at all he said and threw the book back on the floor. I pushed it back beneath the couch, embarrassed by my dull choice of reading matter. But that was a book. This is television. Entertainment. If I wanted that kind of dry intellectual thing I’d watch the science lectures on UCTV, which I also do, but not for a rousing good yarn. Hell, it’s Saturday night, I’m stuck at home, and TCM is having another Esther Williams marathon. So I was watching C-SPAN listening to these five professors go on about Haight Ashbury. I had no idea the Summer of Love could be so boring. I’d rather be hanging with the guy who was dishing the dirt on Alexander Hamilton a couple hours ago. He may have been wearing a suit, and probably couldn’t roll a joint, but he sure could tell a story.
.