Remember the Summer of Love? No? Lucky you.

The counterculture became self-parody before it became tragedy. The news features led to caricature, which made the freaks seem tame enough for American commerce to celebrate them too. Diners around the country offered Love Dogs and Love Burgers. Bonwit Teller sold hippie wigs. Many of the dazzling clothes on exhibit at the de Young became templates for knock-offs, filling the racks at discount stores. Publishing companies produced potboilers: The Hippie Papers, The Hippie File, The Hippie Cookbook, The Hippy’s Handbook, each of their covers featuring photos of long-haired young women in varying states of undress. One enterprising San Franciscan began a business called “Hire a Hippie,” allowing wealthy people to introduce a real hippie to their friends at cocktail parties on Nob Hill. Busses loaded with tourists rolled up and down Haight Street. (When the tourists would debark, Coyote recalls, the flower children would spray paint their camera lenses.)

The travel time from neologism to catchphrase to cliché had never been quicker. No sooner had a hippie phrase entered the general vocabulary than it became a punch line. After a brief moment of saturation, nobody seriously said “groovy” or “far out” ever again. It didn’t help that so many prominent adults were eager to grovel before this parody of youth. One look at the aging B-list actor Peter Lawford as he draped himself in love beads, sprouted salt-and-pepper mutton chops, designated his beach house a “pad,” and declared Jefferson Airplane “groovy” is enough to capture the true horror of the thing, and there were many more like him, in every corner of the straight world. Chroniclers of the Summer of Love like to belabor the brutal oppression of hippies by civil authorities. And there were indeed drug raids, neighborhood sweeps to round up runaways, and the occasional enforcement of vagrancy laws. But the opposite is nearer the truth. The dominant culture caved with astonishing speed.