Welcome to The Confab, I'm Eric Felton. This is where the editors and writers of the Weekly Standard get together to talk about what's in the magazine, what's in the news, and whatever else may be on our minds. Fred Barnes is here to talk about the fight brewing over a $30 billion bridge tunnel and train station project in New York. Donald Trump may not be too enthusiastic at the prospect of giving billions in federal dollars to a project championed by one of his prime antagonists, New York Senator Chuck Schumer.
Fred Barnes will tell us all about it. And then Andy Ferguson will be here after his trip to San Francisco, where he visited a groovy assortment of celebrations marking the 50th anniversary of 1967's Summer of Love, like, wow, man, all that coming up on the Confab. We get the Confab started by welcoming Executive Editor of the Weekly Standard, Fred Barnes to the Confab Studio. Fred, how's it going?
It's going well, and I hope it's going to be going better. All right, well, what could be better than to be here at the Confab talking about the Gateway Project, that's your article in the Weekly Standard this week. What is the Gateway Project? Well, it's probably not of great interest to people all over the country, but if you live in New Jersey and New York...
Yeah, the Gateway Project is to build a new tunnel under the Hudson River, make it easier for these wealthy commuters to go back and forth between Manhattan and Northern New Jersey to refurbish and renovate Penn Station, which is kind of a dump. And it's nine projects, but the big ones are the tunnel in the station. I think it would be well worth the federal dollar if they could actually rebuild Penn Station the way it was back in the 50s, but I don't think they put aside enough money for that. No, I don't think they did.
You know, it is so striking when you go to Grand Central Station, which is still extraordinarily beautiful and spacious. You go to Penn Station, and it's very not spacious and dumpy. Yeah, it's like going in somebody's moldy basement. So this project, there's a board.
People are acting as though that the project isn't done deal. There was all of this money that came promised from the Obama Administration. But as you report, nobody ever bothered to put it in writing. You know, I really spent a lot of time on the reporting on this, mainly in search of a document that would say that these parties signed to this and, you know, stamped in some way or it had been put into law or there had been an executive order in which all this money was promised to this project and so on.
As it turns out, the project consisted of one thing, a press release in which this so-called agreement between New Jersey and New York officials and the federal government was forged. I was talking about $29 billion in a press release. And it'll be more than that, as it turns out, because you know, these, they always... Remember the big dig in Boston?
Look, I remember the big dig here. And when Metro was built, when I was a young reporter, I covered that. I think the original plan called for something under $2 billion. It was over $10.
And that was probably a bargain at that. It turned out to be a pretty good system for the first 25, 30 years. But then, as in some of these other transit systems, when they don't do the maintenance efficiently and on time, the system deteriorates. We particularly see that in the 100-year-old, 120-year-old system in New York City, where you fall there with an old infrastructure and you don't keep up with the maintenance.
It can collapse in a hurry. So how does New York, even though Donald Trump is a New Yorker, how does New York, with its heavily democratic politician base, go to the Trump administration at this point and say, oh, by the way, we were hoping to get $29 billion. Oh, they say, hey, we're from New York. We're not just some folks from someplace out in the aisle.
Well, we're from New York. I mean, this matters. This is not just Florida country stuff. This is New York.
I really do come with that New York complex where, look, if it happens here, it's more important than if it happened elsewhere. That doesn't seem to be winning over Elaine Chao at the Department of Transportation. Well, the leader of this effort, of course, for this project is Chuck Schumer, the Senate Minority Leader, and he's from New York. Mr.
Charm. Mr. Charm, he made the mistake of voting against the confirmation of Elaine Chao for Transportation Secretary, and I thought I asked her husband, Mitch McConnell, the Senate Majority Leader once, and what he thought of that, and I figured he'd laugh it off. He wasn't laughing at all.
He took it as a very ungracious thing for Chuck Schumer to do. And as you say, she had been on the board of the Gateway Project. Oh, they thought they had her. You see, because they had her on the board.
She was the person who would be on the spending end of all this money and on the receiving end of it as a board member of Gateway. They thought they'd locked her in, but she realized, or somebody told her that, you know, there's a conflict of interest here. So at this point, Schumer is trying to play a little political hardball. What's he up to?
Well, he's blocking three of these younger officials who've been nominated for top jobs at the Transportation Department. They're holding up their nominations, or I should say holding up their confirmations. You know, it's a tactic you can use for a while. I don't think it's going to get him anywhere.
But he... Not making more friends at DOT. He's not. You know, I think what he ought to pursue now is to go back and see if he can change his vote on Elaine Shouse confirmation.
So how do you get the commitment of $29 billion from the federal government before you've even done the engineering surveys? Or have a financial plan? Well, the answer is you don't. But, you know, somehow Chuck Schumer and the New York crowd with help from their friends in New Jersey thought that, hey, you know, this is important.
This isn't just, you know, something that might involve Kansas City. This is what's really important. And that really didn't persuade the folks in Washington so far. Now, they'll get some money.
They do need a tunnel, eventually another tunnel under the Hudson River. They need it for the cars and they need it for trains and so on. And you really do need to do something about Penn Station. Oh, Penn Station.
You know, it's so nice. I've often thought it would be so much nicer to live in Connecticut. And I could take the train to work and I'd get out every day and brand Central Station. And instead, whenever I go to New York, I wind up in Penn Station.
You know, there've been times when I've gone there with my children and my wife and I've thought, is there some way we can take the train to New York without going to Penn Station? And the answer is no. Alright. Well, Fred Barnes, executive editor of the Weekly Standard on the Gateway Project.
We'll have to come back and see what happens on this later on. Indeed. Thanks, Fred. You're welcome.
And now the confab welcomes Andy Ferguson, senior editor of the Weekly Standard and just back from San Francisco. Boy, am I arms tired. No, no, no. Any young men jokes are from a previous era.
The era that San Francisco is celebrating this year is the 50th anniversary of the Summer of Love. I know you wore flowers in your hair when you were there, but you didn't bring them flowers with you. Not since my wedding. I haven't worn them.
So, lots going on in San Francisco to celebrate the Summer of Love. You went to their actually museum exhibits about the Summer of Love. Several, several, actually. I think, well, the public library itself, the Central Public Library has, I think, four exhibits on the Summer of Love.
And then a couple of the branch libraries have their own things honoring the Summer of Love, for example. They're giving free classes in tie-dye, making in Macrame and so on. But I thought kind of the whole point of the Summer of Love was you didn't need some institution, some authority teaching you how to do tie-dye. That's right.
I hadn't really thought about that. It doesn't seem to be bothering anybody there. They seem to, I mean, they've jumped into it with both feet. Kind of the irony, one of the things I know in the piece is this is clearly something, you know, got up by the San Francisco Terrace Bureau.
And it's kind of a marketing thing. But the Summer of Love itself was a marketing thing. It was kind of a media creation. But it's a useful idea because it kind of gives you a handle on what the whole hippie movement, the whole counterculture of the late 1960s was all about.
What was it all about? Where did it come from? It seems that hippies just kind of appeared all of a sudden. Yeah, right.
But it had been brewing. Yeah, there's a lot of writing about this. Unfortunately, I had to read a lot of it. Well, a lot of people traced the hippie movement back to the Beatniks, who were also very prominent in San Francisco, Alan Ginsburg and Gary Snyder and Jack Kerouac was out there for quite a while.
And then they kind of went away and then into that vacuum, there was still all this kind of countercultural energy out there, this kind of rebellion against the middle-class American life of the 1950s and 1960s. And that took root in the hippie movement. It's funny to me that the counterculture movement got going in San Francisco. It's really kind of like the one place where the counterculture could really survive, or really just for climatic reasons, which is if you're in Buffalo, New York, and you're trying to just like, hang out and sleep where you lie down, you're not going to make it very long.
You'll have about six weeks where you can do that. San Francisco, you're around. You can kind of live on the street if you want to. Yeah, you know, that's true.
And there's something else about San Francisco, which is a city that I revere in many ways. It's always been a city of transience and itinerants. It's a great world port connected to Asia. Even from the other side of the United States, people would come around to continent.
And so it's always been bringing in new things and new people. And there's always kind of a slightly seedy edge to it, you know, kind of air of a little bit of criminality to it, but also a great openness to new things. And so San Francisco was the perfect place for it to happen. A lot of times there are these movements that people look back at 50 years later and say this big thing happened, but other than revolutions, often the things that happen, people don't realize that they're happening at the time they're happening.
But the summer of love, very much there was a notion that something was going on in San Francisco. People were coming from far and wide. How did the summer of love get going? Well, partly it was a function of something new in American life, or a new, you know, over that 10 or 15 year period, which was mass media, which meant that everybody in America, everywhere, could find out about the very same thing at the very same instant.
And that was really a tremendous revolution in the way people live their lives. And so when Word went out, you know, in about 1966, early 67, that there were a lot of really cool rock bands out in San Francisco, and the weather was great, and, you know, it's beautiful parks, and it's a beautiful city, and there was a lot of dope, and people could really go out there and live the kind of free life that they dreamed of, living three of all the constraints of Bourgeois America. The Word went out real fast, and by the spring and late spring, 67, a lot of people had moved to San Francisco, a lot of young people, a lot of runaways. And then when the schools actually let out in June across America, then the trickle of people became a flood.
And what were they all doing when they got there? Not a lot, actually. I mean, there wasn't a lot of gainful employment going on. It was a party.
You know, I mean, they came for a party, I guess I should say. The party didn't actually turn out the way everybody wanted it to, but it had been a party for a while. But by the time so many people had come out there, it was really a strain on social services, and things went south pretty fast. But before that, you know, it had been the original hippies who, by and large, I think it's understood, were children of the middle upper middle class or upper classes.
They were people who were fairly resourceful themselves, and they went into this kind of new mode of being, with, you know, smoking pot all the time and having lots of sex and partying and taking great drugs and all this gentle people. Yeah, the gentle people from everywhere. The people who kind of followed those people were from different backgrounds, didn't quite have the same resources to fall back on. And when that happened, I think the inevitable happened, which is that, as I say, it all went south very fast.
Well, and you detail in your cover story for the Weekly Standard, how, if you've got a lot of people who don't actually have resources, who are sort of just living and being, that inevitably they have to start stealing stuff. Yeah, one of the big parts of the piece is to talk about the diggers, who are also featured very prominently in all the discussions of the summer of love this year in San Francisco. The diggers were sort of an itinerant group of crypto anarchists, I guess you could say, who decided they wanted, hey, Ashbury District, where all this was taking place. They wanted to start a new economy, a free economy, they called it, in which everything would be free and there would be no need for money, because money was the great manipulator of people.
It's how the power structure kept itself in power. So if you got rid of money, then everybody would be free. And of course, now we kind of look back on it and say, Jesus, did anybody ever believe that? But they did, they did believe it, and they tried to make a go of it.
But, you know, it turns out that to have a free economy, you need money. Even if you're getting rid of money, it takes money to get rid of money. And there was a lot of not only sex, but exploitation and sexploitation. Yeah, yeah, this is something that even now doesn't get talked about very much.
One of the things, one of the traditional arrangements that the Summer of Love did not attack was the traditional relationship between men and women. The middle-class relationship that sort of obtained from cavemen to madmen, where, you know, sort of me, Tarzan, you, Jane. And in all the communes in the group houses and stuff, women were expected to be doing the cooking and the cleaning and the shopping, and the men would go out and do what men do, preening in front of each other, I guess, and trying to get other women. But it was relied very heavily on the exploitation of other people.
Although one of the things that you seem to like in the article is also related to women having a somewhat traditional role, which is the clothes of the period, at least the museum pieces you find, are really spectacular artifacts. And they rely very heavily on the fact that all of these new, free, hip and with it young women had gone to sewing class at junior high in high school, or their mother or grandmother had taught them how to sew. Yeah, it is funny. I mean, I hadn't really thought about it until I was out there talking to people, but it's one of the ironies of the great sexually liberated baby boom was the last generation in which girls were expected to know how to sew.
And so as a result, some of the clothes were just spectacular. And the best of the exhibits are the most entertaining of the exhibits in San Francisco, the young museum, it's an art museum there in Golden Gate Park, and it shows the clothes, and the clothes are just magnificent. I mean, they would take almost nothing and turn it into an object that was sort of exotic and beautiful and creative imaginative. There was a lot of very good kind of creative energy released at that time, and even though people who were looking back on it with a jointist eye, as I do, I should acknowledge that.
There was a lot of beautiful things that came from that period. To me, one of the most beautiful things that comes out of that is just the poster art of the period, which is something old and new all at the same time, these sort of letter forms taken from French-fantasy-ecla style combined with Victorian cowboy lettering, and all done with day-glows, psychedelic, magenta, and denderene colors vibrating against one another. It's designed to be looked at while you're stoned, but it can be appreciated by... Even those about...
Who are no longer... Yeah, they're spectacular. And you mentioned day-glow. One of the interesting things about these posters, and you described them exactly right, they kind of vibrate with the colors, the intensity of the colors, is there's only one in the whole exhibit that the young...
Only one poster used day-glow, or day-glow paint. Everything else was ingeniously manipulated through offset printing to make it look like it was neon or day-glow. In fact, these guys were just using this paint. You expand colors, but the choice of colors against one another.
Right, and the combinations of them in the way they did, they ran the presses, had this just spectacular original imaginative result. So you have a lot of people looking at art and listening to music that is accentuated by taking illegal drugs, and mind-altering drugs, and really thinking that things are recreational that are particularly dangerous. You have to think about all of the heroine, and in particular the LSD that people were using. A drug that kind of unhinges the mind, which is a scary thing to be engaged in, but was thought to be not only good fun, but life enhancing.
Right, yeah. It wasn't just a way to get high. In fact, it is not just a way to get high. It's a very powerful, strange drug.
But people were pretending that it was some kind of opening into a new form of consciousness or new spiritual realms and so on. There was a lot of gassy talk like that to sort of justify the party. Oddly enough, there was sort of a currant streak in the counterculture, which meant to be so liberated. But it was that they didn't want to think that all of the partying and getting high, and listening around listening to music, and all the sex and all that stuff, was just self-indulgence.
They had to find a kind of larger theoretical framework to explain why it was that they were having sex four times a day, and smoking a lot of weed and stuff like that. So that's where all this talk about new realms of consciousness. It's the same impulse that brought us the shakers. The natural thing that happens when you have a lot of people taking a lot of drugs is you have a lot of people who are either ODing or otherwise incapacitated on the street, and you tell a fantastic story about how one of the fathers of the Summer of Love came to San Francisco to witness what he had had a hand in creating and was not pleased.
Yeah. One of the iconic images from the Summer of Love in San Francisco in 1967 is a stroll that George Harrison of the Beatles took with his wife through Hade Ashbury in Golden Gate Park. You find these pictures everywhere. Somebody handed him a guitar, so he was strumming a guitar and surrounded by flowered children as they were called.
And it's soundtrack for the Summer of Love, of course, being Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club band. Which had just come out just a few weeks earlier. And so this was sort of taking the Beatles anointing the Summer of Love, sort of laying on of hands, like, isn't this great? This is exactly what he was doing.
But in fact, later on, in many different interviews, Harrison said that he went out there, and he only stayed there for about three hours because he got scared. But he was appalled. He said it was like the Bowery. It was just skid row.
And a lot of very, very young kids strung out on drugs. And he even said that his few hours in the Hade Ashbury were the things that put him off drugs altogether, the whole drug culture, because he saw where it was leading. George Harrison, the smart beetle. That gives a sense of where everything was headed with the Summer of Love, not even that far into the Summer.
How did it come to an end? Well, I guess the historians all differ about when it started and when it ended. But everybody points to at least one event, which is in the fall of 1967, after the Hade Ashbury had been flooded with new arrivals, and the older veteran hippies who'd been there were kind of thinking like, these aren't our people, and they were sort of leaving and going to Marin County in beautiful places where you wouldn't have to step on a syringe when you got up in the morning. And so they had a death of a hippie, a funeral for the last hippie, and they carried a big casket down Hade Street, took it into the park on what was known as Hippie Hill, where lots of hippies used together, and said it blaze.
And this was supposed to be a symbolic act that... There was no actual hippie in the casket. No one knows. But this was a symbolic act to say that the media had ruined it, that it had become commercialized, that it wasn't the ideal that they had hoped for, and so on.
So that's kind of an official coda to the whole business of the Summer of Love. But the Summer of Love lives on. It has impacts for how we have lived ever since and how we live today. Yeah, basically everything that's kind of nice today, and American life, the surviving hippies like to take credit for, you know, the quality of American food is much better than it was.
The wonderful, magical things that come out of Silicon Valley, they take credit for that, they take credit for new forms of work, and all those sorts of liberating things and enjoyable things that have come about in American life, they want to take credit for, I think that's kind of specious, but, you know, let them do it if they want. What about the not so wonderful things? Well, they don't seem to want to deal with that. And this is one of the things that really got me kind of mad in studying all this was no one involved in the Summer of Love and nobody writing about it now to face up to what I think is an obvious fact, which is that there was something inherently screwy about the whole project, that when you try and question every traditional assumption that people live by, you know, monogamy, honesty, all of the sorts of things that keep civilization civilized, when you question all those things, things fall apart, the center doesn't hold, and bad things come as a result of that.
Instead, what the historians are saying is that, well, what really happened was the LSD got really bad, and so people had bad trips, and then they started taking heroin. It was quality controlled. And then they say, and this is honest to God, people are serious about this. They say, well, where did the heroin come from?
And the general answer seems to be the CIA, and the CIA was using sort of conduits set up by the mafia to shove drugs into the hate ashberry where all these innocent childlike creatures took it and then fell apart. Which is, I mean, it's just crazy, but it's part of the whole self-justification that goes on when people talk about the Summer of Love. But I guess if you're going to strive to return in some way to a state of nature, it depends whether your vision of the state of nature is Rousseauian or Hobbesian. Exactly, exactly.
I think we kind of know which it is. It becomes a time of great selfishness and self-indulgence and a lack of fellow feeling. Andy Ferguson, one of the gentle people, back from San Francisco, revisiting the Summer of Love. Thanks for telling us about it on The Confab.
Thank you, Eric. That's it for The Confab this week. Be sure to tune into The Confab every week. Go to iTunes or Google Play for a free subscription or go to our website, weeklystandard.com.
Thanks so much for listening. I'm Eric Felton. Catch you next time.