Have you ever had a memory resurface like disagreeable, unwanted flotsam? Like when you're bobbing in warm ocean water at the Jersey shore, relaxed and fully happy, then suddenly, an air-filled (or gas-filled?) bag of medical waste surfaces at your side? You see the black and red bio hazard label, and then the bag's contents: used syringes, knotted condoms, deflated IV bags, deformed enema bottles, all surrounded by a brownish-red muck? You swim in with your head above water, stop at the van for the Clorox bottle, and take a long shower? And when you return to the beach, the bag is still visible, but slowly retreating? My recent flotsam-memory concerned a comment made by a young classmate about the 1968 Presidential Primaries. This event occurred in the spring during a junior high school civics class. The Diggers had proclaimed the counterculture dead by fall 1967. In the southwest suburbia of Cleveland, we young students were shamefully unaware of its life or death or significance. Most student comment reflected the attitudes of parents, which ranged, in my socioeconomically and racially homogeneous but intellectually diverse bedroom community from hostile apathy to the strange beginnings of MOR commercial counterculturalism (which later gave rise to Frank Zappa's "consumer-amoeba" construct, and President George W. Bush, crackhead). A student comment connected RFK's hairstyle to a fear that he might be part of the "LSD for lunch bunch". This comment reflected the "METRACAL for lunch bunch" advertising campaign. Metracal was one of the early meal-replacement liquid diet adjuncts. It was developed from baby formula by food scientists at Mead-Johnson to deliver, upon drinking, the feeling of "fullness" after a meal without caloric intake. The desired result was severe and rapid weight loss.
"The Metracal system consisted of flavoured powders
which were to be added to water and
shaken vigorously in a specially designed
Metracal container until they frothed up
into an appetisingly dense foam, just
like a thick shake. Except the flavour,
whether it were vanilla or chocolate
or strawberry, tasted of dust."
Weight loss was seen as the route to fuck-at-the-drop-of-a-hat, which was how "The Greatest Generation" and their younger siblings misinterpreted the message of the counterculture (see Crumb, R: "Whiteman"), until Kent State and Charles Manson rendered the message moot, and Nixon rendered the message irrelevant. The "METRACAL for lunch bunch" appeared on TV as intelligent, anorexic, and eminently fuckable. The student making the anti-RFK statement is now an architect who designs hospital renovations.
