”Will you still bleed me, will you still mislead me,

When I’m sixty-four?”

Paul McCartney

(lyrics slightly altered to fit theme)

What do Sgt. Pepper and hippie freaks, neocons and fundamentalist Christian nutbags have to do with declining Atlantic salmon numbers? Just you wait and see. There is a connection.

Trust me.

As for salmon, well, it seems like the more you read, the bleaker the restoration picture becomes. A fact, sad but true. And we’re not talking about the Connecticut River here, or even the Northeast for that matter. No, we’re focusing on the realistic possibility of Atlantic salmon extinction on planet Earth. In fact, the trend toward extinction could already be irreversible, thanks to human interference that began with dams and log drives, moved to industrialization and advanced commercial marine fishing methods, and has now introduced a death-knell known as aquaculture, or high-seas fish farming. Any of the above factors alone could have spelled eventual doom for salmon and other coldwater fish that seek pristine freshwater streams; lumped together they’re insurmountable, probably imminent.

Of course, you’ll never hear such a pessimistic assessment from the shepherds of restoration projects like the one on the Connecticut River, nor should you expect to, despite an 80 percent North American salmon decline since 1970. Their mission is to reverse the extinction process, and it’s a noble plight at that, one for which they should be saluted. But, unfortunately, conservation has little chance of succeeding in a culture of greed that dismisses global warming and acid rain as schemes of the pointy-headed, Eastern, tree-hugging, liberal elite in one breath, and attempts to legislate a ban on public-school evolution curriculum in the next. Some call it progress, others lunacy. Count me among the latter, even though I admit I’m ”out of touch” following two elections that placed rapists and plunderers in charge of the environment and Wall Street in charge of the Pentagon. Who from the Sgt. Pepper generation would have thunk it in their wildest dreams?

Horrifying!

We all know the threadbare excuse that goes back to the Magna Carta, when the world was still flat. It goes something like this: ”OK, son, I readily admit the president is a world-class embarrassment, but you should see how our General Dynamics stock has soared.”

Yeah, right! I guess that’s one way of justifying the nightmare called Bush 43. The old money and the new prophets are in a state of euphoria; them and the khaki College Republicans, every hair in place, spewing their self-righteous noise 24/7 on the tube and in the airwaves. Remember that old graffiti proclaiming ”God is Dead!” on bridge abutments and urban walls? Forget about it. He’s been resurrected with a vengeance and a Southern accent better than Hillary could ever feign. But me, I’m off on another tangent at this moment, having just returned from a trip to the sound system behind me.

You see, having mentioned Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, the classic Beatles album that recently celebrated its 40th birthday, I decided to give it a spin on my sound system. Of course it’s loud! Absolutely! Is there any other way to listen to Sarge? If you don’t like it, leave! That’s my position, because everything was loud back then, in 1967, nothing more so than the defiant shouts in the streets for racial equality, Flower Power and an end to the Vietnam War.

Predictably, the Windsor-knot Spartans won that battle. Don’t they always win? And now here we sit, teetering upon the WWIII ledge, mired in a flashback foreign fiasco by a petulant preppy brat who cheered the troops during the Yale demonstrations he witnessed, drank and drugged himself silly after earning his Ivy MBA, loafed from one crony Lone Star job to the next, purchased an American League team with idle income, and became Texas governor. It gets better. After allegedly being elected president, Dubya had the audacity to bring along a vindictive retinue from the disgraced Nixon Administration for a gluttonous joyride in capitalist greed and corruption.

Talk about payback. Who could have ever imagined it? Could it be worse? We’re being governed by an intellectually inferior Nixon clone who rose to power on updrafts from Evangelical gasbags and the highest court in the land. If you thought it only happened in movies, or long ago in Italy, Germany and Spain, think again. So it’s high time to put down Tim LaHaye and start rereading Hemingway and Silone before we are all truly ”left behind.”

Back in the idealistic Sgt. Pepper era there were many who believed hippies flipping out to Jerry, Jimi, Janis and Gracie at Golden Gate Park were a threat to our national security. Imagine that: ”peaceniks” advocating conservation, communal living, free-love, natural foods, and human dignity; protesters swarming the streets to halt racism and shake the military-industrial complex off its monorail to nuclear destruction … a threat to Western Civilization? I don’t think so, no matter what Bill O’Reilly and other Fox Noise bullies shout over opponents. Now we call it news, fair and balanced no less; years ago it was Pravda.

Today, those ”deranged, longhair commies” of the Sixties remain among us, hurting no one, content to stake their claims in the hills. They make pottery, blow glass, cultivate salubrious fruits and vegetables, read Thoreau and Nearing, Zinn and Chomsky by the woodstove — maybe even Hunter S. Thompson with a shot of Jack in the back parlor — shaking their heads in dismay at the suicidal path we chose after the racist Dixiecrats and chauvinistic, pro-hardline-Israel liberals switched sides in ’68.

Since that political line of demarcation was excavated into the political landscape by the infamous 1968 Democratic Convention, the Chicago 7 horror show, Dr. Spock, and the Six-Day War in the Middle East, our dramatic Atlantic salmon decline is a symbol of the selfish nation we’ve become. So let’s hope the Petulant Preppy Brat represents the historical apex of this dreadful, Sixties-borne, ”Silent Majority” experiment — a sharp, reactionary right turn away from ”Flower Children,” whose altruistic attempt to shake us from our destructive, imperialistic insanity ricocheted in the opposite direction.

If we don’t soon bang a tight U-ie, salmon haven’t a prayer.