Be a Good Freak and Kill a Hippie

 

 

I was going to compose my thoughts on this important subject into their usual essay format, delineating my theses and subtheses in a series of elegant paragraphs such that you, the unenlightened, would have no option to but to walk away shaking your head at your previous ignorance after reading them. The format works well enough. But what I have to say now is so important that using such a device might be self-indulgent. I would hate to think that any of you grew tired of my eloquence and quailed at the verbal colonnade supporting my argument, thus keeping you from beholding that argument itself. Therefore, I advise you to sit tight and merely review the following list of reasons why you should NOT be nostalgic about the 1960s if you weren't actually there. (Those of you who were there, of course, are free to continue in your correct or erroneous recollections of the import and pleasure of those times. No argument exists to counter experience or to gainsay emotion. But I must ask, Is that you or the orange LSD wedges with the STP booster talking?) Please attend.
WHY SIXTIES NOSTALGIA IS INADVISABLE

1. Freaks are cool by definition; hippies can be cool, but it's not a given. Although you run the risk of being slapped, youngsters, here's a dare: Walk up to anyone above the age of 50 whom you know was at Monterey Pop or Woodstock or used to drink Janis Joplin under the table at Max's Kansas City and call them a "hippie." Then duck or move backwards quickly, keeping your eyes on theirs so you can observe the flash, not unlike the green one said to occur at sunset at certain latitudes. "We called ourselves 'freaks,' not 'hippies'; 'hippies' is what they called us" is a likely response. And believe me, you really don't want to be one of them. Much of the rest of this Web site is an extended jeremiad against them. Even if you are a hippie, my hatred for you is but a pebble next to the Himalayan pile that is my utter loathing for them.

Allow me to reassure you, my bipedal and scaleless friends, that I love freaks. But I hate hippies. The former were and are a genuine and spontaneous social phenomenon that has origins in the mid-twentieth century but that continues to evolve and adapt in response to and in rebellion against the circumstances of each successive decade, whereas the latter were and are a commodified product forever linked to a specific half of a specific decade, frozen in time and attire and truly deserving of ridicule as the Möbius strip of bohemian movements. Freaks of the 1960s sported mohawks during the punk revolution of the 1970s and may have shaved heads and goatees now; perhaps they had a sex change operation, or maybe they're scaling the heights of nonconformity by doing their best to look like Baptists despite the fact that they reek of cannabis and like oral sex. Freaks aren't afraid to admit that they, too, share in human frailties and often exemplified the shortcomings they supposedly lived to denounce and demolish. In contrast, many of the people who followed the Grateful Dead around the country, for example--many, not all, please don't get mad and rip those rolling papers--were hippies, wearing mass-produced tie-dyed T-shirts, flailing their arms arhythmically to Jerry's sometimes inspired guitar work, and shining with love and trust as brilliantly as any reflection in an inch-deep puddle of patchouli oil could. As one of That Which Provides Food's college friends said of him sometime in 1985: "You're not a hippie. You think." At the time, That Which Provides Food felt that to be a crazy thing to say, but his friend was at least right about the distinction made between freaks and hippies in terms of intellectual activity; whether he himself actually thought then or thinks now is another story. He sure knows how to wash lettuce anyway.

But I digress. The good news is that the former greatly outnumber the latter, and this trend appears to be increasing daily. You can do your freaky part by expressing yourself in a truly new and bizarre way, one that hearkens back to your noble bohemian past (and note that the very term bohemian, used to denote countercultural lifestyles, dates from mid-nineteenth-century Paris) but that also looks uncompromisingly to the future. And lest any anarchopunks squatting in an old warehouse smirk contemptuously at their tie-dye-wearing faux-hippie brethren and sisthren, 1977 is history, too. Grow your fucking hair and learn to play an instrument, for crying out loud, if you're going to amplify it. If you can't have a brain, have a heart.

2. "Flower power sucks."--Frank Zappa. Further talks with the freaks you were challenged to address as hippies in the previous section will reveal additional baggage associated with the latter term. Sure, countercultural movements by definition challenge established mores and patterns of thought and emotion, and some of modern life's depressing hallmarks can be impersonality, affectless engagement with the world, and glumness. Freaks were and are fond of being happy and dispelling the grey button-down world, and the fact that they were at least as equally fond of euphoria-producing substances certainly helped their disposition. But much of the Summer of Love hype was just that: hype, spawned by the regrettable hominid tendency toward an optimism verging on collective megalomania. fostered by the media's love of anything that makes good copy and sells units, and spread across the planet by corporations eager to embrace any movement that called for accessories. In fact, by the time that actual summer of 1967 rolled around, Haight-Ashbury was drowning like a day-glo mammoth in the LaBrea Tar Pits of speed, heroin, and the damaged and penniless hordes who had flocked to the area seeking the completion to their lives they themselves had been unwilling or unable to provide. And not everyone made sage choices about where to find their mentors and drop anchor: Charles Manson recruited most of the Family in the Haight. A friend of That Which Provides Food who lived in Manhattan, was friends with people who were fucking members of Andy Warhol's factory entourage, and was present during the heady days of that city's influx of psychedelia recalls how everyone thought that the revolution would occur as a direct result of the entire planet turning on to pot and acid, an illusion dispelled when two kids went off with some guy to score and ended up having their skulls beaten in with a brick.

3. Liberation, my scaly cloaca, unless you had a penis. Women's liberation didn't really start up until the very tail end of the 1960s. The common perception that the counterculture of that time represented a clean break with the older generation's value system is just plain wrong. By and large, the dawning of the Age of Aquarius saw women, not men, bearing the water and raising the unkempt children and milking the goats and baking the whole-grain bread and otherwise submitting in perfect Pauline fashion to the unspoken domestic ultimatums of their so-called old men, who got to hang out on the street and smoke pot and ball other hot chicks. Of course, I'm sure that many women had the inborn ovaries to be their own people and call their shots, and not all men back then were pigs. But much of the established gender roles were not challenged, Betty Friedan notwithstanding.

4. Stonewall? You mean, Jackson? The sexual free-for-all that supposedly characterized the 1960s wasn't all that free. Some situational bisexuality occurred during the course of multiple couplings, but nothing like today's gay movement--or collective consciousness--existed at that time. The Stonewall Riots didn't happen until 1969, and late in the year at that, and it's not as though everything suddenly changed the next day. You youngsters have no conception of the internal and external oppression that would have been yours during those days if you happened to be queer. That Which Provides Food is fond of saying that had he been at the Stonewall Riots, he wouldn't have been throwing bottles; he'd have grabbed a rifle and been sniping at the cops from the rooftops. Many of your countercultural icons, o homosexual youth of today, would have spat on you, even if they were getting their genitals licked by members of their gender on the sly. You'd be far too truthful for their liking.

5. Drugs are better now. Those of you who want to grow up to be just like the crippled children you see on late-night television charity commercials may pine for the renowned chemical largesse of the 1960s. Well, guess what. The LSD available now is just as good as it was back then, if not better owing to the improved synthesis techniques inadvertently popularized when that huge British acid ring was busted in the early 1980s. You might need to take more, because the dosage is a bit less per hit, but it's the real deal. Marijuana is much better now than back in the days of musty Mexican; the heights achievable via such rare imports as Vietnamese or Afghani or the like are routine phenomena owing to the ingenuity of today's horticulturists. (However, I must allow as how nothing has ever surpassed Hawaiian, that boon of the 1970s.) MDA? Speed? Downers? Heroin? You can get whatever you want. Sure, it might be more expensive now, but what isn't? Okay, cocaine, good answer, but that's another story.

6. Hell, no, you wouldn't want to go. Ah, the heady political climate of those days, fueled as it was by the Vietnam War. Are you, dear reader, a boy? Would you necessarily have been in college throughout the days of the draft? Would you really want to put yourself in an era from which you could have been carried in a black rubber bag? Would you have wanted to put yourself at odds with a pack of redneck construction workers, who wouldn't grow their hair long and start smoking pot themselves for another decade at least? Would you have enjoyed being on patrol in the Mekong Delta, not sure if you were really hearing the Viet Cong or if it were just the blotter acid you'd eaten with the rest of your buddies, and watching as the grass turned into snakes all around you and slithered away? If you're a girl, you've already been advised about this retrogressive decade. To put it more plainly, all those wonderful, cathartic, unifying demonstrations took place because the Vietnam War was perceived, first by a few and then by many, as a horrible, horrible thing. Any sense of common purpose and noble intentions that you may wish you'd been able to share existed only because they all wanted to live in a time when there was no Vietnam War. Are you sure you'd want to live in a time when there was?

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You are all blessed to have been born when you were. Many important battles were fought in the 1960s, please don't misunderstand me, but what many people forget is that they were fought, not won, at that time. The victories on many of those fronts elude us still, despite progress that has been made. And battles, although thrilling at times and well suited for long-winded poems, tend to be less attractive as realities than as concepts. People get hurt and die in battles, and so they did during those years so often marketed as having been awash in daisies and love. No one stuck flowers in the wounds of those shot at Kent State, did they? The things that supposedly made the 1960s so much fun--sex, drugs, rock'n'roll, rebellion, paisley--are still very popular and quite obtainable if you have any sense in your head. The things that the popular youth movements of the 1960s struggled to overcome or transcend--conformity, spiritual blandness, sexual repression, quiet music, hatred, greed, soap--still exist and serve as deserved targets for further protest and subversion. You really want it to be 1968? There's no 1968 like the present, my friends, for here you are.

 

 

© 2001 Gregor Everitt