The Hippie Hammer

It was sometime in the eighties.  I was upset with myself: I have a need to be productive, and I wanted to get more done.  But it was a hot, wearing summer, and I had a tendency to be a sleepyhead.  I wanted some kind of help, a mild stimulant, perhaps.  Then, one day as I was pushing a grocery cart past the coffees and teas, I spied it: a large glass jar with a bright-yellow, generic label: Instant Tea.  “Hmm,” I thought, “what could be easier than that? You toss a teaspoon or so into some water, stir, add ice, and away you go.  It’s inexpensive, and millions of Americans use it every day. How bad can it be? I’m going to buy a jar and try some.” 

Well, I was happy with my new drug.  I mean, I would wake up relatively early, make a glass, and within seconds, I felt wide awake, ready to take on the world.  And I was getting things done.  “Great stuff,“ I thought, and soon, instant tea became a regular in my pantry.

This continued for some months before I started to notice some annoying side effects: while that first glass in the morning seemed righteous, after 45 minutes to an hour, I needed a second glass.  And while the second glass was good, it wasn’t quite as good as the first.  And come to think of it, the third glass wasn’t quite as good as the second.  And the fourth glass wasn’t quite as good as the third either . . . .  Years later when a recovering friend explained to me the psychological aspects of his cocaine addiction, I related to his description of a coming-down-the-stairs effect–each new dose doesn’t get you quite as high as the last; by the end of the night, you‘re burned out and can’t “get off” anymore. 

Also, iced tea gave me an edge–but not necessarily a good one.  I was pushy and irritable.  Clerks would take one look at me, sense the annoyance and impatience, and shudder.  Ever seen the WB’s Gilmore Girls?  Well, I was like Paris Geller: I scared people.  I recall with embarassment how rude I sometimes appeared–even, often, when I was trying very hard not to be.

The thing is, I was in pain.  No, I’m not speaking of psychic pain though I know I was carrying around a certain amount of anger.  I’m speaking of actual physical pain: all that caffeine was giving me headaches.

And it all got worse: When the headaches became serious, I would try headache medicines.  But I found only Excedrin-type products helped; the key ingredient, it seems, was caffeine.  Yes, the only way I could escape my caffeine-induced headaches was to take more caffeine; I was like the alcoholic who drinks to relieve a hangover–”Hair of the dog!” my neighbor used to bark at breakfast as he’d sip on a Bloody Mary.

And after a while, it seemed like I’d had a headache for weeks; I had to do something.  But what?  I realized I was acting like a drug addict: I either had too much caffeine in my system or not enough, and it was like I was trying to do maintenance doses–and not succeeding.  I never felt good anymore.  I looked around and saw the peculiar clutter I now lived with: there on the kitchen table, there on the desk, there on the radiator shelf–a partly drunk glass of tea, the dregs thickening at the bottom.  Like little toxic-waste dumps, like a junkie’s used syringes, they littered my apartment.  “Okay,” I concluded, “let’s get this stuff out of my life.”

For the next three days, I went through withdrawal.  Oh, it wasn’t gut-wrenching like the withdrawal from heroin or something, but it was physical withdrawal–a sort of extended hangover.  I haven’t drunk instant tea since, and looking back, it occurs to me that instant tea is to caffeine about what crack is to cocaine–a degraded form of a substance that may not be that safe to begin with.  Yes, I still have some caffeine in my life, but it’s the 5 milligrams in a cup of decaffeinated tea, and I find I can do without even that.

Yeah, I was an addict, and in addition to all the symptoms mentioned above, I know I was an addict because even today, my body remembers: if I open a jar of instant tea and sniff, at the very top of my head, just below the skull, I feel a sharp pain–a tiny, intense headache like someone had reached into my brain with a hat pin and poked me. It’s the only time I feel pain there, and it only happens when I smell instant tea.  Now, by the way, I rarely have headaches, maybe two a year, and then, only when I’ve strained my neck in some way. 

Would I ever go back to caffeine?  Not on your life. I’ve learned ways to energize myself that aren’t drug induced.  Clerks no longer fear me, and I find it far easier to behave the way I’d like to behave.

Why have I told you this?  I think it’s a good example of how drug abuse isn’t necessarily the province of countercultural drugs; as likely as not, it‘s the province of legal and socially sanctioned substances.  As a nation, our double standards on drugs don’t just unfairly target certain substances: they help blind us to the potentially harmful legal ones right in front of our faces.

People often speak of “ex-hippies.”  This is usually said in deference to an assumed truism: hippies were just a thing of the late sixties and early seventies and don’t exist anymore.  Of course, there probably are true “ex-hippies,” people for whom being hippie was a sort of phase, something that no longer resonates within them–just as people can adopt ethnic identities, they can reject them.

When we do acknowledge contemporary counterculturists, we feel the need to qualify ourselves with condescending language: aging hippies, wannabe hippies, hippie followers, etc.  No sir, “real hippies” existed only in that brief half-dozen years around 1970, and that’s just the way things are! The term aging hippie is particularly strained and strange: all humans age, so why do we feel the need to call anyone “aging,” and especially, why only hippie types?

As a society, we’ve developed all sorts of linguistic mechanisms for refusing to see reality: Hippie culture began in the mid-to-late sixties and never stopped.  Too often, these “ex-hippies” we speak of are really just middle-aged hippies whose continuing ethnic identity we can’t acknowledge. We’re especially reluctant to see those Hippie-Americans who are vastly successful; being successful and being a hippie, we smugly assume, is a contradiction in terms. Surely, these individuals must have long “outgrown” their hippie identities.

Enter one Steven Jobs, PC pioneer, founder of Apple computers, now a “media mogul” at Pixar Studios, producing high-tech animated films. As many know, Jobs has a hippie past.  Question is, does he have a hippie present?

Well, based on a passage from John Markoff’s What the Dormouse Said: How the 60’s Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer Industry (Penguin, 2005), the answer would seem a resounding “Yes.”  Markoff comments on an interview with Jobs:

iTunes [then newly created by Jobs] . . . included a simple visualization feature that conjured up dancing color patterns that pulsed on the computer’s screen in concert with the beat of the music [as in a psychedelic light show].

          Obviously pleased with the feature, Jobs turned to me with a slight smile and said, “It reminds me of my youth.” I responded by mentioning the names of several of Silicon Valley’s best-known pioneers who had taken psychedelic drugs in the 1960s.  That ignited a candid and passionate response.  It is widely known that Jobs, a dropout from Reed College in Portland, had experimented with drugs and pursued a countercultural lifestyle both before and after helping found the quirky computer maker [Apple].  Despite the fact that he now flies around the world in his own corporate jet and has a personal net worth of more than one billion dollars. Jobs has maintained deep emotional ties to the era in which he grew up.

          He explained that he still believed that taking LSD was one of the two or three most important things he had done in his life, and he said he felt that because people he knew had not tried psychedelics, there were things about him they couldn’t understand.  He also said that his countercultural roots often left him feeling like an outsider in the corporate world of which he is now a leader.  (pp. xvii, xix)

So, in Jobs we see continuing countercultural identity. Further, the way Jobs displays an affinity for that identity smacks of ethnicity.  That is, all these other psuedo-explanations, cliches, we hear about hippies–“They never grew up,” “They hid from the real world,” “It was just a silly, irresponsible phase they went through,” “Oh the sixties are all over with now; there are no true hippies anymore“–don’t cut it.  They don’t explain contemporary hippies.  On the other hand, an ethnic approach explains Jobs’ “deep emotional ties” effortlessly–even predictably. For example, when he speaks of his sometime feelings of estrangement in the business world, he sounds just like some successful African-American businesspersons who rose to the top among whites–“Privately, I always felt set apart, different.”  And “passion” is what people feel for their people, for their cultural identities, not for just some past phase they went through.

Does Jobs today self-identify as “hippie”?  Got us. What we can safely say is, he seems a classic case of one we might call “ex-hippie” who isn’t. 

Five of us were sitting in the sauna.  Earlier, I had seen two of them outside–twenty-ish males, apparent hippie types. One had shoulder-length hair parted carelessly in the middle and a goatee; the other had his brown hair pulled back in a ponytail, a mustache and a small earring in his left earlobe. They had walked back in behind me. Now I found myself wanting to ask the second, who sat beside me, a question: How did he feel about the word hippie? So, politely as possible, I asked.

He said that no, he didn’t think he was a hippie. “Do you find the term offensive?” I asked.  “I mean, if other people call you a hippie, how do you feel about that?”
 
“Oh,” he shrugged, “it doesn’t bother me.”
 
“So, what do you call yourself?” I asked.

“A gypsy,” he said in a practiced manner.
 
“A gypsy?” I asked.  “Do you have any gypsy blood in you?”
 
“No,” he said somewhat defensively, “but when I was little my parents moved around a lot.”  This struck me as strange; after all, lots of people moved around a lot when they were kids–“army brats” are a good example. So why call himself a “gypsy”?  He mentioned that he had some Puerto Rican ancestry, but I suppose calling himself a Puerto Rican wouldn’t have explained the ponytail and the earring, and somehow, he thought “gypsy” did. 

“You know, I consider myself a hippie,” I offered, wanting to be sure he didn’t perceive me as a threatening outsider or a bigot.

“Do you think I’m a hippie?” he asked.

“Based on your long hair, facial hair and earring,” I replied, “yeah, I suppose I would.  If we gave a photo of you to a cross section of 100 Americans,“ I continued, “and asked each to give five words describing you, I’d bet that for at least 95, one of those five words would be hippie.”
 
Sounding ever more defensive, he retorted, “Hey, having long hair and an earring doesn’t make me a hippie!”
 
“If you were of some other distinctive ethnicity where males wore long hair–say Native American–that might make sense, but given that you‘re not, I think it’s reasonable to see you as a hippie type.”

“Well,” he responded, “if those people saw me with my gold chains on (he raised his hands to indicate a necklace), they wouldn’t say that.”  That having a few not identifiably hippie characteristics would mean people wouldn’t see him as hippie stuck me as a weak argument, but I didn’t press the point: I could see he was getting upset; the conversation soon ended. 

Were this an isolated incident, it wouldn’t be important. But I’ve seen similar resentful responses many a time. And the “gypsy” thing is also relatively common: hippie types often call themselves gypsy or something similar–“just a hippie gypsy,” to use Pete Townshend’s phrase (“Goin’ Mobile” off of Who’s Next). 

Since gypsies are an ethnicity, what we have here is a sort of displaced ethnic identity–Don’t call me hippie; call me gypsy, instead.  This as if gypsy conferred more legitimacy than hippie; certainly, this would describe how our sauna acquaintance seemed to feel.  And when he said he didn’t find being called “hippie” offensive, I think he lied.  How else can we explain his strained, slightly ridiculous and stubborn attempts to avoid that label?

Only an essentially ethnic approach seems to work; that is, members of disrespected ethnic groups, and especially those lacking any sort of opposing “pride” movement, are often ashamed of or in denial about their identity.  Though gays and lesbians aren’t an ethnic group, their term “in the closet” would seem appropos here.

As we showed in our last blog entry, “The Most Important Secret,” the social status of hippies, specifically the far right’s ability to scapegoat the counterculture, to use it as a foil, has facilitated a national slide towards fascism.  The antidote to that menacing power involves organizing the counterculture and defending its legitimate right to exist. So, how do you organize hippies if so many of them are terrified to admit, even to themselves, that they are indeed hippie?  That’s what we’re up against. Only when we first learn to accept ourselves can we save our culture, our country and this world.

It’s probably the most important thing in the world, and though it sits right in front of our eyes, we’re blind to it. And when it’s pointed out to us, we dismiss it out of hand, sniggering usually. It’s the social status of hippies.

First, hippies didn’t end with the sixties. Ask most people why they think hippies did end with the sixties, and they can’t give you an answer other than, “Hey, everybody knows it.” Point out to them the many hippie types easily identifiable today, most of whom hadn’t been born when the sixties ended, and they’ll retreat into a definitional argument: if you define “hippie” as one who existed only in the sixties, then by definition contemporary hippies can’t be “real hippies.” Yet beyond the denial lies a living cultural group comprising about ten percent of modern America (and much of the Western world).

Certainly, the most powerful force in the world today is the US government. As the world’s sole superpower, the United States plays a vital role in everything from global warming to the living conditions of billions across the globe, including, of course, Americans themselves. Meditate all you will, in this life, there is no escaping the power and influence of Washington.

In turn, Washington is dependent on how Americans vote and American politics in general. Unfortunately, over the last forty years, we’ve seen the nation slide steadily towards the repressive right, increasingly placing the interests of a tiny, super wealthy minority above all else. The election of Barack Obama is not a reversal of that ugly slide; at best, it’s only a brake on it.

When societies start to shut down, when nations become less democratic, not more, it’s usually because those privileged, reactionary few who benefit have found a scapegoat with which to demagogically manipulate the rest of the population. Whether it’s witches in New Salem, Communists under McCarthyism, Jews in Nazi Germany, African-Americans in the old South, “capitalist roaders” in Mao’s Cultural Revolution or whomever, to make a society more repressive, a scapegoat is needed to excite and absorb a society’s hatred, to trick the majority into betraying their own self-interests.

There are several ways that neoconservatism has grown so powerful–electoral fraud or a whorish mainstream media, for instance–but among these, persecution of the counterculture is likely the largest since it engages what Karl Rove calls “anger issues”; for much of America, “the counterculture” has become its favorite pulp-novel villain–“Yeah, it all started with the hippies in the sixties!”

Now America has had many scapegoats; today, we see gays and undocumented workers targeted as well as continuing appeals to anti-black prejudice and other forms of bigotry. Thing is, those other groups have organized, and they fight back. The NY Times, for instance, reports that opposition to gay marriage has lost it’s political punch due to organized resistance; politically, Hispanics have made opposition to illegal immigration as much a liability as a strength. But the same can’t be said for the counterculture. Unorganized–often not even understanding who as a group we are–we remain vulnerable, easy pickings.

Do reactionaries really target the counterculture? Regularly–from the late sixties right through the recent 2008 Presidential elections. And they do it regularly because it works. For evidence, see some of the articles on this site: “Slouching Towards the Third Reich,” “Hippie-Baiting: What Makes American Politics Tick,” and “Hippie-Baiting: The Republicans’ Secret Weapon.”

Too often, progressives see repression of the counterculture and related issues (the legalization of marijuana) as trivial–“Well, maybe picking on hippies is wrong,” they say, “but I’m going to devote my efforts to more serious matters.” But, to trivialize the very real repression of Hippie-Americans–many have been beaten, raped and/or murdered, for instance, simply for being countercultural–is to trivialize a portion of humanity and is thus a form of prejudice. And even if that repression were mild, it’s foolish to ignore: the far right is feeding off it.

Until such easy demagoguery is stopped in its tracks, until we have an organized counterculture that fights back, the repressive right will continue to have a mysterious and inordinate advantage in American politics. An injury to one really is an injury to all; the freeing of the counterculture isn’t a political luxury: it’s an indispensable step towards the rebirth of American democracy, the liberation of humankind and the salvation of our planet.