The Hippie Hammer

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.