Daddy, What's A Hippie? Glad You Asked-- A Guest Post From Danny Goldberg

Eventually my favorite band became the Rolling Stones and then The Clash but my very first "favorite band in the world" was The Fugs. The Fugs were the missing link between the dying out beatniks of the 1950's and their children, the then aborning hippies. I even wound up in a jail cell with Fugs founders Tuli Kupferberg and Ed Sanders (and Allen Ginsberg and Dr. Benjamin Spock) after New York's first big draft protest. Sometime later my college newspaper referred to me, then freshman class president, as our school's "first hippie." It wasn't even close to true-- but, inwardly, I was so proud.

Hopefully by now you've seen the video clip from Bill Maher's show in which Alan Grayson rubs right-wing polemicist P.J. O'Rourke's snout in his own poop after he snidely insinuates Alan and the rest of America's 99% are a bunch of hippies. (Video's up top.) Two weeks later, Bill Maher, pointing out that the protesters "don't want free love, they want paid employment," chastised conservative types who call them hippies. Now even the Pope is backing the 99% movement, the Jesus part of his religious organization coming to the fore for a change. This weekend an old friend, Danny Goldberg, published a post that goes into much greater depth, In Defense of Hippies in Dissent Magazine and he gave me permission to share it here at DWT. As usual, Danny sheds a great deal of light on something that a lot of people too young to understand the meaning of the hippie "movement" are bellowing loudly and ignorantly about-- including some non-Republicans in suits and ties. Grab a bongo and play along:

Danny's the hippie on the right (1975)

IN DEFENSE OF HIPPIES

by Danny Goldberg

Progressives and mainstream Democratic pundits disagree with each other about many issues at the heart of the Occupy Wall Street protests, but with few exceptions they are joined in their contempt for drum circles, free hugs, and other behavior in Zuccotti Park that smacks of hippie culture.

In a post for the Daily Beast, Charles Pierce worried that few could “see past all the dreadlocks and hear…over the drum circles.” Michael Smerconish asked on the MSNBC show Hardball if middle Americans “in their Barcalounger” could relate to drum circles. The New Republic’s Alex Klein chimed in, “In the course of my Friday afternoon occupation, I saw two drum circles, four dogs, two saxophones, three babies....Wall Street survived.” And the host of MSNBC’s Up, Chris Hayes (editor at large of the Nation), recently reassured his guests Naomi Klein and Van Jones that although he supported the political agenda of the protest he wasn’t going to “beat the drum” or “give you a free hug,” to knowing laughter.

Yet it is precisely the mystical utopian energy that most professional progressives so smugly dismiss that has aroused a salient, mass political consciousness on economic issues—something that had eluded even the most lucid progressives in the Obama era.

Since the mythology of the 1960s hangs over so much of the analysis of the Wall Street protests, it’s worth reviewing what actually happened then. Media legend lumps sixties radicals and hippies together, but from the very beginning most leaders on the left looked at the hippie culture as, at best, a distraction and, at worst, a saboteur of pragmatic progressive politics. Hippies saw most radicals as delusional and often dangerously angry control freaks. Bad vibes.

Not that there is anything magic about the word “hippie.” Over the years it has been distorted by parody, propaganda, self-hatred, and, from its earliest stirrings, commercialism. In some contemporary contexts it is used merely to refer to people living in the past and/or those who are very stoned.

The hippie idea, as used here, does not refer to colloquialisms like “far out” or products sold by dope dealers. At their core, the counterculture types who briefly called themselves hippies were a spiritual movement. In part they offered an alternative to organized religions that too often seemed preoccupied with rules and conformity, especially on sexual matters. (One reason Eastern religious traditions such as Buddhism and Hinduism resonated with hippies was because they carried no American or family baggage.) But most powerfully, the hippie idea was an uprising against the secular religion of America in the 1950s, morbid “Mad Men” materialism, and Ayn Rand’s social Darwinism.

The hippies were heirs to a long line of bohemians that includes William Blake, Walt Whitman, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Herman Hesse, Arthur Rimbaud, Oscar Wilde, Aldous Huxley, utopian movements like the Rosicrucians and the Theosophists, and most directly the Beatniks. Hippies emerged from a society that had produced birth-control pills, a counterproductive war in Vietnam, the liberation and idealism of the civil rights movement, feminism, gay rights, FM radio, mass-produced LSD, a strong economy, and a huge quantity of baby-boom teenagers. These elements allowed the hippies to have a mainstream impact that dwarfed that of the Beats and earlier avant-garde cultures.

In the mid-sixties rock and roll’s mass appeal fused with certain elements of hip culture, especially in San Francisco bands like the Jefferson Airplane, the Grateful Dead, and Big Brother and the Holding Company (as well as Seattle’s Jimi Hendrix). That mood was absorbed and expanded by much of the popular music world, including the already popular Bob Dylan, the Rolling Stones, and the Beatles. John Lennon’s songs “Instant Karma,” “Give Peace A Chance,” “Across The Universe,” “Revolution” (“But when you talk about destruction / Don’t you know that you can count me out”), and “Imagine” are probably as close to a hippie manifesto as existed, and the Woodstock festival as close to a mass manifestation of the idea as would survive the hype.

It is easy to cherry pick a few idiotic phrases from stoners in the 1970 documentary Woodstock, but what made the event and its legacy meaningful to its fans-- aside from the music-- was the example of people in the hip community taking care of each other, as shown in the Wavy Gravy documentary Saint Misbehavin’. No two hippies had the same notion of what the movement was all about, but there were some values they all shared. As Time put it in 1967, “Hippies preach altruism and mysticism, honesty, joy and nonviolence.”

Like any spiritual movement (or religion) hippies attracted pretenders, ranging from undercover cops to predators such as Charles Manson, who used their external trappings for very different agendas. By October of 1967, following the so-called “Summer of Love” (during which more than a hundred thousand long-haired teenagers overloaded and permanently changed the Haight-Ashbury neighborhood of San Francisco), exploitation of the word “hippie” had become sufficiently prevalent that a group of counterculture pioneers in the Bay Area held a “Death of the Hippie” mock funeral. A flier announcing the ceremony warned young seekers against the existential perils of hype.

"Media created the hippie with your hungry consent. Careers are to be had for the enterprising hippie. The media casts nets, create bags for the identity-hungry to climb in. Your face on TV. Your style immortalized without soul in the captions of the [San Francisco] Chronicle. NBC says you exist, ergo I am. Narcissism, plebian vanity."

The pure of heart were exhorted to “Exorcize Haight-Ashbury. Do not be bought by a picture or phrase. Do not be captured in words. You are free, we are free. Believe only in your own incarnate spirit.” Woodstock shows that by 1969 even the long-haired masses had taken to calling themselves “freaks.”

A year ago, shortly before the 2010 mid-year election, a left-wing blogger on a conference call with President Obama’s adviser David Axelrod complained that dismissive comments by the administration about its left-wing base amounted to “hippie punching.” The phrase was used to emphasize the contempt that the administration had shown for the progressive base, but it was also a reminder of the disdain that most of the Left has for the word “hippie,” as if to complain, “You think that we are as irrelevant as hippies!” Like those who ostentatiously distanced themselves from the Wall Street drum circles, the bloggers wanted to distinguish the modern Left from actual hippies (or who they thought hippies were).

The anti-hippie ethos on the left runs deep. Many 1960s radicals claimed that the hippies had squandered a chance to mainstream left-wing political ideas. In Black Panther leader Bobby Seale’s book Seize the Time he quotes white radical Jerry Rubin as saying that he and others had formed the “Yippies” because hippies had not “necessarily become political yet. They mostly prefer to be stoned.” In the real world, the Yippies never got a mass following, but the Grateful Dead did.

Early in 1967 writers for the Haight-Asbury psychedelic paper the Oracle, along with local poets, musicians, and mystics, organized the first Human Be-In in Golden Gate Park. They were chastised by a group of Berkley radicals, including Rubin, for rejecting their proposal that the gathering should have “demands,” a suggestion that the amused hippie conveners saw as a contradiction of the whole idea. (There are echoes of this argument in criticisms of the Occupy Wall Street protesters as insufficiently specific in their demands-- as if the interests of 99 percent are not a clear enough litmus test for any proposed laws or regulations.)

Bill Zimmerman, an antiwar activist of the Vietnam era, summarized the radical attitude toward hippies in his excellent memoir Troublemaker:

Not believing they could alter the juggernaut of American capitalism through politics, the hippies tried culture instead-- starting with [Timothy] Leary’s slogan, “Turn on, tune in, drop out”....While we [“the political people in the antiwar movement”] all accepted a subsistence lifestyle without expensive clothes, cars or other luxuries, they were about enjoyment, friendship, shared experiences, and whatever transcendence could be achieved through mind-altering drugs, music, and sex.

This both exaggerates the political viability of the non-hippie radicals of the day and underestimates the social conscience and commitment of many of those who chose to develop communes and new age spiritual communities. One example is the SEVA Foundation, founded by Wavy Gravy and Ram Dass in the early 1970s. Over the course of thirty years, the nonprofit organization has raised enough money from rock benefits to pay for over three million eye operations in third-world countries to rescue people from blindness. And of course the modern environmental movement owes as much to a mystical belief in the sanctity of the earth as it does to science.

Some on the left maintained that hippies scared off socially conservative liberals who otherwise would have been more sympathetic to the antiwar movement. In There but for Fortune, a wonderful documentary about radical singer-songwriter Phil Ochs, the artist can be heard complaining that freakish looking protesters undermined the credibility of antiwar demonstrations with middle Americans. In a piece for the Nation in 1967, Ochs’s friend Jack Newfield complained, “Bananas, incense, and pointing love rays to the Pentagon have nothing to do with redeeming America.”

Republicans leaders including Richard Nixon, Spiro Agnew, and Ronald Reagan eagerly used cartoon versions of hippies as part of their successful attempt to break up the New Deal coalition. “A hippie is someone who looks like Tarzan, walks like Jane, and smells like Cheetah,” quipped then California Governor Reagan in 1969. Jefferson R. Cowie’s Stayin’ Alive theorizes that America’s rightward trend began when Nixon lured working-class whites into Republican arms by contrasting the hippie myth of Woodstock with country singer Merle Haggard’s anti-hippie anthem “Okie from Muskogee.”

"One was southern, gritty, masculine, working class, white, and soaked in the reality of putting food on the table; the other was northern, eastern, radical, effete, leisurely, affluent, multi-cultural, and full of pipe dreams. One was real, the other surreal; one worked, the other played; one did the labor, the other did the criticism; one drank whiskey, the other smoked dope; one built, the other destroyed; one was for survival, the other was for revolution; one died in wars, the other protested wars; and one was for Richard Nixon, the other for George McGovern."

Cowie’s book is terrific, but this is nonsense. The lion’s share of the decline in Democratic votes for President occurred between 1964 (61 percent) and 1968 (43 percent), when Hubert Humphrey was the nominee. Most of those formerly Democratic votes went to the racist Alabama Governor George Wallace, who garnered 13 percent of the vote on a third-party ticket-- an explicit reaction against civil rights legislation. The demonstrations outside of the Democratic Convention in 1968 in which many Americans sympathized with cops more than protesters had nothing to do with hippies; they were orchestrated by radical non-hippies like Rubin. (Hippie icon Allen Ginsberg argued in vain against the Chicago protests, because he presciently feared violence).

Four years later, there were no hippies involved with the McGovern campaign’s mistakes, like the ill-advised selection of Thomas Eagleton as the vice-presidential nominee and the breakdown of the relationship between the campaign and organized labor. Those mistakes were made by well-intentioned but inept liberal political consultants, many of whom would self-righteously characterize themselves as “pragmatists” in future years.
It is possible that some non-racist, older, white Democrats switched sides because they were offended by aspects of hippie culture, but it seems likely that more of their children and grandchildren rejected conservative orthodoxy because of their attraction to that very culture. The Allman Brothers and other southern rock bands developed a following that dwarfed that of Haggard, and ended up being a source of funding for Jimmy Carter’s primary campaign in 1976.

Modern heirs to the hippie idea include millions of “New Age” believers, inspired by the likes of Baba Ram Dass, Joseph Campbell, Deepak Chopra, and in some cases Oprah Winfrey, whose non-hierarchal spirituality exists outside the confines of traditional churches and synagogues. Although very few neo-hippie groups have explicit political agendas, many in the progressive public interest world benefit from their largess.

What possible relevance does any of this have to American politics in 2011? For one thing, many of those young people who like to beat on drums and who devised some of the subtle infrastructure of Occupy Wall Street are clearly tuned into an energy that exists outside of the parameters of political science.

Spiritual movements do not adhere to “party lines,” which is one reason why conventional political activists find them so maddening. Martin Scorsese’s recent documentary on the life of George Harrison reminded us not only of the Beatle’s passionate embrace of Hinduism and the funds he raised for Bangladesh but also of his perverse anger at paying his taxes. Nonetheless, it doesn’t take a poll or a focus group to know that people who identify with the hippie idea are unlikely to vote Republican. (Ron Paul’s people are trying. They give out fliers at Occupy Wall Street while, as of this writing, Democrats still fear to do so.)

Conservatives have effectively peddled the notion that all politics are corrupt. The resulting apathy, and opposition to government, conveniently leaves big business more in charge than ever. The price that Democrats and progressives pay for belittling or ignoring contemporary devotees of the hippie idea, who share the opinion that politics are corrupt, is to reinforce the impulse to “drop out” in a cohort that would otherwise be, for the most part, natural allies.

Spiritual values can expand the reach of political action, especially at a time when progressives struggle to connect to mass consciousness. Their causes have been mired in phrases like “single-payer” and “cap-and-trade.” For all of their virtues, policy wonks didn’t come up with “We are the 99 percent.” People with drum circles did.

The Right understands the subtle connections between ideology and practical politics. Few Republican leaders distance themselves from right-wing Christians or demagogues like Glenn Beck. And Ayn Rand’s doctrine of selfishness, despite elements that conservative politicians would be afraid to avow, is celebrated by right-wing oligarchs and wanna-bes. Alan Greenspan, the long-time head of the Federal Reserve, was a personal disciple of Rand, and Congressman Paul Ryan, who drafted the Republican budget that would’ve eliminated Medicare, cites Rand as his intellectual hero.

Any bohemian movement will attract goofballs. Drum circles may inspire and unify a crowd in one situation, but simply drown out conversation in another. It is one thing for a polite protester to offer “free hugs,” and quite another for a sweaty inebriate to impose them. The way to deal with this is to rebuke individual jerks, not to dismiss a vibrant section of mass culture.

As Martin Luther King pursued his strategy of nonviolent protest, the NAACP leader Roy Wilkins, who oversaw most of the legal strategy for the civil rights movement, mocked him by asking, “How many laws have you changed?” King replied, “I don’t know, but we’ve changed a lot of hearts.” Obviously, the civil rights movement needed both spiritual and legal efforts to achieve its goals. So do modern progressives. As Nick Lowe asked in the song made famous by Elvis Costello, “What’s so funny about peace, love, and understanding?”

Join The Drum Circle!

No guest on Bill Maher has ever gotten a standing ovation-- until Friday night when clownish Republican Party chatterer P.J. O'Rourke accused Alan Grayson of being a hippie drum circle symp... and Alan tore him a new asshole (video above). The studio audience-- apparently also in sympathy with the 99% of his who were ripped off by the predatory banksters and their political enablers-- burst into applause for Grayson several times and then stood in the aisles cheering him, much to the visible chagrin of a sputtering, muttering O'Rourke. Out of the blue, small donors started flocking to the Blue America page donating to Grayson's campaign.

If any author inspired and set up the intellectual raison d'être for the OccupyWallStreet movement currently sweeping the country, it was surely David Korten in his 2010 book Agenda For A New Economy. The ecological aspects of this movement are yet to fully unfold, at least for the general public observing from afar. But, as Korten explains, it's as integral to it as banksterism. "This crisis," he writes, "is reducing Earth's capacity to support life and is creating large-scale human displacement and hardship that further fuel social breakdowns."

The failure of the credit system is only one manifestation of a failed economic system that is wildly out of balance with, and devastatingly harmful to, both humans and the natural environment.

Wages are falling in the face of volatile food and energy prices. Consumer debt, housing foreclosures, and executive pay are setting historic records. The middle class is shrinking. The unconscionable and growing worldwide gap between rich and poor, with its related alienation, is eroding the social fabric to the point of fueling terrorism, genocide, and other violent criminal activity.

At the same time, excessive consumption is pushing Earth's ecosystems into collapse. Climate change and the related increase in droughts, floods, and wildfires are serious threats. Scientists are in almost universal agreement that human activity bears substantial responsibility. We face severe water shortages, the erosion of topsoil, the loss of species, and the end of the fossil fuel subsidy. In each instance a failed economic system that takes no account of the social and environmental costs of monetary profits bears major responsibility.

I'm part of an e-mail discussion group that's filled with people who are as politically liberal as it is humanly possible for a conservative to be. Huh? Yes.

Today I noticed a fruit I'd never seen in my regular grocery store. I asked the fruit and vegetable guy and he waxed eloquent on how delicious they-- hachiya persimmons-- are when ripe, which would be in another 2 or 3 days. I bought a few. I put them in a basket on the kitchen table to ripen. I live in a high rent enclave on the east side of L.A. but there are almost no Republicans in the neighborhood and almost no one who dresses up in suits and ties on a regular basis. Kyle from up the street is an exception-- on both counts. It's a Saturday and he knocked on my door at 4 pm in a suit and tie asking to borrow a punch bowl because his broke and he's having some friends over. No problem. He followed me into the kitchen and immediately wrinkled his nose and pointed accusingly at the hachiya persimmons. "What are they," he demanded. I told him I'd never tasted one but that they looked interesting so I bought a few to add to my breakfast shake on Monday. He found that amusing, called me a "hopeless hippie" and left with my punch bowl as I asked him if he'd be showing reruns of the Values Voter Summit at his party later. Robert Jeffress wears suits and ties too.

On the way home from the store-- with the hachiya persimmons-- I spoke with my old friend Helen, a school psychologist who lives in Westchester County. She started telling me how "everyone" on the East Coast uses paper plates and plastic spoons and forks all the time... and that when she arrives at the local supermarket with her own cloth shopping bag, people laugh at her and call her a hippie. (Full disclosure: Helen and I were hippies in college in the mid-1960's and neither of us likes disposable plastic shopping bags.)

Back to the e-mail discussion group with the conservative liberals Gee they hate hippies. The immediate response to OccupyWallStreet from some of them was embarrassment that people "on our side" were dressed "like that" and not wearing suits and ties. Suits and ties-- like fucking Kyle up the street? And they dismissed the whole thing-- the way P.J. O'Rourke tried to do-- as a big giant drum circle... which I guess is some kind of crypto-conservative suit and tie way of saying a "circle jerk." Historian Rick Perlstein would seem as aghast by this idiocy as I was: "Rhythm," he wrote, "is the most powerful tool human beings have to coordinate their activities. Always has been, always will be. William McNeill even wrote a book about it. A gathering that harnesses it is a more powerful gathering. It's one of the things that makes the human microphone down there that Richard Kim writes about so eloquently a galvanizing thing. It's why people chant. Better, I think, to look beyond the aesthetic outrage and negative adolescent associations and recollections and figure this out as a resource."

When the OccupyWallStreet thing was just starting to roll, I asked New Jersey congressional candidate, Ed Potosnak what he thought about it. Like all progressives, he's very supportive. And he started talking about the right-wing media drum beat that the protesters have no focus and don't stand for anything or whatever the p.r. people hired by Koch or the RNC or whoever is hiring them keep repeating to journalists. Ed's take is that "media criticisms of the group’s lack of focus are ridiculous. What are they expecting, an OccupyWallStreet TV commercial and jingle? The focus of these REAL people is Wall Street and the pain our families and businesses are enduring at their hand.

"When I was in High School," he continued, "I boycotted McDonald’s for using polystyrene and you know what, they changed. Consumers are powerful when they stand up to the Big Guys. Together ordinary people can provoke changes the government has failed to accomplish by coming together, standing up, and pushing back. Hopefully Congress will fight back too, I know I will."

That's the kind of hope and the kind of change we all tried to persuade ourselves we were voting for in 2008-- even those of us who knew better. Won't be fooled again? Obama said he'd walk the picket lines with unions before he was elected. I haven't seen that as unions struggle for their lives against a powerfully coordinated and richly financed fascist assault. I hope from now on I'll only be voting for people who embrace drum circles for real. Alan Grayson and Ed Potosnak are on the same page.

Friday The Nation published Naomi Klein explaining why OccupyWallStreet is the most important thing in the world now.

If there is one thing I know, it is that the 1 percent loves a crisis. When people are panicked and desperate and no one seems to know what to do, that is the ideal time to push through their wish list of pro-corporate policies: privatizing education and social security, slashing public services, getting rid of the last constraints on corporate power. Amidst the economic crisis, this is happening the world over.

And there is only one thing that can block this tactic, and fortunately, it’s a very big thing: the 99 percent. And that 99 percent is taking to the streets from Madison to Madrid to say “No. We will not pay for your crisis.”

That slogan began in Italy in 2008. It ricocheted to Greece and France and Ireland and finally it has made its way to the square mile where the crisis began.

“Why are they protesting?” ask the baffled pundits on TV. Meanwhile, the rest of the world asks: “What took you so long?” “We’ve been wondering when you were going to show up.” And most of all: “Welcome.”