The Evil Hippie

by **heyjt** » Sat Jun 24, 2006 1:35 pm

I'm posting this in response to Nemo's ranting on the counterculture, and Jeff's new post on the Yippies. It's a little dated and streaches the operational definition of "hippie" (is there one?), but I very much enjoyed the read-- From a blog called petty-larseny: Bush and Cheney: The Hippie Kings Remember hippies? No, not those loveable, ditsy, daffy, dope-smoking Wavy Gravy wannabes. I’m talking about a species of hippie largely forgotten these days: The Evil Hippie. You could find The Evil Hippie somewhere on the socio-cultural spectrum between Hell’s Angels and Jim Jones. If you’re of a certain age, you remember The Evil Hippie first-hand. I’m just on the cusp of that age, but I do remember the lingering influence evil hippies had on pop culture. I seem to remember them showing up a lot on The Mod Squad and Adam-12. Of course, no evil hippie both epitomized and transcended the species’ defining traits anywhere near as spectacularly as Charles Manson did. Manson created the hippie cult of personality known as the Manson Family, which eventually committed several grisly murders in California based on perhaps the most egregious misinterpretation of rock lyrics known to history. I’m going to use Manson as an exemplar of The Evil Hippie not (just) because his reign ended in the spilling of innocent blood, but because the particulars of his case are by far the best-known instances of Evil Hippiedom. But first, a quick, necessary tangent on the evolution of the genus Hippie. The nearest ancestor of the Hippie, of course, is The Beatnik (although many hippies erroneously claimed a stronger genealogical link to The Negro). The mutation from Beatnik to Hippie was triggered largely by the campus counterculture of the early ‘60s, led by student activists such as Mario Savio, and organized in groups such as Students for a Democratic Society. Bill Clinton is a rare extant example of this early breed of hippie, the Utopian Intellectual Hippie. Mutations are, of course, the engine of evolution. And mutations arise, in essence, from mistakes in transmission of genetic code – inaccurately relayed information. That’s how The Evil Hippie was born. Early hippiedom rejected corporate, mainstream mores in favor of lifestyles and ethical codes that provided for personal fulfillment, stronger communal ties and greater commitment to one’s society and environment. The ethos of the early Hippie was expressed in such slogans as “Turn on, tune in, drop out,” “To live outside the law, you must be honest,” and “If it feels good, do it.” Repeated transmission of the hippie code revealed rejection of the government's laws as a dominant gene, while almost no one inherited the recessive trait that obliged its carriers to adopt the code’s moral burdens. Thus, “if it feels good, do it” became an endorsement of short-term hedonism, rather than an injunction to ensure that your actions meet not just your sensory approval, but also your intellectual, logical and moral approval. “Turn on, tune in, drop out,” became a call to retreat from academia, the workplace and society, minus the prerequisite of “tuning in” to the broader, more meaningful society that lay unrealized in the future. And, “To live outside the law, you must be honest,” was seen as a simple urging “to live outside the law,” instead of what it was: A caveat that those who reject prevailing law must in that moral vacuum become even more scrupulous, and develop their own, more-exacting code. From this replication error, the Utopian Intellectual Hippie swiftly gave way to the Hedonistic Drug-Addled Hippie, and its sub-species (marked by high rates of amoral ambition): The Evil Hippie. The Evil Hippie’s codes: “Turn on, drop out,” “Live outside the law,” “Do it.” George Bush and Dick Cheney are Evil Hippies. How can this be? How can such icons of mainstream, corporate, traditional America be hippies, of any variety? Don’t let the suits fool you. They’ve put clean shirts over the tie-dyes and tucked their pony-tails under their baseball caps so you’ll let them in the house to do odd jobs, never dreaming from their appearance that the real goal of these nice boys is to steal your Hi-Fi and drink all your Scotch. Remember, both Bush and Cheney came of age during the Age of Aquarius, uninterested in the philosophical challenges inherent in Utopian Hippiedom, but powerfully drawn by Flower Power, the appeal of both corporeal and ethical Hedonistic Hippiedom. George Bush may be closer to the Hedonistic Drug-Addled Hippie than to the true Evil Hippie. But Cheney, clearly, defines the modern-day iteration of Evil Hippie. That this dynamic works well for the two should come as little surprise. It wasn’t unusual for a hippie commune to have a smiling, peace-and-love front man out on the porch, while real control of the operation lay with the surly, violent, sociopath who skulked in a dank, fetid, windowless room in the back. That’s the template for this White House: Dick Cheney is Charles Manson, George Bush is Cheney’s Bobby Beausoleil. Like many of their fellow hippies, both Bush and Cheney had run-ins with The Man during their (extended) youths. Bush used to get into it with his uptight, straight-laced Old Man. And Cheney certainly wasn't the only hippie who had better things to do than serve his country: "I had other priorities in the '60s," he said. Hell no, he wouldn’t go. Bush couldn’t get out of it, but like a good hippie made sure he stayed far from all that uncool violence, man, hanging out stateside where he could skip out on his responsibilities and continue having a good time. "I was not prepared to shoot my eardrum out with a shotgun in order to get a deferment. Nor was I willing to go to Canada," he said, referring to the tactics of some of his more courageous hippie brethren. Academically, Bush and Cheney both failed. One professor said Bush scored in the bottom 10 percent of his class. Cheney took Timothy Leary literally, and dropped out. Bush and Cheney also both failed when they tried to make it on their own in the business world. Bush again failed when he tried to become a part of The Establishment. (In this regard, Bush/Cheney diverge from Manson, who actually did succeed in creating a commercially viable product, namely the song, “Never Learn Not to Love”, which was recorded by The Beach Boys). Only when the Old Boys Network enabled Bush's Old Man to set him up in the family business could Bush pass himself off as a successful, card-carrying resident of Squaresville. And today? Today, the Bush/Cheney Family has embraced and champions and thrives within the intellectual legacy of the hippies: Relativism, or deconstructionism, if you prefer. Kurt Andersen alluded to this in a recent column for New York magazine and I’ve been thinking about it a lot over the past few years. Relativism (which I’m, lazily, going to use as synonymous with deconstructionism) is the philosophical analogue of the Hippie. It started well, with good, honorable intentions, but somewhere along the line it went awry, if only due to general misunderstanding and simplification of its principles. Today, relativism has been misinterpreted in such a way as to make possible commonplace acceptance of such absurd corollaries as: We all deserve respect, It’s all a matter of perspective, and Everything’s relative. Well, we don’t all deserve respect, not all of it is a matter of perspective and not everything is relative (at least, not in every way). Relativism’s challenge that we rethink what we know and how we know it has led to the mistaken belief that we don’t know anything and we don’t know how to know anything. There's a principle in logic that if you can prove both a and -a, then you're entitled to conclude whatever you want. Relativism has been interpreted the same way, as if every proposition now carries equal weight, demands equal respect. That, initially, eradicated the left’s ability to challenge absurd ideas originating from the left. Now, more dangerously, it's rendered the left impotent against absurd ideas originating from the right. Thus, Democratic political campaigns eschew critical ads as "negative" or even "attack" ads. The media accept the bizarro notion that explaining creationism constitutes "balance." The media also never say what's demonstrably true; the most they'll do is quote whoever says that it's true. Bush's brand of Christianity is tolerated -- rather than subjected to rigorous scrutiny -- because everyone's belief system is entitled to respect. And so on. Bush has taken this trippy notion of reality to extremes beyond the wildest phantasias of any '60s commune. Bush doesn't just have visions of an alternate plane of reality, he genuinely believes he's creating an alternate reality. How do we know this? A top Bush advisor said so, in a story written by journalist Ron Suskind: In the summer of 2002, after I had written an article in Esquire that the White House didn't like about Bush's former communications director, Karen Hughes, I had a meeting with a senior adviser to Bush. He expressed the White House's displeasure, and then he told me something that at the time I didn't fully comprehend -- but which I now believe gets to the very heart of the Bush presidency. The aide said that guys like me were ''in what we call the reality-based community,'' which he defined as people who ''believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.'' I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. ''That's not the way the world really works anymore,'' he continued. ''We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality -- judiciously, as you will -- we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out." The quotation would have been no more clearly a product of The Evil Hippie if it had read, "We create our own reality, man." Manson, the Evil Hippie archetype: 1. Created his own reality in which he was a divine presence. 2. Twisted irrelevant and benign information (Beatles lyrics) into a casus belli. 3. Launched an unprovoked attack with the intent of fomenting a larger war (the Tate-LoBianco murders were intended to spark a race war, from which the Manson Family would emerge as dominant survivors). Bush, the Evil Hippie front man: 1. Has "this sort of weird, Messianic idea of what he thinks God has told him to do," according to what Bruce Bartlett, a veteran of the Reagan and first Bush administrations, told Suskind. 2. Twisted information both irrelevant (Sept. 11) and benign (Iraq's alleged "weapons of mass destruction-related program activities") into a casus belli. 3. Launched an unprovoked attack with the intent of fomenting a larger war (the neo-con group Project for a New American Century suggested that it would take "a new Pearl Harbor" to justify war with Iraq, a war that Bush has openly said is intended to spark political, if not revolutionary, change beyond Iraq's borders). Bush told his first ghostwriter he wanted the chance for war with Iraq so that he could accumulate political capital and "get everything passed that I want to get passed." Cheney continues to make money as a war profiteer. The disparity in their goals and in the results they reap again shows us Bush on the front porch, the Jesus Freak grooving on the godhead-trip, while Cheney the Lizard King sits in the dark counting the money. We even find in both Bush and Manson an aversion to cities -- those marketplaces of ideas, where rivals will scrutinize and criticize you. Instead, they prefer private, insular communes where they can be surrounded by unthinking, uncritical followers, with no gay guys in sight, but a special emphasis on compliant chicks (and what bad-ass hippie commune would be complete without at least one lesbian and someone's Old Lady who had once killed a guy?) Like Manson, Bush even chose as his compound of choice a ranch that isn't really a ranch. So, what does all this tell us about Bush and Cheney? It helps us predict how they will behave, for one thing. But more importantly, I think it suggests how they and their followers can be beaten. They can be beaten the same way the hippies were. Yes, the hippie lifestyle largely crumbled under the burdens of its own consequences. But we can't wait that long, or bear that burden. We have to assault today's Evil Hippie the same way the right once confronted every hippie. We must call a space case a space case. We must reject nonsense as nonsense. We must assert that some things are nonsense, and provably so. We must reject the claim that every idea is equal. We must do for real what the conservatives claimed they did: Defend not just the implementation of prevailing law, but the morality of it. Demand accountability. Impose consequences. Reject relativism. Impose the reality that 2+2=4. Only after we genuinely embrace and hold ourselves accountable to "traditional" standards - that there is right and wrong, that actions do have consequences, that punishment for wrongdoing is proper - can we then begin to apply those standards to the president and his hippie friends. Posted by Jonathan Larsen : 10/20/2005 02:25:00 AM :

by **Et in Arcadia ego** » Sat Jun 24, 2006 1:58 pm

Excellent.

by **friend catcher** » Sat Jun 24, 2006 3:44 pm

The aide said that guys like me were ''in what we call the reality-based community,'' which he defined as people who ''believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.'' I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. ''That's not the way the world really works anymore,'' he continued. ''We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality -- judiciously, as you will -- we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out." I've not been able to identify this anonymous official but presume it's Rove, anyone ever confimed this. Suskind is currently getting a hammering in the UK press for confusing the names of suspects in relation to July bombings in london. He maintains the confusion is not his <a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/attackonlondon/story/0,,1804981,00.html">www.guardian.co.uk/attack...81,00.html</a> l Edited by: <A HREF=http://p216.ezboard.com/brigorousintuition.showUserPublicProfile?gid=friendcatcher>friend catcher</A> at: 6/24/06 1:57 pm

by **yesferatu** » Sat Jun 24, 2006 4:39 pm

<> Don't forget Dragnet. They loved to castigate evil hippies on that show....Webb would use them so he could crow-bar a preachy conservative monologue (presented as a conversation with his partner) into the last 5 minutes, and his TV audience sucked that shit up. And Star Trek had Evil Hippies which lied to and decieved some Good Hippies on one program.

by **yathrib** » Sat Jun 24, 2006 5:13 pm

I assume the authors are not claiming that Bush and CHeney had any connection to the counterculture as a fungible group. As such, it is even more interesting that they acted out all the least palatable characteristics of that generation. BTW, lest this become another boomer-bashing session, I'd like to refer readers to the recent book, "The Greater Generation." I don't think many of us would want to live in a world where the counterculture never existed, in spite of Nemo's ultra-rightist rants.

by **starroute** » Sat Jun 24, 2006 5:54 pm

The idea of Bush and Cheney as evil hippies may be at least half a conceit -- but it's becoming very clear to me that a fair number of the 60's-generation right-wingers, the YAF-ers and College Republicans and such, deliberately set out to co-opt the idea of revolution and have never looked back. In the 60's, being a left-wing radical meant you were cool and with it and got all the hot chicks, while being a right-winger meant you were terminally square and more than a bit of a dork. So young right-wingers who didn't want to accept this looked around for ways in which they could pretend to be just as wild and radical and revolutionary as anyone on the left. The solutions they came up with have been bedeviling us ever since, since they mostly involve trashing existing, well-functioning institutions (which is the right-wing's distorted impression of what revolutionaries do) without having a genuine progressive alternative to offer in their place (which is the aspect of revolution that right-wingers are congenitally incapable of understanding.) The Neocons and their mad desire to destroy the social and political systems of the Middle East as a sufficient end in itself (see Michael Ledeen as the prime case of this particular form of delerium) are one example. The extreme free-marketeers (like Norquist, although he's a bit younger) are another. The Freepers and dirty-tricksters and Karl Rove wannabees who think the rule of law is something that applies to other people may be a third (though that bunch is perhaps closer to the evil hippie archetype, since they don't even pretend to have revolution in mind.) This is something I've been thinking about from time to time lately -- a kind of special case of the Kantian categorical imperative for left-wing utopian idealists. "Never behave in such a way that you couldn't handle evil right-wing greedheads snatching it up and twisting it into a justification for self-advancement and trashing the local environment." Or a simpler way of putting it might just be that there was far, far too much ultra-individualism and self-indulgence in the hippie ethos, and that this is something we'd better wring out of the system before we try anything like it again. Edited by: <A HREF=http://p216.ezboard.com/brigorousintuition.showUserPublicProfile?gid=starroute>starroute</A> at: 6/24/06 3:56 pm

by **robertdreed** » Sat Jun 24, 2006 6:02 pm

Oh,I doubt that nemo is an "ultra-rightist." It sounds to me as if he's doctrinaire, reflexively anti-capitalist, knee-jerk Left all the way. But seeing as one of the hallmarks of such Leftism is the same sort of pillorying piety practiced by the reactionary Christian right, I can understand the confusion. Typically it's directed at anyone who's found to be "too materialist"- a remarkably elastic standard. For instance, I've heard the accusation directed at anyone who prefers to drink premium brand beer instead of directing their budget toward purchasing the cheapest and most generic brand available. Such epicureanism is politically suspect, comrade... As for the "Evil Hippie" essay- well, I can't say that I haven't met up with the type described in the essay. And there are undoubtedly some to be found in the ranks of the Republican Party, these days. But neither Bush nor Cheney fits that bill. They both went out of their way to apprentice themselves to the elder hierarchy of the Republican Party early on. Even in the 1960s, I've never seen any sign that they put forth any pretense that they were involved in any "alternative counterculture" experiment. The plain fact is that not all that many people were ever "hippies", in the classic original-vision Haight Ashbury sense of adopting core values of independence, transcendence, and integrity in line with the lessons they learned from psychedelic experience. In fact, such individuals and communities were largely confined to small enclaves in scattered regions of the country, with perhaps the largest concentration being in northern California and western Oregon. Even there, they were a minority among their peers. I can truthfully say that after years as a so-called longhaired hippie freak in the early 1970s, I never met a real hippie- someone who took it as a commitment- until I moved to northern California in 1974. Most everyone else who "looked the part" that I had met up to that time was pretty much just some teenager who saw the movie Easy Rider and started smoking dope, or what have you. Perhaps the best book by someone who actually took hippie idealism seriously is Haight-Ashbury Flashbacks, by Stephen Gaskin, later the founder of the Farm commune in Summertown, Tennessee. One thing that Stephen Gaskin isn't is a "moral relativist." Opposed to abortion, pro-adoption, pro-fidelity (although allowing the marital convention of dual-couple marriage), vegan, insistent on abstention from tobacco, alcohol, white sugar, and all forms of hard drugs...pro-organic agriculture, pro-alternative fuels, pro-hemp, pro-midwifery and other alternative naturopathic medicine paths, informal organizer of earthquake relief and outreach programs in Guatemala, as far back as 1979... I'm sure that plenty of people will be up for criticizing the guy, as a "hippie cult leader." But he and his commune actually attempted something along the lines of open and democratic communal agrarian peasant socialism, until they found the economic model unworkable. I honor the experiment, even though I found its failure rather predictable. Now they use a "mixed-economy" model, with members of the Farm being employed off-site, and pooling only part of their resources in common, rather than all of them. And I do believe that they still run a highly respected school of midwifery. They've always striven to be productive people, and credits to their community- notwithstanding their historic fondness for cannabis, and a postively sacramental attitude toward the potential of psychedelics as catalysts for spiritual growth. There are many people who have elected to leave his commune, the Farm, over the years. Some of them have quite articulate criticisms of Stephen Gaskin's leadership. But I've never heard anyone lodge a single serious complaint of coercion, violence, physical or sexual abuses against him. Gaskin walks his talk- which is more than I can say for the general run of the holier-than-thou Left, whose "activism" so often takes the form of impotent naysaying from the sidelines, seemingly drawing on no energy source other than passive-aggressive resentment. Edited by: <A HREF=http://p216.ezboard.com/brigorousintuition.showUserPublicProfile?gid=robertdreed>robertdreed</A> at: 6/24/06 4:26 pm

by **bvonahsen** » Sat Jun 24, 2006 6:06 pm

<blockquote>Quote:<hr>"We must call a space case a space case. We must reject nonsense as nonsense. We must assert that some things are nonsense, and provably so. We must reject the claim that every idea is equal. We must do for real what the conservatives claimed they did: Defend not just the implementation of prevailing law, but the morality of it. Demand accountability. Impose consequences. Reject relativism. Impose the reality that 2+2=4."<hr></blockquote> But is there anyone left who can add? Many people these days can barely make change without a calculator. Who in the current crop of commentators will challenge the right when they claim that there is no objectivity, everything is opinion? Anyone who tries is likely to be shouted down or liable to put the viewrs to sleep.

by **Pirx** » Sat Jun 24, 2006 6:39 pm

Most enjoyable read, thanks for sharing that one.

by **yathrib** » Sat Jun 24, 2006 9:50 pm

Robertdreed, you write: "Oh,I doubt that nemo is an "ultra-rightist." It sounds to me as if he's doctrinaire, reflexively anti-capitalist, knee-jerk Left all the way." Actually, that's me. Or as I describe myself, an old fashioned leftist who still thinks Nazis are uncool. Anyway, Nemo probably isn't ultra-rightist, but *all* the sites he uses to support his somewhat hysterical arguments are red meat eating, gun toting, reptilian brained fundy sites. Most people of all political persuasions think child molestation is wrong, y'know... This even includes *liberuuls!* So why isn't anyone else picking this stuff up, if it's legit? And it isn't so much that he uses these sites, it's that he *only * uses these sites. As the father of our country said, "A man is known by the company he keeps." Edited by: <A HREF=http://p216.ezboard.com/brigorousintuition.showUserPublicProfile?gid=yathrib>yathrib</A> at: 6/24/06 7:56 pm

by **jingofever** » Sun Jun 25, 2006 12:35 am

Tom Tomorrow on Bush/Cheney/Rove as hippies. From 09.20.05. Snarfed from <a href="http://www.workingforchange.com/comic.cfm?itemid=19635">www.workingforchange.com/...emid=19635</a> <img src="http://workingforchange.speedera.net/www.workingforchange.com/webgraphics/wfc/TMW09-21-05.jpg" style="border:0;"/>

by **bvonahsen** » Sun Jun 25, 2006 1:05 am

Yeah, the Bush/Cheney administration is a test from the universe. Don't think they grade on a curve either, we're not doing so good.

by **Joe Hillshoist** » Sun Jun 25, 2006 1:11 am

About 15 years ago i saw a movie starring Keifer Sutherland, as a young FBI agent who grew up on a hippie commune. He was taking a famous 60's radical across the US for trial, that radical was played by. Ahggggh, I forget who. You know, was in other movies, (duh), easy rider and oh well complete brain failure. It was interesting, set at the end of the 90s, in Reagans America, which was really Bush's America. There was one quote from it. <blockquote>Quote:<hr>The 90s is gonna make the 60s look like the 50s.<hr></blockquote> I think I know who they stole that from. Personally acting as if the 60s was somehow special seems weird. Nothing happens in isolation from anything else. every decade in the last century was somehow unique, and that uniqueness was caused by and caused the events that followed it, sowing the seeds for another cycle. BTW It was Ronald Reagan who suggested concentration camps for Hippies wasn't it. Someone told me he did years ago.

by **dude h homeslice ix** » Sun Jun 25, 2006 2:05 am

“To live outside the law, you must be honest,” man, no wonder jeff quotes this guy so much. bob dylan is one of the greatest and wisest voices in american poetry. theres several ways to interpret that statement.

by **robertdreed** » Sun Jun 25, 2006 1:12 pm

Don't think they grade on a curve either, we're not doing so good. Who is this "we"? For that matter, who is "they"?

The Evil Hippie

The Evil Hippie

Re: The Evil Hippie

senior official?

Re: The Evil Hippie

B and C as evil hippies

Don't forget the evil right-wing revolutionaries

Re: B and C as evil hippies

Re: B and C as evil hippies

Re: The Evil Hippie

Q

Re: The Evil Hippie

Re: Tom Tomorrow on Bush/Cheney/Rove as hippies

Re: The Evil Hippie

Re: The Evil Hippie

I'm unclear on the concept...

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