Sure it does. How could it not? The word isn’t yours or mine or Grace Slick’s. Those Starship albums sure were awesome, huh?

Fair enough, Bubba, but I don’t think that applies in my case. I guarantee you, I’ve studied the hippie thing far more than anyone else here –it started with loving the music and then working backwards to find out the cultural and social context– and what you excerpted is what I’ve concluded after that. Perhaps it reeks too much of “Well, that GW Bush, he’s not a *real* Conservative/Republican now, is he?” but oh well, I’m not going to let that shitstain get in the way of 30 years of study of a subject. I mean, if you read the stories about the Human Be-In, there was a large percentage of people who saw it as the end of an era, not the beginning as is so commonly portrayed.

And not to be rude or anything, but I’ll take Grace Slick’s word for what a hippie was/is supposed to be over anyone’s here.

I’m shaken. What’s next? Are you guys going to admit that Kennedy and Byrd are idiots? Please don’t just now. It would blow my mind. Tomorrow would be ok though.

I note an appearance of a True Scotsman.

Robert Crumb had a pretty interesting comic about the San Francisco scene and the eventual arrival of long-haired louts who would brag about taking x amount of pot and acid and reds while cornering some polite baffled hippies they thought were their peers. Sadly, nobody owns their peer-group, their movement, their words, and so on.

*sigh* that “I prayed to God and I’m not gay” kid is totally my type, if I saw him in a gay bar, I’d hit on him in a flash. Err, if he’d, like, accepted something that he’s not responsible for (his homosexuality) and actually worked to end the homophobia and hatred that has made him feel he needs to deny his true self instead of enabling it and hoping that by renouncing his homosexuality he won’t get his head bashed in for it and went to gay bars, that is.

Re: hippies. I’m a hippie. However, we need to work on definitions here. Someone with long hair, reeking of patchouli who flashes peace signs isn’t a hippie, they’re……someone with long hair etc. As Andy Patridge wrote in the great XTC song Travels in Nihilon:

There’s no youth culture
Only masks they let you rent

To ME, the hippie movement lasted but a blink of an eye, in two places only: from ca. early 1965 to late 1966, in San Francisco and on the London underground scene centered on the UFO Club in the Tottehnam Court Road. It’s a truism to me that by the point Time magazine is reporting on some cultural trend it’s already dead and lost whatever made it interesting in the first place and so it was with their infamous Summer of Love cover. By the time losers from shithole towns in the Midwest and on the Least Coast were hitchinhiking to the Haight in mass numbers to escape their dreary lives Back There, the whole hippie thing had come and gone; it was just dress-up after that. Bubba’s mentioning John Lennon, much as I really enjoyed listening to Plastic Ono Band today, provides the perfect example of the type.

A good case could even be made that by the time of the Human Be-In in Golden Gate Park on 1/14/67, the whole hippie thing had passed, much like that by the time Johnny Rotten snarled “Ever have the feeling you’ve been cheated?” at the Pistols final gig at Winterland in…. San Francisco on….wait for it… 1/14/78, the whole punk was a corpse, but only not as beautiful as the hippie corpse cuz the hippies looked really cool in their paisley and faux-Robin Hood gear.

Grace Slick once said, that for her, a hippie wasn’t about the clothes or anything it was a mindset, a reaction against the 50′s. She said it was basically about mind expansion through controlled use of LSD, anti-materialism, anti-militarism (NOT pacificism, anti-Military Industrial Complex, as she knew war was a fact of human existence), the valuing of artistic expression above making money (yes, she was a hypocrite after Surrealistic Pillow), intelligence (i.e. having a basic grounding in philosophy, the sciences, the arts and other intellectual pursuits), equal rights for all humans, a sound environmental policy, ceasing the economic exploitation of The Many by The Few and a few other things. I’ve had that mindset since I read that in the early 70′s, but I have always had short hair and looked and acted like a bank clerk.

The fact that something that had a germ of possibility in it turned to shit and basically ended up negating all it originally stood for is irrelevant; humans have the amazing ability to glom on to the worst and most convenient aspect of things at the expense of doing the hard work of maintaining the original spirit of something.

Anti-hippie people who mock silly white kids with dreads in String Cheese Incident t-shirts who want to sell them veggie burritos are totally fucking lame, no different from people who steal candy from children because it’s so fucking easy to do.

Take John Lennon, a utopian hippie full of hate. Seeing him yell “HOW DO YOU SLEEP YOU CUNT?!?” in the studio slamming Paul McCartney – who seems to be kind of jerky himself – was pretty priceless. Tony Hendra – another awful man – nailed him with Magical Misery Tour, which apparently rendered Lennon speechless. There’s also some great footage of Lennon being picked apart by some rather nasty journalist at the bed-in in Toronto: Lennon’s got the hate in spades but is trying to force it out through hippie lingo and just can’t bring the love, failing utterly.

Hippie totem, made some great records, hateful and ripe for parody.

Ambrose Bierce defined impiety as “your irreverence to my deity” and it works for tribes as well, the hippie cow being as sacred as the cow of any other tribe, and somehow more tasty for the new-agey pseudo-innocence. And there’s so much undeniably funny material there: clothes, music, trust-funds, pot, shitty food, free love, cults, mysticism, communes, Jung, patchouli, trust in bikers, revolution through getting really blasted… Some of that’s fun stuff, but it’s hilarious too.

Are you SURE you hate hippies too?

Care to elaborate, please?

So goes the stereotype, but some pretty good hatin’ came from hippies. The guilt adds funny.

Hey, don’t you owe ME an apology for being “too sensitive on this topic of hippies and hippy[sic I think]-hating” too? No need my friend. Apology accepted!

Group hug and people singing Kumbaya all around!

Mat: I am sorry that I annoyed you. I guess I am too sensitive on this topic of hippies and hippy-hating. That is silly of me.

You’re the James Dean, Fonzie, Miles Davis, Snoopy, AND Jerry Garcia of hippie apologists.

Fonzie and Snoopy were hippies?

Sarcasm. It’s not for amateurs.

Kevin: Your flippers seem to be malfunctioning. Sucks, huh?

OY! Why is it in every commenting thread on the “Internets” there’s always a babbling drip who just can’t let go?

One more time for the myopic boobs like this assclown who don’t seem understand the difference between joking and serious commenting:

I WAS JOKING in my original “I hate hippies” comment. Making a funny. Being sarcastic. Not being serious one bit. KIDDING. Tongue firmly in cheek. Presenting the intellectual equivalent of making fart noises in my armpit with the palm of my hand.

But you, assclown extraordinaire, have to keep piling on the boring sanctimony, because, well, that’s what silly “Internets” assclowns do.

Do you also wipe your bottom with a Q-tip after making a doo-doo to ensure every molecule of poo is removed from your tushie? Do you continue to beat a dead horse to prove what a clever wanker you are, or is this just some mental condition like Tourette’s and you can’t stop your babbling?

We get it. You’re the James Dean, Fonzie, Miles Davis, Snoopy, AND Jerry Garcia of hippie apologists. The COOLEST of the COOL. We genuflect to your magisterial hippie apologist glow! How silly of me to even JOKE about the hippie vs. punk dichotomy. What was I thinking? SHAME on me! SHAME! My head is bowed and bloodied.

Now will you shut the hell up? Pretty please with a Cherry Garcia on top?