"When the moon is in the seventh house," was Shockwave’s reply when I asked him when he was going to visit me. The reference was not lost on me... I was raised on Broadway musicals and I recognized the quote from the song "Aquarius" in the musical Hair. I thought he was just joking, but two days later he emailed me. "The moon IS in the seventh house," he said. The email contained an invitation to see Hair.
Hair, famous for its nude scene, was one of the very few musicals my parents did not take me to see as a kid. This particular performance was staged as a fundraiser for the Arlington West project, bringing speakers, soldiers, and DVDs of the documentary about Arlington West to the inner city schools targeted by military recruiters.
I’ll cut to the chase of this diary before going back to talk about Hair and its message a bit more: When we look back on the ‘60’s and Vietnam, we remember the hippies, the counterculture, and the protests. When we look back on today, will the pro-peace anti-American-empire segment our society even make it into the history books? Or will people just remember how Britney Spears doesn’t wear underwear? Will history record reality TV as a bigger cultural phenomenon than the anti-war movement?
Today we talk about the men and women in uniform as heroes. Claude, the hero of Hair, also goes into the military, but he’s a tragic hero (a la Hamlet). Instead of bravely volunteering for his nation and making the ultimate sacrifice, the way both sides of the political fence describe soldiers today, Claude firmly opposes Vietnam but each time he tries to dodge the draft, he hesitates (like Hamlet). Ultimately, as in Hamlet, "the rest is silence."
The audience experiences Claude’s story through the eyes of him and his friends, a group of politically active hippies living in the Village. Yes, there are drugs and sex (quite a lot of both), but the characters are all incredibly innocent. By innocent, I don’t mean naïve – in the words of the play, "[their] eyes are open." Still, they lack the cynicism that pervades our society for today.
Their promiscuity isn’t portrayed in a predatory way... they are experiencing all of the joy the wondrous world around them has given them, accepting pleasure as a gift. Quite a difference from, say, a guy (or girl) who goes out cruising the bars with a selfish me-first attitude. And their drugs of choice – LSD and pot – are a far cry from more vicious ones like heroin, meth, or crack.
Tragedies deal with a world closing in around the tragic hero. In contrast, the characters in the play enjoy incredible freedom. Not the kind of freedom the U.S. is imposing on Iraq at the barrel of a gun, either. They experience and express pleasure and joy via song and dance. For example, in the song "Good Morning Starshine," the lyrics go:
Good morning, starshine
The earth says hello
You twinkle above us
We twinkle below
Good morning, starshine
You lead us along
My love and me as we sing
Our early morning singing song
The aforementioned early morning singing song is an expression of uninhibited sponteneity and happiness – and the lyrics are all total gibberish. Most humans above the age of about 9 would already be too trapped by whatever inhibitions they’ve picked up from society to sing in gibberish. Not surprisingly, I believe Sesame Street has featured this song on their show.
Several times throughout the play, members of the "establishment" show up on stage to try to beat some sense into the hippies, continue on with their conventional lifestyles as though the hippies don’t exist, or investigate why the hippies look like they look and do what they do.
As the play is telling the story through the eyes of the hippies, each "establishment" character is actually just a hippie dressed up in costume – and often men play women, blacks play whites, and vice versa. Naturally, the older generation comes off looking ridiculous. (Why oh why can’t we dress up the White House Press Secretary in drag???)
Even as the counterculture persists in the face of the "1948" crowd, the older generation first badgers Claude to join the military and later praises him for accepting the draft order that proves fatal to him. Their culture is death, in comparison to the 1968 crowd. The symbolism says it all, but to make sure no one misses the point, 1948 asks Claude what about 1968 makes him so special and he replies, "I got life."
When his friends burn their draft cards at a protest, Claude begins to burn his and then pulls it out of the flames, realizing he can’t. He’s already passed his physical too. At that moment, his fate is basically sealed. One element of tragedy that always gets to me is that the end IS inevitable. Wonder all you want why Hamlet didn’t kill his stepfather when he had the opportunity, but unfortunately, they call it fate for a reason.
The others leave the stage, leaving Claude alone to wonder, "Where do I go?" and "Will I ever discover why I live and die?" Eventually, the rest of the cast joins Claude singing – this is not just his tragedy but the tragedy of their whole generation.
At the end of the song, the entire cast removes their clothes, standing naked on stage for a minute or two before they finishing singing and the lights come up for intermission. Standing there with nothing on, they are fully vulnerable, with nothing to buffer them from facing the human condition.
The play sparked controversy for its nudity when it first opened – but it also did so for its treatment of the American flag. A few people hold it upside down while singing about it (and gradually turn it right side up), but there’s a good message in that song. Hidden between the line repeated ad nauseum ("Crazy for the red, blue, and white"), they say, "because I look different, you think I’m subversive."
Yup, take that you idiots who put yellow ribbons on your cars but vote for Bush. Liberals are patriots, too. Our hearts "beat true for the red, white, and blue" just like yours do. In fact the difference between you and us isn’t in the heart – it’s in the brain. We use ours.
Two other issues tackled in Hair are racism/civil rights and pollution. Both are sadly relevant today. Have we made progress on either? Certainly we made progress on the environment in the 1970’s but what we did then isn’t enough now if we want temperate climates and polar ice caps.
I would’ve said we made progress on civil rights, but look at the news lately. And beyond the violence and discrimination imposed on blacks, don’t forget about the crap the LGBT community endures too. I always wished I had a chance to live the ‘60s, but I wasn’t looking for a repeat of the worst elements from that decade. I’ll take the good music and free love without the war and hate crimes, please.
I really struggle with the PNAC pro-world domination foreign policy we’ve had in DC under Bush, but (as portrayed in Claude's hallucination in Act 2) one can hardly claim that it’s new. Yes, we were isolationist pre-WWI but that doesn’t erase "manifest destiny," our god-given (we thought) right to take over this continent from sea to shining sea and either kill the native Americans or push them onto small plots of marginal land that we weren’t interested in.
Hair says that Vietnam is the (and I’m paraphrasing) "White man sending the black man to fight the yellow man to protect the land he stole from the red man." What have we got today? Replace "yellow" with "brown." Give or take the word "black."
40 years passed since the first performances of Hair, yet the issues facing our nation stayed the same. This time around, I fear the history books won’t have an modern equivalent to hippies. What would it be? What cultural movement could possibly be that significant?
I'm not asking for university students to start bombing their ROTC buildings or something, but what can possibly penetrate the popular consciousness and make people wake up?? Several hundred thousand protesters in DC doesn't seem to do a damn thing. Cindy Sheehan REALLY made an impact when she founded Camp Casey, but it seems the media tired of her after the initial month.
Bloggers? Perhaps. We're a new phenomenon and we're making an impact. We’ve got a culture. No, we don’t dress alike and wear our hair alike, but we all call cats pooties (or at least, for those who abhor the word, recognize that pootie means cat) and understand the etiquette of tip jars, of not posting a first comment that says "Frist!" (and troll-rating anyone who does), and of throwing recipes at trolls.
Is there enough of us to be a cultural movement? There were 30,000 or so active users in 2006 (people who diaried, commented, or rec’d). There were more than 30,000 hippies. Still, we make the news occasionally. Markos gets to go on TV. We’re not insignificant. I'm just afraid we're not enough.
I’m not aiming for a metadiary, nor for a glorification of bloggers here, but I really can’t see anything else sweeping the nation to oppose the criminals in power. I’d be depressed if a modern day adaptation of Hair just showed a bunch of kids eating McDonalds, watching TV, buying hippie artifacts at the mall, and talking about celebrity gossip.
My brother compares the difference between now and the '60s to the difference between Adam and Eve before and after they ate the apple or the monkeys in 2001 before and after the monolith came. We can’t let history record this era as a time of indifference and willful ignorance about our situation in the world.
When the moon is in the seventh house
And Jupiter aligns with Mars
Then peace will guide the planets
And love will steer the stars
When will that be? We’ve got a depressing track record but perhaps we can shed our cynicism and work to make it happen.