I won't cede my fuckin' hippy bona fides to frickin' nobody.
No, I wasn't stoned on Ginsberg and thrustin' like Cassidy at it's conception... I missed the acid tests by a couple of years, sure.
But I was sent home from High School for wearin' my homemade "Four Dead In Ohio" T-shirt and wore it again two weeks later with a bitchin' letter from the ACLU in the back pocket of my jeans. I camped outside the Gates of The Federal Medical Prison here in town in support of the Danbury 10 (a group of draft resisters who were fasting to protest the Viet War) with a contingent of VietVets against the war whom I'd hooked up with at a anti-war rally sponsored by the Unitarian Church - a member of which I'd met while canvassing for George McGovern - walking my skinny 150 lb. ass all over this mfin' burg, wearing my stars and striped sneaks, shoulder-length freak flag flying cause I was too stupid to realize that that good, honest and earnest man was never gonna beat the Dick. My ole lady lived on a sheep ranch and made me a sheepskin manpurse I carried my my campaign shit in...
She also made her own sun dresses and sweet plum wine and her aunt grew some of the best shit in seven counties. We secretly got engaged the day they signed the Peace accords in Paris and married with flowers in our hair by a bucolic babbling fuckin' brook a few days after Alexander Butterfield testified and put one in Nixon's neck. We didn't get to see the Doors but we saw the Dead deeeeeeeeeeeep in the Ozark Mountains, dropped mescaline and went to see Jimmy Spheeris sing "Begin the Beguine", rocked out to a Dr. John/Leon Russell double-bill and wondered who the fuck Lynyrd Skynyrd was when they were warming up for the New York Dolls.
And after the inevitable seven car pile up break up anybody with any sense could see coming, I pulled my best Jack London and shipped out to spend 3 1/2 years smoking my weight in hash while visiting nearly every country that is fortunate enough to be touched by the Mediterranean.
I stood above the Acropolis and spilled wine onto the spot where they say that jerk Paul preached. I slept in a Turkish brothel, knelt at the Garden tomb, rode the train from Rick's Cafe to Marrakech, took the sun in Antibes with three grams of hash in my belly, did two weeks in a provincial Italian Prison sharing a cell with an expat 1930's anarchist who'd crossed a judge in Indiana who deported his anarcho Yugoslavian ass to eventually wind up in a refuge camp in Trieste after the big war.
I saw Dylan in Rotterdam and slept in the mud of the soccer stadium that night and crashed in the pillow room of the Melkweg Bar in Amsterdam the next. Stalked the Ghosts of Orwell and Hemingway in Barcelona and Michener in Torremolinos. I went to Gertrude Stein's flat in Paris because I didn't know Alice had died a couple of years before, and finally caught up with Jim (or did I?) at the Père Lachaise on a rainy evening. I went to Dante's Tomb in Ravenna and got sucked into a Carabinieri/Brigate Rosse riot. I shook my fist and spat at Ezra Pound's house in Rapallo then went down to the shore and got riotously, gloriously drunk on Peroni and Sambuca with some Aussies I'd met on the beach. I can still hear Mick's harp clamorously echoing down the cobblestone alley as the juke rocked "Midnight Rambler"...
And, oh yeah, I'm still diggin' petrified chiggers out of my ass from Rainbow fests in the '80's.
I don't cede my hippy bona fides to no one. And I'm here to tell ya there were good hippies and bad hippies, narc hippies and transcendent hippies, there were scholar and idiot and angel and asshole hippies and apparently some who want to hide behind the term and all it's panache and residual good will to throw rocks at the President like they've done from the first month of his term...
"It's too small..."
"It's too big..."
"*Whine, bitch, kvetch*..."
Fuck 'em.
I'll slap 'em if I feel like it.