One Pissed Off Liberal's recent diary,
In Defense of Hippies, brought up an old meme: What happened to hippie spirit? And why has
hippie become a bad word among some people who were too young to be there?
As a member of the next population bubble (labeled by the media and marketed to as "Generation X"), I can sum it up for the hippies:
You had Jimi Hendrix. We had Jimmy McNichol.
Okay. That's too facile. (To be honest, we didn't want Jimi Hendrix either.)
I never felt the warm fuzzies for the hippie years. I didn't care for the music, the clothes, the vibe. Patchouli did (and does) stink. Give me the Dead Kennedys over the Grateful Dead any time.
I certainly appreciate many of the contributions made by the folks who called themselves hippies, particularly as I've grown older, but when I was a teenager in the late 1970s, a hippie was the last thing I wanted to be.
I have often encountered strongly biased attitudes toward hippies. Most of the time there's not much point in saying anything. Too often people don't want to be educated about hippies. Hippies are beneath them, an object of scorn or derision. I understand that it's usually just rightwing propaganda having its way. --One Pissed Off Liberal
Not really. Some of it was generational. Some of it was borne from resentment, the feeling that they got all the good stuff and we got the dregs. And some of it was that we just didn't like the trappings, the patchouli and the incense and the Grateful Dead.
History
I was born in 1963. I was 10 months old when JFK was assassinated. I don't remember RFK, Martin Luther King, or Malcolm X. I was six when Woodstock happened, and probably watching the King Family with my parents. Vietnam was background noise when the news was on. I barely remember it. (And if that makes you feel old, consider that there are now college freshmen who don't remember the first Gulf War.)
Culturally, to a teenager, the 1970s were a void. The biggest cultural movement was even a pale Xerox: Fifties nostalgia. There was nothing and no one to emulate. Between Nixon and Reagan, even our leaders were filler: Ford, the failed Republican; Carter, the failed Democrat. Oh, sure, on the periphery were a few figures who seem even more amazing in retrospect - Barbara Jordan, for instance - but they weren't even on the radar screen of your average 12-year-old.
Then, when I was 17, the hippies had become the Establishment that they loathed, and Ronald Reagan was presented to me and my peers as our president. To people my age who loathed Reagan (and who had no say in his election, but were becoming adults as he was handed to us to run our lives for eight years), Reagan's coronation was seen as the ultimate kissoff from a generation that was perceived as having all the fun:
Here's your new president, kids! Enjoy!
Of course, it wasn't the people who hated Nixon that got Reagan elected, but try telling that to a bitter teenager, particularly when the sheer number of baby boomers meant that the culture would always be following their interests, serving their imperatives, and catering to their needs.
Their generation had the numbers. Ours didn't. It was a matter of mathematics, demographics, and marketing. And yes, we felt dissed and we felt pissed.
Sanctimony
If I had to pick one lodestone that crystallized this divide, it would be this:
I remember going to see The Big Chill in my early 20s, in a group of people who were all "old hippies." And when we all left, and they were misty and happy and raving about its lifetruths, I stood there and wondered if we'd seen the same movie.
What they'd seen: a tale of some good friends who shared the Most Important Decade together, had grown older, and were doing their best to reconcile their youthful ideals and gentle spirits with their new reality of 401ks and high tax brackets and just-so houses filled with charming antiques and West Elm furniture, all set to a tasteful soundtrack of Motown.
And they were crying.
What I'd seen: the people who'd brought me and my friends President Reagan (and Nancy...God, Nancy), now ensconced in their new lives of privilege, and making fun of the one character who was supposed to represent my generation: the loony, spacey, none-too-bright Meg Tilly.
And I was pissed.
Jealousy
Who was right? Both of us, I suppose, and neither of us.
Underneath it all, of course, was a good dose of pure-J jealousy...jealousy that they'd had Kennedy and the Beatles and free love, while we had Reagan and Supertramp and AIDS. (On the brighter side, we also had punk, which we didn't invent, but which was a lot of fun. And it tells a lot about our outlook on the hippies that one of the popular punk buttons at the time was I'LL BE GRATEFUL WHEN THEY'RE DEAD. But punk is another diary...in fact, it might be a good Part II for this one.)
We sure would've liked a crash pad in the Haight, but we were priced out by the Yuppies (the new emerging demographic, and mostly made up of ex-hippies). We would've liked to feel we had the power to make political change, but the left was even more moribund in 1981 than it was in 2001. We would've liked to take a year off and just travel around, but we were having trouble just keeping up as it was. The McJob was born during this time. I had 'em. So did my friends. We never found the secret to scraping up food and rent by just hanging out.
Was it fair to blame the hippies for all this? No way. But what we got wasn't fair, either. Despite (or, as the conservatives would say, because of) their efforts, we were the first American generation in a long time who were worse off than the one before it.
Irony
What were our contributions? I'm not sure. But we did begin to develop the first coping strategy: ironic humor. Today it looks as dated as a Jack Benny routine, but in the early 80s, when we were coming of age, it was new and cool and fresh and a logical response to a world that felt like a picked-over buffet. Back before he became the new Johnny Carson, David Letterman was the king of ironic humor, and he felt as au courant then as Stephen Colbert does today. We wore ironic T-shirts; we made ironic references; we wore irony as a defense. We watched The Brady Bunch, and then when we grew up, we went to watch adults reenact its stupid scripts onstage.
We weren't Generation X; we were Generation Jan, always feeling overshadowed by our older sister who got all the attention.
Now that it's our turn in the relaxed-fit pants and thinning hair, it's a lot easier to reflect on our old attitudes and not look so harshly on our hippie elders. We didn't mean to be so snotty, just as I'm sure you didn't mean to be so condescending. ("Oh, God, I can't believe you don't remember when Kennedy was shot!") Peace, love, and understanding are good things, whether you're 60 or 40 or 20 or 10.
(But you can keep the Dead albums and the Peter Max. Honest.)
With respect...