[MD] Barbarians & Hippies

[david buchanan]

Smith and all MOQers:

dmb said:
"I grew up expecting to live in a hippy free-love world. But by the time it 
was my turn to have fun the hippies had been replaced by preppies and 
yuppies, the war on drugs was raised to the level of an actual military 
operation and HIV arrived on the scene, which meant love was very far from 
free. It would cost you your life."

Mr. Smith asked:
So help me out. i'm not sure i completely understand. You were a hippy at 
heart but you masqueraded as a frat boy? Did you fraternize in any way with 
the real hippies: protests, get close to any "hippy chicks" pick up a guitar 
and sing about love, peace, or facing down "the establishment"? Here's an 
important question: what did you wear?

dmb answers:
I'll start with the important question first. ;-) I wore the same thing I've 
always worn and the same thing that I'm wearing right now; Levis and a 
button-down. This has been my uniform since I was a teenager, mostly because 
I don't care about clothes or fashion and have never been one to display my 
attitudes that way.  I do have a tee-shirt that says "Ape shall never kill 
ape", although I'm waiting for the right party to actually wear it. Also, I 
stopped getting haircuts 6 or 7 years, mostly to cover a bald spot. I wear a 
ponytail now and call it a "hippy comb-over". And there is something about 
long hair these days. I like to be out of step because so many young 
american men are wearing those severely short, fascist-looking haircuts. But 
more seriously,...
I'm not old enough to have had a realistic chance to march with the hippies 
or flirt with hippy chicks. During the summer of love I was looking forward 
to kindergarten. As I already tried to explain, the whole thing was over by 
the time I went to college in the early '80s. Mine was an attempt to 
describe that slip back to Victorianism, that cultural shift in values, as I 
experienced it.

Smith said:
There's something about the questions that i ask that get little response. 
How difficult is to answer: yes i was, no i wasn't, or maybe i always wanted 
to be one? No one asked: "What about you Smith"? Maybe i'm trying to read 
too much out of the words or lack of words in some cases.

dmb says:
I thought your question was a casual one, but still thought I answered it. 
Bascially, I'm not the right age to have been a hippy, but I have lots of 
sympathy for the causes they stood for and agree with Pirsig in seeing the 
'60s as a moral movement, as more moral than the neo-Victorians who've 
replaced them. Even more broadly, I agree with Pirsig in seeing that 
movement as just one example among others. I think the bohemians, artists, 
revolutionaries and contrarians of all sorts are the ones at the cutting 
edge of things. These are the people who make the world better. As 
self-serving as it may sound, yes, I identify with these sorts of people 
more than anyone else. These are my heros and I think Pirsig is one of them 
despite his not being a hippy. That's who I look up and they represent what 
I would like to be. I think the culture would be better if our heros were 
artists instead of gun slinging warriors.

Marsha asked smith:
I'm interested, so 'what about you Smith?' Are you a hippy?

Smith replied:
Diddn't like the Beatles or hippies. Joined the Army in 1967 got stationed 
at the Presidio of San Francisco during the "Summer of love". Fate showed up 
in may forms. A friend i met who had just returned from Vietnam sweetened my 
coffee with a sugar cube and put a set of head phones on my ears and played 
Magical Mystery Tour, Sgt Pepper, and 2000 lightyears from home (Stones). My 
life changed. ...Yes to the hippy question.

dmb says:
I probably ate some sugar cubes in 1967, but they were just sugar cubes. I 
wasn't even old enough to drink coffee, let alone drop acid. I was five. 
Everybody knows that a person shouldn't drop acid until they're at least 
six. But seriously, these mind-altering substances were a major influence on 
the whole movement and I think when Pirsig talks about the confusion between 
DQ and biological quality he is talking about the confusion surrounding the 
use of LSD and such. But as we all know from the peyote scene in LILA, the 
use of these "drugs" does not always entail group sex or any other kind of 
physical pleasure. As Pirsig's use of the word "de-hallucinogen" indicates, 
they can be powerful tools in terms of gaining insights and expanding the 
mind, etc. I've also seen people treat these powerful tools as party toys 
and otherwise disrespect them  - even without taking their clothes off. They 
can be abused just like any powerful tool, but i can also think of several 
people who desperately need to eat some sugarcubes. I would also point out 
that LSD is a relatively recent discovery, but people have been eating 
mushrooms and other plants as part of their religious pratice for thousands 
of years, maybe even tens of thousands of years. In the long view, our 
culture's taboo against their use is a bit odd.

Thanks.
dmb

P.S. Since nobody can get drunk enough to confuse a small bird with a 
friend, I think Dick Cheney was tripping his brains out when he shot that 
dude in the face. This conclusion is based on the fact that once, on a 
fishing trip, I ate 9 hits of acid and mistook one of my own body parts for 
a worm.

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