Hippie Vs. Freak
Work Zone
“We make our media, then our media make us.” Marshal McLuhan
“Hippie” is a superficial print journalist's construct, a proto sound bite. It refers to paisley shirts, bell bottom hip-huggers, shaggy hairstyles. It refers to the casual faddish experimentation with drugs that should not be taken casually. It is the employment of a certain cant to declare your current identity: “far out”, “groovy”, “trippy”, “head”, etc. Shallow following of the crowd.
Hippies moved on with the times, the Viet Nam war was over, they saw saw there was money to be made by going along with The System, in quest for further propriety left all that “woo-woo New Agey” stuff behind and went into real estate, got into EST and polyester slacks. Uncle Reagan didn’t look all that bad, and besides, by then they had kids to think about. “That’s what’s happenin’ now, man. Wow, 35 almost 40, I feel so old, man”
“Freak” has roots.
It implies transformation.
The Trip was the Tibetan Book of the Dead before it was the Grateful Dead – a reverent connection with ancient quests. It was the serious contemplation of the Doors of Perception before the Doors were a vehicle for self indulgent musical genius.
The telegraph & radio sent out warning swells, but the front waves of the information age reached storm crest after World War 2 when the medium of television swept everything in its path with its enveloping bi-sensual power. Those who were raised in this new environment were unlike any who came before. They were mutations. Freaks.
Then followed stereo long playing records, allied with the shift from AM radio to FM. Sound, the aural medium, asserted itself to equal influence against the 500 year dominance of the visual medium of print.
What was left was to struggle to understand, to quest, to explore, to seek the answer to that ubiquitous zen-simple question: “What’s happenin’?”
Electronic media is extending the human nerve system around the globe. Consciousness is no longer something only within us, it surrounds us. Thus the prevalence of narcissism in recent decades. It is hard to look in any direction without seeing ourselves. We are literally wrapped up in ourselves.
Technologically driven change continues at a relentless pace. Each generation is raised in a slightly different environment than the one before. Although the gap between generations may not be as wide as that 60's Baby Boom one, there is distance between our contemporaries and those who came before and come afterward. Across time, what we share is not so much an identical sameness as it is the experience of being different, being dislocated, coping with discontinuity and insistent change.
When you see my long hair & beard, why don’t you call me transient,? Why don’t you call me homeless, hobo, bum, refugee? Why react like a hippie and only acknowledge the surface of things? You’re soooo plastic, man.
“Within without, without within.” Beatles
“Tryin’ to make it real . . . compared to what?” Les McCann
OK, this is getting too freaky man, I’m truckin’ outa here.