Mr. Blog has hooked me into a bit of a shooting war over my "Old Hippie" / "Post-Hippie" distinction. The whole business is here. Rather than respond immediately to his last comment, I'd like to run a little induction on his ass by continuing with Hippie Watch™
Last weekend, the Public Interest Environmental Law Conference (PIELC) descended on my precious Law Center. For the uninitiated, PIELC is a 3,000-strong invasion of exactly the "Post-Hippies" I've been talking about. They roll in from all over the country in VW's and Kia's for four days of networking and seminars. Laundry, showers, and basic adherence to well-posted signs such as . . .
QUIET PLEASE! CLASSES IN SESSION. . . and . . .
STUDENTS ONLY BEYOND THIS POINT. . . is strictly optional.
As the organizers euphemistically put it, "the Conference attracts thousands of independent thinkers and free spirits, and we try our best to keep this crowd from distracting you in your normal affairs." Not terribly well, but let that be.
For a couple months leading up to this conference, I saw grumblings of dread ripple through the school listserv whenever one of the Conference organizers sent out a request for help. Here is one of the funniest. Names, of course, have been changed. Aggro is the star:
To: Students
From: "Kell"
Subject: have a big backyard?
Hey there everyone!
Do you have a big backyard?
We have several Conference attendees who need a place to set up their tents - so all they need is a nice patch of grass!
You'll get the chance to meet some great folk!
To: Students
From: "Tony"
Subject: RE: have a big backyard?How about the lawn behind the law school – we can have our own Law School Hippie fest. Who wants their backyard smelling like the law school during the conference anyway?
Hippies smell!
To: Students
From: "Aggro"
Subject: RE: have a big backyard?Fascists are worse.
After Aggro's provocative point, the "debate" quickly decayed into a battle of Big Lebowski quotes. And rightly so.
So there you have it, Blog. Why is Aggro best called a "Post-Hippie", and not something like "dirty activist"? Well, among other things, because (1) he does nothing to disclaim the "hippie" label, and (2) he tosses around the word "fascist" the way most of us breathe.
Posted by FLOG at March 9, 2004 1:28 AM | TrackBackNIMBY
Posted by: phooeyhoo at March 9, 2004 2:07 AMHe calls himself a hippie and dresses like one but I still say he's a wolf in sheep's clothing.
I'm also skeptical of your claims about the merging of Berkeley-style activism with the hippie lifestyle. As you've said elsewhere, '60s activists had a hell of a time getting the Haight Ashbury crowd "to care about anything." Maybe they converted a few of them but I'd be willing to bet 90% of all those flower children never made the jump.
Nowadays, I'd willing to bet the ratio of lazy hippies to your self-described "post-hippies" is still 9 to 1. For every tree-sitter, there's 9 others oblivously loafing in front of their Phish bootlegs.
If you insist on throwing around "post-hippie," you'll need to come up with a new term for all those traditional hippies out there. Mayhaps "retro-hippie"?
Posted by: Blog at March 10, 2004 10:09 AMI think that hippies need more classification than just hippie and post hippie, maybe hippie is just the subspecies. You know, things like Human (Homo sapiens)
Kingdom Animalia
Phylum Chordata
Subphylum Vertebrata
Class Mammalia
Subclass Eutheria
Order Primates
Suborder Catarrhini
Family Hominidae
Genus Homo
Species sapiens
subspecies hippieas dirtius. hippeas confusideaus, hippieas newagicus, hippeas flashbackiccus, hippieas dirtbagiccus, hippieas posticus, etc ...
Responding to Blog:
I'm also skeptical of your claims about the merging of Berkeley-style activism with the hippie lifestyle. As you've said elsewhere, '60s activists had a hell of a time getting the Haight Ashbury crowd "to care about anything."Blog, I am not careless with my written words (however careless I may be in person after several iterations of Jack Daniel's).
If you would review, you'd find my actual words to be along these lines: hippie style merged nationwide with Berkeley-style activism. The Haight / Ashbury scene itself, however, was very resistant to activism, as were/are most "true" hippies, whose lifestyle was apolitical if anything ever was.
I'll gladly concede that there are plenty of apolitical hippies still about. And with them I have no beef. Even semi-political ones I have no quarrel with. But the strain that developed when Berkeley radicals went for hippie style, thems I don't like.
Of course this is all founded on generalities, which is why we're debating over different shadings and nuances. Perhaps we'd both be better off accepting, as Ashley has demonstrated, that there are at least a half-dozen different breeds of hippie out there. Somes I like, somes I tolerate, somes get my gander up.
Posted by: FLOG™ at March 12, 2004 9:08 AMAgreed. Problem solved. Hooray!
Posted by: Blog at March 15, 2004 1:44 AMDarn. Quick: new fight topic!
Posted by: FLOG™ at March 15, 2004 4:02 AMCheck out my Xmas tree post on Blog. Surely, there's a spark there...literally and figuratively.
Posted by: Blog at March 15, 2004 5:47 AM