Happily Hippie-American

Book Overview

      Chapter One: This book isn’t nostalgia; it’s not a memoir. Rather, it’s a combination of argument and what I call “popular social science”; that is, it’s writing that attempts to be scientific in its approach (using objective evidence and sometimes consulting scholarly texts), but it isn’t academically stuffy.

      After this book-by-chapter preview, in the next part of this chapter, I’ll tell you a bit about myself. The introduction’s final section regards writing matters: who I see as my audiences, language issues, even why I’m capitalizing Hippie and Counterculture.

      In Chapter Two, “Ethnocide in the American Mind: Rumors of our Death are Greatly Exaggerated,” I’m going to take that demeaning cliché, Hippies Were Just a Thing of the 1960s, and show how it’s a socio-political myth constructed by American neoconservatism and the War on Drugs. Hippiedom never died; rather, it became socially invisible, meaning that although everyone at some level knows Hippiedom lives on, publicly we deny its existence, see the subject as unpleasant and impolite. Hippies Were Just a Thing of the 1960s, then, is the ethnocidal wishful thinking of American bigots, nothing more. If this book is about paradigm shift, we begin here. We’re taking that decade-specific paradigm of Hippies, wadding it up and tossing it into the recycle bin.

      Among other arguments, this chapter undercuts Hippies Were Just a Thing of the 1960s in its assertion of generational transfer; that is, Hippie parents often produce Hippie kids, and sometimes those Hippie kids grow up and produce Hippie grandchildren. In addition, I’ll show the reader two crude demographic maps of Hippie-America.

      Chapter Three, “A Most Important Secret: Why the Counterculture Counts,” also demonstrates the continuing relevance of Hippie-America by showing how anti-Hippie demagoguery has for five decades been what makes American politics tick, how in election after election, the Republicans have essentially said, “Hey, the Democrats are just a bunch of hippies!” and thus have shoved the nation to the hard right. We’ll examine American political history from the mid-1960s through the 2016 election of Donald Trump.

      Without Ethnic-Hippies Theory, EHT, we can’t understand modern American politics and history; it’s like watching a play, and since one of the most important characters is invisible or can’t be acknowledged, we’re puzzled. This chapter clarifies that confusion by showing readers how that invisible character is affecting the larger national drama.

      The next four chapters, four through seven, are the ethnic proof.

      Chapter Four, “The Better Lens: Ethnic-Hippies Theory,” begins by demonstrating how our current definitions and paradigms of Hippiedom don’t make sense. The phrase “the 1960s generation,” for instance, doesn’t explain either those of that generation who didn’t go Hippie or the many Hippie-Americans of today born after the 1960s ended, sometimes by several decades.

      Chapter Five, “Hippie as Ethnic; Counterculture as Ethnicity,” is a deductive (general-to-specifics) proof of Hippie ethnicity; that is, it takes a definition of ethnicity and then proceeds to prove that Hippie culture fits it. We’re going to use the definition of ethnicity/ethnic from The Harvard Encyclopedia of American Ethnic Groups, and then, because that definition neglects certain obvious matters, such as ethnic costume, we’re going to amend it. The chapter opens with an essay refuting the sometime misunderstanding that ethnicity requires racial/biological distinctiveness.

      Chapter Six, “Waddling Well: What a Relatively Short, In-Many-Ways-Typical Trip It’s Been,” is an inductive (specifics-to-general) proof of Hippie ethnicity. The “waddling” is as in “If it walks like a duck, if it looks like a duck, if it quacks like a duck—it’s probably some kind of duck.” (The rest of the chapter title is a play on the Grateful Dead lyric “What a long, strange trip it’s been.”) So, I’m taking things we see as typical of traditionally recognized racial and ethnic groups and showing how we can see these same things in regard to Hippiedom and how society treats it; for example, I’m going to take 14 stereotypes applied to various racial and ethnic minorities and show how these same stereotypes are routinely applied to Hippie-Americans.

      The chapter ends with a response to the liberal argument that Hippie-America can’t be oppressed because it’s largely white. 

      At this point, then, I’ll have double proven the ethnic nature of Hippie-America. One question remains: “If Hippiedom is an ethnicity, where did it come from? How did it originate?”

      Chapter Seven, “The Birth of Hippiedom: Stand and be Delivered!” explains Hippiedom’s unusual origins, the ethnogenesis of Hippie culture. It concludes that Hippie culture is a synthetic ethnic minority: it’s synthetic in both how it formed (with the decisive intervention of technology, especially mass media) and in its culturally eclectic content. In the historical background, of course, is widespread social dissatisfaction, a malaise with mainstream Western culture, leading to what social scientists call a revitalization movement.

      Chapter Eight, “God Bless the Freaks: Hippiedom’s Greatest Hits,” is a catalog of the amazing contributions of Hippie culture to this nation and the world. We’re going to look at the creation of the personal computer, at modern midwifery, at the recycling industry, at the Muppets, at Cirque du Soleil; we’re going to explore Countercultural business empires. We’ll be taking a Hippie tour of Hollywood—directors, actors and comedians. We’ll check in on the adventure-gear industry and modern American microbrewing. We’re going to look at the world of sports, including some World Series-winning baseball teams and US Olympic medalists, and much more.

      Chapter Nine, “‘Now, Lay Back on the Couch, Please’: Healing Your Inner Hippie,” deals with the psychological aspects of Hippie identity. Counterculturists have, of course, been subjected to a regimen of social shaming; this chapter discusses the attitudes that keep some in the “Countercultural closet” and an alternative to them: Hippie pride.

      Chapter Ten, “Drug Laws and Hippie-America—We Are Not Criminals: We’re a People Criminalized,” is EHT (Ethnic-Hippies Theory) applied to the prohibition of marijuana and other drugs. It's history that demonstrates how the true purpose of American drug laws has been to persecute minorities and that today’s drug laws persecuting Hippie-America are more of the same. I’ll point out that there is no correlation between drug laws and the extent to which people use or abuse a drug, neutralizing the protecting-the-public-health argument that is the mainstay of the War on Drugs. I’ll prove Gateway is illogical and ridiculous—an argumentative embarrassment. We’ll see how War on Drugs pseudo-science is biased and silly. I’ll cover some health issues and show how Hippie-America is the driving force behind today’s Legalization Movement.

      Chapter Eleven, “A Problem’s Solution: Building a Hippie-American Ethnic Organization,” sketches out what a Hippie-American ethnic organization (HAEO) might look like and a relatively simple plan for starting one. The most obvious function of such a group would be the promotion of social equality for its members, but there are other things an HAEO could do. If Hippie-hating has done great social harm, imagine how much good might be done by moving in the opposite direction, by building an HAEO that works to make Hippie-America visible and respectable.

      Chapter Twelve, “The End of a Book, the Start of an Organization,” summarizes this book and ends with a call to organize.