Hippie Who?

Not too long ago there was a piece published about 'hippies' and I am pleased to have forgotten the name of the common media which permitted the article and the writer fella who talked about how 'hippies' were so important. The word itself - hippie (as in being one who is hip) - was thoroughly repugnant to social revolutionaries of that day.

Had the phony knower known or been a part or experienced anything from that era of intellectual challenge, even been a minor member to assault the establishment of the day, the word 'hippie' would have smelt clearly to him as a betrayal. The so-called 'hippie movement' was reposited in a burial parade in 1967 in San Francisco at Haight-Ashbury. Trust the common media and some idiot, google-defect scribbler to fumble history.

"In 1963, Beatniks were fleeing North Beach to take advantage of the cheap rents and available storefronts of the Haight. But a sea change took place between the scruffy existential Beats and the earliest denizens of the Haight: LSD. Haight-Ashbury was the site of a remarkable syncretism, an admixture of influences that coalesced over time into the psychedelic eddy that Haight Street became. Like the collection of thrift-store finery and period costumes the original hippies fancied, their philosophy was fashioned from Eastern mysticism, comic books, science fiction, and the Beat writers who acted as a filtering agent through which the younger poets picked and chose their reading. Similarly, acid-rock emerged out of a grab-bag of styles: Be-bop Jazz improvisation, folk and bluegrass modalities, dabbed on a heavy impasto of garage-rock primitivism. For the hippies, LSD was their communion, and rock music their liturgy.

"At first the scene was remarkably self-supporting, with small venues catering to a local group of cognoscenti. In 1965, there were an estimated 800 hippies in residence. By 1966, new arrivals had flooded the Haight, with an estimated 15,000 hippies in residence. A more disturbing statistic, but at this point hardly a blip on the radar were the 1,200 runaway teens who flocked to the Haight as if guided by some special teen-alienation magnet. Shops, boutiques, restaurants, and clubs sprang up to cater to the new arrivals, and an activist collective, the Diggers, provided for the needs of the more indigent among them with a soup kitchen, crash pads, and later, a free store.

"The year 1967 started off optimistically enough with the first 'Be-In,' a massive free concert and showcase of the local musicians. A hippie parade in the Haight-Ashbury district, 1967. It was by all accounts a magical event. The next logical phase, or so it seemed to the movers-and-shakers of the community, was to invite the youth of America to the Haight for the summer.

"They envisioned a kind of hippie training: the youth would come, get turned on, and return from whence they came with the blueprint for a new culture. It didn't quite turn out that way. Young people did arrive for the summer, but they were not the beautiful people the Haight habitués anticipated. 'They had bad teeth and acne scars and it was easy to see why they hadn't been voted homecoming king or queen back in Oshkosh or Biloxi or wherever they'd come from,' wrote Jay Stevens. 'These kids were rejects; they'd come here because they were losers, and while they had a certain Christian appropriateness, it was not what the Council for the Summer of Love had expected.'

"By summer's end, the dream of a self-sufficient urban conclave of tripping Luddites had dissolved in a miasma of hard drugs, runaways, and incipient neglect. The fragile social infrastructure the counterculture had built was overcome by the onslaught. Tour buses and sight-seers flooded the district, as did reporters. Their dispatches only added to the throng of destitute, addled kids. The indiscriminate use of every variety of drug was legion, as were drug busts, hence informing and informers.

"The language was Love," writes Hunter S. Thompson, "but the style was paranoia." That October, the Diggers held a mock burial of the "Hippie, son of Media" in Golden Gate Park. It was a pointed bit of street theater, but it was after the fact. The wave had surged and broken, leaving human jetsam in its wake. By then, the Haight-Ashbury pioneers had already fled to higher ground."

Joachim Foikis wouldn't even pause to piss on that local writer's grave... too busy dancing.