How Should We Remember the Hippies?
If there is a modern audio component to what we can loosely call the Resistance, it exists in the form of podcasts and the vertical video clips they generate: a million short videos of people speaking into USB microphones have replaced not only rousing political speeches but also music as the primary vehicle for agitation. This transformation means we produce a flood of effective, annoying, and disposable media about political dissent. It is a theater for pundits and satirists but not for poets and artists. What I haven’t been able to decide, thinking about Country Joe’s legacy, is whether it’s a good thing or a bad thing.
I first saw McDonald’s music video for “Woodstock” when I was in eighth or ninth grade. This left a deeper impression on me than anything else in the film, except for the flashes of crowd nudity. Around the same time, a kid at my school played me a really secular album that his father, Patrick Sky – another folk singer, whose career followed a trajectory not unlike that of McDonald’s – had recorded in the early seventies. “In the selection committee we sit here / Covered in Nixon’s shit,” Sky sang. All the insults and nastiness were pretty exciting, which is probably why I was so struck by Country Joe spelling out “FUCK” with the Woodstock crowd. I also thought these songs were very funny. And while this may seem precocious for a seventh grader – especially if he wasn’t as smart as he thought he was – I remember appreciating the fact that the song was so explicit not only in its language but in its message.
Looking back, I wonder if my attraction to the directness of “I feel like I’m going to die” might have been a sign that, for my work, I would ultimately choose political commentary over novel writing, which I did in my twenties. There was something distinctly unsatisfying for me about a song like “Where Have All the Flowers Gone?” », which seemed to me much too plaintive, almost passive in its protest. What I didn’t think about at the time — and, frankly, don’t really worry about now — was how those words would age. A fiction writer friend of mine when I was younger told me that he wanted his books to feel timeless and eternal. My work, I have long accepted, is ultimately ephemeral and intended only to change opinions, not to move people’s hearts. It is simply true that direct, topical political dissent is ultimately disposable. We don’t remember “He is one, two, three / What do we fight for?” ” as much as we remember “How many roads must a man travel / Before you call him a man.”
Still, Country Joe provided a rhythm and melody that large crowds of people could dance to – watching him and Fish at Woodstock was probably a lot more fun than tweeting angrily on your phone in your bedroom. There is no doubt that the hippies were more successful in transforming dissent into something attractive and dangerous. At the same time, I suspect that what I perceive as the spiritual arrogance of aging hippies comes from the aesthetic appeal that the sixties and seventies still have on this country.
Why can’t the left generate this kind of aesthetic political identity anymore? Why isn’t there a giant movement of neo-hippies creating phone-free communes somewhere among the marijuana farms of Humboldt County, or even in arid West Texas? I suspect the atomized way we experience much of what we absorb today, through social media, discourages it. We hear direct words and, sometimes, moving images of large gatherings. Nothing else seems more effective than firing off a tweet, perhaps trying to organize an instant protest. The right, on the other hand, has given rise to new tribes that wear the same hats and make up names, like the Groypers, although they too express themselves primarily by speaking into microphones and webcams. What I have previously called Internet ideology—a broad anti-authoritarianism and hostility toward institutions—is perhaps better suited to reactionary culture.
It’s a strange situation. I tend to think that political discourse should be direct rather than wrapped up in pretty verses and the sound of a dulcimer. But I admit to being a little jealous of the old hippies. They haven’t all aged gracefully, but many have remained committed to a cause, which is more than I’m afraid I can say for myself. When the war finally ended, the books had been written and the country was more or less in agreement that he was right about Vietnam and civil rights. There was always music and the idea, even if it faded more and more, of living free. ♦
