What Counterculture Hath Wrought
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Very little changes, in heaven above nor earth below.
Yet behold the follies traveling down throughout mankind's long, tortured history like a science experiment gone awry, like a petri dish pulsating with volts of electricity zapping through every so often like a juiced-up battery of divine inspiration. Most social movements have their "life cycle"-- metatasization, peak, decline-- and then "die out". However, strains of others fester on like stubborn lichens putrid with rot; either taking on new forms, or calcifying like stubborn dead matter interfering with new life, new inspiration.
1960's "Counterculture" made the mistake of thinking itself "the final statement" on anything, taking a sledgehammer to the dialectic of history in one big "who are you to tell me what to think?" orgy of liberty, equality, fraternity, and "doing your own thing".
Yes, with a liberal, activist Supreme Court cutting the bonds of "the old strictures" and setting the rock n' roll generation loose to run wild in the post-war streets, you had a kaleidoscope of impressions. A pirated television image of "The Eagle" landing on the moon to the strains of Jimi Hendrix's "The Star-Spangled Banner" wahhhing at Woodstock, and then hairy, Aquarius-worshipping hippie rodents bouncing their banded heads pettily to the galloping drums-- a nose-dive of sinister guitars on Black Sabbath's "Iron Man". . . . . and the whole LSD-fueled genesis of sight, sound, and color seen as the young person's version of "The End of History" played out as one, big, happy rock n' roll party cookin' wienies on the sunset beaches of southern California.
The legacy of freedom's struggle, if not a world-wise black man with a feathered pimp's hat nodding on the corner with a glowing blunt certainly bigger than any of the white, privileged, patriarchal Founding Father's cerebral dicks-- surely mummified or turned into dust like so many outdated interpretations of the Constitution as the Black Panther rose his fist in the air.
It's "Us vs. Them", man. Forgetting of course, that the true enemy hisses within like the serpent of temptation. . . . . feeding off a society falling to pieces.
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If you live in your own world, or even a small community where "the echo chamber" tells you nothing but the same thing-- and anything questionable is not addressed with feedback-- then consensual reality is going to get pretty warped. About the cruelest thing you can do to anybody is hold up a mirror and show them exactly what they are. Most people will thrash away like a shark in a net with its lowest instincts exposed, and come back chomping at you in a flurry of sharp teeth and a "jerking retreat" with their hands up to their forehead.
The worst part is, if they're half-right about something but you're an ideologue who won't give ground so when they trot out inconvenient facts, you're the one thrashing in the net. If "truth comes in blows", then people thump on each other before running back in the forsaken jungle of left or right-wing politics to regroup with "their tribe" and chant the creed. Most "warriors" on either end are not very sophisticated, but represent raw bodies in the democratic struggle for majority votes and control-- and sometimes the most vexing persons are those who sit on the sidelines, uncommitted either way. A true "war of ideas" is won with truth, not necessarily volume which is "the cheap way out" and only part of the problem of why factions can't talk.
Too often, "the rank-and-file" of any liberal social activist movement full of "said types" is going to be so cruddy, so unsightly, so questionable within the limits of what the mass mind can comprehend-- and the mass mind is scarcely ever more intelligent than its dumbest member, the weakest link in the chain-- that the whole tent is pulled down in one pathetic trample of chaos.
Which is just as well, when the young and idealistic put up far-fetched conspiracy theories on the exalted altar of truth just so long as it's against "evil white men" and "The Octopus of the State" or hatred of "the complete and total other" in a version of cartoon evil, when the quality of the company you keep frightens away most decent people and makes the other side crow in mockery, even as the crowd gravitates around the flashier jewels of a withered, extreme cause like some kind of grubby, secular-humanist "Shroud of Turin" where you see only what you want to see, while cherry-picking as much as any neoconservative ghoul on the build-up to the Iraq war. The world can not always be divided between Amnesty International saint and big-bellied southern sheriff cracking heads because that is a stereotype in reverse and also a kind of cheapening of humanity.
For whatever the cachet the 1960's movement had, just remember what "The Me Generation" stood for-- EGO. Haight-Ashbury began as a noble utopian experiment, but brought out the very worst elements of humanity-- pimps, thieves, prostitutes, runaways, drug addicts, and sociopaths feeding off the naivetè of others before the whole thing collapsed under its own weight. Bad hash was circulating around the crowd at Woodstock, whether by accident or malevolent prank as revelers went into epileptic convulsions on their spread blankets, smacking into their neighbor's picnic baskets like diseased dogs. And no one particularly felt like "picking up after themselves". . . . . leaving tons of trash in the kind of naturalistic setting they claimed to cherish.
And there was humanity-- rotten humanity-- a sweating, stinking, squalling face of flesh that shouted its slogans; a self-congratulatory tale told by an idiot that struts and defies and caterwauls across the stage until it is heard no more, or at least until it settles down into something remotely respectable. Or then again, a certain element never does. . . . .
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Vintage Vinyl, alternative new/used record store to adolescents, post-adolescents, and the loose pieces in the jigsaw puzzle of society clonking around like the dead-fleshed unfit, was clearing out its sister store across the brown, sluggish Mississippi.
In Granite City, Illinois where the factories belched sulfur and rose up like a twisted construction topped with sooty towers of licking flame. . . . . where the facts of economic barrenness and the emotionally-stunted quality of the population that remained were just as pitiless as the slag metal in rusted-over piles like some stick-wristed, unhealthy-lookin' sophisticate's notion of decayed postmodern sculpture. Scarcely a tree was to be found on these ruined floodplains and across the gently sloping distance rose a freakishly-large hill of earth-grated garbage to rival the Cahokia Mounds built by the Native Americans centuries ago.
Huge, unrelenting, putting our stand-alone affairs on the level of a colonist in an ant farm as a trailer sat at the bottom like a tiny excrescence. In ecology, man exists as a mouth or an anus. . . . . and here was the evidence, 1,000 feet tall and more gargantuan than an unspeakable beast out of an H.P. Lovecraft story. Yes, unspeakably obscene.
Which in my mind, would loosely define the counterculture-derived entertainment industry which has been the business model over the past 40 years. Once revolutionary, it now finds itself fairly entrenched like an oily ground-hog of a Saudi prince lounging on a pillow, snorting cocaine off a dollar bill, and telling his subjects "to kiss the ring". Yes, one could rightly say so by the time you behold the deluxe $80 box sets of "The Classics" in heavenly script, a "Rock n' Roll Hall of Fame" underwritten by corporate brass sipping $1000 Chardony, and a magazine-- "Rolling Stone"-- which has long since sold its soul to something that ain't rock but rhymes with "honey" as Jann Wenner rides to his New York publishing offices in a limo.
And
the owner of this Granite City store was the ultimate apologist for this unclean
relationship. . . . . living in another decade, another century. Kids feed cash
into the mouth, creativity ferments in the gut, and the industry defecates
movies and records. What fuels creativity can be likened to "swarming
bacteria", vital to the good of the organism, and not all can be described
as "squeaky clean" and sprightly as Mickey Mouse clenching his
fists with an "oh boy!" through Alice's "Looking Glass".
But as a magical thinker of limitless optimism as he shuffled around with manic, chatterbox speed, the owner saw it all as a "whimsical smorgasboard of diversity". Something ugly and cancerous would loom up like a particularly tall pile of shit, and he would deftly step OVER IT in his world of clutter and filth like a silver puffer balloon filled up with the fermenting cultural rot of a society in decay, and not necessarily for the better.
Free speech had become a profitable, self-justifying "parlor game" with egalitarian myths, fuzzy thinking, and lunk-headed shabos goyum who never questioned his self-absorbed suppositions and hyper-intelligent speechifying while standing there like cloud-eyed peasants in sack cloth as he harangued against any manner of order and discipline as
"FASCISM".What has been true about the "ME" generation and handed down to its descendents hence is a somewhat unrealistic notion of the meaning of "wealth", how to get there, and the side effects-- if not waste products-- of our efforts. Increasingly, we're trading in paper, illusions, or shoddy products-- and folks seem to think that wealth "happens by magic", like a faux-world on television showing a little girl riding on a pony and waving a cowboy hat, only that the horse never needs to shit and everything is ecologically happy and taken care of.
And here the old hippie was, crooking his finger at the system while claiming to be "completely blameless" for whatever part he had in the coarsening of America with the questionable merchandise he sold like a quasi-pornographer, if not owner of a "grind-house" theater. There was always the argument about "free will", but when are you enabling society's bad choices as the lost and sick wandered in and out of your store with a lower level of cloud-eyed consciousness? And if you're in **the shit business** you know well enough to wash your hands before eating, or hugging your family if you're not completely in denial about who you are and what you do.
It went back to that whole either/or thinking that had grown silly and corrupted. Rolling Stone covered stories with complete stone-faced detachment of characters getting into desperate straits, taking their debauchery "at face value" and laying fault at the foot of "The Establishment"-- the cops, the judges, the lawyers, the teachers, the preachers, and never really explaining how all of this blame goes back to my hokey old Uncle Bob and Aunt Virginia sitting in their flower-print living room and watching "Lawrence Welk" wave a horse-hair baton in the 1960's, a copy of "Reader's Digest" sitting next to the candy dish their fingers idly made contact with every great once-in-a-while with an attitude of self-restraint instead of carpet-bagging from the system like mean-eyed turds who needed their assed kicked by strong father figures.
There was "the square way", then "the with-it way" that bent rules for the sake of credibility, if not convenience. Such as it was when I was tapped to help clear out the store with only three days left on the lease with no real forethought or planning from "the boss". And there he was, like Robin Hood "The Jewel Thief" swinging from the castle wall like a counterculture swashbuckler who would never be mistaken for Errol Flynn.
It was all about doodling and smoking pot and slapping together something at the last possible second, frenetically paddling upriver against a stiff wind when the gods farted in contempt at this pitiful "Rube Goldberg" machine made out of pipe cleaners, paperclips, staples, and Styrofoam cups dangling on a shaky string that kept snapping like an unholy joke.
As he repeatedly checked "the ropes" on top of the parapet wall, he assumed this time "the hold" would be solid as if by magic-- taking it for granted despite the crumbling certainties of our outdated assumptions of how life worked.
What was true in 1973-- peddling records on the fringes of society like an electric-haired "Abbie Hoffman" with the potent, hairy stench of marijuana alongside characters that would make Nancy Reagan's hair stand up-on-end-- may not necessarily be exactly the same game today. Not with the narrowing of society and the closing of the American mind. "Cheech n' Chong" once had their cachet, but such slobs are finding themselves squeezed into oblivion when the quality of the pot gets inversely worse-- sucking harder after the same miserable, shriveled little joint like counterculture outlaws looking out for a bigger, badder, swooping albatross of the pissed-off state.
It was certainly enough to send Hunter S. Thompson into the suicidal abyss. . . . .
And maybe I was not a "hip, with-it" individual when we got into a tiff about culture & race. Other than asides about "how lame" white people were, how much "inherently scrappier" Jews are, or how much "more soulfully" black folks compete at singing contests like drippin' Jamba juice in the hip, subversive social narrative, the old hippie was a complete namby-pamby equalitarian. He could see no contradiction in his liberal attitudes reconciled with the world he cynically gauged in his clever, lynx-like eyes like Lenny Bruce stickin' it to the denser Disneyfied gentiles, panicking because the world was not "Mickey Mouse" or orderly as he sleazed around, a lot less cagier than he thought he was with "THE HARD STUFF".
However, neither could it take account for the miserable service at the local Hardee's when the bloated, dim-eyed natives took half-an-hour to complete my order, and even then were so incompetent that they forgot to charge me, waddling off like Jesse Jackson's biggest embarrassment swept under the rug and what white liberals "pretended not to see" like good citizens denying the obvious, wanting to cling to self-bolstering notions of high-mindedness.
Inequality and unfairness is the way of the universe, and thinking you can mend what is inherent 100% of the time with human intervention, much less with government programs, much less with magical thinking, is like trying to lasso a bursting volcano with a shoe string, box in a stampeding herd of buffalo, stop a rumbling earthquake. It is the blooming of the flower, the mating act, the explosion of the supernova deep in outer space, the fact that the raw power of the universe, much less the expression of the human soul-- race, rhythm, instinct, culture, soul-- can not be contained by artificial constructions that try to deny its primal force.
It's the same reason why you can't stop drugs, or the religious impulse, or the inexorable fall of "The Soviet Union" when the kids wouldn't stop demanding rock n' roll and blue jeans; it is the seeping drain of illegally-downloaded music that sooner or later is going to drive all record stores out of business. It is why the old & sick are pulled down by a pack of wolves, why lesser objects gather around the centrifugal force of stronger individuals before breaking up, eddying around with uncertainty, and then gathering elsewhere.
And you call me a purveyor of wicked opinion? Look at what you sell!
In every human relationship, there are the lies we tell ourselves and the lies we tell each other. Then the gloves come off, like an apocalypse of clashing egos when the parties in question take to bludgeoning each other with sticks, carrying on like a bunch of overgrown, wailing children.
He made fun of some of my rather gross motor control difficulties brought about by Asperger's Syndrome, and I cut his ropes and whistled for the sheriff's men. What we both learned is there are surely consequences for either being too honest, or too dishonest with either ourselves or anybody. In Alcoholics Anonymous they talk about not paddling too far up the golden creek of your grandiose, self-indulgent instincts, because that will surely cause you to deviate off the narrow, rocky path of commonsense as it all turns to "shit".
The line is a thin one, indeed.
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"You want a-nuther song? Well I ain't plain' one mutherfuckin' note until someone comes up here and puts sum money in my god-damned tip-jar! You know I only came here for one purpose. . . . . to take yor fuckin' cash! Why, I could make more profit puttin' out my meth-head neighbor's asshole and ringin' a bell, hollerin' 'Man for sale! Man for sale!'
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(Rheeee of Crickets)
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("I heard that, Missy!")
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