Hippies Punched

While U Wait!

Proving once again that there is never a topic so unrelated to hippies that he cannot stretch it into an occasion for hippie-punching, David Brooks uses the announcement that "The Daily Beast" is gobbling up "Newsweek" to explain how hipsters destroyed American culture.

And no, I am not kidding.

According to the David Brooks time-line of Recent American History, there was once a Golden Age of magazining, when every Floyd-the-Barber knew who was singing "il Pagliacci" at the Met that night and every Arnold Ziffle lived and died over the two-fisted exploits of Norman Mailer.

Rather conspicuous by its absence from Mr. Brook's gauzy, expurgated version of Recent American History is any mention of any equally rustic Negro Persons who also spent the 1950s and 60s waiting anxiously by their suburban tract-house mailboxes for the latest news about what Andy Warhol was up to, which starlet Frank Sinatra was banging, and who was holding court at Elaine's. This is because Conservative dogma holds that, except for Rochester and Amos & Andy and some early, pioneering work done by Abraham Lincoln on American Negro 1.0, black people disappeared completely from American history for nearly a century until Reagan discovered the American Negro 2.0 dressed in furs and whizzing through the streets of the Emerald City in a Cadillac all thanks to their wily abuse of the Welfare System that White People had so graciously provided.

(Later, a 3.0 version would go on to open a string of dry cleaners, move uptown and campaign for George H. W. Bush, while a smaller, 3.1 release would figuratively sit on Nancy Reagan's lap

as she explained to the intricacies of United States drug policy. As a note to future historians you must understand that, in the Small Gummint obsessed Conservativeland of today, the terrifying nanny-state implications of the First Lady of the United States coming personally to your home with her Secret Service detail to lecture you on the evils of drug use are no cause for alarm as long as the First Lady is a Republican named "Reagan" and the lecturee is a tiny black person.)

At its gauzy, expurgated, Brooksian apex, American Civilization was run by happy, conformist White Men, spruced up with perky women who vacuumed in pearls and heels, and enlivened by the occasional splash of color here and there: the humble Asians who cooked for the Cartwrights and raised Eddie's Father's son; the noble Mexicans who were all Guy Williams or Ricardo Montalban and just wanted to get along with White People; the scary Red Injuns who were all Guy Williams or Ricardo Montalban and just wanted to kill White People until their Wise Chief found out how awesome White People could be; and a couple of festively encrypted gay people named Paul Lind Lynde (thanks, Tengrain) and Charles Nelson Reilly.

Then some time passed.

Then, out of nowhere, hippies rode into town!

Hippies, with their smelly hair, clitorises, jungle music and marijuana cigarettes! No one knows who they were or where they came from, but for no reason whatsoever they started wrecking the place!

About a generation ago, this earnest self-improvement ethic came under attack. People no longer believed that there was such a thing as a common culture that all educated Americans should study and know. The new ethos valued hipness, not class.

Moreover, the self-esteem hurricanes blew across the landscape. You don’t have to read or listen to boring stuff to possess character. You are wonderful just the way you are.

Bad hippies! Bad!

Also rather conspicuous by their absence are things like the Civil Rights Movement, because Bobo's idiotic Reader's Digest Decline and Fall of White Conformist Suburban Nirvana fantasy could never survive its sharp and terrible rebuke. But that is the advantage of being a Conservative; when facts and history don't in any way square with your stupid ideology, you can just scrap facts and history.

I mean, its not like there are

any consequences to lying on the Right anymore.

And so, down the memory hole goes the Civil Right Movement, followed by the Women's Right Movement, the Vietnam War, the American Indian Movement, the Gay Rights Movement, Watergate and all the other seismic shifts in American culture caused by non-White, non-Suburban, non-Straight and/or non-Male persons taking American democracy seriously enough to stand up and insist that their rights were just as valid and their opinions just as worthy of inclusion in the marketplace of American Ideas as Ward Cleaver or The Lone Ranger.

Also down the memory hole goes any acknowledgment of the fact that the more confident and leisurely pace of an earlier time was made possible by a middle class who were enjoying record prosperity thanks to political and economic trends against which David Brooks' Conservative Movement has waged a relentless, ideological jihad; things like an export economy based on a healthy manufacturing base, a powerful labor movement, massive government spending on public works programs and top-marginal tax rates for millionaires of between 70% (Kennedy) and 90%(Eisenhower).

Also down the hole goes any recognition that the business model under-girding the general-interest magazine world -- like the business models which kept everything from genre-magazines to academia to book publishing to Mom-and-Pop stores prosperous -- has been wiped out. Liquidated by the WalMart mentality and replaced by a two-tier feudal model where The Few at the top prosper and The Many at the bottom barely eke out a subsistence living.

Like David Brooks, I too would love to see a resurgence of all kinds of magazines, including the "general interest". But first, we would have to see a resurgence of the economic environment that was congenial to a...

...magazine that offers an aspirational ideal to the middle manager in the suburban office park, that offers a respite from the deluge of vapid social network chatter, that transmits the country’s cultural inheritance and its shared way of life, that separates for busy people the things that are enduring from the things that aren’t.

Because until the middle class gets a little of its leisure time back, and writers can make something approximating a living plying their trade, the situation is only going to get worse.

(There is, of course, at least one notable exception to the overall bleak outlook for writers: as long as he has an ample supply of Imaginary Hippies to blame for his every itch and ache, and the myth of White Suburban Camelot to wax nostalgic over for 800-words once every three weeks, a certain moon-faced, overpaid New York Times Conservative tripe-slinger will obviously never miss a meal.)