Rhinocrisy

I dropped a friend of mine off at Esalen in Big Sur last weekend; when I stepped out of the car I was greeted by the sound of African drums pounding out a tribalesque rhythm. At once my lip began to curl, and my skin crawled like a seething carpet of bees. Hippies.

I only caught a glimpse of one, maybe in his sixties, paunchy, shifting and repositioning his limbs in some kind of ritualistic imitation of dance. Fortunately I did not have to speak to any one of them, and was thus spared the effort of controlling my tongue, preventing it from twisting and spilling forth a litany of contempt.

I’m not precisely sure what my problem is, or why I should feel such an acute dislike for hippies. I can certainly name two qualities which I associate with them, and which might speed my distaste: cultural appropriation and inauthenticity.

An anecdote I have repeated to illustrate this point: a coffee shop I used to sit in for long hours was also frequented by a young gentleman of the hip persuasion. He had all the essential trappings of his kind: unkempt facial hair, dreadlocks, rough, organic cotton clothing. I overheard him conversing with a young woman, chatting her up, as smooth as a polished buckeye. He roved over a number of eco-tastic and spiritual subjects, finally landing on his devotion to Amma, Amritanandamayi Devi, speaking seriously of her environmentalist ethics. “You know, Amma says you should plant at least one tree every year,” he propounded.

“Do you do it?” his subject returned.

He hid his confusion behind a laugh. “No, I don’t do it,” he admitted. Which was not at all unexpected. He fairly stank of his inauthenticity, which is why he tried so hard to cover it up with the correct physical forms.

I’m convinced that at bottom what motivates most hippies to don the hemp pajamas is white post-colonial guilt. It’s hard to be a white kid in the modern day and age, constantly reminded that your privilege is built on centuries of oppression of people of color. The institutions of your culture have been dissected and identified as racist and patriarchal, run through with all sorts of demonic tendencies and compromised by their ceaseless perpetuation of horrific levels of violence. And on top of all that, you’re not cool, either. What’s a poor white kid to do?

Rather than live with the guilt, I think many try to give up their privilege by running as far from their roots as they are able. They study Third World and First Nations cultures, replace their own discredited institutions with bits and pieces taken from other world-views. They affect appearances of poverty and marginalization.

Why does this irk me so much? First, because I don’t think any of them manage to eradicate their privilege to the extent that they believe they do. Second, even if they did achieve this difficult goal, I’m not sure that their success would be laudable. I’d much rather someone retain their privilege and employ their position to setting the world to right, rather than focus on the more self-indulgent project of removing the source of their guilt.

This is a poor position to take, since I’m certainly not in a position to pass judgment on anyone else, and, furthermore, most of these people are my fellow travelers, and, at the very least, possess the basic desire for promoting social justice. Alas, bigotry grows from stereotyping. Encounter enough of a type and you may reify it enough to form attachments and dislikes.

I’ve been listening to a lot of 80s pop music lately, via Pandora. I know; it’s embarrassing. But what can I do? I like to dance, and I like being reminded that I like to dance. My favorite new discovery is this one:

Today I received my first really striking demonstration of San Francisco’s famed microclimates. I live on 24th street in the Mission. Right now we have our own personal raincloud, small, but dense and extremely fierce. It is pouring rain down on our block with a vicious determination to soak. If I ride my bike a few blocks north to 19th street, the rain gives way to an ancillary spray of cool mist, blue skies and sunbeams. Fantastic.

No doubt you’ve seen this already, but this guy is a hero and deserves to be lauded many times, so I’m posting it, too. A great farewell to a really shitty man. Hopefully Muntadar al-Zaidi will be okay.

Yes, it’s true. I’ve thought about it, and after doing some math, I decided that we should bail out the auto industry. This is the math:

700/35 = 20

I’m not a big fan of Detroit. They make big, badly-engineered cars designed to fall apart quickly. They had a program of selling larger and larger cars to the American market over the past fifteen years.^* But they do actually MAKE things.

Remember how, in the 1990s, economists told us there was a “new economy”, and from now on we would make our bread from lines of code, “intellectual property” and cunning manipulations of people’s psychological states? Remember how they slowly implemented a program of shifting our “old economy”, based on building stuff with our hands, to other countries? And remember how that turned out to be a load of hooey, and it all fell apart a few years later? Well, now it’s time to shore up the sagging remnants of our manufacturing sector and get back to using our hands again.

It’s somewhat mysterious why there’s so much nervous dry-washing and fidgeting over this prospective bailout. It can’t be the money - we spend the same quantity in Iraq in three months, and we’re giving away twenty times that amount to the financial industry, which hasn’t exactly proved itself capable of handling money correctly. But of course in that case, we’re providing liquidity, the all-important hydraulic fluid which keeps this fabulous capitalist golem moving and flailing. Never mind that the valves and flanges have all burst, and there’s really nowhere for that precious fluid to go except to drain onto the ground. There’s very little point disbursing funds when you don’t have a clue what to invest them in, because all the pieces of the economy that actually produce goods and services - rather than uselessly moving money around - are in tatters. The act of bailing out the financial sector is comparable to a desperate Rabbi Loew operating his golem by standing behind it and repositioning the limbs as necessary. The illusion is gone - it’s not a glorious automaton, it’s not a magical engine driven by the spark of the divine word. It’s just a dead piece of clay. We’re better off coming out from behind the machine and doing the work ourselves - fix what we broke. Let the golem return to dust.

I have little faith that the Big Three will make good use of the money. And perhaps it would be wisdom to let them be dashed to pieces against the rocks of their own failed vision. But I’m more inclined to say that right now we should be focusing on keeping our heads above water. We posted half a million jobs lost in November. And as a great man once said^†, people have got to put food on their families.

^* Culminating in the opening of a Truck-a-saurus dealership down the street from me a few years ago - the flames kept me awake at night and the fumes gave me black lung.

^† Probably right before he fell off a Segway.

While trying to find out about Elton John’s album “Captain Fantastic and the Brown Dirt Cowboy”, I came across this important piece of news:

In February, a judge in New Zealand made a young girl a ward of court so she could change her name from Talula Does The Hula From Hawaii.