open mind, open heart. open neckface.

S-NNAAAP! Sasha whips up Dave Grohl cauldron-style.
The comments section of the “hippie” entry, below, has reached boiling point. As with the irony trend, I will posit the “new hippie” thing is territory largely relegated to white males with class leverage. I will now quote E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial and remind all to “be excellent to each other” (or, um… was that Bill and Ted? christ), and request that, like Lenny Kravitz, C’n’P commenters let love rule, and that everyone minds their manners.
In the new issue of The Nation, there’s a transcript of a conversation between Cornel West and Toni Morrison; it’s not online (yo, lefty mags gotta make rent), but it’s tres pertinent:
West: “There are certain structural processes at work that make it difficult for us to maintain the kind of web, the care and bonds of empathy with not just the vanilla/chocolate city distinctions in the empire, but also with the materialism, the careerism, the individualism that make it difficult for us to even conceive of ourselves as a part of some larger communal project.”
…later, on 9/11 and the failure of our government to call upon us as CITIZENS, and not just consumers:
WEST: “It’s a sick civilization that would be so obsessed with the sexualization of its children, the targeting of its children as a constituency to consume, and think that somehow the future is going to be in mature hands when they’re 100 percent of the future. That’s not just shortsighted, it’s pathological…
In the history of black people, we’ve been so hated that love takes on subversive status.”
MORRISON: “It’s renegade. Totally renegade.”
I highly recommend buying the issue for this interview (it’s the 5/24/04), because it busted my mind several times over, complete with verbalized “whoa”s. I guess what I’m hoping for the hippie microcosm as outgrowth of irony is that people realize irony-as-movement was a product of insecurity, disillusionment, dysfunction, and in the worst cases, hate. And hopefully it means that, even living with a terrifying government, people are genuinely inspired to reach out to one another, outside an oppressive materialist culture, even if they are propelled there by a hit of acid and seven minutes in Acid Mothers Temple.
how’s that for some fucking hippie shit.