June 8

I was walking back along Bloor after lunch a couple of days ago in my favorite tie-dye, past a friendly young panhandler east of the Dominion supermarket. And as I passed him, he called out to me:

“Hey, that’s a great shirt, man. Smoke weed in that shirt!”

I laughed. “Thanks.”

I also laughed it off when I was out on the edge of the greenspace at Bloor and Spadina practicing guitar tonight, and a kind-of-cute blonde walked by with half a dozen of her friends.

And as she struts past in high heels on the sidewalk she points me out to her friends, and drops an H-bomb: “Look! A hippie with a guitar!”

You can’t say, “Look! A nigger with a basketball!” ‘Cause that would make you a racist.

You can’t say, “Look! A dumb blonde with a vagina!” That would make you ... conservative.

But drop an H-word, and no one even bats an eye. Even if it’s raging hairism.

‘Cause hippie is the nigger of the world. If I’m in a job interview against two other men, they’ve both got shorter hair than I do; and as soon as the people doing the hiring see that, I’m not even in the running anymore.

Be honest: Would you employ an obvious “drug dealer”?

So if I hear that H-word coming out of your mouth, you damned well better have hair down past your shoulders, and at least one tie-dye in your closet.

We’ve never been kept as slaves, but that’s only because everyone knows you’ll never get an honest day’s work out of a hippie. Right?

“Where are the slaves, Bentley?”

“They’re still pretty wasted from the acid test last night, sir. Jerry’s tripping out about dissolving into a field of cotton. And that hippie chick you’ve had as a concubine since last winter? She’s pregnant and wants to keep the baby. She’s naming it ‘Moonbeam.’”

The U.S. would be a Third World country. Because everyone knows you’ll never get an honest day’s work out of a hippie. That’s what makes it more than a stereotype: It’s just common sense.

What have the hippies ever done for the world? You know, aside from Woodstock, environmentalism, recycling, organic foods, the sexual revolution, casual clothes in the workplace, and some of the first multimedia shows as part of the Acid Tests—which the Dead were the official in-house band for. Not to mention a good part of the computer revolution:

The latest generation of supercomputers, utilizing massive parallel processing, was invented, developed and manufactured by Danny Hillis, a genial longhair who set out to build “a machine that could be proud of us.” Public-key encryption, which can ensure unbreakable privacy for anyone, is the brainchild of Whitfield Diffie, a lifelong peacenik and privacy advocate....

Before Steve Jobs founded Apple Computers he was a Beatle-haired hippie and college drop-out, who went to India looking for spiritual enlightenment and came back wearing traditional Indian clothes with his head shaved.

He was also a hacker on the edge of the law, for the “blue boxes” he and Steve Wozniak sold to let people make free long-distance phone calls. Woz actually once used his box to dial Vatican City—identifying himself as Henry Kissinger, and asking to speak to the pope. Sadly, His Holiness was asleep at the time.

Wozniak was also “one of us.” As he put it:

Everything I was reading about hippies and hippie beliefs in the late 1960s—the free love movement, things like putting flowers in guns—I knew that was me and what I wanted to be. I agreed with every bit of it. I believed, like hippies did, that everybody should be able to get along and help each other out and live out whatever kind of existence they wanted....

I would wear this little Indian headband, and I wore my hair really long and grew a beard. From the neck up, I looked like Jesus Christ.

Woz wouldn’t do drugs, though, so the real hippies finally made him stop hanging around with them. Seriously.

There’s actually an old programmer’s joke about how both LSD and the BSD distribution of Unix came out of Berkeley ... and maybe that’s not just a coincidence.

Counterculture icon Ram Dass explains why it really isn’t just a coincidence:

My friends from Silicon Valley all used acid, and they took what they learned from psychedelics into technology. The creation of personal computers and the Internet was inspired in part by psychedelics.

And that surprises you? Where did you think the “all-knowing, talking paperclip” came from?

And an interpenetrating network where everything’s connected to everything else, like in the Web of Indra, well that’s just ... groovy, man.

Or consider the testimony of James Fadiman, a leading transpersonal psychologist who “studied acid” under a younger and less mystical Dass at Harvard, and later supervised the LSD experiments at Stanford University in the mid-’60s:

[T]here are a number of rather distinguished, very happy [!] scientists who were involved in our studies. One became a vice president of Hewlett-Packard, another has won every major scientific award that the computer world offers....

If you were to go to a conference that featured the “breakthrough” computer minds from the first wave of computer companies, nearly all of them were deeply affected by psychedelics.

Steve Jobs, for one, experimented with LSD, calling his experiences with that drug “one of the two or three most important things” he had done in his life.

And then there were the psychedelic experiences of Bill Wilson, the founder of Alcoholics Anonymous:

In the late 1950s and early 1960s Wilson volunteered to become a research subject for Sidney Cohen, a physician on the faculty of the UCLA School of Medicine, and one of the world’s leading medical psychedelic researchers. After several profound and transformative LSD experiences facilitated by Cohen and his research psychologist, Betty Eisner, Wilson proposed to the Board of Directors of Alcoholics Anonymous that the psychedelic treatment model be incorporated into the AA approach.... [H]e asserted that psychedelics offered a safe and efficacious pathway to recovery from alcohol addiction.

Could anything be more outta sight? It’s like, Psychedelics Anonymous, man.

Stoners and hippies in I.T. and AA are one thing. But, potheads and Deadheads in politics? Christ—is there any group you’d want less to have a say in running a country?

Well, tell that to Tony Blair, who played in a Dead-inspired band in his student days (as did musician Bruce Hornsby—different band, though). Tell it to Senator Patrick Leahy, Al and Tipper Gore, Nancy Pelosi, Al Franken, John Kerry, or fellatio expert Bill Clinton himself—Deadheads, every one of ‘em. And on the other side of the political spectrum, there’s Ann Coulter, the pundit Tucker Carlson, and Clinton’s Monica-gate nemesis, Kenneth Starr.

“I did not ‘rock and roll’ with that woman.”

Even if us hippies meddle occasionally in politics, though, we thankfully tend to steer clear of the business world. Well, except for maybe Jerry Greenfield—of Ben & Jerry’s fame; hence the world’s all-time best flavor of ice cream, Cherry Garcia. And Larry Page, co-founder of Google. Plus Mitch Kapor, of Lotus 1-2-3 spreadsheet fame—and a former Transcendental Meditation® teacher to boot. Maybe he’s not even a full-blown Deadhead, but he still co-founded the Electronic Frontier Foundation with the other Grateful Dead lyricist, John Perry Barlow. (Barlow was also on the Board of Directors of the WELL—the Whole Earth ‘Lectronic Link, an early [1985] online discussion board co-founded by Wired magazine father and Acid Test-organizer Stewart Brand, and home to the original Craigslist. He was also—if you can believe this—a campaign manager in Dick Cheney’s run for Congress in 1978.)

There’s also a guy Coulter mentions who made candles to sell at Grateful Dead shows, whose “daily routine consisted of waking up, smoking a bowl, and turning on the Rush Limbaugh radio show while he made his candles.”

But hey, that could be exactly how Greenfield and Page got started!