Happy Halloween: Our Hippie Heritage

By: Arthur Hu, Oct 21, 2007

Tags: Hu's on First, Opinion |

I was struck by the History Channel’s unbalanced depiction of our hippie heritage on the series Time Machine. The herd of independently thinking middle-class white kids who tuned in, turned on and dropped out, started in Haight-Ashbury. They were visited by the “acid test,” where everybody paid money, took LSD and tripped out. CIA-researched LSD was a defense spin-off that mainstreamed drug use, killed rock stars and gave us spectacular murders.

Researchers who investigated that only bad people had bad trips found out that, well, drugs are bad for everybody. But we knew that from the Opium Wars. Some thought reason led to wars, but a society with no rules or bounds produced—surprise?—complete chaos.

If you were to be believe some of the wild conjectures of the program, LSD bootstrapped a deliberately engineered decay in values that would end up contributing to the rise of AIDS and the decline of the nuclear family and marriage. If you ask me, I’d say you could also toss in the reaction of the Christian right, which has become today’s most active counterculture.

The conservative City Journal and National Review remarked that while blacks made tremendous economic progress, this new cultural revolution of making love, not climbing the career ladder, was a formula for disaster. This hardly prepared them to compete with the social weapon of mass destruction of educated immigrants indoctrinated in the ways of Confucious and Sir Isaac Newton, rather than Timothy Leary.

Today’s Democrats and Asian American intellectuals who speak for immigrants are still dominated by hippie-think. Nearly half of Democrats either want the Iraqi insurgents to win or aren’t sure. How much of AsianWeek is devoted to impeaching Bush, abandoning Iraq to totalitarianism and reflexive support across all America’s 500 Asian rights groups for gay marriage, abortion and race preferences, for other people’s kids? The real Asian Americans are picking up Chinese and Korean phone directories with college SAT rankings, and our kids are watching the Crazy Asian Mother on YouTube, not reading the quotations of Mao.

Protesters charged police lines bearing the flag of the Viet Cong. Jane Fonda played “Tokyo Rose” to “Thud” pilots, while making pin-up pics for AAA crews. Declaring war on America for peace was their way of destroying a village to save it. It was the Republican Nixon who shook hands with Mao. Bringing our boys home paved the way for the renaming of Saigon, the Killing Fields, and the subsequent stampede to get out of communist Southeast Asia into Little Saigons.

Today, YouTube hosts Asians singing worship songs audibly indistinguishable from rock hits. I grew up with long hair and KJR radio. Jobs and Wozniak were long-haired, sandal-shod creators of the Apple personal computer. Our most famous Asian-Canadian-American hippie, if not comedian, of all time may well be the rarely recognized Tommy Chong of Cheech and Chong (”Dave’s not here!”). But if your church has a strict prohibition against witch or Harry Potter costumes, you should scrutinize those popular hippie and flower-power girl costumes this Halloween as well.

Comments

Dear Arthur:
I read your piece debating Phil Tajitsu Nash’s denouncing the Bush/neocon debacle in Iraq, and, after reading the above, I still have a problem disceerning either theme OR

–Frank Eng on Oct 21, 2007
Dear Arthur:
I continue to have grave difficulties trying to follow your thoughts and reasoning.
But, if what you are trying to say is that Republicans are your political heroes and that the Iraq War is not only “winnable” but justified, like the Vietnam War, I can only shake my head in bemusement.
As for drugs, legal or verboten, they are purely peripheral to the societal symptons of DIS-ease.
Confucius may not have addressed “sex” in his ideal society, but how many exemplars of his ideal relationships are you conversant with?
“Chaos” within always outstrips the chaos “out there,” even as we struggle mightily to project the damnable mess onto others.
By the way, the Democrats are proving not all that much saintlier than their brother/sister subjects to the reigning powers of “lobbies” and warmongers, war profiteers, and war lovers.
Are you a war lover? Better the hippie variety, sandaled and “high” on whatever. If they mistreated themselves, at least they didn’t indulge in murder, mayhem, and destruction in the name of self-interest.
Frank Eng
P.S.: Are you absolutely certain “climbing the ladder” trumps climbing into bed with er, ah someone you fancy?

–Frank Eng on Oct 21, 2007
Dear Editor,

Arthur Hu demonizes the hippies in his latest article (“Hu’s on First,” 10/19/07, page 6), but he forgets what our real hippie heritage is. We hippies have stood and fought for racial equality, peace, the environment, women’s rights, and gay, lesbian, and transgender rights. We have and are fighting for the rights of our troops to openly voice their views, and for our country to obey international law. Consider this - the hippies have always stood up for the rights of minorities - rights our attackers hate. When I was a child, there were no Asian elected officials, none. Now the issue is, we want more Asian elected officials, enough to represent our percent of the population. We Asians came this far with the consistent support of my hippie brothers and sisters. Has Hu forgotten this?

Hu opposes Jane Fonda, but if he had seen the movie, “Sir! No Sir!,” he would have seen documentary footage of Jane Fonda being cheered by thousands of American soldiers during the Viet Nam war. Why? Because she supported the majority of soldiers who opposed the war because it was based on lies, manipulation, and deception of the American and Vietnamese people - as documented by our government in the “Pentagon Papers.” This is no different from the 72% of American active duty troops in the 2006 poll who for similar reasons oppose the Iraq war.

In the ‘60’s, we hippies had a dream. A dream of a world in which hunger, war, torture, oppression, and exploitation no longer exist. A world in which nations resolve their differences peacefully, in which the environment is respected and cared for, in which all persons are respected and have equal rights, and in which people and nations strive to live together in peace and harmony. My hippie brothers and sisters have fought for this dream all of our lives, and some have died for this dream. The world may be a long way from this ideal, but is this dream really what Arthur Hu wants to oppose?

Sincerely,

Michael Wong

–Michael Wong on Oct 26, 2007
Dear Editor,

Arthur’s retelling of revisionest history is another example of how the truth can set you free while lies will enslave you. He writes of the past with the conviction of a high school reporter who has consulted only a single source and accepted it as the gospel truth without ever thinking of asking anyone who lived through that era what it was really like. The sixties were an era of change for all of us living in it. The American promise of power to the people was seeing the first signs of being tested by young people who were trying to live up to the ideals they were being taught, and the harsh truth of reality when we discovered that the people in power could be so ruthless in the ways they abused their authority and how they used every means they had to supress the truth to stay in power. Yes, there were drugs flowing around as we set about to find the true meaning of life but it should not have been given as much historic attention as it got because it obscured the real issues at hand. A lot of reports of drug use and its effects on society were blown way out of proportion in an effort to distract public attention from seeing what was really going on. The free speech and anti-war movements was attacked by political leaders who called the free speech movement the “Foul Speech Movement” when it our goal was to ensure students and their teachers had the same protection and rights to freedom of speech on campus as we were told all Americans were then guaranteed to have under the U.S. Constitution. We were told that as students we did not have those rights and our concerns about the war in Southeast Asia were the result of being turned into Communist supporters by our enemies. Instead of trying to understand our concerns and commitment to the rights of others as we were taught, we were beaten and attacked with police dogs and firehoses for questioning the right of our leaders to send young boys off to fight in a war before they were old enough to have the right to vote for and elect leaders who could stop the madness. The efforts to register voters in the South and eliminate poll taxes that kept poor people from having the right to vote were met with lynchings, murder, and unwarranted attacks by the police and National Guard.

The National Guard opened fire on a peaceful student anti war demonstration at Kent State University killing several innocent children while here at Berkeley I remember a peaceful demonstration turning into a wild stampede and near riot as National Guard helocopters flew low over the Berkeley campus and downtown area using their rotor blades to spread the barrels of tear gas they poured out as they spread it all over the campus and downtown attacking everyone in their path just because they were there.

Whenever you see a gathering of old gray haired men wearing faded and worn battle dress fatigues protesting our nations current policies, please don’t drive past them and dismiss their presence. Stop and ask them why they they are gathering there. You will find that many of them put their lives on the line forty years ago so you would have the right to question authority today. There may be less of us now than there once were as time claims so many of our voices now, but they are my brothers one and all.

I consider it my sacred duty as an American to seek out the truth wherever I can find it. The truth for us will be found in the journey to understand. All you need to do is ask.

–Tyler Gee on Oct 27, 2007
Wow man. Like I said starting out, it was a remarkably UN-balanced TV documentary, though you’ve all figured out I thought it was fully _justifiably_ unbalanced. But in the end, yes Reagan was right and the hippies were wrong. Drugs are bad for you. Marxism is bad for you. Dropping out is bad for you. Ask anybody in Little Saigon if the real bad guys were in Hanoi, Beijing and Moscow, or McNamara and Johnson? Do a web search on Jane Fonda and look at how history has judged her little DJ stint with Radio Hanoi, and her Vietnam magazine cover picture. The 60’s are over and the hippies and drug culture lost. Get over with it, and we need the next generation of Asian Americans know what really happened back then so we can learn the lessons of history and the REAL lesson of Vietnam - there is nothing wrong with fighting for freedom when other forces are willing to give THEIR lives to take it from you.

–arthur hu on Oct 27, 2007
Arthur:
If, indeed, you are Hu you are, ask ANYone in “Little Saigon”?
How about asking the rest of us everywhere OUTside of Little Saigon?
I, for one, insist that Reagan was “Right,” all right, as in trickle-down Reaganomics, maybe Grenada as well, and drugs DO have too many side effects, whatever theit “legal” status, do you drink wine, Art?, and Marxism seems to have proven as good or as bad as ANY system of governance humans have devised to date, but why are you still insisting that two million civilian dead, whatever the cause or ideology, is “winning”?
If you are part of the airlift out of Saigon back then, I, for one, don’t begrudge your good fortune, but I’ll be damned if I can accept this nation’s idiot following of the French into Indo-China then, and, today, into Afghanistan, no matter where bin Laden may be “hiding.”
A generation ago, WE were exploiting the idiot Russians in THEIR go in that sad nation, after the Brits a century earlier. For oil or glory or simple macho hegemony, this administration has much to answer for to the people, and I include immigrants like yourself?
In this particular interchange, I think Tyler Gee’s personal experiences and beliefs trump yours by, say, a lifetime? Ditto Michael Wong.
This graybeard salutes the both of them, the while pondering your claim to the “new” generation(s) of presumably conformist Establishmentarian “Asian-Americans”.
Ah, the real lesson of the Vietnam War. Indeed.
Frank Eng

–Frank Eng on Oct 27, 2007

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