Posts Tagged → hippie
Oh Joni, you’re a mean ol’ granny but I like you
Aging hippie and outstanding musician Joni Mitchell became an American citizen this week. After sixty some years of living here, and benefiting from America, she finally became a citizen. She used her newfound freedoms and opportunities to immediately attack the guy responsible for her admission, President Trump.
It was the usual bad form, bad manners, lack of appreciation, and selfishishness of the political Left, who act like they were raised in caves by packs of wolves or lions.
Having been raised by hippies myself, which is like being raised by wolves, as well as being raised myself by an actual pack of wolves – no lie, absolute truth – I can both relate to much of Joni Mitchell’s music, enjoy much of her music, understand her weird counter-culturism, within the period that was her youth, while rejecting a lot of it for the corrosive immaturity it is, especially now, and also say “Joni, you are a mean old granny, but I like you.”
One of my favorite songs is Joni Mitchell’s “Carey,” which today serves as a time capsule or a time machine back to the freewheelin’ early 1970s. I recommend listening to it at least twice; once to hear the words, and twice to understand and envision them. If you binge listen to it a bunch of times, you are a normal and healthy person.
And while I am here lauding Joni Mitchell’s song, I would like to say that I wrote an eponymous apology letter recently. It is the epic apology letter of human history, and for the one young reader we have here, I can give you some advice: Follow your heart when you are young. Be like Joni Mitchell in that way, and go where your heart takes you. Be brave; do not let fear or uncertainty stand in your way. You will regret it. And if you do not regret it in your mature years, you have no heart, never did.
And Joni, honey, if you are a conservative when you are young, you have no heart, but if you are a liberal when you are old, you have no brain. You are still a hell of a talented musician, and please stop talking about politics. Forthalovagod.
Here are two versions of Carey: One where she gives a great on-stage introduction, and the produced version, which is easier on the ears, and thus easier on the mind creating mental images of 1970s Greek beaches… true freedom in a sense.
Trump is the Resistance
When I was a very young person, I was exposed to a shocking bumper sticker in bright red letters on a white background, on the rear fender of a rusty rattletrap vehicle in front of us: “QUESTION AUTHORITY“.
How I hate to admit that much of my adult political philosophy was shaped by that one dumb, but true and fortuitously placed bumper sticker, at such a young age. Guessing around 1972-1973.
Well do I recall asking my dad (who was driving our car) what that bumper sticker statement up ahead meant, and how the young hippie gave me his explanation. Recall that this encounter and resulting discussion was during the very end of the Vietnam War. It was a time of great change in America, with young people like my hippie parents finding their own interests and cultural comfort zones, and questioning assumptions and everything they had grown up with.
To my dad, QUESTION AUTHORITY meant to question what the government was doing, as it was the ultimate authority, and could cause great damage if left to itself without citizen oversight. He also told me it meant to question what people with authority and power and self-interest anywhere are doing, including teachers and policemen, to ask what corporations are doing, what drug companies and pesticide companies are doing, and so on. To my dad, and then to me, the bumper sticker (which I can still see now in my mind’s eye as clear as the day I first saw it) was the original fact check, an encouragement to think for myself.
It was the original statement of resistance against “The Man.”
“The Man” being the euphemistic hierarchichal boss overseeing all aspects of American (or any other country) government, industry, and culture.
Well, well, well, how times have changed.
Now, those once-young hippies run the government, the teacher’s unions, the drug and pesticide companies. They are The Man, they are in control, they do not want to let go, and brother they tolerate zero questioning of their authority. Their political orthodoxy is absolute and stifling. They tolerate no dissent. It seems once they had achieved power and control over all of the institutions and levers of power and decisionmaking, the once-young hippies settled into cruelly enforcing their views. The same views that once encouraged people to question authority.
But don’t you dare question their authority!
Yes, this irony seems lost on the hippies, but what is most curious is how few young Americans today want to question authority, to think for themselves. Instead, I see a huge proportion of American young people as mass produced, cookie cutter stamped young authoritarians coming out of the very industrialized education system. They do not question authority, rather they aspire to be the authority, the unquestioned, the duly obeyed.
Against the enormous array of completely corrupted and highly organized power and authority – the media, academia, entertainment, government schools, corporate America, Silicon Valley, the United Nations, both political parties in Washington DC, etc. stands One Man, who is questioning authority.
Against this incredible array of raw power and exploitative money stands Donald Trump, Our Man, the very image of resistance against The Man, of the American citizen standing against corrupt power.
The fact that so many young Americans do not identify with the underdog resistance the way the hippies did in 1972, the way healthy young people normally do, but rather so many desire to bully the underdog, to crush the resistance, to blot it out, to sadistically damage, cancel, hurt and destroy the underdog resistance, so that their own authority shall not be questioned, is a very bad sign. These are sick children.
To all the un-sick young Americans out there: Donald Trump is the resistance. He is the symbol of The People’s rebellion against the evil empire in Washington, DC. He is the underdog representing all of the forgotten little people in America, the forgotten workers and forgotten taxpayers, questioning the authority of terrible people, and he is battling against terrible forces of great evil and destruction. He deserves your support.
If you want to fight against the evil empire, join forces with Donald Trump. He needs you. America needs you. We have just a week remaining to save the galaxy, your galaxy, your future.
Don’t trust anyone under thirty
A few weeks before I was born, a leftist activist in Berkeley, California, said “Don’t trust anyone over thirty” in a newspaper interview, and a star was born.
What young Jack Weinberg was saying in that late 1964 interview was that a generation gap had developed between America’s youth and our elders at the time. In 1964, the young people were using language and ideas that their elders could not understand, and did not approve of when they did understand them. Weinberg’s point then was that people over thirty years old could not be trusted, because they could not understand or relate to the young people and held onto old fashioned ideas. There was a sense among young people that they were leading a movement for positive change that would make America even better.
While those young people were wrong about an awful lot, like most everything they promoted, they were right about the Vietnam War. And it was the daily images from that bloody, sad war that energized Jack Weinberg and his fellow activists most, and enabled them to implement a whole bunch of real crap that has still damaged America to this very moment.
Fast forward a couple decades, when I was in graduate school down south back in the late 1980s, and my former hippie dad sent me a funny post card with a cartoon of an aging hippie saying the “Don’t trust anyone over thirty” line, which was crossed out. And then there were subsequent lines, each one crossed out: “Don’t trust anyone over forty, Don’t trust anyone over fifty.” The implication being that the once-young hippies had grown up and themselves become the conservative elders they once rejected, and if Jack Weinberg’s truism was going to still hold true for them all those decades later, it was going to have to keep up with the march of time, age, grey hair, and robust bank accounts and retirement plans. My dad was poking fun at himself, and admitting that he had become that which he once rejected.
And what eventually happened to Jack Weinberg, Abbie Hoffman, Jerry Rubin, and the other 1960s radical leftist Jews and their Christian colleagues? They eventually almost all grew up, bought nice clothes, got married, bought a home, got jobs selling stocks, in law, and accounting. All their silly radical generation gap nonsense was discarded. Many of them found God, and became the hard working middle income earners their parents had aspired to be.
Now let’s fast forward another couple decades and I am talking to a class of college students in central Pennsylvania. Invited by professor Andrea, I mostly answer questions about my perspective on “climate change”, environmental protection, the role and purpose of government, marriage, gardening, owning guns, and work life. Afterwards, Andrea confided to me that her own students accuse her of being a conservative because she is married to a man, with whom she has two kids, a home, a car, a dog, and a mortgage.
“Josh, never in a million years did I think that by being a traditional liberal would I be accused of being a right wing reactionary,” she told me, with her eyes bugging out in surprise.
And this is why we can no longer trust anyone under thirty years of age. These young, untested, pampered, entitled, spoiled goofs clogging up our colleges and street protests and Tik Tok video feeds are not only politically radicalized, they are incapable of growing out of it. These are not the happy hippies of the 1960s, rather, these are monsters.
Their overweening parents have protected them from reality all their lives, allowed them to become culturally indoctrinated in government schools resulting in no actual skills like knowledge of math and science, but great skills in yelling at people they don’t know while crying about boo-boo words. Unlike yesteryear’s working class hippies they want to emulate, today’s kids don’t know anything and cannot do anything, so much so that they are at risk of never growing up and never being able to grow up.
This is where today’s young people diverge from the Jack Weinbergs, Abbie Hoffmans, and Jerry Rubins of the 1960s and 1970s. Young people in the 1960s still had an American work ethic and knew basic right from wrong. They thirsted for knowledge and trusted science. Today’s kids mostly have zero work ethic, know zero actual facts, have no useable skills, can’t tell a man from a woman, and have no moral compass. And they are not interested in anything that gets in the way of their five dollar latte.
Today’s young people have become not an agent for change, but for destruction. We can’t understand them because they don’t understand themselves and probably can’t ever. Today’s young people are a dire threat to themselves and to the rest of us who rely on the rule of law and the application of modern science in our daily lives. Their nonsensical ideas about hiring scientists and engineers based on skin color and allegiance to Marxist principles instead of merit and skill is why Boeing planes are suddenly disintegrating and nearly hitting each other in the air, and why schools everywhere at all levels have openly given up on teaching math and science in lieu of teaching racism against white people, enforcing silly pronouns rules, and subjectively respecting “feelings” above all or “I will throw a crying tantrum while simultaneously beating the snot out of the offender.”
Today’s under-thirty man-child crowd is soon going to be at the controls of America, and it won’t be a sustainable situation. We don’t trust these people for good reason, and unlike the young people of the 1960s who eventually grew up and contributed to America, there is nothing funny or cute about this situation.
Today’s young people aspire to be permanent wards of the state, while their elders work to support them, and also bow and scrape and constantly apologize for whatever imaginary hurt the woman-child has just experienced.
America is in a world of trouble.
America’s young have this fantasy that they can simply force everyone to adopt whatever crazy ideas they have, no matter how destructive
“Mom, peanut butter smoothie NOW!”
Biden DOJ is suing Texas and others because Biden DOJ does not want federal immigration law enforced. Think about this crazy treason
I am not making this stuff up, just using their own images and their own words (arch demon Adolf Hitler on left)