The counterculture’s B side

by David Benjamin 

“… Every town must have a place where phony hippies meet/ Psychedelic dungeons popping up on every street …”

—The Mothers of Invention

 

MADISON, Wis.— The counterculture is back, but in a mirror image, everything in reverse. It’s been with us since 2015 but we’ve barely noticed, because of its dizzying ass-backwardness. Look closely, though, and you’ll see the Sixties all over again. Let’s reminisce.

In my college days, I got accustomed to “straight” folks pegging me, somewhat inaccurately, as a hippy. I’m not sure what anyone actually meant by that but I didn’t object.

The criterion people seemed to apply, in sussing my hipness, was how I looked. Besides my overgrown hair, they saw evidence in my clothes, despite the fact that my only fashion standards have always been a) cheap and b) comfortable. Among the features of my Sixties wardrobe, the most hippified was an Army surplus fatigue jacket that I wore ’til it fell apart. On the back, I had written with a Magic Marker the strange device, “Trout Fishing in America.” Not, you might note, “Power to the People” or “Off the Pig.” 

My two other staples were blue jeans and sandals.

I’m still wearing blue jeans and sandals. Why? Cheap, comfortable.

My fellow accused hippies shared my sartorial style, especially the cheap part, because most of us had jobs. Nancy, for example, was a nurse’s aid. Stan washed pots and pans in the college kitchen. I put in thirty hours a week in the same kitchen, serving meals, mopping the floors, stealing ice cream. 

Our fashion outlet was the Goodwill thrift store. When you look back, it becomes apparent that most so-called hippies dressed, for practical reasons, in second-hand clothes, from Goodwill, St. Vinny’s, the Army/Navy store. It wasn’t ’til the mid-’70s, after the counterculture had dwindled to a psychedelic memory, that costly boutiques retailing faux hippy garb began popping up on the streets of middle America. Bell bottoms, please note, were post-revolutionary.

Despite its influence, the Sixties counterculture never made a signature fashion statement. There was a lot of tie-dying, most of it garish, amateurish and ugly. If you look at photos from Woodstock, there are a few daishikis, the odd kid with a U.S. flag sewed to his ass, some billowy skirts and gossamer robes, big bright scarves and peasant blouses. There were remarkably few obscene t-shirts and hardly any bras at all. Underwear was optional. Jimi Hendrix was overdressed, Country Joe McDonald the opposite. Everything wearable was cheap, haphazard and easily removed. The overall effect was an impression—as in Monet. The counterculture’s outward appearance was loose, harlequin, improvisational and sort of blurry. It was anti-commercial—although not openly hostile to commerce. 

After the counterculture whimpered its way into history, the species whom Frank Zappa called phony hippies was literally extinct, having melted back into an “establishment” that, for a semester or so, they had scorned, reviled and defied. Their clothes fell out of vogue and drifted back to Goodwill, to be sold third-hand to the poor folks who ended up receiving no palpable benefit from a revolution that waved their banner but bypassed their block. 

All this ancient turmoil occurred to me as I watched a crowd of Trump believers milling outside the Miami courthouse where their messiah was being arraigned for stashing nuclear secrets in his toilet. This gathering was a wan echo of the January 6 putsch on Capitol Hill, but as I considered these two MAGA-fests, the obvious, but counterintuitive analog that came to mind was Woodstock!

The Trump faithful hate an “establishment” the way hippies and stoners hated it in ’68. They have no better definition of this nebulous elite than we did back then. We only knew for sure that the bad guys who wore suits (except Gene McCarthy and Bobby Kennedy) were the Devil. Likewise, the only guy in a suit tolerable to today’s B-side counterculture is … well, you know. 

Also, like the Sixties, today’s counterculture needs a crowd, a rally, a wide street to march down, lots of signs and a thousand nervous cops—plus a decent band with a good beat, if you can hire one. It needs the Fillmore man! The apogee of the Sixties counterculture was those 100,000 kids on Max Yasgur’s grassy hillside. Its death came barely four months later at Altamont. I wonder. Was January 6  the new counterculture’s Woodstock, and Trump’s Miami micro-mob the day the music died?

For the most part, the original counterculture, besides its prevailing attitude of opposition (aided immensely by the actual, tangible reality of the war in Vietnam), had trouble explaining itself. Its intellectual incoherence was a sort of strength. You either got it, or you were, in Dylan’s terms, “Mr. Jones.” This visceral ethos recurs, even more chaotically, in the Trump cult. In both cases, a nebulous “movement,” born in anger, devolves into a focus on the people (or groups of people) they hate and on institutions they would bomb, if they could, and burn.  

The engine of both countercultures is emotion. In 1967, “flower power” was camouflage for rage. The current congregation’s emotional touchstones are, in the words stitched on hats and shirts, “God, guns and Trump.” They struggle to articulate what they want, but they know how they feel, and they revel in the camaraderie of people who feel exactly, loudly, profanely the same. 

I remember the time when I could spot a fellow freak a block away at a glance. Any number of signs—hair, huaraches, headband, beads, pashmina, pince-nez, guitar, attitude—told me that he or she was “one of us.” In today’s context, this same comradely recognition comes at the sight of a red ballcap.

When I grasped the glaring parallel between tie-dyed bandannas and MAGA headware, I had a revelation about this strange faith: It’s all about the gear. 

These folks don’t have programs, plans or expectations. They don’t have their own music. They don’t have campuses, coffee houses or folk clubs. Ask for their main idea, their political philosophy, their utopia, and they’ll call you a Stalinist. 

But what they do have is their stuff—tons of stuff, almost all of wearable or waveable. Every time they buy more MAGA merchandise, at retail prices, brand-new—marked-up to feed their lord and savior’s defense fund—their movement grows. The counterculture flourishes and the establishment quails. 

I’ve checked. You can buy a basic Trump flag as cheap as six bucks, but the deluxe version, with a pole for beating cops, goes as high as $120. Those ballcaps—in hundreds of designs—range from $12 to $33. A distressed unisex Trump sweatshirt goes for a cool $36. A simple lapel button can cost as much as $27. The one that reads “Drain the Swamp” is ten bucks. And body armor? How about $450. 

And all that gelt goes to the gilded palace in  Palm Beach. 

But hey, this ain’t about the money. The importance of all this gear is its bonding power. If you’re wearing the ballcap and twenty MAGA buttons on a Trump-logo bulletproof vest, if you’re waving a Gadsden flag and shlepping a lifesize cardboard statue of your messiah, you don’t have to introduce yourself to the rest of the gang. You belong. You don’t have to explain. No thinking required. You’re one of us—among friends—even if you don’t know their names or whether they have a criminal record. 

Bottom line: The counterculture is back, and it’s for sale—with a caveat. Like all protest movements, this will pass. After it’s over, what do you do with all that suddenly outdated and possibly embarrassing stuff? Burn it? Bury it? Recycle it? 

Can you drop off at St. Vincent de Paul a 10×15-foot American flag overlaid with the orange face of Donald Trump and the black silhouette of an AR-15?