I was, indeed, a deplorable hippie.
One of my favorite basketball players was Desmond Mason. He was so smooth and slippery and athletic. I once saw him dunk downwards—he had skied so high that he actually had to reach down and push the ball through the rim. Another NBA player—I don’t recall who—called him a “fake thug.” I had, and still have, no idea what that means.
I do know, though, that I was a fake hippie. I wore the clothing and listened to the music, but I’ve never taken any (illegal) drug in my life—not even those which have since been legalized. Nor did I engage in any sit-ins or love-ins or the like.
In the early-to-mid 1970s, I infested Calaveras High School in the eponymous county Mark Twain celebrated with his droll tale of the leaping amphibian. Many of my fellow sufferers labored under the delusion that to be a scholar at that institution, you had to fall into one of two categories: “Are you a hippie or a cowboy?” was the question several of them put to me from time to time.
“Neither,” I would say. I was all for peace signs and saving the environment; Cat Stevens, The Cream, The Byrds, and Ten Years After; and tie-dyed shirts, flared jeans, and longish hair; but I was never part of the sex and drugs part of the equation. So I didn’t really consider myself a hippie. On the other hand, although I liked Hank Williams (Sr.) and western/country/rustic/olde-fashioned stuff in general, I didn’t see myself as a cowboy, either. From what I saw around me, cowboys chewed tobacco (a gross and stupid habit), looked down on and beat up hippies, and couldn’t—or wouldn’t—speak English very well.
“C’mon, you have to be one or the other!” the inquisitor would insist.
Sometimes I would say, “No, I don’t”; other times I would say, “OK, then I’m 1/2 hippie and 1/2 cowboy.”
I have to admit, though, that I did flash the peace sign a lot back in those days, and I often wore a decommissioned army sergeant’s jacket (my uncle’s, who had been in Vietnam) similar to the one Country Joe McDonald (another veteran) wore. I liked anti-war songs, especially Country Joe and the Fish’s I-Feel-Like-I’m-Fixin’-to-Die Rag, which contained the words:
Come on mothers throughout the land
Pack your boys off to Vietnam
Come on fathers, and don't hesitate
To send your sons off before it's too late
And you can be the first ones in your block
To have your boy come home in a box
Another favorite was Eve of Destruction, made popular by Barry McGuire and written by the superb songwriter P.F. Sloan (who also wrote Johnny Rivers’ Secret Agent Man, several songs for the Grass Roots, Herman’s Hermits, the Turtles, the Searchers, etc.).
If the draft would have still been in force when I hit the age to get a greeting from the government in the mail, I would not have gone. I was prepared to go to jail instead. Fortunately, the war ended and the draft was suspended a couple of years before I reached that age.
So: Did I, after all, incline more hippieward than cowboyward? It might seem so, indeed, but some would probably label me a “fake hippie.”
To me, what being a hippie meant was mainly (aside from the drugs and the rejection of traditional mores) support for the peace movement, the ecology movement, and striving for justice over material advantages and being “real” (not phony, artificial, fake, bogus). Desmond Mason may have been a fake thug; I don’t know; I’m still confused about what was meant by that. Was I really a fake hippie? I guess it depends on your definition of what it meant to be a hippie.