The Hippies

YOUTH

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One sociologist calls them "the Freudian proletariat." Another observer sees them as "expatriates living on our shores but beyond our society." Historian Arnold Toynbee describes them as "a red warning light for the American way of life." For California's Bishop James Pike, they evoke the early Christians: "There is something about the temper and quality of these people, a gentleness, a quietness, an interest--something good." To their deeply worried parents throughout the country, they seem more like dangerously deluded dropouts, candidates for a very sound spanking and a cram course in civics--if only they would return home to receive either.

Whatever their meaning and wherever they may be headed, the hippies have emerged on the U.S. scene in about 18 months as a wholly new subculture, a bizarre permutation of the middle-class American ethos from which it evolved. Hippies preach altruism and mysticism, honesty, joy and nonviolence. They find an almost childish fascination in beads, blossoms and bells, blinding strobe lights and ear-shattering music, exotic clothing and erotic slogans. Their professed aim is nothing less than the subversion of Western society by "flower power" and force of example.

Although that sounds like a pipe-dream, it conveys the unreality that permeates hippiedom, a cult whose mystique derives essentially from the influence of hallucinogenic drugs. The hippies have popularized a new word, psychedelic, which the Random House

Dictionary of English Language defines as: "Of or noting a mental state of great calm, intensely pleasureful perception of the senses, esthetic entrancement and creative impetus; of or noting any of the group of drugs producing this effect." With those drugs has come the psychedelic philosophy, an impassioned belief in the self-revealing, mind-expanding powers of potent weeds and seeds and chemical compounds known to man since prehistory but wholly alien to the rationale of Western society. Unlike other accepted stimuli, from nicotine to liquor, the hallucinogens promise those who take the "trip" a magic-carpet escape from reality in which perceptions are heightened, senses distorted, and the imagination permanently bedazzled with visions of Ideological verity.

Hashish Trail. From this promise, possibly more exciting--and more dangerous--than any adventure offered by travel agents, was born the cult of hippiedom. Its disciples, who have little use for definitions, are mostly young and generally thoughtful Americans who are unable to reconcile themselves to the stated values and implicit contradictions of contemporary Western society, and have become internal emigres, seeking individual liberation through means as various as drug use, total withdrawal from the economy and the quest for individual identity.

Only last year, many sociologists and psychiatrists dismissed the hippie hegira with a verbal flick of the wrist. The use of mind-changing drugs such as LSD, said National Institute of Mental Health Director Stanley Yolles in 1966, was a fad, "like goldfish swallowing." City officials blandly waited for the hippies to go away; indeed, a year ago they had established scarcely half a dozen inchoate colonies in the U.S.

Today, hippie enclaves are blooming in every major U.S. city from Boston to Seattle, from Detroit to New Orleans; there is a 50-member cabal in, of all places, Austin, Texas. There are outposts in Paris and London, New Delhi and Katmandu, where American hippies trek the "hashish trail" to get cheap but potent hallucinogens and lessons in Buddhist love. Though hippies*consider any sort of arithmetic a "down trip," or boring, their own estimate of their nationwide number runs to some 300,000. Disinterested officials generally reduce that figure, but even the most skeptical admit that there are countless thousands of part-time, or "plastic," hippies who may "drop out" only for a night or two each week. By all estimates, the cult is a growing phenomenon that has not yet reached its peak--and may not do so for years to come.

Flora & Fauna. During their school and job vacations, thousands of summer trippers will drop out for weeks on end, aggravating the problems of accommodation and hygiene that are already straining many an urban budget. Addressing the Mayors' Conference in Honolulu late last month, San Francisco's public-health director, Dr. Ellis D. ("LSD") Sox, said that the 10,000 hard-core hippies already in San Francisco are costing the city $35,000 a month for treatment of drug abuse, warned that with a summer influx there was serious danger of epidemics in infectious hepatitis (from needles exchanged in shooting amphetamines), venereal disease (already up six times from the city's 1964 rate), and other illnesses ranging from typhus to malnutrition.

Despite such dire predictions, perhaps the most striking thing about the hippie phenomenon is the way it has touched the imagination of the "straight" society that gave it birth. Hippie slang has already entered common usage and spiced American humor. Department stores and boutiques have blossomed out in "psychedelic" colors and designs that resemble animated art nouveau. The bangle shops in any hippie neighborhood cater mostly to tourists, who on summer weekends often outnumber the local flora and fauna. Uptown discotheques feature hippie bands. From jukeboxes and transistors across the nation pulses the turned-on sound of acid-rock groups: the Jefferson Airplane, the Doors, Dow Jones and the Industrials, Moby Grape (there is also a combo called Time).

Last week the hippies were in full flower. In New York City, they brought their tambourines and guitars to the aid of dog owners protesting the leash laws in Greenwich Village's Washington Square Park, chanting "What is dog spelled backward?" Other New York hippies raised $2,100 for a bail fund to rescue "busted" (arrested) buddies. At California's Seal Beach, 2,500 devotees gathered for a sunny "love-in" that throbbed to the rhythm of trash-can drums and random flutes. In Dallas, 100 "flower children" gathered in Stone Place Mall, the public hippiedrome, to protest an ordinance that would prohibit gatherings there. A dozen hippies paraded barefoot through the White House, then promised to return for a July 4 "smoke-in" to lobby for legalized marijuana.

Elephant Bells. San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury district--a throbbing three-eighths of a far-from-square-mile --is the vibrant epicenter of the hippie movement. Fog sweeps past the gingerbread houses of "The Hashbury," shrouding the shapes of hirsute, shoeless hippies huddled in doorways, smoking pot, "rapping" (achieving rapport with random talk), or banging beer cans in time to ubiquitous jukebox rhythms. The tinkle of Indian elephant bells echoes from passing "seekers"; along the Panhandle of Golden Gate Park, hollow-cheeked flower children queue up for a plateful of stew, dispensed from the busy buses of the Diggers, a band of hippie do-gooders. Last week the sidewalks and doorways were filling with new arrivals--hippies and would-be hippies with suitcases and sleeping bags, just off the bus and looking for a place to "crash" (sleep). Wise hippies wrap themselves in scrapes against the San Francisco chill, or else wear old Army or Navy foul-weather jackets and sturdy boots. One way to identify the new arrivals is by their mod clothes: carefully tailored corduroy pants, hip-snug military jackets, snap-brimmed hats like those worn by Australian soldiers (also known as Diggers).

Rubberneckers are now as much a part of The Hashbury scene as are hippies. At the Drogstore, where a bowl of minestrone or a hamburger costs 75-c-, goggle-eyed straights in suit and tie sniff the air for the musky-sweet scent of marijuana; others flock to such hippie shops as the Print Mint and the Phoenix to buy pornographic or psychedelic posters.

The Hashbury's pads are something else. Most of them sport gaudily painted doors and rainbow window shades; in one window near the Drogstore is a gigantic copy of a canned-fruit ad that, in red, green and gold, proclaims "Del Monte Boobs." Within The Hashbury circulate more than 25 undercover narcotics agents, who arrest an average of 20 hippies a week, usually for possession of marijuana. Busted hippies in turn come back under orders to inform on their suppliers, but the drug sources are so varied and elusive that the "narco" squad has yet to pin down any major outlet.

Formidable & Forbidding. Difficult as it is to take precise bearings on the hippies, a few salient features stand out. They are predominantly white, middleclass, educated youths, ranging in age from 17 to 25 (though some as old as 50 can be spotted). Overendowed with all the qualities that make their generation so engaging, perplexing and infuriating, they are dropouts from a way of life that to them seems wholly oriented toward work, status and power. They scorn money--they call it "bread"--and property, and have found, like countless other romantics from Rimbaud to George Orwell, that it is not easy to starve. Above all, as New York's Senator Robert Kennedy ("the best of a bad lot" to hippies) puts it: "They want to be recognized as individuals, but individuals play a smaller and smaller role in society. This is a formidable and forbidding arrangement."

To alter that arrangement, the hippies hope to generate an entirely new society, one rich in spiritual grace that will revive the old virtues of agape and reverence. They reveal, says University of Chicago Theologian Dr. Martin E. Marty, "the exhaustion of a tradition: Western, production-directed, problem-solving, goal-oriented and compulsive in its way of thinking." Marty refuses to put the hippies down as just another wave of "creative misfits," sees them rather as spiritually motivated crusaders striking at the values of straight society where it is most vulnerable: its lack of soul. In a sense, hippiedom is a transplanted Lost Horizon, a Shangri-La a go-go blending Asian resignation and American optimism in a world where no one grows old.

It is in the hope of settling that precious state, and defining his position in it, that the hippie uses drugs--first for kicks and then sometimes as a kind of sacrament. Anti-intellectual, distrustful of logic, and resentful of the American educational process, the hippie drops out --tentatively at first--in search of another, more satisfying world.

Follow the River. "The standard thing is to feel in the gut that middle-class values are all wrong," says a West Coast hippie. "Like the way America recognizes that Communism is all wrong." They feel "up tight" (tense and frightened) about many disparate things --from sex to the draft, college grades to thermonuclear war. Hallucinogenic drugs like marijuana and LSD, they believe, are the knives that cut those knots. Once unleashed, most hippies first become insatiable hedonists, smoking and eating whatever can turn them on in a hurry; making love, however and with whomever they can find (including "group grope") that "feels good and doesn't hurt anybody"; saturating the senses with color and music, light and motion until, like an overloaded circuit, the mind blows into the never-never land of selflessness. The middleclass ego, to the hippie, is the jacket that makes society straight, and must be destroyed before freedom can be achieved. One East Coast hippie recently held a "funeral" for his former self. "You must follow the river inside you to its source," he said, "and then out again."

In a recent study, three University of Southern California graduate students interviewed 18 randomly selected LSD users for a period of four months, found that the primary quality in common was a history of unhappy family life. All of the acidheads were loners and losers, with few friends and few accomplishments before they dropped out. They were definable in three main subspecies: the "groovers," graduates of the 16-to-19 mod-togged teeny-bopper school who take drugs mostly for libidinal kicks; the "mind trippers," 17 to 22, who wear flowers and unassuming dress, and turn to hallucinogens mainly for therapy; and the "cosmic conscious" hippies, introspective, mystical and "spaced" (out of communication), whose drug use is primarily Eucharistic in nature, an attempt to "find God."

Land of Cockaigne. Whatever his status, the hippie is a confirmed believer in the benefits and benefices of his own way of life--even though he recognizes that if all the world were hip, he could not survive without a return to work and routine hang-ups. "Hippiedom is more than a choice of life style," says Chuck Hollander, 27, drug expert for the National Student Association.

"It's an apolitical systemicide." If there were a hippie code, it would include these flexible guidelines: >Do your own thing, wherever you have to do it and whenever you want. > Drop out. Leave society as you have known it. Leave it utterly. > Blow the mind of every straight person you can reach. Turn them on, if not to drugs, then to beauty, love, honesty, fun.

As a result, there are hippies of every stripe: city and suburban hippies, who can do their thing only in urban environments; beach hippies and mountain hippies, Indian hippies and neoPolynesian hippies, desert hippies and river hippies, musical and poetical and light and sound hippies, all doing their thing as they see it to be done, some alone and some in "tribes" of like-minded thing-doers.

A swelling sense of utopianism pervades the hippie philosophy. It has little in common with the authoritarian city-state envisioned in Plato's Republic, or Sir Thomas More's Utopia, which was a bustling agricultural collective where everyone worked six hours each day. Hippie millenniarism is purely Arcadian: pastoral and primordial, emphasizing oneness with physical and psychic nature. The University of Toronto's Northrop Frye, a professor of English and a disciple of Communications Philosopher Marshall McLuhan, sees the hippies as inheritors of the "outlawed and furtive social ideal known as the 'Land of Cockaigne,' the fairyland where all desires can be instantly gratified."*

No Wants. The hippie philosophy also borrows heavily from Henry David Thoreau,* particularly in the West Coast rural communes, where denizens try to live the Waldenesque good life on the bare essentials--a diet of turnips and brown rice, fish and bean curd --thus refuting the consumerism of "complicating wants" essential to the U.S. economy. Historically, the hippies go all the way back to the days of Diogenes and the Cynics (curiously, no rock combo has yet taken the name), who were also bearded, dirty and unimpressed with conventional logic.

The hippies like to relate to such ancient figures as Hillel, the 1st century B.C. Jewish prophet of modesty and peace, and of course to Christ ("a groovy cat"). Buddha, they recall proudly, was a dropout from a royal family who later came back to the palace and turned on his father, the king, with nothing more than sincerity and a mendicant's bowl. St. Francis of Assisi, who left a rich Italian merchant family to live in poverty among the birds and beasts, is another hero, along with Gandhi (for his patient nonviolence), Aldous Huxley (for his praise of hallucinogens in Doors of Perception), and J. R. R. Tolkien's Hobbits (with their quirky gentleness and hairy toes).

The key ethical element in the hippie movement is love--indiscriminate and all-embracing, fluid and changeable, directed at friend and foe alike. SUPERZAP THEM ALL WITH LOVE! prOclaims a sign in Los Angeles' Sans Souci Temple, a hippie commune. Manhattan hippies whose skulls were zapped by police billies during a Memorial Day "bein" in New York's East Village are now trying to arrange a picnic for the cops' kids, as well as a Mantovani record concert for the officers them selves. Charges against the hippies were dismissed last week by Criminal Court Judge Herman Weinkrantz, who said: "This court will not deny the equal protection of the law to the unwashed, unshod, unkempt and uninhibited."

Black & White. The immediate progenitors of the hippies were the beats of the 1950s, but there has been a startling transformation in bohemia. Many of the same elements were present in the Beat Generation: scorn for prevailing sexual mores, a predilection for pot and peyote, wanderlust, a penchant for Oriental mysticism on the order of Zen and the Veda. Yet the contrasts are even more striking. San Francisco's North Beach was a study in black and white; the Haight-Ashbury is a crazy quilt of living color. Black was a basic color in the abstract-expressionist painting of the beats; hippiedom's psychedelic poster art is blindingly vivid. The progressive jazz of the beats was coolly cerebral; the acid rock of the hippies is as visceral as a torn intestine.

The Negro, a model of cool to the beats, is a rare figure in the hippie scene. "How can a Negro drop out?" asks a New York hippie. "He's there, at bedrock, all the time." The difference is reflected not only in the contrast between Norman Mailer's 1957 beat manifesto, The White Negro, and the "white Indian" affiliation of the hippies, but also in the apolitical nature of hippie philosophy as well. Mailer's model was a white activist who shared the Negro's sense of rage at injustice; the Indian whom many hippies emulate is a primitive man whose ego is submerged in a Jungian tribal consciousness.

Crazy Stop. Except for a few spiritual gurus and swamis, the hippie movement is leaderless and loose. The Beatles--forerunners of psychedelic sound and once again at the forefront with their latest album, Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band--are the major tastemakers in hippiedom. (Beatle Paul McCartney admits to taking acid trips.) Yet another guru, Indian Sitar Virtuoso Ravi Shankar, who now has a burgeoning music school in Los Angeles, is dead set against drug use as an enhancement to music. He recently lectured the Monterey Pop Festival audience, chiding them for being stoned while listening to his music, which he claims should be sufficient to turn them on. Timothy Leary, a former Harvard psychologist who coined the "Tune In, Turn On, Drop Out" slogan central to hippie philosophy, was once a major guru but has lately fallen into disfavor with a large majority of hippies, who feel that he is trying too hard to "put his trip" on everyone.

Hippie art, with its improvised music and irrational posters, its spontaneous light shows and ditto-machine "automatic" writing, its quippy axioms and somnambulant dances, relies more on inspiration than discipline. Says San Francisco Poet Jack Gilbert: "They have the courage to take one step--but then they come to a crazy dead stop. They want instant entertainment without any effort. There is a lack of tension in the mind; and how can you have decent art without tension?"

The Drug Experience. That slack is often the product of the drug experience. Defenders of the hippie subculture liken it to a super-Eucharistic ritual, one that has brought drug users, particularly of LSD ("the mind detergent") and the other synthetic hallucinogens, into epistemological experience and thus changed their lives forever. Detractors, many of them former hippies themselves, maintain that the religious turn-on is spurious, that true enlightenment can only come through "natural" means, the meditations and mystical experiences common to every religion in history. Still, in its variety and virulence, the hippie pharmacopoeia is the subculture's most valued possession (though it does not really include bananas, the greatest put-on yet wrought by hippiedom on straight society).

Central to the drug scene is marijuana, the green-flowered cannabis herb that has been turning man on since time immemorial. Virtually every hippie uses it--sometimes up to three times a day. Known as khif or hashish in the Middle East, bhang or ganja in India, ma in China, maconha or djama in South America, pot, grass, boo, maryjane and tea in the U.S., it is ubiquitous and easily grown, can be smoked in "joints" (cigarettes), baked into cookies or brewed in tea ("pot likker").

Usually marijuana produces a feeling of euphoria and exaltation; subjective judgments of time, distance, vision and hearing are prolonged. It can also cause paranoid episodes. According to medical experts, the pungent smelling weed does not result in physical dependence, and once the user learns the number of puffs necessary to reach his "high," he rarely takes more. Some medical authorities and federal officials believe that the drug will eventually be legalized. Hippies, who pass a joint like a peace pipe, quote Genesis I--"Let the earth bring forth grass"--as justification for its use. And, invariably, they argue that marijuana is less deleterious than liquor and does not bring on hangovers. "Juice is a down trip," says a New York hippie. "Grass brings you up--up and away."

In The Hashbury, grass can be had for $10 to $15 a "lid" (a one-ounce lot, capable of producing up to 40 joints); the finest variety is "Acapulco Gold" from Mexico, undiluted and selling for $1 a joint ($5 for a matchboxful that can produce about ten joints). Lately, hippie chemists have learned to synthesize THC, which seems to be the active mind changer in marijuana, in a complex 17-step operation. Their formula, says a Government chemist, is "crude but effective."

Intense Perception. If grass is the staple of hippiedom, then lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD) is its caviar. Derived from a parasitic fungus that grows on rye, lysergic acid is mixed with volatile diethylamine (used in vulcanizing rubber), then frozen; the resulting LSD is extracted by using chloroform or benzine for fractional distillation, or else by means of a simple vacuum evaporator. Now available in pill form, or else as a soluble crystalline powder (the liquid-dunked sugar cubes of yesteryear are out), LSD produces an eight-to-twelve-hour trip highlighted by profound changes in thought, mood and activity. Colors become heightened, sounds take on preternatural shades of meaning or unmeaning; the trip passenger feels he can see into his very brain cells, hear and feel his blood and lymph coursing through their channels. It is this sense of intense perception that stays with most hippies and, in part, sustains their fondness for bright colors, flowers and bells. "Have you ever heard yourself move?" asks Hippie Poet Richard Brautigan..

Yet, for all its reputed ability to make a man aware of his true "nature," LSD has demonstrably damaging qualities as well. Mood changes can range from tears to laughter to intense anxiety, panic, and a psychedelic paranoia that duplicates psychosis to the last dotted shriek--and can last indefinitely.

White Light. Though 250 micrograms of LSD can be had for $2.50 (enough to turn on the average user), its cost in potential chromosomal damage and long-lasting psychotic aftereffects is much higher--not to mention the fact that it is illegal to manufacture the drug without a federal license. Many hippies --particularly the weekend variety--have taken to using the shorter-lived and still legal DMT (dimethyltryptamine), which produces only a 45-minute trip, or else the related DET (diethyltrypta-mine), an equally short haul. Others are turning on to the milder pre-LSD hallucinogens: cactus-derived mescaline, the American Indian's peyote (it takes many bitter peyote cactus buds to achieve a high; usually, nausea comes first to the uninitiated), or psilocybin, which produces a giggly, warm high.

The newest item in the pharmacopoeia is a concoction called STP, apparently named after the gasoline additive ("It makes your motor run better," say hippies). Similar to a chemical-warfare product code-named "BZ," STP can produce a 72-hour trip--up to six times the length of an LSD voyage--and generates the "blinding white light" of hallucinatory omniscience that many hippies claim is the be-all and end-all of the drug experience. Believed to be a chemical called 5-methoxy-NN-dime-thyltryptamine, STP cannot be treated, as LSD is, by use of chlorpromazine tranquilizers to ease a bad trip: it only accentuates the symptoms.

The mastermind behind STP is widely believed to be a mysterious figure named Augustus Owsley Stanley III, 32, grandson of a U.S. Senator from Kentucky, a San Francisco-based hippie chemist who got into the turn-on business two years ago, before the manunfacture and distribution of LSD was made illegal. Known as "the Henry Ford of Psychedelia," Stanley--or Owsley, as he calls himself--is said to have amassed a million-dollar fortune from acid before he turned 31 and the drug was banned. Owsley is dedicated to "turning the whole world on," and not necessarily by acid alone; he is a patron of the Grateful Dead, a San Francisco acid-rock group second only to the Jefferson Airplane in national popularity. Owsley's next product, says the grapevine, will be a super-hallucinogen called FDA in honor of the Food and Drug Administration.

Morning Star. A major new development in the hippie world is the "rural commune," some 30 of which now exist from Canada through the U.S. to Mexico. There, nature-loving hippie tribesmen can escape the commercialization of the city and attempt to build a society outside of society. At "Drop City," near Trinidad, Colo., 21 hippie dropouts from the Middle West live in nine gaudy geodesic domes, built from old auto tops (200 apiece at nearby junkyards), and attempt a hand-to-mouth independent life. An hour's drive north of San Francisco, in apple-growing country near Sebastopol along the Russian River, some 30 to 50 country hippies live on a 31-acre ranch called Morning Star. Their closest neighbor: Cartoonist Charles Schulz, whose Peanuts people are hippie favorites. The ranch is owned by Lew Gottlieb, 43, former arranger, composer and bassist for the folk-singing Limelighters, who has his hippie followers hard at work--rarest of all hippie trips--growing vegetables for the San Francisco Diggers.

Most Morning Star colonists avoid acid. "I'd rather have beautiful chil- dren than beautiful visions," says a tanned, clear-eyed hippie girl named Joan. That hippies can actually work becomes evident on a tour of the commune's vegetable gardens. Cabbages and turnips, lettuce and onions march in glossy green rows, neatly mulched with redwood sawdust. Hippie girls lounge in the buffalo grass, sewing colorful dresses or studying Navajo sand painting, clad in nothing but beads, bells and feather headdresses. (Not everyone is a nudist--only when they feel like it.) A shaggy sheepdog named Grass plays with the hippie children, among them a straw-thatched 17-month-old boy named Adam Siddhartha.

Work Trip. The new-found trip of work and responsibility reflected in the Morning Star experiment is perhaps the most hopeful development in the hippie philosophy to date. Other hippie tribes are becoming aware of the work trip as well. New York's Group Image, an aggressive agglomerate of some 50 East Village hippies--many of them from the Middle West--turns out everything from silk-screen prints to psychedelic artifacts and a deadly serious, tidily edited magazine called Innerspace. The tribe's seven-man combo plays to packed and palpitating houses at such uptown discotheques as Cheetah and

Trude Heller's Trik. Other New York tribes, like Pablo and the Third World, produce light shows for discos and department stores, run their own shops, where they make jewelry and pottery with a medieval dedication to craft and quality.

The drug scene itself has imposed demands for organization on the hippies. Foremost among the do-gooders are the Diggers; named for a 17th century society of English agricultural altruists, the latter-day Diggers provide free food, shelter and transportation for down-and-out hippies in San Francisco, Los Angeles, Boston and the East Village (where a Digger with the nom de hip of Galahad maintains a crowded "crash" pad and returns runaways to their parents). San Francisco alone has such drug-derived service organizations as HALO (Haight-Ashbury Legal Organization), the HIP Job Coop, with 6,000 names on its part-time employment roster, and Huckleberry's (homes for runaways). In Los Angeles, an outfit called Kerista, founded three months ago by a former heroin addict named John Thomsen, provides pads and proteins for homeless hippies.

Irrelevant Goals. For all the hippies' good works and gentle ways, many Americans find them profoundly unsettling. One reason is that straight society finds it difficult to argue with people who, while condemning virtually every aspect of the American scene, from its foreign policy to its moral values, offer no debatable alternatives. By contrast with the rebels of every previous generation in the U.S.--from the "wobblies" of 50 years ago (see BOOKS) to the New Left activists of the early '60s--the hippies have no desire to control the machinery of society or redirect it toward new goals. They have no urge to reform the world, if only because its values seem irrelevant to them.

What offends, perplexes and yet also beguiles the straight sector is hippie-dom's total disregard for approbation or disapproval. "Do your own thing," they say, and never mind what anyone else may think or do. Yet this and many hippie attitudes represent only a slight and rather engaging distortion of the Protestant Ethic that they purport to reject.

Indeed, it could be argued that in their independence of material possessions and their emphasis on peacefulness and honesty, hippies lead considerably more virtuous lives than the great majority of their fellow citizens. This, despite their blatant disregard for most of society's accepted mores and many of its laws--most notably those prohibiting the use of drugs--helps explain why so many people in authority, from cops to judges to ministers, tend to treat them gently and with a measure of respect. In the end it may be that the hippies have not so much dropped out of American society as given it something to think about.

*The term derives from the pre-World War II jitterbug adjective "hep": to be "with it"; hep became "hip" (in noun form, "hipster") during the bebop and beatnik era of the 1950s, then fell into disuse, to be revived with the onslaught of psychedelia. *A 14th century English troubadourian vision, the Land of Cockaigne was inhabited by precooked "larks well-trained and very couth who cometh down to man his mouth." The larks were eaten by hooded monks, who prayed through psychedelic church windows that "turn themselves to crystal bright." A new U.S. postage stamp of Thoreau, designed by Painter Leonard Baskin, was under fire last week on the ground that it makes bearded, long-haired Henry David look like a hippie.

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