Stupid Hippies Ruin It For The Rest Of Us

I found my favorite headline of the month.  Maybe it's the best one I've seen all year:

"Hippies still trying to ruin the country"

That'd be a whole lot funnier if it weren't so, you know, tragically disturbing.  It's from the Lexington Herald Leader, out of Kentucky.  Here's the whole sorry story. 

Honestly, you have to read something like this -- hell, just the headline alone, which, admit it, is totally classic -- and think, Lord God Almighty, how in the world can you expect us all to figure it out and get along and live our lives together, in peace and harmony and with a sense of brotherly love as You surely must expect us to, when there are people like this to deal with?  And then what can you do but laugh out loud, long and hard?  I sure did.

My favorite line? "Their BAWL (Buddha-Allah-Wicca-Lenin) is better than some old Judeo-Christian God." As if Buddha and Allah and Wicca are all somehow related, and worse yet, are all somehow, in some weird, twisted way, related to Vladimir Lenin. Who are these people that come up with this shit?  And how is it that they get published in newspapers?  Talk about the unfairness of irony.  Sweet mercy.

I think about poor Ms. Jenean Mcbrearty and I'm forced to conjure the reverse of the stereotype she's deliberately heaped upon her readers.  Of course, the sole purpose, the real purpose of her quote-unquote article is to bring to mind the likes of a rode-hard-and-put-away-wet Tommy Chong, complete with a too-faded tie-dye, overly well-worn hemp jeans, stinky sandals black with grime, rounded glasses (a la that other despised hippie with a name similar to the infamous Marxist, Lennon), long braided hair, long braided beard and the requisite Willie Nelson Commemorative Headband.  It seems to go without saying that he drives a relic of a VW Bug, more beige body putty and rust than cornflower blue.  Bumper stickers hold at least one fender on:  "War Is Not the Answer," "Thank You, Jerry!" "Dog Is My Co-Pilot."  His "Kerry/Edwards 04" bumper sticker deliberately covers up his "Nader for President 2000" sticker.  There are the dancing bears of varying colors.  The bumper sticker list can go on and on, really.  The list of what's on his IPod is too long to go in to here, but you can bet that the top playlist is either "Grateful Dead Live, 1974," or anything by Phish and/or Dave Matthews.

In short, it's really hard for me to imagine this guy as a menace to society.   

So, because she's sort of fobbed off a forced stereotype on her readership in Kentucky, I find myself daydreaming about her own pathetic self... I imagine some priggish imp of a woman in a gray neck-to-toe burlap dress with those skulky half-glasses perched on the end of her pinchy nose and a lit Virginia Slim poking out of the corner of her sourpuss mouth, her frumpy gray hair done in the World's Tightest Bun.  There's ancient hard candy on her desk next to a flattering picture of George W. Bush, Jesus and her children that never bother to call or write. I'm actually thinking kind of along the lines of Phyllis Schlafly on a bad day.  I know the conservative movement has trotted out Ann Coulter and Michele Malkin and Laura Ingraham -- attractive-ish, young-ish -- to counter that hideous stereotype, and I guess maybe it's worked to some degree...  But if they're going to have idiots like Jenean Mcbrearty continue writing drivel like this, well, who among us can be held responsible for perpetuating a negative stereotype?

Whatever.  I have a hard time with the notion that someone like this can write something as soul-crushingly disturbing as: "Whose life is more important: the 12-year-old Iraqi firing an Uzi or a soldier from Kentucky?" And not even begin to consider the notion that maybe, possibly, surely the answer not only could be, but is both.  Is it expected of me, as an American, to value the Kentucky soldier more than a boy with a gun in Iraq?  Sorry, I think real patriotism demands more of me than that.  It demands of me a way to find an answer -- to seek it if I must -- of not one or the other, of not simply throwing up my hands and saying, Well, we've got to have one of 'em dead -- may as well be that Iraqi kid. 

Jesus Christ, is this what American Conservatism has finally come to?  A schoolyard bully's cheap taunt to the rest of the world?  "Our well-trained super-soldiers with the latest technology and equipment and firepower are better, stronger, faster and meaner than your illiterate, starving, pox-stricken twelve-year-old children!"  Whose life is more important?  How dare you, Jenean.  When did determining the importance of life become the sole domain of D-list conservative columnists from Kentucky?  Funny, I sort of thought it was the domain of God.  You know.  Buddha.  Or Allah.  Or Mother Earth.  Or Jesus Christ.

Or Lenin. Kidding, kidding.

How is it these people don't know what always inevitably happens to bullies in the end?  Have they never, ever seen a John Hughes movie?  Is this some kind of twisted rage at the last election results manifesting itself in a column now perpetrated on unwitting Kentuckians?  Is it some kind of reaction to the way the war in Iraq is going?  Is this some kind of visceral acknowledgment of the true notion that Junior's War most likely will not turn out the way these conservative war-mongers thought ("We'll be greeted as liberators," snarled Uncle Dick Cheney, who later harumphed, "the insurgency is in its last throes."  Sure, liberators.  Sure, last throes.  I'd be willing to bet a quart of the best bourbon in Fayette County that there are some dead Kentucky soldiers who would respectfully disagree, Dick.)

Anyway, there you are.  Just hours before we all sit down with friends and family and raise a glass to what we are thankful for, Jenean Mcbrearty gives us a big heaping helping of hate, something none of us -- hippies or not -- are at all thankful for.  Thanks a lot, Jenean.

So let me leave you with this: read Jenean and then do what I didn't do.  Ignore her.  You'll be thankful you did.