Tuned In

If you were to tap on the shell of a snail with a tip of a pencil, it would retreat into its shell. Psychologists call this an orienting response. If, however, you were to continue tapping on its shell, the snail would eventually cease to perceive the tapping as a threat, and will move on with its life. At some point, it probably doesn't even notice the tapping anymore. This is called habituation. We grow accustomed to stimuli. As long as we perceive the stimuli as unthreatening, we can ignore it. I set two alarm clocks for this very reason. I can sleep through both of them if I can convince myself that there isn't a good reason to hear them, and wake up.

History is full of tappings on the shell. Though in retrospect we might be aware of our deafnesses, we are, in the present, numbing to the tap, tap, tap of a pencil without contemplating the monster that holds it in its grip.

I think this is often why the counter-culture is created by the young. They hear the tapping and want someone to explain what the fuck is going on. And when no one can, they refuse to contribute to the tapping, and then they make their own noise.

Although bellbottoms came back briefly only to reincarnate into wide-legged Levis and boot-cut Tommy Hilfiger's, it wasn't until George W. Bush began saddling-up and aiming his lasso toward a small Middle Eastern country that I began hearing people murmuring that the 60s were coming back. We even had a war to protest and a swarm of misguided youth to herd. Where, though, amidst the pot smoke and the rubble was the soundtrack?

Who are we? What does the new counter-culture want? And why isn't anyone singing about it?

The answer, my friend, is blowin' in the wind.

It's not a time when you can go to the park and play the ukulele and wonder how Art Garfunkel maintains that afro. In fact, you can't even go to a Rage Against the Machine show anymore for your fill of "Fuck you, I won't do what you tell me," which is the new, "Where Have All the Flowers Gone?" Musicians are talking politics, but who is singing? Bono wants us to wear white bands on our wrists in hopes that we'll unplug the earbuds from our Ipods long enough to hear that there are greater tragedies than the success of bands like Hinder or Nickleback. Saving Darfur is as easy as adding the campaign's MySpace page to your friend's list. Freeing Tibet is as simple as slapping a bumper sticker on your Hybrid.

If we look to current musical sensibility for a cultural clue, we're the punch line of a joke that asks how to combine the materialism of the 80s with the emotional angst of the 90s. The answer doesn't make sense, and comes in the form of boys trying to pull off Kate Moss's heroin chic, black eyeliner, and pink Izod legwarmers. It's a counter-culture ripped from someone else's mainstream. It's a literary-approved irony, unlike Alanis Morissette's bemoaned ten thousand spoons.

The sixties, though, are no where to be found. There is no free love, at least not without a Trojan and an HIV test. Our version, a mimicry, of civil rights leaders are thug gang rappers who brag about gun shot wounds while misquoting Martin Luther King, Jr. We don't wear flowers in our hair, we wear bling. The closest we have to a drug guru is Elizabeth Wurtzel, who dubbed us the Prozac Nation. The happiness that used to be a warm gun, now comes in pill form, which along with its friend, Ritalin has scared every parent into rushing for a prescription for their child who would rather play than sit in a desk in a classroom.

We don't have Woodstock, but we had Perry Ferrell's freak show, Lollapalooza. If you went, you'd know we weren't naked and covered in mud, but we saw Jim Rose's Circus. And mud isn't so impressive once you've seen a man suspended by his nipples. In fact, nothing impresses you after that. If anything proves we've moved beyond the lovey-dovey, limp-dicked, psychedelic blur that was the sixties, a man hanging by his nipples does. If the mantra of the 60s was "tune in, turn on, and drop out," the motto of the 90s was "stop, drop, and roll."

Someone needs to explain to the majority that we've been moving in these absurd circles for generations. If I am going to live in a culture of civil disobedience, I at least want the acid to be as good as it was forty years ago. Hell, if we can't move forward, I at least want to do backward right.

At this point, I'd gladly exchange my capacity for human empathy to worry about things like how to wash that man right out of my hair or to be burdened by NBC's war coverage interrupting my Must-See TV. The truth is, we can't be the sixties, not with a war in a far away land, not with a band called Phish, the Simon & Garfunkel Reunion Tour, or the rape fest that was Woodstock part deux. Not only have we become accustomed to the tapping, but also our shells are harder. The Terminator is governing our softest state. Women aren't burning brassieres, they're flipping through the slick pages  of the Victoria's Secret catalogue, which offers an eleven million dollar bra encrusted with diamonds. Cher is without Sonny. Two of the Beatles are in heaven, if we can imagine one. Elvis is dead. Nothing is real.

We learned this from the 80s. Hair was blue, green, purple. Boys wore make-up. Madonna taught us that in order to be cool, we had to become clowns of ourselves. And if after that, Nirvana's self-absorbed flannel-rock had us ripping off our untruths, acting in self-indulgent apathy, all apologies. At least we were feeling again.

You see, for there really to be a revolution, people have to know they are getting screwed. We live in a time when no one feels the dick up his ass. We're numb. We're schizophrenic: we crowd around the man suspended by needles through his nipples, and at the same time we shrug at it. Oh well. Whatever. Nevermind.

The sixties taught us, if nothing else, that counter-culture is always counter. It's belittled. It's fad. It's naive. Ultimately, nothing changes, it's just televised.

I think it's beautiful to stand up against an administration that has lied to us, to protest an injustice. It is entirely our responsibility to take to the streets when someone's freedom has been violated, for, really, one person's freedom is all of ours. And you might see me there, holding a sign. But part of me is ready to jump in a painted Volkswagen, just for the ride to somewhere else. You see, I've done enough turning on and tuning in for a lifetime, and now I'd like to take my remaining brain cells and caravan with mis compadres somewhere safe, somewhere times doesn't catch-up, where I can keep warm by a fire fueled by brassieres, where if I hear so much as a tap, I will recognize it immediately as the sound of a safe world, slowly coming undone.

Comments

[Red Zebra]

If you’ve ever “dropped out” into a counter-culture for a while - even briefly - then coming back is a shock to the system. You can hear the tapping on the OTHER people’s backs, that they can’t even hear themselves. You can see how they/we are all trapped in a “culture” of our own making – trapped in our own limited imaginations. But is there any escape from that? The very notion “counter-culture” implies a culture it depends on for its definition – they’re interdependent. They feed off each other. Sometimes they digest each other whole.

The counter-culture is the fraying edges around the carpet, where patterns shift and change. It will never change the make-up of the entire carpet – that’s woven too thickly with the strands of human nature. But at least for some of us it’s a place to stand and gain some perspective on the whole damn thing – to see it for what it is – a big, shabby carpet with frayed edges. It’s both a blessing and a curse.

Keep on tapping…