Some of my earliest full memories go back to when I was a toddler living in a house in Santa Cruz before the Loma Prieta earthquake destroyed downtown. Apart from a very vivid memory of being bitten by a ground squirrel while playing in the front yard, two things stick out in my mind. First, my dad would regularly invite homeless people to stay in our house. And second, Santa Cruz’s downtown was filled with a cast of fascinating people who had charted a course that took them straight off the conventional societal map.
I still remember a Vietnam vet and amputee named Gerald, pushing himself around Pacific Garden Mall on a skateboard. It was the days when the Cooper House still stood, and before downtown’s fill dirt liquefied in the 1989 earthquake and caused most downtown buildings to collapse, opening the door for a new, rebuilt, gentrified Pacific Garden Mall.
My mom, who felt responsible for the safety of her three small children, understandably had mixed feelings about street people wandering the halls of our home at night. But my dad, who had a colorful past filled with wandering without a home for years on end, insisted on inviting just about anyone to come stay at the Bunker abode.
Growing up rubbing elbows with people who somehow eddied out of the current of mainstream society gave me an early and deep appreciation for originality and authenticity. And it has got me thinking about the trajectory of originality in today’s society, and how much it has changed in less than a generation.
As a child, I would sit wide-eyed and listen to my dad’s stories of living in a Hawaiian lean-to while subsisting strictly off of tropical fruit, raising goats in the canyons of Big Sur, hitchhiking across Spain during the dictatorship of Franco, and working as an itinerate fruit picker, backwoods Christmas tree harvester, and Oklahoma cowboy.
My dad came of age in the heart of the ’60s. He was part of a group of delusional hippies who marched to the Pentagon, encircled it, and attempted to levitate it with the power of their minds. But soon he shifted course and went on to herd cattle on horseback, work on High Plains oil rigs, and travel across the world helping to build orphanages.
Trying to categorize individuals like my dad is a lesson in frustration. He wandered through the subcultures of hippies, oil workers, cattle ranchers, and humanitarians, and came out the other end without being co-opted or identified by any one group.
Today, that subculture-defying originality is hard to find. We fall too easily into categories, and define ourselves one-dimensionally through politics, religion, culture, fashion, or music. We find identity in the products we consume, the style of clothing we wear, the events we attend. We are hipsters, Burners, Tea Partiers, or Sierra Clubbers. We too easily glom onto some cause or creed or obtuse social genre simply to belong, or to make sense of the political and social chaos around us.
Hipsters, to me, are perhaps the most colorful example of this new American herd mentality. By mining generations of past fringe cultural activities and commercial choices, they have created their own subculture, defined by the moving target of retro, underground, ironic one-upmanship. As one hipster critic wrote in New York Magazine, “The hipster movement did not produce artists, but tattoo artists. It did not yield a great literature, but it made good use of fonts.”
To be honest, the style-over-substance, irony-over-earnestness is hard for me to understand, try as I might. It seems to me only a matter of time before hipsters find themselves in a weird no-man’s-land of contrived uniqueness, where they are all different in exactly the same way. But to discard their cultural preferences simply because they have become popular would reveal their own triviality.
Originality is becoming more and more hard-fought in our homogenized, tightly connected world. We are a culture of leaders and followers. But there are still a select few who wander off on their own, genuinely content to neither lead nor follow. Their jeans might be too big, and their facial hair not ironic enough, but they have the satisfaction of charting an original course through life, knowing they are not spending their lives chasing the vaporous fringes of an ever-shifting culture.
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