Wyoming is a place that even we Nebraskans look upon with eastern condensation, considered a Mordor even as far out as my hometown of North Platte. Colorado is seen as the place with 'big' cities; skiing, parties, life, Wyoming is just so much dirt overtly hostile towards life. Wind, cold and dryness along with a tiny handful of misanthropes who like that, and the sight of a shepard's trailor on a cold day surrounded by his brood and absolutely nothing else is depressing as hell.
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I'd hate to go on another anti-baby boomer rant here, but I suppose it is called the baby 'Boom' for a reason. The Rolling Stones, ZZ Top and Kiss will always have airplay and a profitable touring schedule. The internal tensions of the United States in the sixties and seventies will, to those who were in their formative teens and twenties during that time, forever be the One True Lens for looking upon all history everywhere. The great war between Hippies and Patriots is forever. No political question does now or shall ever exist on its own terms but only as a means for the Patriots to prove that they have always been right and the Cool Kids were a bunch of dummy-dumbs for thinking they were so cool. No one is exempt from this war. For a non-Baby Boomer to refuse to pick a side is in itself an act of siding with the hippies. Any media or pop-culture production that does not loudly endorse the Patriot worldview is part of the hippie conspiracy. And please do not ever suggest that the hippies preference for music and sex over god country and moral triumph was anything less than perfectly unique. Such a thing was completely unheard of among middle-class twenty somethings before the hippies came along don't ya know, and obviously something that the rest of us would have never picked up if it wern't for them.
In all honesty though, my own hair is shoulder length, and I am high right now, like for real. But I am not a hippie. The hippies are all old and/or dead now, very specific to a very small window of time. Very specific to a small space yes, but at the same time not at all a freakish anomoly living radically outside the American path, but rather inspired by an American mythos older than America which paints our open spaces as a holy refuge for the Free Folk of the West, liberating to the spirit and invigorating to both body and moral character. The hippies were in fact inspired by the same cultural gene line of Leatherstocking, Huck Finn, Jack London and Geronimo that produced John Wayne.
As for the 'Satan Worshipping' stuff, that's boilerplate which really doesn't upset me. It is at least honestly more up-to-date and thoughtful than smearing the Flower Children as Communists, which was of course the go-to snarl for them at the time. Plus I'm still teenage-metal enough to think that there's great honor in being accused of devil worship. (So long as the people making the charge don't have an actual stake and the means to use it anyway), We're the people who stay out till six in the morning getting the sort of joys that one can find only there.
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