Weekly Column
We Won: Get Used to It
What happens when the counterculture becomes mainstream? Hint: the mainstream becomes the counterculture.
Back in 2000, I was invited to appear at Richard Metzger’s famous counterculture festival, DisinfoCon, along with luminaries of the alternative scene like Joe Coleman, Robert Anton Wilson, The Girls of Karen Black, Marilyn Manson, Grant Morrison, Kembra Pfahler, and more. It was a crazy, boisterous, artsy, psychedelic, and rebellious celebration of the weird, the occult, and the odd, all presented under the tagline, “everything you know is wrong.”
It felt like such a bounty of counterculture riches, such a turning point, that I challenged the assembled renegades to accept victory. “The counterculture has won,” I told them. “It’s time we realize that we are not the counterculture at all. We are not against culture. George Bush is the counterculture.”
My argument was that the ideals of the 1960s counterculture had become mainstream, and we should stop trying to run from that fact. Just as the aesthetics of the counterculture were available online and at the mall, so, too, had the values of the counterculture become mainstream. The core counterculture values of environmentalism, women’s rights, racial justice, and international peace…
