Kill All Hippies

May 14th, 2007

Last night, I caught a little documentary on the history channel that dealt with hippies. Don’t get me wrong, I hate hippies, but I was attracted to this documentary not because of it’s Grateful Dead (or just “the Dead” if you’re so inclined) footage, but because the whole surrounding aura of the LSD movement was wayyy weirder than the people who took the drugs. The government tested it on military personnel and just regular humans, and it was pretty legal for a while, so all the LSD experimentation went down without a hitch. That is until the idea of a “counter-culture” started taking shape beyond just a bunch of dirty teenagers with long hair. Anyway, I started flipping around the channels when they stopped talking about Ken Kesey (tidbit, he took a job as a security officer at a mental institution to have access to LSD. This later turned into the basis for One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest), but came back every now and again. The most interesting point they made happened in the last five minutes and involved the hippies influence on technology. Yes, technology. It kind of puts away all the bullshit of Mother Earth and other hippie ideals. They just had such a new and different way of seeing things that once their “bad trips” ended and they kind of grew up, they created some of the most technologically advanced products of our time. Case in point: Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak. You might know them better as the brains behind Apple Computers. These two probably took a ton of LSD, touched a bunch of wires together, and had their minds blown when they “saw electricity” on a screen. Then they probably danced in front of a strobe light and hung-out with the Hells Angels. And you thought all computer people were dorks.

Jobs and Woz being totally tripped out.

Entry Filed under: Uncategorized, Movies/Television