

Media Stereotyping: Hippies as Bad Guys: Ever noticed how a disproportionately large numbers of the villains in today's television programs and movies are white males with ponytails? In conjunction with Arabs and Arab-Americans (who these shows often show us as being in cahoots with, partners in "terrorism"), hippies have become America's preferred bad guys.
This column looks in particular at the now-defunct television series Baywatch and at the now-popular television series Fox's 24, including its apparent promotion of the torture of hippie-Americans.
The Case of Jeffrey MacDonald: "Helter Skelter" Meets "The Ballad of the Green Berets": His wife and two daughters were murdered in 1971; MacDonald claims the murderers were hippies high on LSD. Later convicted, MacDonald now languishes in prison, his paroles denied. Several books, including Fatal Vision, have been written about MacDonald and the infamous and controversial case.
Cultural conservatives like to portray MacDonald as a martyr to hippie irresponsibility and recklessness, stereotyping us as crazed killers. But MacDonald, as the courts have repeatedly said, is likely guilty.
We feel this piece is important not only for what it says about how much of America, particularly neoconservative America, views the counterculture but because it seems an original approach to that case, offering an often-missed perspective on the murders and the the unlikely role of LSD in them.
Incidentally, there wasn't space to fit this into the column, but there are other reasons why we should see MacDonald's story as preposterous: First, people on LSD don't really chant: a consistent, steady, stable rhythm is inconsistent with the spontaneity of LSD use, and since LSD use is illegal, and its users are in a relatively vulnerable state--and they know this--most aren't eager to call attention to themselves by repeatedly saying things like, "Acid is groovy." Second, the hippies in MacDonald's tale are cartoonish and nonsensical:So, this group of countercultural young people are going to drop acid one night and then go onto a military base--a place where they might be in danger, anyway, sticking out like proverbial sore thumbs--and then attack a family whose father is likely trained in hand-to-hand combat and killing techniques and may well have firearms and other weapons in the house. Well, not unless they were suicidal.
So instead of giving us a believable scenario, MacDonald's defense would seem to rely on a stereotype of hippies and of LSD users which seems to say, "Hey, the killers' motives and behavior doesn't have to make any sense: they were just a bunch of Establishment-hating hippies out of their minds on drugs. That's the way those crazy hippies are! Honest!"
