My "Hair" Problem

A few years ago some friends and I re-experienced the tribal rock musical "Hair."  The Bridgeport [CT] Downtown Cabaret's production precisely and enthusiastically re-created the version I gawked at in 1968.  I again held the same vision of life and wasted death I marveled at from the orchestra of some Broadway theatre a whole lifetime ago.

And that has become my problem.  That sense of life and travail is now more than I wanted to remember, and my eyes see with those other eyes every day now, and I know that the prophecy has come real. All that poetry and laughter has soured in our passionless lives and in the closeted cynicism of Washington.

I had just turned thirty that year, had just fathered my third child into a marriage that was on the wane, was new to Connecticut and in a new job, and was going to graduate school in lower Manhattan, bearing witness to the tempting lust and rage of Washington Square.  And I didn't know why I was doing or being any of it.

My Silent Generation did what we were told, listened and watched.   That socially acceptable voyeurism allowed me to be in the Sixties on the Square, on the train and on the job, but kept me from its harm as well.  I lived an invisibility provided by my thirty year old mask and costume, short-haired, drifting in and out of demonstrations and parlors, urging it on willfully but blending with the rest of the tourists my age.  And what a party it was.

The conventional wisdom claims we were a nation torn by the times, especially by the Vietnam War issue.  But what I recall is a brawling, sprawling national family that cared enough about all its members to hate them and call them pigs and commies and hippies.  Everyone was desperately proclaiming superior morality and acting on that claim.  As I see again the rushing crowds pushing into the streets and buildings now, I see a nation that cared deeply about all of it and argued endlessly over the differences.  I'm looking into the face of a Parkway toll taker as he's declaiming against my McCarthy bumper sticker.  And we're heading for a demonstration somewhere, anywhere.

But today as I look around with the eyes that "Hair" gave me, I see blank faces on kids and anger in the eyes of two separate parents, scrambling at their separate jobs and fretting over day care, a nation of cellular phone drivers sealing their deals from the steering wheels of their imported four-wheeled cubicles.  If it's all for fun, then nothing is funny enough.  At least, the fun of the Love Children had an edge of desire to it.  The fun of our Yuppies and their acquiring children mews empty phrases in pursuit of soft memories.  They have hard bodies and healthy lungs, and they have vapid minds speaking smarmy jargon to justify their latest crystallized morality that avoids the snarling looks of honest people.

"How can people be so heartless?" runs the lament of Sheila in "Hair" as she confronts her lover's choice to leave.  And that earnestness and desire make me cringe in the face of the mean-spirited avarice we wallow in.  Her lover leaves for an ideal he's not sure of except that it promises more than the overload of ritualized drugs and nameless sex partners in the tribe.  As it turns out, he dies like some 50,000 others, wondering what it all was for, what the ideal meant to all the people at home and in Saigon who didn't want to fight.

Even so, he held a belief.  His short life meant more than a Volvo or a Hummer and the latest wonder toys from the Silicon Valley and Japan.  As I look at the faces of my students and my forty-something neighbors, I see the look of a beater, flicking fierce eyes around to see the opening, the squeeze to get over on the system or the sucker.

We don't live in an age of greater morality or new morality.  We live in an age of amorality.  The only values are the codes of easiness and success.  For all the health crazies around, my Hair-ed eyes see precious few people who are willing to exert a pinch of real effort to work on large problems that don't directly benefit them individually.

And so I have this "Hair" problem.  Actually, it's an eye problem.  With these eyes, I can't overlook things anymore.  Like a few of my contemporaries, I had compromised with the spiritlessness of our age.  I had blinded myself to the rudeness and crudeness that is commonplace.  I had learned carefully to avoid the spin and curl of the slick-lipped hustlers.  But then along came last year's emptiness, and I couldn't turn the other way.

I saw the bathos in local politics and could see how its canker festered exponentially in national politics.  The Kerry/Bush Follies was hyped as a nasty campaign. But my eyes saw a soapbox derby with mediocrity's lowest common denominator the face at the finish line.  The country didn't win or lose.  The country sent a clear message.  It doesn't care, because nothing about those guys matters.  The most justified addition to Mount Rushmore for the 21^st century would be the Happy Face.

So the Age of Aquarius has shmoozed into the Age of Putty.  The starshine of the Sixties is the American Idol of the 21^st century.  Perhaps, despite all our fun, the sound behind our laughter is the whimpering that closed T.S. Eliot's vision of the modern era. Perhaps, in this new century it's the nasal sneer of the cashiers when they say to me, "Have a nice day."