The Hippie Blog

Writings From The Author Of The Hippie Dictionary

March 31, 2024

Dear Mr. Thom Heartman

Dear Mr. Hartmann,

My UPS package of two books to you seems to have been turned away. No problem. I will try to relate to you by my website; hippiedictionary,com. In this site there is a comprehensive overview of my books and my politics.

I would like to speak with you, on air, the next time I call you. Pick any subject. I will pick a subject that I am conversant with, and I like to participate in back-and-forth discussions. I am a free-enterprise social democrat.

I trust and believe that Democratic government is supposed to be a fiduciary agent for the people and basically to help advise and tell the truth/to the majority, not just to the rich

The hate you take is equal to the hate you make. The Beatles wrote “the love you make is equal to the love you make,” which I already knew because my mother taught me that.

My grandfather, father and I have been fighting the evils of capitalism since the 1880’s. At least one of us has been assassinated. I still tend to concentrate on the possibilities, not the negatives.

I am a third-generation journalist. My father and grandfather were muckrakers, newspaper owners and political speechwriters. My grandfather, James Madison Bassett, owned the Golden Era, Oakland Tribune, and the Los Angeles Herald. Samuel Clemens worked for him as a linotype operator and sometimes as a reporter. J.M. Bassett wrote columns “Old Pard” in his papers that accused Callis P. Huntington of stealing 7 million dollars from the US Government during the Civil War, while building the cross-country railroad. Hannington was forced to return the money and my grandfather disappeared under suspicious circumstances. My Father was a newspaper owner and columnist in Hawaii in the 1940s and 50s and was Honolulu’s Mayor John Wilson’s executive secretary and speech writer. Though a Caucasian WK was on the board of the Hawaiian NWACP. My Father, W. K. Bassett, is credited with starting the Hawaii Field Workers Union and was assassinated by the Big Five fruit companies, a fact well documented.

I am the authority on the generation that questioned authority.

I am the author of the Hippie Trilogy comprised of The Hippie Dictionary: A Cultural Encyclopedia of the 1960s and 1970s, published in 2002, revised in 2004, published by Crown Publishing, a division of Random House. I self-published Common Sense and Reason Again in 2021 and Mother’s Heart, Father’s Mind: The Sexual Revolution of A Young Man: 1955 to 1985, in 2022. These three books took me 45 years to compile and much of my writing was and still is ahead of the time. Now people are catching up and plagiarizing my work. It is time I got recognition, not for myself alone, but to get these ideas out there.

John Bassett McCleary, jcmccleary@comcast.net

The Hippie Trilogy... three books which have all the answers for a peaceful and rational world... the people should have listened to the hippies.

There are many of us out there trying to save the world. They want no money, they want no glory, we just have a compassion for life, this world and all its creatures. We are whale huggers, we are tree huggers, we are people huggers, we want to leave this world better than when we came.

During the 1960s and 70s, in Los Angeles I was ad agency executive, a music industry photographer and on stage and in the dressing rooms with The Doors, Jimi Hendrix, The Stones, Tina Turner and others. In the early 1970s, I produced a series of twelve posters and The People’s Book, a photographic essay of the counterculture of the era. I participated in and photographed many civil rights and anti-war demonstrations across the United States during the 1960s and 70s. My photographic essay of the 1960s counterculture was published in 1972 by Celestial Arts in San Francisco, and in 1998, I self-published Monterey Peninsula People, a book of photographs and bios of peninsula residents.

I have written articles in numerous newspapers. I was a copywriter, art director and account executive for two Top-10 ad agencies, helping to produce advertising for companies, such as Bank of America, McDonalds and Richfield Oil. And then I became a hippie. I am a good public speaker, I have good instincts, I think on my feet. My only motivation is to help save this world for the future generations. But if we are too stupid as to destroy the viability of this earth, I hope that when life comes back there will be two of every other creature accept homosapiens.

Please excuse the erratic format of this communication, I have imported these from incompatible programs.

A Hippie Speaks

By John Bassett McCleary

Author of The Hippie Dictionary: A Cultural Encyclopedia of the 1960s and 70s

Except from Hippie Dictionary

The Hippies Were Right!

It was once considered an expletive, at best, a dismissive slur. Hippie, “The cause of all problems in our Christian, capitalist, family values country.” But now, most people know that hippies stand for peace, love, tolerance, and cheap, organic, non-pollutant granola, the four things that this world needs more than anything else right now.

For years, the hippie has been ridiculed for his indulgences. But the sins of sex, drugs and rock & roll cannot compare with the sins of greed, war and religious intolerance. At least the activities of the hippie culture do not inflict pain upon the rest of the world.

What was once considered a counterculture is now an active, vital and productive mainstream culture in this country. Hippies didn’t all overdose or become stockbrokers. They are predominantly in the “soft” industries--libraries, schools, medical support, self-help, art, crafts, retail and the building trades.

Many people in this country are now demanding a different viewpoint than the pabulum served to them by the mainstream media. People today want to hear alternative, even radical, new ideas.

The hippie rebelled against great odds and spoke out against silence. No generation before was more different than it’s predictors. No generation before searched more for the truth.

Soon, when “The Greatest Generation” passes on, “The Peace and Love Generation” will be the leaders, voters and consumers of this country.

Most of the 40- to 70-year-olds in this country were raised on newspapers and liberal media. Many of them still read, or would read, a book or a newspaper paper if it contained something that challenged their intellect.

Oddly enough, many in the younger generations now are also potential readers of a column with more liberal content. There is a curiosity about the hippie era and its ideals, because they know that the hippie was their forerunner and gave them the “permission” to be different.

Also, deep inside, the young, electronic generations still seem to have an intellectual respect for the traditional book or newspaper. There remains, although I don’t understand why, a belief that newspapers are professionally committed to democratic goals.

Electronic media has not yet convinced even the new generations completely. The expedience of giving every self-appointed muse an unedited voice is confusing. It would be like expanding the Opinion Page to the entire newspaper. Fox News is tainted opinions not news.

If a newspaper wishes, honestly, to be “fair and impartial,” and to tell the whole story, it needs a hippie columnist. The public needs to hear from someone new with the old ideals of Benjamin Franklin, John Adams, Thomas Paine and Timothy Leary. But someone who writes this column must have credentials at both ends of the spectrum.

You don’t have to explain hippie to the public. Most everyone loves or hates the name and all that it stands for. The word alone will get attention. I can make them come back for more.

The hippie, bleeding heart liberal has for years been considered America’s national embarrassment. Now, most people realize that our military-industrial complex is the real embarrassment. Where does that leave the hippies who have been fighting greed and war for the last 40 years?

Our founding fathers, John Adams, Ben Frankland, Ben Harrison, Tom Jefferson, James Madison, Gorge Washington, (in alphabetical order) were moral and rule of law people. Capitalism is not the form of economics that these six fathers had in mind for America. It was Free Enterprise they chose, where everyone is free to be enterprising and it is implied that it would be done in a moral and legal way. Whereas Capitalism gives people the option to lie, steal and kill people for money. We have Hamilton to blame for that.

Peace,

Guns Do Not Protect Your Family

Excerpted from the book:

Commons Sense and Reason Again

By John Bassett McCleary

First written in the 1990s

Guns Do Not Protect Your Family! Stop using that as an excuse for owning firearms.

The facts prove that you are actually putting your family at risk by owning a gun. Numbers show that, for every one criminal who is subdued by a household gun, there are literally hundreds of family members who are killed in gun accidents at home, not to mention all the thousands of friends and family members who are killed with household guns in fits of passion.

This information should cause any rational person to dispose of his weapons. But then, we are not dealing with rational thought here, are we? Let’s face it; we are dealing with the male macho ego.

Don’t use “the right to bear arms” excuse for your reasoning. Don’t dishonor the fathers of our country by saying that they meant citizens should own half a dozen assault rifles, Mac-10s, and nine-millimeter semi-automatics.

Don’t offend the writers of the Second Amendment by thinking they intended it to be used to justify the indiscriminate sale of deadly weapons to just about anyone who could pull a trigger.

Please, let’s start thinking with our heads rather than other parts of our anatomy. If you own guns, you should look deep inside yourself to see why you really own them. Understand where this urge for weapons comes from. Could it be less to protect your family than to enhance your own image?

Men use guns, cars, clothing, sports, bodybuilding, sex, power and money to enhance their image. It’s part of life, and most of those sublimations are relatively harmless. But guns are not.

We have supposedly gone beyond the days of the Wild West. But some men are trying to drag us back into those times when men were measured by the size of their guns.

Wake up! Having the bigger gun does not make you the bigger man. It makes you a weak man hiding behind a big gun. If you have such a fixation, seek help.

Although most women don’t have such fixations, they often humor their men. Women, tell your men that you like them just as much, maybe even better, without that cold, steel rod. You may be saving the life of one of your family members.

But, if your man must own a gun, urge him to do so with common sense. Keep it locked up and unloaded. Teach every member of your family to treat every gun as if it were loaded, even though it isn’t. Never ever, ever point a gun at another person unless you wish them dead.

Keep the gun and the ammunition in separate places. Put the ammunition someplace where anyone looking for it will have plenty of time to think about what they are doing and cool down if need be.

So, you might get robbed, but the chances are greater that you will save the life of a family member.

The gun lobbyists say, “If guns are outlawed, then only outlaws will have guns.” The truth of the matter is that most gun homicides are perpetrated by people who were law-abiding citizens until the moment when they shot someone. Most gun violence is a crime of opportunity. The availability of so many guns is what makes the criminals and causes the deaths.

I think the NRA is misguided right now, not because they put guns into the hands of criminals, but because they put them into the hands of potential criminals. Remember, keeping one questionable freedom is foolish if it jeopardizes all of our other freedoms combined. Death ends all your freedom.

When a danger to society is recognized, a rational society will place restrictions on that danger. We have automobile speed laws, which some people feel infringe on their rights, but these laws save lives. It’s about time we became civilized and started considering more stringent gun laws, too.

It is as if some people in this society don’t want humankind to evolve and succeed. Often, making unpopular intellectual decisions is what human beings have to do to survive and/or to correct previous mistakes. I am ashamed of the shortsightedness of the Supreme Court Judges who voted to negate local handgun laws. With each decision like this we are slipping further back into the dog-eat-dog jungle and further away from the Garden of Eden.

These are only my opinions. This is a free country, and I have the right to my opinions, as you have the right to yours. But please, use the gray matter that God gave you, and think about what I have said. Don’t let your macho ego kill someone you love.

In Common Sense and Reason Again, I propose disbanding the representational form of government as it is today. We can all vote on all bills and propositions pertaining to ourselves, by using computer ballets protected by our own eye prints. I also preposed that we change the advertising industry into a consumer advocacy 24-hour TV program, rating and critiquing all products, giving prices etc… And I suggest greatly curtailing the Stock Market, going back to its original reason which was to give money to companies for research and development only, not for higher salaries for management. There needs to be a maximum wage just like we have a minimum wage. And the true value of any worker can now be computed, based on education, experience, brain power and physical exertion used. I’ve been proposing these for thirty years.

CHAPTER 42

Excerpt from Mother’s Heart Father’s Mind, published in 2022

Sex, Business and Religion

“In America, everything our society does with sex is wrong!

We preach that sex is nasty, and then we promote it and advertise it

to the point that it titillates all aspects of our life, leaving us no way

to ignore it.”

Dudley Griffin 6.5.99

“Why is your pocketbook attached to your dick and not your

brain?” Mr. California

Common sense would seem to say that sex, business and religion

should never be mixed. Sure, prostitution is a business, but really, in a

perfect world, I don’t think that business should have any influence on

religion or sex, and I definitely feel religion should never be associated

with sex or business in any way.

When I speak of religion, I mean organized, proselytizing

church religion, not morality. Morality is altogether different from religion.

Morality is the Golden Rule.

It doesn’t sound right, yet in our society, sex, business and religion

are irrevocably bound together. These three most volatile, complex

and emotional activities of humankind are indeed all wrapped up

together in the crazy, imaginative psyche of mankind.

The first truth that we must admit in order to straighten out this

travesty of conflicting emotions is the fact that sex is by far the most important activity of humankind, not business or religion. Sex is the activity that continues the flow of life, and in Nature it is our primary function.

True, business may help to maintain life, but it is third or fourth

in importance behind sex. After the basic need for food and the primal

reflex of self-defense, all of man’s other actions are dictated by the

desire for, pursuit and maintenance of sexual gratification.

Some would say that this is too simplistic. They

might mention work, children, home and garden as the main activities

of life. Yet my question to these people is, “What is the reason for

work and home and what are children produced for? Are they just for

our own gratification, or are we working for a better life?”

Sure, most of our active life is not devoted to sexual intercourse,

yet much of our existence is involved in getting laid, supporting

the product of our sexual activity and protecting the home where

our children and the object of our sexual desire lives.

So how did human society get so involved in business and religion?

Why do we now attribute so much importance to business and

religion? No other animal does. Why do we?

Blog Posting in my hippiedictionary.com blog. John Bassett McCleary

It has been said many times that democracy may not be the perfect form of government, but it is better than all the others. And I will add that it is the best form of government for the majority of people. That alone should convince all smart and moral citizens of America to fight for democracy and proper voting rights.

Democracy sometimes means straddling fences, compromise, and cooperation to maintain a safe and civil society. Anarchy and conflict are not conducive to a safe, free, and happy life for human beings. That is why our founding fathers chose democracy as the form of government for the United States. Democracy is people governing themselves.

In the United States of America, our representational form of government is continually trying to maintain order and safety for the people, all the people, not just the rational and moral people. That is why we have laws chosen to benefit the majority of the public, and in many cases to protect some folks from their ignorance or stupidity. We have traffic laws, which have cut down deaths. We have drinking and drug laws that cut down on deaths. We have warnings on cigarettes and requirements to use helmets, seatbelts and child seats that save lives. If you want to live in danger or anarchy move to Russia or a fourth-world country.

Compromise is the rational way to maintain peace and prosperity for all. Voting to change your government is the peaceful and intelligent way to live. It is the human way to improve the existence of all of us and most importantly for the majority of us.

The Proud Boys are too macho to be rational. The violent and corrupt fascist mentality is ego-produced, which is created by insecurity and arrogance. It is self-defeating; it is a less-than-human response to the world.

How do you speak to a person who doesn't understand the words? How do you reason with someone who is not reasonable? How do you try to help someone who feels helpless?

My grandfather, my father, and I have been battling the evils of capitalism in California and Hawaii since the late 1880s. At least one of us has already been assassinated.

I don't want to prove anything...I don't want to make a lot of money...I want to be heard... I want to beat the capitalist bastards and help save the world for the good people.

Oh, God Save the World. And if ITs not willing and the world is not willing, I’m willing to try.

In 1965 I was an ad executive, copywriter, and art director for top ten ad agencies.

I WANTED

GO SOMEPLACE

AND

DO SOMETHING…

SO in 1967

I BECAME A HIPPIE.