Hippie Bureaucracy

We know from Drum Circles.

For several years, in a number of capacities, we were involved with the Oregon Country Fair, a three-day summer crafts and music event that (during our time) drew 30,000 visitors to the woods outside Eugene.

Founded in 1969, it was already a multigenerational hippiefest by the time we messed around in the late ’80s. Over time, we worked security, helped in the front office, even played trumpet in the Fighting Instruments of Karma Marching Band/Orchestra, which, after two daily parades featuring “Teddy Bears Picnic”, would sit in as the house band for the juggling Flying Karamazov Brothers.

It was very, very, very fun. Especially the night we dropped acid and kept the camp awake singing Gilligan’s Island.

Oh, right. Night. You see, after the paying customers went home at sundown, that left about three thousand people on site, and everybody had camps or treehouses. Some gaslit food booths – no electricity allowed – would stay open, so if you simply needed a stoner-satisfying cheesecake at 2 a.m., it was available.

And twenty-four hours a day, the pulse never stopped at the Drum Tower. You quickly learned to set up camp far away from there. Yes, it’s Tradition, but still.

What impresses us to this day is not only that the Country Fair worked, but how it worked.

For example, they owned the land. Bought it, paid it off, burned the mortgage.

And as a landowner, the Country Fair found itself part of The System. They had to follow rules. All those food booths? Licensed. All those treehouses? Inspected. The medical stations? Coordinated. The shitters? Cleaned. That highway project that threatened to cut the property in half? Diverted.

They may have been hippies – and trust us, they were the originals, accept no arrivistes – but they were responsible.

They had to be. You couldn’t pull off an event of that scale otherwise. Year after year after year after mind-blowing year.

We called it Hippie Bureaucracy. And we saw it in action, repeatedly, on site and at the year-round office, in a small house near campus. This was the most anti-authoritarian crew you could imagine, but somebody had to step up, and tell others what to do. There was a Board overseeing the whole thing, and votes taken on appropriate issues at appropriate moments, but you can’t be democratic about every fleeting decision. At some level, not far from the top, somebody has to give orders, somebody has to follow them, and somebody has to take responsibility. Or nothing gets done.

This wasn’t universally understood. You had your share of Floaters, young Free Spirits for whom everything magically just happened. These folks were welcomed as innocent entertainment, and they were only scorned by Hippie Bureaucracy when they got in the way. Yes, yes, this beautiful happening is just for you. Now please stand aside so somebody can stock up the toilet paper.

The Country Fair came to mind last night as we were reading a very familiar account of the Drum Circle Standoff at Occupy Wall Street:

“They’re imposing a structure on the natural flow of music,” said Seth Harper, an 18-year-old from Georgia. “The GA [OWS General Assembly] decided to do it… they suppressed people’s opinions. I wanted to introduce a different proposal, but a big black organizer chick with an Afro said I couldn’t.”

We know that scene. We’ve seen it institutionalized.

And we know this: Soon after our Country Fair time had ended, the Drum Tower went quiet during the wee hours.

There had been a vote. Even hippies gotta sleep.

The Organizers vs. the Organized in Zuccotti Park [New York, via Sully]