But this is Chico, too

I can sympathize with fellow blogger Lon Glazner, who joked that the “end goal” of his blog “Commission Impossible” is to “drive readers away.”

He wrote, “I have come to the conclusion that I can’t be a counter culture icon without being a popular culture pariah. It is to this end I strive aimlessly and without import. The greatest impact I can have on Chico’s policy makers is to have no lasting impact at all.”

Glazner is one of the NorCalblogs group's most popular bloggers, so I suspect he’s having an impact. But all writers worry about how effective they are at getting their message across.

His job isn’t as contradictory as he thinks. That’s because there is no counterculture. It died in 1974. I didn’t realize this until much later, but I think it happened sometime after Patty Hearst was kidnapped by the Symbionese Liberation Army but before Richard Nixon resigned as president.

Therefore, Glazner’s only worry is his standing in the popular culture. He’ll do fine with that. Popular culture embraces all manner of pariahs, fringe-dwellers and outlaws. A few posts ago, I likened our popular culture to a big box of confections. Even if you have weird appetites, you will find something to your liking in the box.

I’m not saying Glazner is weird, but becoming a pariah wouldn’t lessen his impact. It could help him.

An officially weird event in Chico took place at the Airport Cafe a couple of weeks ago. Liz Laird, assistant entertainment editor at The Orion, wrote about it in the Chico State campus newspaper. The event featured “horror punk” bands, fire twirlers, a woman getting a “corset piercing” and a man who opted to hang 6 feet off the ground for a few minutes after being pierced in 10 places on his body with rings that were attached to a metal bar and a suspension device. “The slightly sadistic and decidedly creepy event was a suitable ending to a bizarrely entertaining evening,” Laird concluded.

This weirdness du jour sounds a little too predictable to have been bizarre. In such a setting, a hopscotch tournament featuring people dressed in kilts would have been much more surprising. But it sure was entertaining. Laird reports that “the audience went wild” during the suspension.

I bring this up because some might say this kind of event is the early 21st century version of the counterculture. But I say it is part of our something-for-everyone popular culture entertainment package. It comes from the same big box as re-enactments of Sxities counterculture, such as the Rainbow Gathering, which illustrates this blog entry.

My thoughts about the counterculture were sparked by Jaime O’Neill’s essay in a recent issue of The Chico Beat. He wrote about the first time he ever held an “alternative” newspaper in his hands, back in the mid-1960s in Berkeley. “It was an exciting moment because the paper read and felt like a truly subversive document, chock full of radical politics, anti-war news, celebratory odes to fee love, sex and rock n’ roll,” he wrote.

In his essay, O’Neill wonders about the purpose of alternative publications “in the age of George W. Bush.” He finds himself asking “What is so alternative about them?”

I felt the same way as O’Neill when I read the Berkeley Barb and the San Francisco Oracle 40 years ago. They were the voice of the counterculture. They were messages from a world that was still largely hidden, a world that seemed to pose a real threat to mainstream culture.

It took all of 10 years for mainstream culture to discover this world, co-opt it and kill it. That’s why alternative newspapers have lost their zest. Because the counterculture is dead, there’s nothing interesting for them to report. There’s nothing they can tell us that we don’t already know. There’s nothing out there except the pop culture in all its variations, from mainstream to so-called edgy.

But I still appreciate alternative newspapers for their reliably liberal editorial points of view. Most mainstream newspapers are just as conservative now as they were 40 years ago. The idea of the “liberal media” is a misnomer. Liberal newspapers still matter, especially at a time when liberalism can't seem to get much respect. Liberal newspapers are like voices crying out in the wilderness.

Speaking of wilderness, I would like to believe there is a counterculture out there somewhere, operating in secret, avoiding media attention, biding its time until it becomes powerful and organized enough to seriously challenge mainstream culture.