Steve Pearce's Hippie Hippie Shake: Don't You Want Somebody to Love?

Stare into the center of the mandala, Steve

As I commented on Matt's post at NM FBIHOP about the Steve Pearce hippie attack ad on Tom Udall, Grace Slick used to sing "One pill makes you larger. And one pill makes you small." Steve Pearce must have gotten the one that makes you small -- and that causes flashbacks for 40 years. Steve isn't looking for somebody to love -- he's trying to get people to dredge up old grudges from decades past. He must still carry that baggage from all those years ago. Stuck in the past like an angrily buzzing fly in a time-warp web.

Early Beatles do Hippie Hippie Shake.
Steve only shakes it to the right.

I highly doubt Steve can shake his hips. Maybe he never could and that's why he's still so angry about days gone by. I wouldn't be surprised if Pearce resented the Beatles too -- all that long hair, infectious energy and lust for life and love. He's carried the battle against everything liberating all the way to the 21st century.

Somebody had to do it. Why not someone so incensed by uppity women, peace symbols, solar energy, 1969 love beads and silvery minnows that he takes out a full-page ad in the Albuquerque Journal on them in the year 2008. And then tries to hang all the bathos and pathos of an era gone by on Tom Udall, his highly popular Senate seat rival -- who has a nasty habit of living in the present and approaching the future with optimism and ideas. Change and the future are scary to those stuck in the past and hung up over milk that spilled in the days of yore. Fear of the new. Fear of the other. Fear of creative thinking and being.

Tell Me This Is Sane
Check out what Pearce has to say in this Albuquerque Journal article. Does he sound sane speaking about his full-page Journal ad full of faux-hippies?

“This picture is a picture from my past,” Pearce said, referring to a photo of a pair of hippies in his Wednesday newspaper ad that maintains Udall is allied with “hysterical left-wing” environmentalists — an ad the Udall campaign calls bogus.

“In 1969, I was the president of the student body at New Mexico State University, and the radicals were going to burn down the administration building — as they had done across the country,” Pearce said. “I took it on myself to go out and stand on the wall where (a) guy was actually wrapping the crowd into an enthusiasm to go burn the building, because at that time, I felt like these extremists had hijacked our policies, and they were controlling our universities. And we're finding the same thing today. The extremists have hijacked our policies, so that we can't live.”

Asked by a reporter whether he was charging that Udall stands with the kinds of people who once wanted to raze college buildings, Pearce, who went on to be an Air Force pilot in Vietnam, responded:

“There's a counterculture that was epitomized by the hippies. They were against the war. They were against America. It was always that criminals have more rights than the victim. That America's enemies have more rights. And what I'm saying is, that push from the past is still being carried forward. The counterculture is the same today. And it's people who think America is wrong. I don't think America is wrong. I don't think American jobs are wrong. I don't think the American economy is wrong. And so that's the distinction that I see between Tom Udall and myself.

Cue the Twilight Zone Music
I can't imagine what Republicans with even a modicum of sense are thinking about these weird and wildly inappropriate attacks by their candidate in one of the most important and spotlighted Senate races in the nation. After this, it's hard to see who will be able to take Pearce seriously, regardless of their political leanings. Only the most paleoconservative -- and rageful -- of voters could see this line of attack as anything but deranged and desperate indeed. I find that the scariest part is that he may well believe what he's saying ....

Imagine having this guy in on setting the course for our future and that of our children and grandchildren. Then again, don't. Just do what you can to make sure Tom Udall is elected to the Senate.

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