Wash Your Hair, Go To Jail

Studio 77
Oberlin, Ohio

It's just getting ridiculous out there. I've taken to keeping almost strictly nighttime hours - 4 pm to 8 am with the phone cord ripped brutally out of the base and a piano bench jammed up under the door knob - in order to avoid the creeping madness that seems to have gripped the country by the balls. At nighttime it's almost bearable. There's an unnerving kind of peace out there, daytime in a marrow-white vampire village; the kind of night where you just wanna go out into the street and yawp just to break the silence.

I woke up this afternoon and, with much disgust, engaged in a series of rapid electronic exchanges with absolutely nobody. In my inbox was a form email from a friend informing me that the federal Drug Enforcement Agency was plotting a total ban on body care products made with hemp sees and would I go to SaveHemp.org to send a form email to my local representatives to protest this proposal.

With a few keystrokes, machines were humming to life, communicating with each other. My form email was off through the wires to a computer in some representative's office, where it was replied to by another apparatus which told me, in so many words, that still another gadget would be printing me out a response. Of course, it didn't tell me that outright. No, it said that I would be getting a reply via the regular mails, almost undoubtedly to give the impression of some human contact somewhere along the line.

All of this number crunching dressed up as real social interaction before 5 pm made me remember that I still hadn't eaten. As I wandered off to the kitchen in search of vitamin C, the true hilarity of the situation suddenly paralyzed me, and I collapsed giggling in the hallway of my house. As I lay there twitching, I marveled over it: I have never washed my mangy locks with hemp shampoo, nor scrubbed my heady physique with hemp soap, yet - under this law - if I were to do so, my action would be classified as illegal, as illegal as a Schedule I narcotic (like pot), and I would be subject to a large fine and time in jail. The government is making it a crime to be heady.

The reason the government claims it's going for this ban is because the hemp products in question are getting in the way of their drug tests, making it appear that people who have, say, washed their hair with hemp-based shampoo will test positive for marijuana use even if they haven't smoked it. Yeah? Seems to me that the government is changing the rules of the game to match the deficiencies of their own drug test. Ah, the American spirit is in fine fettle, indeed. Instead of making their tests more efficient, they are taking the lazy man's way out. Sounds an awful lot like what they seem to claim pot does to people, doesn't it? The logic, though, doesn't sound remotely like anything any self-respecting dope fiend would come up with. Not even me.

If the D.E.A. can't come up with functional tests, then fuck 'em. The idea is to test for drugs, not hemp... that is, unless these kinds of hemp products are illegal. Then it would be really quite convenient. Imagine a situation where hemp was illegal all along and someone came up with a way to test to see if some fiend had used hemp-based shampoo and discovered that the same method of evaluation could be used to determine whether or not the bugger had recently smoked pot. Golly, might as well make pot illegal, too.

Above all, though, it strikes me as violation of the First Amendment (now this is the logic of a self-respecting dope fiend) because hemp has become something far more than a base for various products. No, hemp is a celebrity cousin. Thanks to its genetic connection to marijuana, with trace elements of unharvestable THC in its make-up, hemp is something that people embrace as a symbol and flaunt like a pink feather boa. They might not be able to smoke pot in public, but they can at least silently scream of it through use of various hemp products. What the federal government would essentially like to ban is a symbol.

In this scene, it's a pretty big symbol, too. The existence of people like myself who've never donned a piece of hemp clothing on general principle are a testament to that. The appropriation of hemp as a symbol has always seemed somewhat ridiculous to me, but this move by the D.E.A. seems even moreso. With the right sense of humor, the next four years could be downright hilarious. That's all this is really: comedy in its purest, most brutal form. the way I see it, our collective job is to play the proverbial straight man. Remain calm.

I don't think that it's a coincidence that the Dead scene surged throughout the 1980s, almost in direct reaction to the conservative trip that Reagan and a lot of the country was running on. And I don't think it's a coincidence that, once again, this kind of scene is blossoming in an age of Dubya and the politics of high comedy. The difference this time around, I hope, is that we're prepared. The Internet seems key to me in a way it never has before, the idea of a counterculture, for the first time in my life, beginning to make sense.

In the same way that my denying the use of hemp products somehow proves their existence as a symbol, this legal suppression of hemp products by the D.E.A. somehow proves the existence of a subculture. A subculture, by definition, is a marginalization of something deviant towards a larger body, therefore rationalizing the existence of the larger body -- ground to Dubya's figure. (Christ, when did I get so damn polemic?) A counterculture is something a little prouder.

Does this mean it's time politicize? Golly, I hope not. I hate politics, and I'm not well-versed enough in the rules of improv comedy to be able to think on those terms. Still, I think I have a sense of what's funny and what's not. Trust me: this is funny. The only reasonable solution I can think of is to simply - to quote Dylan - "keep a clean nose [and] watch the plain clothes..." You better. If they catch you keeping a clean nose with the aid of a hemp product, you might just land yourself in jail.

Jesse Jarnow might just regret this in the morning.