Rocky Mountain News
August 4, 2006
Making fun of hippies is a worthy pastime, especially here in Colorado, which hardly wants for natural resources. (Drop that Boulder joke right here, baby…)
Part of the joy of skewering this subculture is that it’s risk-free. Since they’re all about the peace and the love (and the impossibly bad fashion), one need not fear major retaliation. And like making fun of yuppies, hipsters or the liberal media, it’s that much easier because no one self-identifies as a member of the tribe, so to speak.
But those who might be targeted as silly hippies almost 40 years after the Summer of Love are more complex than the snarkier among us care to admit. And the story grows more complex in Dean Kuipers’ fascinating new effort, Burning Rainbow Farm, the tale of two working-class gay men who were shot down by FBI agents on their scorched property in southwestern Michigan in 2001. Their crimes: growing marijuana and refusing to cede their land to the feds.
Rainbow Farm, in Vandalia, Mich., was a real farm in the sense that stuff grew there. Its main purpose, however, was to serve as an open campground, festival venue and meeting place for hemp activists and other libertarian-minded partiers wishing to taste freedom, listen to music and organize against the war on drugs, mostly as it pertained to pot.
While cultural stereotypes make great comedy, they’re useless in explaining Tom Crosslin, Rainbow Farm’s founder, a working-class kid who grew up as something of a Rust Belt hillbilly in nearby Elkhart, Ind.
Crosslin was no angel. He got into fistfights. Drunk and enraged by the Oklahoma City bombing, he once assaulted an innocent woman at a hamburger joint. On the flip side, he spent thousands of dollars of his own money buying toys and school lunches for needy children and even purchasing affordable houses.
Ultimately, a combination of marijuana use and homosexuality turned this small businessman from a government-off-our-backs Republican into a fighting libertarian. This was aided by the febrile climate of the ’90s. The anti-government sentiment of the time, triggered in part by the Waco compound raid, the Montana Freemen standoff at Ruby Ridge – and arguably the hysteria of Newt Gingrich’s Congress – pushed fears of federal incursion to heights previously attainable only by space stations.
Meanwhile, the war on drugs set the stage for federal and state forfeiture laws that let various agencies seize the property of those caught growing even small amounts of proscribed narcotics. In several cases, most prominently that of California millionaire Donald Scott, authorities used the law as nothing more than a profit center. Combine these seizures with the paranoia of pot and militia culture and a county prosecutor bent on shutting Rainbow Farm down, and a confrontation was only a matter of when.
Part of what makes Burning Rainbow Farm so compelling is the unlikely political alliances it details. Many of the farm’s early bashes saw the Michigan Militia rubbing shoulders with marijuana activists. And, of course, there were your run-of-the-mill hippie party people. Strange bedfellows, to be sure.
Kuipers manages to balance it all as well as critique the war on marijuana while detailing the difficulties inherent in running Rainbow Farm as a business. Competing egos and ideologically pure activists aghast that Crosslin and partner Rollie would openly desire to make money led to many schisms. In short, the farm confronted the complex issues inherent in any organization. It had its triumphs and failures but ultimately couldn’t beat back the apparatus of the state.
Hippie culture invites derision for many reasons, not least of which is its annoying tendency to dress up indulgence as something that’s “subversive.” Kuipers doesn’t get mired in such debates, but he does manage to make real and inviting a subculture that’s perhaps too easily dismissed. Rainbow Farm was something way beyond a venue for jam bands and a place to toke up. It allowed people to create their own cultural space and their own brief, if messy, utopia – though they eventually paid a huge price for it, thanks to an injustice carried out by the FBI.