image via paperkraft.blogspot.com/

So I made a bit of a mistake in a Signal article I wrote last week. Remember when your parents told you “never mention politics or religion at the dinner table”? Well they forgot to warn me about not mentioning hipsters, either.

Now mind you, I actually wasn’t making fun of hipsters. I was just describing them in an effort to better frame the context of the article. But even that upset some readers, who were concerned I was leaping on what is apparently a band-wagon of hipster critique.

The rally of the hipsters surprised me. And intrigued me. Do Canadians love hipsters? Or hate them? Was I losing my connection with the zeitgeist of my own pop culture? And what do pandas have to do with any of this?

I needed to know more.

So I turned to Google. Time for scientific research, thought I.

I entered the phrase “Hipsters are great.” 159 results.

Now let’s try “Hipsters are evil.” 655 results. So far the hipster-haters are in the lead.

Of course, the study isn’t quite scientific yet. We need some control variables. So let’s continue:

“Communists are great”: 815 results. “Communists are evil”: 9470. Okay, well, the internet was invented on this side of the cold war, after all, so maybe that’s not the best control variable to use.  I decided to contrast it with something a little more free market.

“McDonalds is evil”: 2470. “McDonalds is great”: 2830.

Now THAT surprised me. Who would have guessed that western culture is so divided on the fast food genre? With the McDonalds advocates slightly in the lead. Well, I suppose McDonalds might have a vested interest in, you know, stacking internet traffic in their favour. As we know, Signal is still sort of mad at Google for selling out to the corporate world. So let’s try something non-corporate.

Kittens-are-evil scored in at 1140, with kittens-are-great at 5190. Well this is more what I expected. Pandas-are-great, however, only garnered a meager 726 compared to the 12,600 sites that think Pandas-are-evil. Who would have thought our society hates pandas so much?  In fact, there are entire websites devoted to convincing the world that pandas are the enemy.

image via gawker.com/

Well, we have perhaps concluded that my Google study of hipster-hate is not the most reliable of scientific models. Even if “hipsters are pretentious” did rate another 533 websites in favour (for those counting: 1 site thinks Communists are pretentious, nobody thinks kittens are pretentious, 1 site thinks pandas are pretentious, and 2 sites think McDonalds is pretentious, although one of them is berating McDonalds for selling bagels and cream cheese in an attempt to “cater to hipsters”).

Google models of the world aside, I still found this phenomenon intriguing. Where should I fall on the hipster divide? Does pop culture love them? Or hate them?

One of the things that really intrigued me about the comments on my article, was that those who seem favourably inclined toward the hipster, also displayed a strong criticism toward the framing of Newfoundland as a special, unique, even romantic place. Indeed, there seemed to be a bit of hostility toward such sentiments. “Parochialism” was one of the ways Newfoundland was described. But let’s face it – that’s not a unique sentiment. I think there’s been a contrast, through much of our recent history, between those who want to see Newfoundland as a special, romantic place, distinct from anywhere else in the world and in a magical way that makes us, as much as the place where we live, something to be proud of regardless of what political or economic realities we might be facing. Juxtaposed to that, there’s also been a sentiment which sees that as romantic balderdash, and that wants us to break out of that historical mould – to see us as cosmopolitan, as “catching up” to the metropoles elsewhere. And even if they’re not critical of Newfoundland culture (whatever that might be), they’re not sorry or worried about seeing it change, either.

Could it be that the hipster is the 21^st century internationalist, seeing not a world of cultures struggling against the forces of globalization, but rather a growing network of cities where everyone is, ultimately, the same – whether they choose to express themselves as hipsters, as activists, as geeks or conservatives or crustypunks or grufties? Where we each have the freedom to choose the styles we want to express ourselves in, but using symbols and concepts shared the world over, regardless of where we are?

Or is it more nuanced than that? Is “Free NFLD” in fact the hipsterism of our own neck of the woods? Is the way we express our own uniqueness to the world being framed in the styles of that very world we’re trying to distinguish ourselves from? After all, according to Air Canada’s Aeroplan Arrivals magazine, St. John’s “has begun to rival Halifax as Atlantic Canada’s hipster nexus thanks to a network of artists, musicians and entrepreneurs.”

And before you accuse me of trying to bring hipsterism into politics…don’t even try, cuz it’s already there. The Conservative Hipster was one of the prime aggregate sources for pro-Stephen Harper news until it shut down last year (having decided that in an era of tumblr and twitter, blogs were no longer hip). Fox News’ teabagger Palin-ite commentator Andrea Tarantos has been described as “the conservative hipster” by fans. And another self-styled “conservative hipster” on the blogosphere advocates paisley bow ties as an essential, albeit difficult to find, element of hipster style.

But don’t worry, it’s not all right-wing. Hipsterjew.com outs the “hipster commie bastards of socialist Brooklyn” (and the growing trendiness of their moonshine), while one of the more scathing insults issued on Boston’s noiseboard.com was “you ultra-PC hipster commie beardo burrito-eating Lemmingtrail guy!”

Indeed, the word hipster is just BEGGING for its grand coming out in political discourse. Remember how in 2008 Stephen Harper slashed funding to the arts community, and then when people who like music and culture complained, he derided them as elitist “gala-goers”? And this year, when people complained about the Conservatives eliminating the census (and any pretense that they believe in scientific research), his government said the complainers were also just “some of the elites”? And those who complained about prorogation were denounced as “the chattering classes”? As people struggled to figure out what that was supposed to mean, I figured maybe Stevie was just reading one too many Victorian horror novels at bedtime. Now I realize what he was yearning, inwardly screaming, to call the Liberals and NDPs and artists and believers-in-science: HIPSTERS! If there’s one good thing to the Conservatives staying in office another few months, it’s that I’ve got serious money riding on a pool that says Harper will fire off the ‘H-word’ at Jack Layton before the next election. In order to facilitate this, I’m even sending Layton a paisley bowtie as a token of my respect. I don’t think it’s really cheating.

So there you go. Just when we thought the hipster wars were over…they may just be starting.

What does hipster mean to YOU, St. John’s?