Purple Haze Paradox

It borders on a religion. Pass through the Seattle-Tacoma airport, as I did last week, and you’ll see a huge wall mural dedicated to it – at taxpayer’s expense. Now, the federal government is taking federal tax dollars to make a Forever stamp featuring its god. I speak of the cult of Jimi Hendrix, 60s guitar player extraordinaire. Sure, I acknowledge what a great guitar player he was, especially for that era. I was at a Miami concert at the peak of his career when he first set his guitar on fire, although I wasn’t quite sure what the pyrotechnics had to do with musical artistry. Forty years later I wonder if, in a morally disintegrating culture in need of noble icons, it is wise to lionize a man who (musical skills aside) promoted the use of drugs, including hallucinogens. The design above also features a psychic third-eye which is supposed to symbolize Hendrix’s spiritual side. Spiritual? Let’s be honest, he died ignominiously in a purple haze (insiders will get the quip), suffocated in his own vomit due to an alcohol/drug overdose at age 27. (On tour he constantly smoked hash while using heroin, LSD and amphetamines.)

He was talented, but I speculate it was more than drugs that did him in. Generational curses abounded in his family. His paternal great-great-grandmother was a full-blooded Cherokee, a proud and noble nation until the genocidal “trail of tears.” Some Cherokee turned to witchcraft to get revenge on the white man, and hence some of the most powerful Native American demonic curses are of Cherokee origin. Hendrix’s paternal grandfather was conceived illegitimately from an affair of a black slave woman and a white slave master. Hendrix didn’t have any say about his ancestry, but he could have controlled his consumption of illegal substances. Those who know him say that Hendrix’s haze drove him to become violent, once hitting a girlfriend with a vodka bottle which required her to have stitches. And now he posthumously has a stamp. And you, Mr. and Mrs. Taxpayer, footed the bill. Who we as a nation chose to be our heroes says a lot about who we have become.