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Chapter 13

A SURFEIT OF SUBCULTS

Thirty miles north of New York City, within easy reach of its towers, its traffic and its urban temptations, lives a young taxicab driver, a former soldier, who boasts 700 surgical stitches in his body. These stitches are not the result of combat wounds, nor of an accident involving his taxi. Instead, they are the result of his chief recreation: rodeo riding.

On a cab driver's modest salary, this man spends more than $1200 a year to own a horse, stable it, and keep it in perfect trim. Periodically hitching a horsetrailer to his auto, he drives a little over one hundred miles to a place outside Philadelphia called "Cow Town." There, with others like himself, he participates in roping, steer wrestling, bronco busting, and other strenuous contests, the chief prize of which have been repeated visits to a hospital emergency ward.

Despite its proximity, New York holds no fascination for this fellow. When I met him he was twenty-three, and he had visited it only once or twice in his life. His entire interest is focused on the cow ring, and he is a member of a tiny group of rodeo fanatics who form a little-known underground in the United States. They are not professionals who earn a living from this atavistic sport. Nor are they simply people who affect Western-style boots, hats, denim jackets and leather belts. They are a tiny, but authentic subcult lost within the vastness and complexity of the most highly technological civilization in the world.

This odd group not only engages the cab driver's passion, it consumes his time and money. It affects his family, his friends, his ideas. It provides a set of standards against which he measures himself. In short, it rewards him with something that many of us have difficulty finding: an identity.

The techno-societies, far from being drab and homogenized, are honeycombed with just such colorful groupings – hippies and hot rodders, theosophists and flying saucer fans, skindivers and skydivers, homosexuals, computerniks, vegetarians, bodybuilders and Black Muslims.

Today the hammerblows of the super-industrial revolution are literally splintering the society. We are multiplying these social enclaves, tribes and minicults among us almost as fast as we are multiplying automotive options. The same destandardizing forces that make for greater individual choice with respect to products and cultural wares, are also destandardizing our social structures. This is why, seemingly overnight, new subcults like the hippies burst into being. We are, in fact, living through a "subcult explosion."

The importance of this cannot be overstated. For we are all deeply influenced, our identities are shaped, by the subcults with which we choose, unconsciously or not, to identify ourselves. It is easy to ridicule a hippie or an uneducated young man who is willing to suffer 700 stitches in an effort to test and "find" himself. Yet we are all rodeo riders or hippies in one sense: we, too, search for identity by attaching ourselves to informal cults, tribes or groups of various kinds. And the more numerous the choices, the more difficult the quest.


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