QotD: Hippies

The Aggressive College-town Hippie, of which the Berkeley dweller is an examplar, is ultimately a poseur in everything he does, and so must confidently (which usually means loudly) remind others of his chosen lifestyle. This includes his intellectual predilections, whereby he dutifully reads his assigned Chomsky and Marx — occasionally it's Foucault and Derrida; the actual content doesn't matter — and parrots the statements of his goatee'd teaching assistants and wire-rimmed professors in the unspoken belief that they have grasped something in the material that he's missing that makes it all seem sensible rather than intellectual masturbation. Because of this inner-anxiety, the ACH tends to forcefully assert his reading assignments beliefs at inappropriate times, such as random enounters with strangers in a store, restaurant or public restroom.

Russell Wardlow, "Day 6", Mean Mr. Mustard, 2006-09-13