DEATH OF A TOKER'S UTOPIA

The motto of Rainbow Farm in Vandalia, Mich., could have been "A
Working-Class Hippie Is Something to Be." On Memorial and Labor Day
weekends from 1996 to 2000, a few thousand amplifier-factory workers,
hippie girls and truckers' wives-turned-political-activists camped
out there to smoke weed, listen to rock 'n' roll, hear
pro-legalization speeches and commune with the land and each other.

A 34-acre campground owned by a gay couple named Tom Crosslin and
Rolland Rohm, Rainbow Farm was located in a hardcore Republican part
of southwest Michigan. The county's prosecutor, Scott Teter, believed
he was "guided by the Lord" and crusaded against abortion and drugs.

After several attempts to squelch the festivals, Teter succeeded in
May 2001, when a police raid, ostensibly for tax evasion, nailed
Crosslin and Rohm for growing marijuana in their basement.

Then the government kidnapped Rohm's son out of middle school--Rohm
found out when the boy didn't get off the bus that afternoon--and put
him in foster care. Teter filed papers to seize the land as property
used in a drug crime.

At the end of August, the couple gave away their possessions, torched
the farm buildings and holed up on the land with rifles.

The FBI shot Crosslin on Labor Day. Michigan state police gunned Rohm
down the next morning.

Dean Kuipers' Burning Rainbow Farm: How a Stoner Utopia Went Up in
Smoke is a detailed account of the farm's story, weaving in the
couple's biographies and drug-war history.

Kuipers has unearthed an impressive amount of background material--I
covered Rainbow Farm for High Times, and I learned a lot--though it's
occasionally marred by minor errors (misspelling Harry Anslinger's
name, garbling what I told him about Rainbow Farm's ticket prices).
Generally, however, he gets the flow of events right and tells the tale well.

Tom Crosslin grew up in a brawling hillbilly family in Elkhart, Ind.,
reaching adolescence as the weed culture of the '60s was filtering
into the factory town. After a stint as a trucker, he built a
construction and real-estate business, living as a discreetly out gay
man and hard-partying godfather to his crew. Rollie Rohm was a
rock-fan stoner and troubled teenage father who joined the crew in 1990.

Sixties counterculture was a strong force in the industrial Midwest,
from MC5's rabble-rousing rock to the 1972 strike by longhaired
workers at the GM plant in Lordstown, Ohio. Though gone from most
cities by the '80s, hippie culture survived in rural America. By
1990, "hemp festivals"--micro-Woodstocks with a pot-legalization
agenda--had sprung up in places like Logansport, Ind., and Black
River Falls, Wis. These provided the template for the "Hemp Aid" and
"Roach Roast" events at Rainbow Farm.

The dominant atmosphere there was, as Kuipers puts it, "a cross
between Woodstock and a union picnic"--people with a strong naive
sense of justice, enraged when they had to pee in jars to keep their
jobs and wondering why their peaceful party rite brought down such
violent repression. I connected to it immediately when I went to Hemp
Aid in 1999. Coming from the Lower East Side of Manhattan, I
recognized a fellow low-rent counterculture community, a blessed find
when my own was being crushed by a ruthless real-estate market and
paramilitary evictions. Marijuana was central, but passing the spliff
was often more about bonding than intoxication. Being able to burn
one openly was liberating (especially coming from Rudy Giuliani's New
York, which led the nation in petty pot busts), but once you left the
gates, the descending paranoia was palpable.

Some in this rural-stoner world had odd hippie-rightist libertarian
politics. Among the characters involved in Rainbow Farm's early days
were an Indiana pot activist who opposed Social Security (while
collecting SSI disability payments) and a Michigan Militia leader who
claimed Biblical justification for herb. And while urban blacks would
cite Amadou Diallo and Rodney King as examples of police violence,
Crosslin was one of the many rural whites who would talk about Waco
and Ruby Ridge. And his beliefs were strongly motivated by property
rights, the idea that people could do whatever they wanted on his
land. Rainbow Farm hired the Michigan Militia as unarmed security one
year, but rejected their path in favor of nonviolence and electoral
activism, trying to get a marijuana-legalization initiative on the
state ballot in 2000 and 2001.

"We are pacifists," Crosslin wrote Teter in March 1999, but he also
warned that "we are all prepared to die on this land before we allow
it to be stolen from us."

The confrontation gradually intensified. In 2000, Crosslin rented an
expensive stage setup, enabling him to bring in national acts like
Merle Haggard and partial reunions of the Byrds and Big Brother and
the Holding Company. (For Kuipers, the Haggard show was totemic, with
people waving joints in the air when the singer stretched out the
word "marijuana" to twist his 1969 anti-hippie anthem "Okie from
Muskogee.") But police checkpoints on the road in scared off hundreds
of people, and the core crew disintegrated in financial acrimony.

When the farm was raided the next spring, the die was cast.

Kuipers is telling an important story here. There has been a cultural
war going on in America since the late '60s: a war between the
spiritual freedom symbolized by hippiedom and open homosexuality and
the spiritual lockdown ordained by Mammonite fundamentalism, that
rapacious hybrid of imperialist capitalism and dominionist
Christianity that has become America's state church.

That war--in which one side controls the violence of state power--put
Tom Crosslin and Rollie Rohm in a position where their
defiance--mixed with mistakes and rage--would get them slaughtered.

It's a story that should be remembered, not least because it was
quickly obscured by another religious war. Rollie Rohm's funeral took
place on September 11, 2001.

One wonders how many Rainbow Farms loom in the future, in a country
whose rulers denounce critics of their militaristic crusades as
traitorous faggots.

Or how many Rainbow Farms will find room to be born in a land where
every physical and cultural corner is colonized by corporate greed.