The hipsters of the ’40s set the tone for the beatniks of the ’50s and the hippies (a term with the same etymological roots as ‘hipster’) of the ’60s. At almost every stage in its evolution, the counterculture movement of the second half of the 20th century drew on the legacy of hipsterdom.

I guess I shouldn’t be surprised at the current hipster backlash—after all, every new generation rebels against its parents’ and grandparents’ values. And hipsters and hippies now reek of old-school, kneejerk attitudes. But how strange that the original rebels, the hip cats themselves, should find themselves in the crosshairs of today’s discontented and dispossessed. Hipsters wrote the rulebook on generational discontent, but, to reverse Huey Lewis’s axiom, it’s now square to be hip.

When examined with any rigor, the stereotypes circulating about current-day hipsters make no sense whatsoever. Buzzfeed assures me that deadbeats camped out on the pavement in big cities are hipsters. But how can these homeless people be the same folks who are buying up property in trendy neighborhoods? I’m told that hipsters are driving artists out of cities, but the very definition of hipster is a person who supports fringe and emerging artistic movements. At their birth, hipsters came out of the black community and the movement flourished among whites who supported the Civil Rights movement, but now I am supposed to believe that hipsters are racists and Nazis. None of this adds up.