Liddy and Leary are winding down the night at a table on the Boulderado Hotel’s mezzanine lounge, obviously aware people around them are listening but sophisticated enough not to gawk. Liddy says he wants to see public debate come back in style again, as in 1968 when William Buckley, live and on coast to coast network television said to Gore Vidal: “Now listen, you queer, stop calling me a crypto-Nazi or I’ll sock you in your goddamn face and you’ll stay plastered.” Good old fashioned hand to hand combat debate. Liddy said, “I’d like to see public debate come back as a vital source of information.”
Leary: “I’d just like to see thinking come back in style. I haven’t heard a new idea in eight years. Let’s get ordinary people arguing and talking again. I want to trigger new circuits in their nervous systems. That’s the philosopher’s job and I am the most important philosopher at this time.”
Unfazed by Leary’s bold claim, Liddy continues: “Americans are becoming increasingly stupid. The greatest tragedy of our time is the disintegration of the public education system in this country. Even if half the young people they are turning out were geniuses, they can’t communicate or write well enough to be effective.” Liddy has always been smart and his lament is not disingenuous. Trouble is that smart ambitious people get hung up on the smart part, and not the heart part — which is why we never seem to get a singe decent presidential candidate offered by either party, just smart overly ambitious people such as Bill and Hillary Clinton, or in George W. Bush’s case, the third generation congenitally flawed seed of the terminally rich for whom audacity passes as dedication and sheer arrogance as a sure sign for the masses that he must know what he is doing.
Liddy continues to bemoan the decay of American public education. “Kids now come out of even good colleges unable to write a coherent sentence”… yada yada … until Leary interrupts him. Winking, Leary says, “Gordon wants to go back to the days when only 10 percent of Americans could go to college. Writing is a hieroglyphic art these days. And besides, only 10 percent of people are genetically wired, fired and inspired to do it. That makes it an elitist skill. Computers are going to replace hieroglyphics text as communication. Computers will be THE drug of the future.”
“Then we’ll have computer addiction and computer abuse,” I laugh.
“As always, 90 percent of the people who do or do not use any kind of drug, do so stupidly. But you cannot ban drugs and you cannot have a drug-free society. If that’s what you want, then go to China. The same people who want a drug-free society want a sex-free society. If you want a drug-free and sex-free society (waves his arm), then go to China.”
“China is one half of the struggle happening on the planet right now. And the struggle is for the consciousness of the planet, a struggle between the mass centralization of China, which American corporate feudal lords aspire to, which breeds that Maoist, insectoid kind of suspicion … [And sure enough, we find China today expending more effort in surveillance of the Internet than developing it usefully] the authoritarian Soviet-style state vs. the American sixties style self-realization movement toward individuality and self-evolution. The main battle is for the consciousness of the American people. It’s the biggest ballgame they will ever play. And it is being played for keeps between cultural outlaws and the repressive forces of military police court authority worshippers. During the Sixties an undeclared civil war took place and the right side won.”
“Yeah, my side,” says Liddy. “And we’re not about to let it happen again.”
“Between the end of World War 1946 and 1965,” Leary explains, “my generation produced you, the 75 million babies who wanted everything, the whole world. And we tried to give it to you. I was busy all the time digging retaining walls at the nursery school … And here you are still moving through the American culture like an avalanche of pure appetite. You are the python and American culture is the pig in your belly.
“Your generation is in charge from here on out. Not the government mafia, and all governments are mafias. The American mafia is the best because it gives more for our money, but both political parties are families of that same mafia. On one hand you have the Democrats, who are genuinely stupid. They think America’s problems can all be solved from Washington, DC. At the same time, Democrats tend to be kind of nice people. But the Republicans understand mafia power is about fear. They are a bunch of mean repressive motherfuckers and always have been.
“You are the hottest, sexiest, most empowered generation ever. You’re in charge of your own evolution now that we’ve deciphered the DNA code. The future is going to be different. You can’t be bought off because there are just too many of you. You can make the world into anything you want. Open up the all the world’s future possibilities. So you should go for it!”
Obviously we didn’t. But it was a tall order to start with.
In retrospect, I would have liked to have stirred more discussion of personal freedom and authoritarianism between Liddy and Leary who, after all, personified the giant struggle between the authoritarian state and sixties-style self-realization. How did these philosophical and ideological enemies accommodate their ultra-serious differences? We often hear, historically, about enemies able to call a temporary truce, which of course gives us valuable insight into the nature of warfare. What are the mechanics of such a truce, however brief? Here were two modern men, a microcosmic example in the persons of Liddy and Leary. But this wasn’t Truman against Stalin or Caesar against Pompey. They were simply ambitious men who overshot their expectations and found themselves to be serving as symbolic gladiators over an immensely important issue in the media coliseum, but there only for the amusement, revulsion and/or adulation of the throng. And their success or failure depended upon the persona they created and sustained.
Death by digitized celebrity
The effect of stardom and electronic immortality on these two men was apparent. I’d seen it in dozens of rock stars and as many movie actors and artists (an interview with Warhol comes to mind, but then, media’s hyper-superficiality was the point of his art). But to what extent was the authenticity of Leary’s and Liddy’s respective messages corrupted by their clear addiction to celebrity? Well, not much in Liddy’s case because he later chose to go into the entertainment business, and why not? There is a certain kind of honesty in a convicted felon, a burglar to be exact, making a legitimate living doing what he is truly best at — radio comedy for jock commuters.
Leary’s predictions in particular keep haunting me because they have proven true, even after his death and despite decades of media portrayal of him as LSD Outlaw Fool. Are other valuable, inspired insights from brilliant people today being similarly trivialized? Probably. But they can no longer gain entry to the now closed system corporate media. Otherwise, Stan Goff would be among network television’s chief commentators on the war in Iraq and all things military and covert. Paul Craig Roberts would be anchoring television discussions of American domestic political policy, or at least replacing the soothing artificially thoughtful news analysis of NPR’s Daniel Schor, and Paul Krassner would be where Al Franken is today. Amy Goodman is the genuine article, but she’s relegated to the outer rings of planet media, which the American Internet left deludes itself into believing is closer to the center. I’d love to see her put her foot up Katie Couric’s ass and say, “Now hand me the mike, b*tch!” It’d be nice, wouldn’t it? But, believe me or don’t believe me, most Americans have never heard of any of the truth-speaking people above, so let’s not bullshit ourselves that we have a real voice in media. Yet. For the time being, we still have what superstate capitalism allows us to have a voice on the Internet, and Pacifica Radio (god bless their freedom loving hearts) — that Mediterranean Avenue on the Monopoly board of the airwaves. All the hot properties remain dedicated to what will sell buckets of fried chicken to 300 pound people taught never to question authority.
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