As I walked out the front door of the Boulderado, I had no idea that Leary’s comments on the cult of authority’s war on individual freedom and the future importance of computers was the closest thing to political prophesy I’d ever hear. I stopped under a streetlight and jotted down their words merely because they sounded cool. By next morning however, there was an epiphany afoot. There was that electro-metallic tang of truth stinging the mind, the kind that only someone who has taken lots of LSD toward good purpose can perceive.
It was then I began vaguely to understand the Twentieth Century’s new hyper-simulacran media-made man — the electronic, digital equivalent of Biblical transfiguration into something beyond the flesh. And how celebrity of any kind was becoming the new sainthood in the all pervading, overarching media holograph that now constitutes this civilization’s temple.
Here were men whose televised infamy transformed them into brain consumable electronic entities, condemned (or canonized) to play their assigned roles forever. Once electrocuted by a certain voltage of fame, once a person is atomized through the cathode ray tube into the ether of true celebrity, consumed as a host administered to the masses through television, there seems to be no recovery, no return. I’ve since watched the phenomena in dozens of celebrities from Madonna to Brad Pitt to Bill Clinton. They come to believe their own publicity because they are publicity. Some just have more power. For a brilliant gonzo writer or an explorer of personal freedom through consciousness, it is bad enough. But for politicians, whose sole occupation is obtaining and maintaining authority, it is nearly always fatal to the soul.
Such men are sentenced, or sentence themselves, to a life of the most extremely symbolic public performance. Then too, we all now live a life of performance. But on the far more dismal stage of the global economic system. We perform for a faceless audience of corporate managers and a handful of big investors, with advertisers casting our roles in the consumer state. The python has consumed and digested America and sh*t out what we see around us today. It now unhinges its jaws so as to swallow the world.
Pogo and the Dark Prince
Thompson was anarchistic, with a dark yet hilarious sense of American folly and extreme dislike of authority. It was the darkness that got him. He started out as a sports writer and ended up as one. He had no magical insight, but he had unerring instincts, that golden gut, and was the heavyweight champ when it came to punching words into an expression of the America he saw and felt around him. He still wears the title belt.
Almost at the other end of the spectrum stood Leary, whose belief in “the enlightened spirit of philosophical levity” was anything but dark, at least as he presented it to the world. His messianic act (much of which, like his stand-up philosopher routine, was a spoof that the press never quite got) but Leary’s authentic pioneering of pure consciousness itself — the raw stuff of self liberation — is still remembered and admired by those of us who experienced it first hand. Not to mention a handful of young but more alienated generation of countercultural consciousness explorers. Discredited to the broad public from the beginning, he remains. Despite 30 years of neoconservative foundations’ efforts to cast Leary as the antichrist, he remains. The most recent discrediting comes in a very well written book cataloguing each and all of his worst mistakes and character faults in excruciating detail — yet curiously avoiding any attempt to explain the source of his worldwide charisma in proselytizing LSD. Some truths are too risky for publishers in our security state’s Good German consumer market. And one of them is that LSD anarchizes the brain, creates brotherhood and sisterhood and a deep sense of awe for the natural things of this earth — dangerous concepts in a nation making war both on Middle Eastern children and nature itself. To be sure, Leary was an inconsistent f*ck-up by Middle American standards, and a hopeless narcissist too; but hell, those are now considered qualifications for the presidency and its entire cabinet.
Thompson and Leary and even Liddy may be counted among what we like to call “complex” men — which in America means any self-contradicting person who can maintain the appearance of authority and confidence, and has a vocabulary of more than 400 words. Unless he or she is a true artist, in which case they must offer public demonstrations of pathos and self-abuse or, better yet, commit suicide, thereby obtaining the mantle of complexity in their obituary. But mainly it comes down to confusing the Calvinist Capitalist template of the American mind. We are lucky that the template historically has had enough cracks in it to allow a few contradictory wild, untamed rebels to slip through, made some of us receptive to guys like HST and Leary, or for that matter, Lenny Bruce and Little Richard.
Obviously, I retain a special affection for Uncle Tim. If any of these men could legitimately be called complex, it is probably Leary. A brilliant scientist, he was often reviled by traditional scientists, whom he called “arrogant motherfuckers who deny their role in the military industrial complex’s manipulation of the American people.” Leary rejected what he called the “grim Newtonian mechanics of objective fact” for the “free flowing quantum physics approach to consciousness” that the changing, not the static, governs consciousness and the outcome of the world. “Understanding this even intuitively,” he said, makes people unmanageable by agents of the criminal government syndicate that runs and ruins America.” That sort of talk was why Nixon called him “the most dangerous man in America.”
If God really is an authoritarian prison warden of mankind, Leary and Thompson are hanging from their tongues on hooks somewhere in hell. And if not, then they are basking in the glow of that 40-froot rainbow p*ssy. Meanwhile, a few old beatnik and hippy coots still understand how arbitrary even the most deeply held concepts of reality are. It’s like the old cliché about jazz, “You either you get it or you don’t.”
Having inspired much refection, not to mention tomfoolery, in countless men, Old Granddad counsels wisely: “There’s such a thing as going on too long about anything, son. Day’s a breaking. Now go the hell to bed.”
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This essay is dedicated to Gypsy Joe Hess (1919-1988).
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Copyright 2007 by Joe Bageant
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