Chant Down Babylon
Men see their dreams and aspiration
Crumble in front of their face
And all of their wicked intention
To destroy the human race - Bob Marley
Maybe more Yippie, and less Hippie?
Yesterday on the RI board, "Johnny Nemo" remembered Abbie Hoffman saying "There were all these activists, you know, Berkeley radicals, White Panthers... all trying to stop the war and change things for the better. Then we got flooded with all these 'flower children' who were into drugs and sex. Where the hell did the hippies come from?"
The Yippies were trickster revolutionaries, who staged shamanic acts to advance social transformation. They led thousands to the Pentagon in 1967 to attempt its levitation. They crashed the galleries of Wall Street to shower money on the trading floor. They ran a pig for president. But the decade, in America's memory, belongs to the Hippies.
The misty-eyed nostalgia has created bitterness and confusion over how members of the Grateful Dead can also be members of the Bohemian Grove. Before Neil Young's change of heart, there was dismay at his support for Ronald Reagan and at his "Let's Roll" jingoism. And there's the resistance I still feel within myself to the consideration that Hunter S Thompson may have been up to some pretty weird shit with some disturbed company, even though Michael Aquino is also a fan, and Thompson said in 2003 that he didn't "hate Bush personally. I used to know him. I used to do some drugs here and there."
But where the hell did the hippies go? They entered into power, and the institutions of selfishness, because If it feels good, do it is a philosophy of life that doesn't shy from power, because it needs power to feed the habit.
The Sixties, at least as romantically recalled, is one of the most debilitating things that ever happened to progressive America. A mass, Dionysian movement for social justice became co-opted and debased into Bacchian self-indulgence, and was called a triumph.
In Breaking Open the Head, Daniel Pinchbeck tells the story of Robert, who one day in the Sixties consumed three Fly Agarics with some friends. To their disappointment, nothing seemed to happen. Until he went to the kitchen to grab a beer:
I took out the beer, turned around, and across the kitchen there were three huge mushrooms staring at me - a five foot tall, a four foot tall, and a three foot tall mushroom. The mushrooms were red and yellow and they had little eyes and little mouths. They looked just as solid and real as me or you.
Robert and the mushrooms stared at each other, until the largest asked, "Why did you eat us?" Robert thought, and then replied, "I was just following my dream."
Pinchbeck writes:
The mushrooms conferred with each other. Finally they seemed satisfied by his answer. "But are you prepared to follow this path?" the tallest Fly Agaric asked. Robert answered, intuitively and without hesitation, "Yes I am." Whereupon the mushrooms vanished. Fifteen years passed before Robert realized that the path he had agreed to follow was plant shamanism.
(Unknown at the time to Robert, Paul Devereux writes in The Long Trip that "the spirits of the mushrooms might appear to the individual and converse with him directly.... The number seen depends on the number of mushrooms consumed.")
A friend of Robert's who also ate Fly Agarics received a similar visitation, and was also asked "Why did you eat us?" But he answered, "I was trying to get high." The mushrooms told him, "Well, if you ever do this again, we're going to kill you."
That was America in the Sixties, and that was its choice, and these are the consequences. And it was more than just the mushrooms talking. At almost every turn in the culture and the counterculture, the easy and the selfish were chosen over the hard and the common. Not surprising. But America and the wider world still await a vanguard to take the harder paths into sacred space that lead to sacrifice and social transformation. It's a lot to ask, but that's how Babylon gets chanted down.
By the way, a couple of good things to report, after a month of bad from Blogger.
Thanks to 'et in Arcadia ego,' RI now has an excellent footprint in myspace. And here's a sign of things to come. Our family is moving, in material space, next week, so a move in virtual space will need to wait a little bit longer. But I'm looking forward to providing a better home for this community.
posted by Jeff Wells at 6/23/2006 07:07:00 AM
127 Comments:
I have always found this too be seriously odd since I have done my share of experimentation with man made and natural psychedelics and absolutely nothing like this has ever happened to me. I wonder why?
I've never been comfortable with my own generation, and thanks to your post, Jeff, I now understand why. The way of the hippie, in the late '60s, seemed to be aimed toward peace and love. Yet it resulted in a sell-out, and looking back, I see I was myself part of the problem. It's too easy to say, "Well, I was young and had ideals, and now here is the real world and I need to participate in its structure of power, money, and mainstream beliefs." It's our job, as I now understand it, to make the real world as close to ideal as we can.
Is it too late?
And Jerry Rubin of the Yippies, who said "you can't trust anyone over thirty," and then, "Kill your parents," became a rapacious investment banker in the 1980's.
Couldn't trust him then, couldn't trust him later....
Where have all the hippies gone?
Most of them never were.
On lamentations for loss:
Whatever by divine destiny becomes lost to you,
Know for sure it has saved you from difficulty.
Someone once asked, what is sufism?
To feel joy in the heart at the coming of sorrow.
Regard chastisement as the eagle
Who carried off the Prophet's boot,
In order to save his foot from the serpent's bite.
Joyful is understanding that is not dusty and dim.
God has said, Grieve not for that which escapes you.
If the wolf comes and destroys your sheep,
That God-sent affliction keeps away greater afflictions,
And that loss prevents much greater losses.
===============
Harche az to yâveh gardad az qazâ
to yaqin dân keh kharidet az balâ
"Mâ al-tasawwuf?" Qâla "Wijdân al-farah
fi al-fu'âd `inda ityân al-tarah"
n `eqâbesh-râ `oqâbi dân keh u
dar robud ân mawzeh-râ ze ân nik khu
Tâ rahânad pâsh-râ az zakhm-e mâr
ay khonok `aqli keh bâshad bi ghobâr
Goft Lâ ta'saw `alâ mâ fâtakum*
in anâ al-sirhân wa-ardâ shâtakum
K-ân balâ daf`-e balâ-hâ-ye bozorg
va ân ziyân man`-e ziyân-hâ-ye sotorg
Mathnawi, book III, lines 3260-3265
Jalal'uddin Rumi
And as for the selling out of the "hippies" it has always been my understanding, since I was born in the very early 70's, that the majority of the "flower children" came from upper middle class households. So if they were children of the more privileged in our society does it really surprise anyone that they were just in the counterculture for the sex and drugs and had no intention of being in it for the long haul?
This is what happens to every counterculture movement. The bougie see it as a way to get their kicks while they are young, experiment with whatever notion flits through their over indulged imagination, and then when it comes time to put up or shut up they choose to go back to their comfortable lifestyles. You see with every youth movement, but with "punks" and "hippies" it is very glaring.
"Revolution is this year's 'flower power'"-Frank Zappa
As someone in a similar predicament, who recognizes the complexities, in fact, who recognized them as early as high school, let me play devil's advocate, or at least try to elucidate their probable point of view:
1. They come from a life of relative comfort;
2. They learn that the comfort is purchased at a hideous moral price that cuts against the IDEALS they were taught from various authority figures;
3. They try to "do" something, but inertia, lack of imagination, and peer pressure lead them down easy, coopted paths of "lifestyle" rebellion; OR they "do" things that are problematic for the machine, but they are isolated, individualistic acts that the machine easily adjusts to by instituting consequences and penalties that are harsh and that discourage others from acting in a similar manner;
4. They begin to wake up and realize that they desire to live in the comfort to which they were "accustomed," as opposed to living in discomfort trying to fight for ideals that more powerful, better organized forces oppose;
5. They realize that this comfort comes at a price, and that price is joining and becoming part of the machine;
6. They join the machine, perhaps thinking they can change it, but it changes them instead, gradually and imperceptibly;
7. They justify their choice by renouncing their previous lifestyle, which was never more than a lifestyle, and cast aspersions on other deviations, pointing to their failures rather than their successes.
Basically, it comes down to throwing in your lot with the more powerful, better organized forces versus the weak, perpetually disorganized ones. Nobody wants to be a "loser," which has been hypnotically engrained into them for a lifetime, as has a life of comfort and certainty, versus roughing it.
That, and most people have little idea how to rebel, or what it would cost, or the risks involved. Those that do know, tend to join the machine, or they tend to be similar to the rulers, especially when they get in power.
However, the type of change we are discussing has less to do with actual rebellion, and more to do with a mass raising of consciousness where people start making better choices; choices that erode the machine's power.
I think that this has been the trend of history, but the machine, getting weaker, has had to evolve to make itself appear more powerful, and in doing so, perhaps has become more powerful.
Back in Roman times, the Empire would crucify you for disobedience. That's a pretty harsh penalty; today, the Empire has a sliding scale of punishments it applies towards disobedient acts, most are unofficial and non-legalistic; so I guess that's progress.
This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.
Somebody who actually lived through those weird times... correct me if I'm wrong:
But I'm kind of given to understand that the simplification of "counterculture" = "hippies" = "flower children" was an oversimplification even at the time, a caricature that's been subsequently peddled by the mass media in terms of TIME-LIFE nostalgia and punk-era broadsides, which were really attacking the smug, safe, self-serving, post-hippie lifestyles of the '70s, not the vibrant counterculture of the '60s. The reality of the mangy, multi-varied counterculture couldn't be so easily categorized.
I'm assuming many of you have encountered TURN OFF YOUR MIND, Gary Lachman's kinda wonderful look at the "dark side" of the sixties, focusing especially on the counterculture's fascination with the creepier fringes of the occult. It smashed away quite a few of my own preconceptions regarding what "the Sixties" was all about.
It's easy to discount the "hippies" and to bemoan the failure of the counterculture. But let's not forget: there was a naive belief in the air that things could be changed, that the times, they were a-changing. And even in these dark days, I can't imagine how disheartening it was to encounter the progressive destruction of that dream. JFK, MLK, RFK shot down by "lone gunmen," the police-provoked riots in the streets of Chicago, stemming from protests directed at the blatant disregard for the the will of the democratic (and Democratic) process at the National Convention; the ever-grimmer tidings from Vietnam; the confusion and disorder instilled by CointelPro and its ilk, seeding disinformation and distrust, inciting violence as a means to discredit revolutionary groups; the rise of Nixon; the flooding of the streets with heroin shipped in the bodies of dead soldiers; and the appearance of the anti-LSD, STP, which users claimed permanently destroyed some part of the soul. Eventually, America exited Vietnam and some minor advances in the rights of women and minorities had been wrought. But the price of these small victories was devastating.
I can't blame "the bourgeois" or "the hippies" from retreating from their dream. I can only blame the forces that methodically and systematically violated any reason to have faith in the system, and gutted a thing we used to call hope.
One of the better things to come out of the 60's generation is Greenpeace and the environmental movement. It signified a commitment to the Quaker principle of bearing witness to atrocity, and stewardship of the earth. Certainly, the movement has been compromised and watered down over time, but groups like Rainforest Action Network still fly the flag with integrity and effectiveness.
It's a shame that the movement didn't attract more youth than it did, but Jeff's piece here illustrates very well why that is.
In this land, service-to-self trumps service-to-other. It's called the American Dream.
dude,
great photo art of eyeball, crop circles etc.
You offer alot of good insight, along with your fellow readers.
Thank you.
cinedog
PS Our government created the drugged-out hippie for social movement&control/infiltration
I wouldn't be too quick to blame the hippies, who were only one small and very late part of a movement that was not of their making.
I remember the 60's -- and most of it was pretty damned cynical and pretty damned despairing. The 60's were the Rat Pack and James Bond and Swinging England and Andy Warhol. They were existentialism and absurdism and the conviction that life is a cosmic joke with us as the victims. They were war and recurring assassinations and a deep-rooted sense of pain and futility.
On the philosophical level, the 60's were still dominated by the rag ends of old-fashioned mechanistic materialism. The prevailing view was that life was meaningless, the universe a hollow shell -- and that even sex, drugs, and rock 'n' roll were temporary evasions of the ultimate bleak awfulness of everything, rather than pathways to an alternate vision.
The hippie phase coincided with the initial turning away from all that. In the late 60's and early 70's, enough people hit themselves over the head with enough LSD -- and then sought out the appropriate books and art to understand their visions -- to finally get the notion that there might be more to the universe than atoms bumping together at random. But the change didn't happen easily or quickly -- it wasn't until the very late 70's that it became possible to use the word 'spiritual' again and not be laughed at.
Moreover, the people doing the heavy lifting of changing the worldview generally didn't consider themselves hippies. The hippies were the dropouts and the drifters and the weekend flower children. Nobody I knew who was doing real work thought of themselves that way.
The hippies were, at best, the foam on the wave that was sweeping away an older world. But most of them never really knew what they were part of -- and it shouldn't be surprising that many of them would revert to the diehard materialism of their upbringing once the brief moment of intoxication had passed. Or that their slightly younger brothers and sisters, who'd never know the false dawn of the late 60's, but only the decadence and retrenchment of the 70's, should have turned into happy little Reaganites.
By the rivers dark
I wandered on.
I lived my life
in Babylon.
And I did forget
My holy song:
And I had no strength
In Babylon.
By the rivers dark
Where I could not see
Who was waiting there
Who was hunting me.
And he cut my lip
And he cut my heart.
So I could not drink
From the river dark.
And he covered me,
And I saw within,
My lawless heart
And my wedding ring,
I did not know
And I could not see
Who was waiting there,
Who was hunting me.
By the rivers dark
I panicked on.
I belonged at last
to Babylon.
Then he struck my heart
With a deadly force,
And he said, "This heart:
It is not yours."
And he gave the wind
My wedding ring;
And he circled us
With everything.
By the rivers dark,
In a wounded dawn,
I live my life
In Babylon.
Though I take my song
From a withered limb,
Both song and tree,
They sing for him.
Be the truth unsaid
And the blessing gone,
If I forget
My Babylon.
I did not know
And I could not see
Who was waiting there,
Who was hunting me.
By the rivers dark,
Where it all goes on;
By the rivers dark
In Babylon.
~lyrics (c) Leonard Cohen
Many of us were exposed to hippie-dom in college. We didn't know anything. Come on, we didn't even have computers for goodness sake. But what we could see was the hypocrisy between the values we'd been taught at home and the reality of what was being done in our name. You know how unfairness just tears you up at that age, and that led to participation in various demonstrations and some political activism. But we were also exploring ourselves in other ways with sex and drugs. Those certainly did attract some unsavory elements, some predators you could say. I became very disllusioned when I realized we weren't all brothers and sisters, that many would use and abuse others. At that point I think I threw out most of my hippy dogma but kept the drugs and sex, heh. I was also afraid and thoroughly domesticated. Although the lure of communes was there, the mundane cares like what would I do without health insurance, etc. kept me in the system. (We had free clinics up until Raygun, dammit.) I've often wondered what my life would've been like if I really had dropped out; it hasn't been all that great having stayed in. It has to have been mostly the fear and that's exactly what they use to control everyone today. I don't consider myself to have sold out, because I just didn't have the depth of knowledge and experience that I have now. And perhaps more than that it was because I needed to go through the things I did since then so that I could be who I am today. Certainly, the political part of the movement was absolutely co-opted and infiltrated which is one reason why I now avoid organizations and movements.
Dear Starroute,
If the sixties were, in your experience, as you have described them, then I have newfound sympathy for you.
What a bummer.
Most of it sounds more like the fifties.
My 1960's were full of hope, joy, transpersonal awakenings, and honest attempts at meaningful change in the context of rebellion against what was then the latest in a series of brutal, unjust wars.
Are there any "just" wars?
Not very many, I would suspect.
I do believe that the primary reason the youth movements failed to change society at large in more noticeable ways, other than leaving us with a legacy of pop psychedelia-inspired tv ads and ever greater forms of paranoia-fueled government repression, had to do with:
The litany of assassinations of every honest leader, from Mossadeq to JFK, MLK, RFK, Malcolm X, Patrice Lumumba, the list goes on, by the people who run the show now.
Subversion of the environmental movement with co-intelpro type "eco-terrorists" along with the buying up by big oil companies of everything from solar cell patents to the co-opting of fuel cell technology...just like Firestone and GM et al formed a consortium to buy and rip up the railroad rights of way in Los Angeles in the early part of the 20th century.
Psy-op psychos like "Marshall Cinque."
The introduction of speed (amphetamine) into the counterculture scene, followed by disco and cocaine.
Phony 'revolutionary' movements led by illuminati tools....
The list could fill a book.
Still in all, it was, in fact, a time of great promise for the propagation of world redemptive social justice and spiritual awakening.
Now that we know who spoilt it and how they did it, maybe, just maybe, as was written in the previous posting, we can now do something better.
And more effective.
One legacy from the sixties that I find to be more and more true the older I get.........from Bobby D.:
Don't follow leaders, watch your parking meters.
You don't need a weatherman to know which way the winds blow.
Star: Maybe you can catch the wave this time around, and surf it, along with the rest who are trying, to a better destiny for us all.
Just leave that 'magic' crap behind. It won't help you shoot the curl and hang ten.
And yes, I know, surfing is usually a solitary image. But there are tandem surfers. Even group ones. All are apt metaphors...
Surf's up.
It is clear when you compare the indigenous use of “psychedelics” to the cavalier use of Leary’s generation, there is a serious discrepancy of intent.
Daniel Pinchbeck wrote, in Breaking Open The Head, that “(the) dialectical process that created the possessive mind-set of the capitalist and the “rational” outlook of the technocrat required destruction of the premodern vestiges of communal and animalistic beliefs, whether these beliefs were found in isolated pockets of Europe or in the indigenous populations of the New World. This destruction was part of the process that Karl Marx described as the alienation of all of our physical and intellectual senses into one sense: the sense of having. Of course, the “sense of having” is not really a sense – it is an illusion of fulfillment that seems to extend outside of the self.”
Without this “illusion of fulfillment”, driven by the all-consuming desire to possess, driven by fear and greed, all progress as we have come to understand it comes to a grinding halt. In fact, we are already beginning to see this.
In an excellent article entitled “Waiting For The Lights To Go Out”, the author notes “(the) greatest getting-and-spending spree in the history of the world is about to end. The 200-year boom that gave citizens of the industrial world levels of wealth, health and longevity beyond anything previously known to humanity is threatened on every side. Oil is running out; the climate is changing at a potentially catastrophic rate; wars over scarce resources are brewing; finally, most shocking of all, we don't seem to be having enough ideas about how to fix any of these things.”
Martin Luther King, Jr. & Civil Rights icons were the counterpoint to the Bacchanal Co-opting of Social Justice.
How did the Hippies respond/react to MLK?
Passive goodwill, as far as I know.
Dylan arguably was "above" the icons of the Civil Rights Movement, in more than one sense. Lennon's only (veiled) reference to MLK was in his song "God": "I don't believe in Kennedys/I don't believe in Kings." Veiled, to the last.
Philadelphia, Mississippi was where a man named Chaney was "disappeared" by an American Death Squad.
Philadelphia, Mississippi was where Ronald Reagan began his 1980 Presidential Campaign, as a wink-and-a-nod to the Death Squads & their sympathizers.
In the end, a Cheney will be responsible for the final military coup and mass-disappearances. And in the end, Cheney's most embarassing moment -- being booed in a stadium in April at the Washington Senators' baseball game -- reminds me of the stadiums of Santiago, Chile, & Buenos Aires, Argentina, where mass-disappeared were brought, tortured & executed.
Perhaps D.C. will get his revenge on that same soil where he was so enraged in April 2006.
The Children of the 1960s were divergent: those ex-Hippie boomers who gave Reagan a landslide ... and those boomers like Richard Cheney who would fulfill the "promise" of Philadelphia, Mississippi.
I penned this several months prior to our invasion of Iraq. My views have since changed, somewhat, but the spirit of my words is as valid today as it was several years prior. I have given this piece to several people over the years and they generally have no response. Either they consider me a lunatic, or they are just too apathetic and superficial to grasp it.
This essay attempts to conflate several poignant issues; namely, Consumerism/Materialism, Environmentalism, Globalism and Militarism.
The Last Crusade
The concept of Materialism is an extremely appropriate, and I would say urgent topic, considering the serious issues currently confronting Man and the Globe. I believe the topic lends itself to a multi-faceted analysis, however, I will limit my discussion to the facets that appear to me, to be the most crucial and pertinent.
Materialism, the word itself, in my opinion is somewhat of a misnomer in that Material refers to something concrete, physically identifiable, tangible and measurable. As such, the term precludes something less tangible such as services. Therefore, I feel it more appropriate to refer to the issue as Consumerism; the purchase or acquisition of wants versus needs.
It has been my observation that the discussion of this topic centers around the assumption that Consumerism has been adopted wholesale by the inhabitants of the Globe, or in the least, will be, and as such the analysis of the issue proceeds according to this precept. I do not agree with this assumption/precept as a given, however, for the sake of the point I am about to make I will allow the assumption in the hypothetical. My second point will address the validity of this assumption, so hang in there.
Assuming that Consumerism is fully accepted and adopted as the way of life under the New Global Order, then I fear the implications of such will be destructively far-reaching and ultimately catastrophic. I will attempt to illustrate my point through the use of an analogy, given the disclaimer that analogies are not foolproof; nonetheless, I will do my best to come close.
Try, if you will, to envision mankind collectively as a fetus in its Mother’s womb. Ideally, the Mother and Fetus coexist in a state of equilibrium for the entirety of the gestation period; the Fetus requires exactly what the Mother can provide. Suppose the Fetus has a genetic defect though, a defect that alters the nourishment equilibrium and leaves the Fetus yearning for more than the Mother can provide; an unquenchable yearning that must be satisfied regardless of the implications.
The Mother, in an attempt to quench the fetus’s “unreasonable” nourishment requirements, diverts life- sustaining nutrients from herself to her Fetus, thus depriving herself of vitality. The Fetus’s requirements increase exponentially to the point where it is defecating in the womb. Alas, the Mother can no longer provide any additional nourishment, in fact, her yield to the Fetus declines precipitously, and she is on the verge of death, while the Fetus wallows in a cesspool of its own excrement with an unquenchable and veracious hunger.
It is no longer receiving satisfaction from the Mother so it proceeds to devour its host. It begins with the umbilical cord and proceeds to the uterine lining, consuming layer upon layer.
The Mother is in physical arrest at this point, she is writhing in pain; the internal bleeding is massive and irreversible. She succumbs and the Fetus is violently vomited from the now deceased Mother’s womb.
Such is Man’s destiny if we continue to globalize the concept of Consumerism; the production and/or the delivery of wants.
As I mentioned earlier, I do not believe that Consumerism will be adopted under the New Global Order, in fact, the resistance to such will ultimately lead to a Global clash and human self-annihilation. An analogy of such could be likened to two diabolically opposed fraternal twins in the Mother’s womb fighting for position in the birth canal and ultimately destroying each other in the process.
I believe the current clash between many of the Arab nations and the West (exemplified by the U.S.) is a clash over ideology; that ideology being Materialism, or more appropriately Consumerism.
There is no doubt in my mind that Western Civilization is marked by, among other things, Consumerism. It is “our” way of life. There is no need for me to elaborate on what is obvious, one need only turn their head about and observe to prove this point.
However, since I do not have the luxury of observation related to the Arab world, I have to rely on the observations of others; for example, T. E Lawrence.
Lawrence gives a profound (given that he was speaking to the issue in the early part of the 20th century) insight into the Arab, Semitic, Bedouin disposition, specifically as it relates to Western Materialism/Consumerism.
In his book, Seven Pillars OF Wisdom-A Triumph, Lawrence expounds,
“The common base of all the Semitic creeds, winners or losers, was the ever present idea of world-worthlessness. Their profound reaction from matter led them to preach bareness, renunciation, poverty; and the atmosphere of this invention stifled the minds of the desert pitilessly. A first knowledge of their sense of the purity of rarefaction was given me in early years, when we had ridden far out over the rolling plains of North Syria to a ruin of the Roman period which the Arabs believed was made by a prince of the border as a desert-palace for his queen. The clay of its building was said to have been kneaded for greater richness, not with water, but with the precious essential oils of flowers. My guides, sniffing the air like dogs, led me from crumbling room to room, saying, ‘This is jessamine, this violet, this rose.’”
“But at last Dahoum drew me: ‘Come and smell the very sweetest scent of all’, and we went into the main lodging, to the gaping window sockets of its eastern face, and there drank with open mouths of the effortless, empty, eddyless wind of the desert, throbbing past. That slow breath had been born somewhere beyond the distant Euphrates and had dragged its way across many days and nights of dead grass, to its first obstacle, the man-made walls of our broken palace. About them it appeared to fret and linger, murmuring in baby-speech. ‘This,’ they told me, ’is the best; it has no taste.’ My Arabs were turning their backs on perfumes and luxuries to choose the things in which mankind had had no share or part.”
Western civilization cannot buy the Arab world. We may think we can, witnessed by the various puppet governments placed in power and kept in power by the Western Multinational Corporations, however, that device is only temporary, and we are beginning to see the dismantling of it before our very eyes. The Royal families and the Puppet dictatorships of the Arab world are not a true representation of the Arab people. The renunciation of Materialism/Consumerism is woven into the life-breathing fabric of Arabs. Conversion, considering this pretext, is impossible.
One might well say, nonsense, look at the Royal families of Saudi Arabia and Jordan. I would say, yes, let us look at them. They appear to me to be irresponsible and contradictory individuals according to Western logic. Their life of opulence is a conflict for them and their erratic behavior exemplifies this.
T.E Lawrence writes,
“To live, the villager or townsman must fill himself each day with the pleasures of acquisition and accumulation, and by rebound off circumstances become the grossest and most material of men. The shining contempt of life, which led others into the barest asceticism, drove him to despair. He squandered himself heedlessly, as a spendthrift: ran through his inheritance of flesh in a hasty longing for the end.
……The Semite hovered between lust and self-denial.”
So you see, the Arabs are not at peace, at home, amongst Materialism/Consumerism, and as such, will ultimately squander their fortune due to a un-conscience longing to return to worthlessness.
What we are seeing now, in the resurgence of fundamentalist Islam, is not so much a religious revival, as much as a Cultural revival. According to Lawrence, these revivals have come in waves as follows,
“Since the dawn of life, in successive waves they had been dashing themselves against the coasts of flesh. Each wave was broken, but, like the sea wore away ever so little of the granite on which it failed, and some day, ages yet, might roll unchecked over the place where the material world had been, and god would move upon the face of those waters. On such wave (and not the least) I raised and rolled before the breath of an idea, till it reached its crest, and toppled over and fell in Damascus. The wash of that wave, thrown back by the resistance of vested things, will provide the matter of the following wave, when in fullness time the sea shall be raised once more.”
Lawrence experienced a wave that predicated his novel. There have been waves since, and, I believe, we are in the midst of a wave right now; a tidal wave of astronomical proportions. One that may perhaps strip the granite clean in one fell swoop and clear the Earth of Materialism/Consumerism once and for all. Of course, Mankind would be a casualty, leaving only Purity (God).
T. E. Lawrence, when he mentioned, “ages yet,” obviously had no knowledge of Nuclear Weaponry. With the advent of such, and his knowledge thereof, I’m certain he would have asserted “years yet.”
"where did all these hippies come from?"
why is weed illegal?
why do the rainbow gatherings have the "a-camp?"
A ghastly priest doth reign The priest who slew the slayer...
Doth this night terror ever end?
The black Goddess, the black Delilah Kali, must be turning over the axis mundi in her blood birth, for surely the cannibalism of this age of man has finished eating the dead and is now feeding on itself.
For surely season of madness is upon us and no hero to save us...
A previous poster wrote:
"The Children of the 1960s were divergent: those ex-Hippie boomers who gave Reagan a landslide ... and those boomers like Richard Cheney who would fulfill the "promise" of Philadelphia, Mississippi."
I would say this analysis was mistaken; the Dick Cheneys of the world are the right cheek of the *ss formed with the Reagan landslide boomers. I remember growing up during the 1979 election campaign and watching Reagan's famous 'I am paying for this microphone Mr. Green' speech.
I remember the way the crowd just erupted, in the same way I saw German crowds erupting for Hitler in old Nazi newsreels. The sound of Ayn Rand's 'mindless brute' exemplified by that cheering crowd of flag waving idiots who hated their own Constitution made an indelible impression on me. The impression was that what was going on just wasn't right.
Here's some interesting reading about the 'counter culture movement,' in the spirit of those posters who noticed the establishement's hand pulling the strings of the hippee puppets:
http://www.conspiracyarchive.com/NewAge/new_age_beliefs.htm
The only way to chant down Babylon by singing baby-lawn
http://www.ivanrainbow.com/images/baby/lawn.jpg
Having fun moving Jeff - don't make your wife lift anything.
Anonymous said:
"It is clear when you compare the indigenous use of 'psychedelics' to the cavalier use of Leary’s generation, there is a serious discrepancy of intent.
"Daniel Pinchbeck wrote, in Breaking Open The Head, that '(the) dialectical process that created the possessive mind-set of the capitalist and the “rational” outlook of the technocrat required destruction of the premodern vestiges of communal and animalistic beliefs, whether these beliefs were found in isolated pockets of Europe or in the indigenous populations of the New World. This destruction was part of the process that Karl Marx described as the alienation of all of our physical and intellectual senses into one sense: the sense of having. Of course, the “sense of having” is not really a sense – it is an illusion of fulfillment that seems to extend outside of the self.'"
***********
Um, if you want to talk about "cavalier use," I'd argue first of all that you don't want to be quoting Pinchbeck. He may pay lip-service to the rigors of "indigenous" use and "following the path" in his own earnest, book-educated, New York Intellectual kinda way. But, seriously, should we be taking Pinchbeck's cultural analyses any more (or less) seriously than Leary's pop-art excursions into Tibetan mysticism and the Book of the Dead?
At the end of the day, Pinchbeck's book is basically about a smart guy who just wants to get *high.* He's not a scientist of any kind -- he's not a psychologist like Leary, or an ethnobotanist like McKenna, and he's far from the best replacement for the gaping hole their deaths left in the counterculture constellations. Pinchbeck is a journalist whose forays into the psychedelic jungle started with boredom and/or morbid curiosity. Unless I'm hallucinating myself, he describes in his book about how he basically pitched a story to give him an excuse to try a psychedelic he'd heard about but couldn't get his hands on.
And speaking of "cavalier"... I don't have a copy of BREAKING OPEN THE HEAD in front of me, so pardon if I don't nail the details on this. But I regarded the conclusion with some alarm.
Pinchbeck describes sampling some random synthesized psychedelic, and experience visions of an army of gothick demons in Victorian garb. The creeped out Pinchbeck seems to realize he maybe, perhaps opened up a door to something he better shouldna ought have; and he subsequently calls over some flaky Burning Man "witch" type to conduct a half-ass "exorcism" involving flushing a toilet.
As someone who regards both psychedelia and matters of the so-called "occult" as worthy of serious study, I regarded Pinchbeck's reckless intake and his hapless solution to the consequences as a bit "cavalier."
I (and probably a lot of other people) suspect that both the allure and the danger of psychedelics is that they open direct gateways into specific mystic states of consciousness. I don't know precisely what door opens into a gallery of Victorian devils (I have theories)... but for my money, Pinchbeck broke his own head open, and revealed that the stuff inside is more than a little soft-and-fuzzy, and its products are less rigorously constructed than novice 21st C. psychenauts need when girding their minds & souls for this particular fungus-strewn "path."
We are all but children awaiting ackowledgement and validation, though it never comes. Lives waisted seeking validation and acknowledgement that doesn't exist, beyond the superficial nod.
We ejaculate our soul into cyberspace only to have our ideas usurped and misdirected with articulately calculated precision.
Crucify me. Take my soul. Extract the substance of my being. Superfically ignore the substance of my being whilst my words redirect your cells.
Reciprocation is neither expected nor warranted. It is the way of things and that fate has been accepted.
Stand or Fall
State Your Piece Tonight
Kris Kristofferson.
Freedom's Just Another Word For Nothing Left To Lose
So true, those words. Too many vested interests. This thing can never happen for that very reason. Sacrifice is so cliche.
Jules,
I have no contempt for you, and I'm sorry you took it that way. Avoid categorizing yourself and applying a generalization personally.
The poor, as a category, are part of the 80, for the most part, and as such are a fungible mass who have signed away accountability. You are not part of that fungible mass by virtue of your profound and insightful, albeit scattered, streams of consciousness.
I like you Jules, just as I like Syn Diesel, and Richard, and Jeff.
Was always down with the Yippies who were far more of a direct threat than the escapist hippie movement. Still, all in all both were considered threats to the order and had sustained intelligence ops launched at them to discredit, demonize and neutralize them as a viable political and progressive force. The pattern was:
1) Prolific CIA/DoD insertions of LSD and other psychotropics to distract and disorient. Then have your paid PSYOPs stooges (Timothy Leary) propagate the benefits of drug use to the burgeoning youth culture, and you have an MK-DELTA field operation.
2) The FBI's COINTELPRO, otherwise known as America's Phoenix Project.
3) The use of cut-out black ops like the Manson family to castigate hippies as psychotic and consumed with bloodlust.
4) The use of pseudo-gang terrorists such as the SLA, Karenga's US organization, Team Zodiac, the Zebra Killings, and others to wreak havoc on the populace. The Problem-Reaction-Solution dynamic that has "crazies" wreak havoc on the populace, then in comes the government with paramiltary solutions like SWAT.
5) Use of spies, agent provocateurs, moles and other destructive elements to destroy the leadership and reputation of legitimate progressive organizations.
6) Use of a Viet Nam draft as a side cull of some of the potentially 'troublesome' working class youth.
7) The final coup de grace... pump massive amounts of Heroin into America as a pacification agent ala the 'Opium Wars' that was used to counteract the insurgent movement in China. The problem of not enough 'customers' was solved by Nixon and the Narcotics Bureau, who effectively dried up the pot supply. This in turn drove the prices for weed up extensively and made Heroin a more attractive option. Not to mention all of the money to be made for intel black bugets, mobsters and violent freelancers whose trade destablized familes and destroyed neighborhoods. You also have the law and order crowd satiated with new freedom and privacy destructive laws and draconian enforcement methods.
For more information see the great Mae Brussell's article Operation Chaos:
http://www.maebrussell.com/Mae%20Brussell%20Articles/Operation%20Chaos.html
Also pick up Alex Constantine's 'The Covert War on Rock'. Available here:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/092291561X/qid=1151104881/sr=2-3/ref=pd_bbs_b_2_3/102-7919465-7468117?s=books&v=glance&n=283155
Thank you, Omega Man.
That's exactly what happened; hippies didn't just quit being political when it wasn't fun anymore, there was a concerted effort to stop them--which worked, to be sure--and that, at least is to our credit, we were taken seriously enough by the Powers That Be for them to take action against us. What have you done, lately, that has made the FBI and the CIA sit up and take notice?
Fuckin' punks
Time is what you make it.
There are/were plenty of "traps" to suck a person off his true track. All are different in their glory and bring something unique to the table. One find the table by being as was said long ago, true unto thy being, thy calling in life. And then to treat your nweighbor as thyself.
And again one gets what one takes. What I found among hippies was theis basic philosophy - Question Authority & Respect Beings.
Part of the whole thing was a psy-op involving many things a big thing being drugs. The scret society system wished to opiate the "boomer" generation. It was enough of a plan that my CIA father who quit in 1959 knew of it.
The whole Marijuana is a gateway drug was part of the op. Most kids/hippies learned how to use drugs from Bonesman's Luce's Life magazine. Marijuana/hemp is the largest natural competitor to the secret society petroleum (rock oil) monopoloy. Remember Rudolf Diesel introduced his engine at the 1900 Paris Epo, running 24/7 on … peanut oil. He was hounded , in 1913 comitted "suicide," engine retrofittrd to run on petro. Hemp oil best oil for humans … gee, Bushes have omega 3 fish oil tied up. It is in the secret society's interest to keep drugs illegal. Keeps the price of heroin and cocaine up and keeps petroleum's largest competitor off the market. Hemp makes over 4,000 different products.
The CIa early in 60's helped pot smugglers, then they turned them imto coke smugglers, then heroin smugglers. The would give a smuggler tons of pot if he would take a small package of other.
Then they completely stopped pot only help and busted the networks.
Psychedelics are another story.
Also, check out sociology for much, especially Generatiosn A History og Americas Future.
Much of the murders and antics of the late twentith century were a repeat of actions in the late 19th that produced a fake progressive movement, killed of the "Hero" archytpe and allowed for the creation of the Federal reserve, world Wars, etc. It is a long story.
Peace,
Kris Millegan
Nixon and Narcotics
Yep, Tricky dicks generation of smack and the cycle merely started anew in the next decade and a half w/ the ol 'gipper' Ronald Reagan's CCC , CIA Crack Cocaine© ; if indeed it ever stopped but they just switched tactics from the drug lords of the east to the down south crew. And it's groundhog day over and over...
And the whole time guess who was running the drugs, Donald Redrum and the other dick the one from Wyoming now known as VP.
Ask journalist Gary Web, oh never mind, you can't, he's dead...
Only inconsiderate assholes use black background for web pages.
-
Your take on the "60's" is derived entirely from the mediated record of what was more threatening then to what's writhing through these years than Hoffman or his butt-buddy Jerry Rubin ever dreamed of being. The re-coining of "hippie" from a jazzbo term of derision for square wannabes into a term of derision for what was already happening around the country and world and making a lot of vested interests - in fact all vested interests - decidedly nervous, occurred in a Look magazine expose of what was happening in the Haight already and basically got extinguished under the weight of media-driven pilgrims and refugees from nowheresville to SF.
The scorn in some quarters yet still for people like Emmett Grogan and Ken Kesey is a mark of how fearsomely their loving fires burned.
You can't talk about "hippies" without talking about men like them, unless you want to parrot the dominant party lie.
You speak of things of which you know not.
That's the best I'll give you.
Where does eden ahbez fall into the hippie movement? He was living in communes in the 30s--And grew his hair and beard long in the 40s...
"The greatest thing you'll ever learn
Is just to love and be loved in return"
From "The Vision Quest" by Paul Devereux:
"The specifics of vision-questing differed to greater or lesser degrees from one Indian nation to another. The Kiowa vision-quester, for instance, would go off to a high place in the Wichita Mountains & there settle down on a bed of sage, facing east, with a buffalo-hide robe around his shoulders and his shield beneath his head. After offering tobacco to the spirits, he would smoke a long stemmed, black stone pipe while calling out to the spirits for their attention & their compassion. A cycle of fasting, praying and smoking went on for 4 days before he was brought down to the village by a tribal member."
If you'd compare this formalized ritual ,whose history probably dated back thousands of years, to the average modern psychedelic experience which exists in a complete cultural vacuum, I don't think that's it's hard to see how the counter-culture was derailed by psychedelics.
Also, imagine the discipline those shaman had to have to undergo that vision quest. The modern version, on the other hand, required little more than the drug & a desire to get high.
Shrubageddon said -
Freedom's Just Another Word For Nothing Left To Lose
So true, those words. Too many vested interests. This thing can never happen for that very reason. Sacrifice is so cliche.
Cliche it may be, but I keep thinking that sacrifice is somehow the key to everthing. The word sacrifice, after all, means nothing more than 'made sacred' -- nothing in there about death or destruction or dark forces.
Internally, the imperative is to sacrifice your lower self in order to give birth to the higher. Or, as the Waterboys sing in "Strange Boat":
We’re living in a strange time
Working for a strange goal
We’re living in a strange time
Working for a strange goal
We’re turning flesh and body
Into soul
But externally, sacrifice is a source of power -- power that is incorruptible because it is based on giving away rather than holding on. It depends on being willing without reservation to fail, to lose, to perish, or simply to be laughed off the stage.
That's where Kris Kristofferson went off track. He believed, it seems, that you could only be free if you had already lost everything. He couldn't conceive of a willingness to lose everything -- that is, everything material -- in pursuit of the holy.
Our culture, by and large, hasn't believed in pursuit of the holy as an acceptable motivation. It only believes in greed, in self-promotion, and in some of the pettier emotional objectives, like revenge or showing up your father.
Just dare to get famous, and you'll immediately find your motivations parsed in exactly those terms, in the tabs or in the paper of record.
Even here at RI, far too much of the discourse is in terms of "how do we keep from losing." I've seen it said that this is a Western hangup -- that other cultures, like the Japanese, have far more respect for honorable losers. But all the Western heroes are the guys who won -- or, at the very least, whose causes won not too long after their heroic deaths.
Perhaps we need to simply stop thinking in terms of winning and losing -- and think in terms of right action instead.
"They crashed the galleries of Wall Street to shower money on the trading floor. They ran a pig for president."
Come on. Get a bit more savvy. These people were FBI/CIA agent provacateurs attempting to discredit the democratic 1968 challenge that year. It worked. Rockefeller's Nixon was elected.
Google it up.
And all the drugs of the 1960s were either coming straight out the MKULTRA networks (like from Eli Lilly, tied to the present to Bush family) or coming straight out the CIA's money tranches in the Golden Triangle.
Drugs were introduced to TRANCEFORM America.
And it worked for the most part.
Only a few used it to expand their consciousness.
Many took it, as your post noted to escape and "get high" and the "mushrooms killed them."
The CIA set up the 1960s starting in 1963, when to take the American mind off the obviously gov't perpetrated JFK assassination, they offered them free drugs and "strange" music changes.
The back to back weekend apperances of the Beatles immediately in the wake of JFK hit; Beatles EMI producer is really the British military industrial complex by the way.
and drugs came in immediately thereater from the CIA/Eli Lilly.
Various 1960s entertainment promoters were connected to the various CIA programs and drug muling, etc.
Don't make the analytic mistake of falsely painting "government operations" always as taking the form of a right wing looking operation. They'll use whatever works.
And by the way, unauditable computer tabulation machines for voting were introduced for the first time right after the Kennedy assassination as well.
The whole 1960s culture, in some sense was a government op, along the lines of Project Mockingbird. Mockingbirds copy and follow the song of other birds independently without direct disinfo connections, simply in the process of trading and sharing information. The "drug version of Project Mockingbird" worked like a charm, in my opinion, since it came out of the government labs, spread like wildfire 'independently' thereafter, and provided huge operating consumer drug budgets for black ops as well as "jutification" for police state crackdown in the artificial criminalized "drug war" which is the recipe for the police state that came in only for many drugs in the 1960s.
"MYSPACE"??? Come on! Get real. That's tied into the surveillance networks of NSA. Isn't it owned by that ex-Australian neocon? I think Alex Jones has had some Myspace purgings, so beware of that 'venue.'
The hijacking of the politics of the 60's is pretty well documented but there was a cultural hijacking as well as shown in Mae Brussell's work on Operation Chaos.
The hippies knew it was over in 1967 when the Diggers staged the "Death of the Hippy", around the time the insipid Scott McKenzie song "San Francisco" came out. I was quite young and in Europe so I caught it from a different angle (Remember the Dutch Provos?) but even then, even intuitively, anyone could see that this movement was being sold out, and not just because of that song.
A few quotes:
"In the evening, I went up to the U. to check out a strategy meeting. A kid was giving a report on the SDS [Students for a Democratic Society] convention. He said that at the convention, men from Business International Round Tables, the meeting sponsored by Business International for their client groups and heads of government, tried to buy up a few radicals.
These men are the world's leading industrialists and they convene to decide how our lives are going to go. These are the guys who wrote the Alliance for Progress. They are the left wing of the ruling class.
They offered to finance our demonstrations in Chicago. We were also offered ESSO (Rockefeller) money. They want us to make a lot of radical commotion so they can look more in the center as they move to the left."
---- James Kunen, The Strawberry Statement: Notes of a College Revolutionary, pg. 116
and:
"Young people have no conception of the conspiracy's strategy of pressure from above and pressure from below.... They have no idea that they are playing into the hands of the Establishment they claim to hate. The radicals think they're fighting the forces of the super rich, like Rockefeller and Ford, and they don't realize that it is precisely such forces which are behind their own revolution, financing it, and using it for their own purposes..."
---- Jerry Kirk, former Black Revolutionary in 1970 testifying before the House and Senate Internal Security panel.
And this one which I never verified:
"Tom Hayden, who by 1986 was defending his state assembly seat against those trying to oust him because of his anti-war record, was quoted as saying that while he was protesting against the Vietnam War, he was also cooperating with U.S. intelligence agents"
--- AP in San Francisco Examiner, June 21, 1986.
Here is a snip from the excellent book "Storming Heaven":
"Standing by the speaker's platform, listening to the yammer of the crowd and the booming oratory of the speakers, Kesey was reminded of his Cow Palace epiphany. When his turn came at the microphone, he bounded onto the stage flanked by a bevy of Day‑Glo, guitar‑wielding Pranksters. Whipping out a harmonica, he began honking his way through "Home on the Range."
"You're playing their game," he drawled into the microphone. "We've all heard all this and seen all this before, but we keep doing it … I went to see the Beatles last month … And I heard twenty thousand girls screaming together at the Beatles … and I couldn't hear what they were screaming either … But you don't have to … They're screaming Me! Me! Me! Me! … I'm Me! … That's the cry of the ego, and that's the cry of this rally! … Me! Me! Me! And that's why wars get fought … ego … because enough people want to scream Pay attention to Me … Yep, you're playing their game."[11]
Here is the book.
http://tinyurl.com/lh3x8
Anyway, it was also clear that many of the so called Hippies never were, it was a media fueled fad. Trust me, a real hippie would never have voted for Reagan.
What did Hippies want? Is this embarrassing?
"What Did the Hippies Want?
by Alicia Bay Laurel
We wanted intimacy--not a neighborhood where you didn't know anyone on the block, or you competed, kept up with the Joneses.
A hunter-gatherer or early agricultural community meant that people lived, worked and sought deeper contact with the holy spirit as a group, and they all knew one another, from cradle to grave. I used to call my hippie friendships "a horizontal extended family," as opposed to the ancient tribal extended family, which was multi-generational, and therefore, vertical.
We wanted a culture which acknowledged the human body, not just for sex, but to hug each other, to be naked without shame, to revere the body with natural foods, beneficial exercise, herbs, baths, massage, deep understanding. This was not part of the culture from which we came.
We wanted a culture that thrived on gift-giving. We hitchhiked, shared our food and drugs, gave away our possessions. People who could afford to buy land invited others who could not to live there.
We opened free stores, free clinics, free kitchens, not just in the Haight, but everywhere we went. We wanted be living proof that god was taking care of us and therefore there was no need to hoard.
We wanted to live without the constraints of time. We wanted to wake up each day and decide what would be the most fun to do that day--or just find out as it went along. We wanted to go with the flow, follow our bliss, be here now. This was in complete opposition to the culture from which we came.
We wanted new ways to value one another, rather than by wealth, status, looks, achievements, machismo, as our culture of origin had taught us, and continues to teach us through the media. We wanted to value one another for being lovable and real.
We valued spiritual depth, which we referred to as "heavy." We admired one another for being happy. We admired those who offered selfless service or peaceful resolution of conflict.We wanted a spirituality that actually caused you to grow as a person, not one in which people attended religious gatherings for social status. We wanted to be guided by our own Inner Spirits, rather than by priests.
We thirsted for the spiritual awareness and grace we experienced on psychedelics, without psychedelics, or in addition to them. Many hippies would spent their last cent on a weekend workshop that promised to "change your life forever." That was how so many gurus found followers in those days.
We wanted to live in harmony with the earth, the plants and animals, the indigenous peoples of the earth, with each other, with ourselves. We were the fuel behind the rapid expansion of the environmental movement. We experimented with living arrangements that we thought would harmonize with nature. We sought out indigenous tribal elders as our teachers.
We wanted to make the things we wore and used with our hands, grow our food and medicine, feel all kinds of weather--all the experiences our modern urban lives had excluded in the name of convenience and comfort. We wanted to live on the road, have adventures, build things that hadn't been built before, and live in them.
We wanted to live our mythic selves, give ourselves names that resonated with our souls, dress in costumes that expressed our dreams, do daring deeds, dance as if no one was looking, decorate our homes with magical things, listen to music that took us out of ordinary reality into altered states of awareness.
We wanted to see life without violence. We wanted media that contained truth. Some of us risked our lives to find out what the government was doing and let the underground press know. We wanted to talk about things in print that we were not allowed to discuss in our culture of origin.
We wanted to live without stupid, arbitrary rules, either for ourselves or for our children. Some of our children, as adults today, say they wish we had been more protective of them, or offered more structure. We only knew what we endured, being as culturally different from our culture of origin as Chinese are from Italians, and punished for it, and wished to spare our children these experiences. However, some portion of kids raised by hippie parents grew up to be hippies themselves. At that point, one can say, a new culture was born and continues.
...Alicia Bay Laurel
================================
I'm down with most of that.
"It's a bit embarrassing to have been concerned with the human problem all one's life and at the end that one has no more to offer by way of advice than 'Try to be a little Kinder'"
-- Aldous Huxley
So where are the hippies? probably hanging around here.
Google up "Skolnick, Anti-War Movement, Chicago 7" This is just one interesting quote from it:
Preface to the series as of 3/23/2004:
This is another part of our series on the Anti-War Movement at the time of the Viet Nam War. Studying this may help to scrutinize any possible fakers foisted on us as supposed "leaders" and "activists" of the Anti-Iraq War Movement.
The report was issued by us in 1972.
It is here VERBATIM as it was then circulated. Items in parentheses and brackets are identical to what was in the report.
It is about the fakers selected, installed, and funded by the American CIA, and promoted by the liars and whores of the Press as the supposed main activists and "leaders" of the Anti-Viet Nam War activities, known then as the "Peace Movement". Called "The Chicago 7", that was Rennie, Davis, Abbie Hoffman, Jerry Rubin, Tom Hayden, and others.
The purpose was to sidestep the specifics of the Aristocracy and the war-mongers who are the stooges and scapegoats for them. And, to wind down the disastrous Viet Nam War before it would expose how the Establishment profits from instigating wars and depressions to further enrich the Ultra-Rich.
Sound familiar?
A further purpose was to discredit the 1968 Democrat Party candidate for President Hubert Humphrey, to install Richard M. Nixon for the GOP, as the Fascist-inclined occupant and resident of the Oval Office.
The "Committee" referred to is the independent-minded investigative group, Citizen's Committee to Clean Up the Courts, the Founder/Chairman of which has been Sherman H. Skolnick, since 1963.
Earlier parts told how the trial judge was manipulated. Now we learn about the jurors hearing the Anti-Riot Act federal criminal prosecution of the "7", starting in 1969.
...
"CHICAGO 7" ARE THEY FOR REAL?
7. [Gov't] Efforts to overturn the contempt ruling and the guilty verdict against 5 of the "7".
...
[and] Manipulation of judges to gain worldwide travel permission for the "7". In respect to key rulings on worldwide travel permission for some of the "7", the important rulings were made by two judges of the U.S. Court of Appeals in Chicago: (a) Federal Circuit Judge Otto Kerner, Jr., and (b) Chief Judge Luther M. Swygert.
Members of Skolnick's Committee have been instrumental in focussing a certain federal probe onto Judge Otto Kerner, Jr., resulting in Kerner's indictment in December, 1971. In the course of that work, the Committee became aware of the fact that Judge Kerner was being pressured and manipulated to grant almost an unlimited. worldwide trafvel permission to some of the "Chicago 7".
A key ruling of Judge Kerner came on July 15, 1969, prior to the Conspiracy trial. Kerner, at the drop of a hat, almost instantly upon application, ordered that Rennie Davis be authorized to travel to Paris, France, and to Hanoi, North Viet Nam, commencing that same day. (U.S. vs. Rennard C. Davis, No. 17761, U.S. Court of Appeals, 7th Circuit, Chicago). It is apparent from the application for travel permission that Rennie, an alleged "radical revolutionary", was going on U.S. State Department business. See: previous mention of P.O.W., Navy Lt. Robert F. Frishman.
In May, 1971, Abbie Hoffman and Rennie Davis were indicted as a result of certain purported disorders as part of the "May Day Tribe" in Washington, D.C. By May, 1971, it was also evident, or becoming evident, that Judge Kerner himself faced indictment. To appease a certain faction in the Justice Department, Judge Kerner entered a court order revoking Abbie and Rennie's travel permission and severely restricted them to their home districts.
Oddly, there was a contrary court order entered by Judge Swygert.
(Judges in the same court have equal power; they cannot over-rule one another.)
By May, 1971, it was becoming evident that Judge Swygert, like Kerner, was the target of a federal probe. The particulars of an apparent series of frauds participated in by Swygert were put into the Congressional Record by Congressman H.R. Gross, of Iowa. Cong.Rec., May 17, 1971, p. E4482.
Congressman Gross and others demanded an investigation of the plundering of a multi-million dollar real estate company by Judge Swygert and associates of his, including his former law partner.
On June 11, 1971, members of the Committee discovered in the file of case No.s 18294, 18295 (the "7" appeals), the above described court order by Judge Kerner revoking court travel permission. Committee members went to the Chief Clerk of the U.S. Court of Appeals, requesting a certified copy of the same.
Whereupon, in the presence of two Committee members, the Chief Clerk tore up and discarded the court order, and said "This is none of your business".
...
It sure would be interesting to re-live the 60's knowing what you know now. Everyone would seem like children caught up in a fantasy world made up for them by Big Daddy.
To go against the grain and try to wake people up would have been difficult. I recall Cher being derided for being "straight". Years later, she saved the Average White Band's drummer from an overdose.
Frank Zappa was particularly subversive to the counterculture. He did no drugs, and got younger people's attention with South Park-like potty humor while indulging his taste in avant-garde music. His sense of irreverence towards hippiedom did much to break it down for us young spuds before we could get too far down that road. There is a reason why he is no longer with us.
The Rockefeller gang really did buy themselves a revolution. They wanted a movement that was much farther left than their own, so as to seem centrist by comparison. They also wanted a leisure class whose politics were just an extention of their own self-righteousness, and they wanted a criminal class raised on hard drugs, and with a strong sense of hopelessness. And, they wanted to get down to the business of cult-building in order to grow cells of willing slaves. I'd say they got all that and more.
On the cultural end:
"This was decades before the Beats or Hippies and their influence was very substantial. In "On The Road" Kerouac noted that while passing through Los Angeles in the summer of 1947 he saw "an occasional Nature Boy saint in beard and sandals".
New to me.
http://www.hippy.com/php/article-243.html
And a pretty good essay, my only bitch with this article is her misuse of the word 'Conservatives', I'd use something like 'hard right' or maybe just 'fascist pigs' lol.
"These misinformation campaigns build on longer-term strategies that erase historical realities from the public memory (and, as a result, erase possibilities from the public imagination). A timely example is the mostly forgotten GI movement against the war in Vietnam, an important chapter in 1960s history uncovered in the recent documentary "Sir, No Sir!" Jerry Lembcke, a Vietnam veteran and scholar who appears briefly in the film, wrote an entire book about one of the '60s' most enduring -- and counterfeit -- images: the self-sacrificing soldier spat upon by unpatriotic protesters. Lembcke shows how the Nixon administration and the media purposefully propagated this myth in an effort to disparage the antiwar camp and drive a wedge between the military and civilian peace movements. Decades later most people, young and old, barely remember that half a million young men deserted, that grunts were refusing to fight en masse, and that soldiers published over 100 underground antiwar newspapers."
http://www.alternet.org/story/36328
For us Zappa was precious because of his ability to slice into and expose the stupid faddism of much of it, often shocking in his sarcasm toward the lesser trends.
"The illusion of freedom will continue as long as it's profitable to continue the illusion. At the point where the illusion becomes too expensive to maintain, they will just take down the scenery, they will pull back the curtains, they will move the tables and chairs out of the way and you will see the brick wall at the back of the theater."
-- Frank Zappa
This 1986 video with Novak lays it out no?
http://tinyurl.com/emn4z
If I had to do it over again, I'd be a lot more paranoid, like now.
As others have noted, the Age of Aquarius was deliberately derailed, but why does anyone even believe that the “hippies” could have saved us from ourselves any more than, say, the “beats” of the fifties, the “goths” of today or any other outsider group which has attempted to hold a mirror up to the dominant society so that it can recognize its distorted face? Today the Bush regime doesn’t even attempt to hide or disguise its vile actions and yet we STILL can’t seem to make any headway against them -- so why single out the 60s hippies/boomers/counterculturals?
Many of the people I knew then and know now were not sell-outs. Rather they were Peace Corps volunteers, teachers, advocacy lawyers, organic farmers, wholistic healthcare practitioners etc, etc. In fact, the entire alternative movement in organics/healthcare/conscious living is a direct outgrowth of the 60s to the extent that you could almost say that mainstream society is its evil twin.
I am always mystified to see the “60s sell-out” boomer-bashing, but to find it here on RI where the awareness of COINTELPRO & dirty politics is almost universal, is depressing indeed.
When it comes to modern American social history, a lot of very basic and important facts have gotten lost by the "blame it on the hippies" viewpoint.
Point 1: the idea that "LSD use derailed the political consciousness of American youth in the 1960s" makes no sense when one realizes that the vast majority of American youth have never took LSD even once- whether in the 1960s, or in any other era since. The statistics are elastic in regard to matters of illegal drug use, or course, but even when the estimates of the general run of studies I've perused are doubled, the number of people in the general population who have ever used psychedelic drugs even once is less than 10%. If psychedelic drugs are to blame for wreaking havoce on the sanity, values, and political acumen of American youth, well, how do you account for what happened to the other 90-97 per cent?
( I suppose that you could do even further into chemical McCarthyism, a la Lyndon LaRouche, and blame it on Weed...admittedly, that brings up the "lifetime use" statistics quite a bit. But really, are you that determined to cling to ignorance-generated hysteria? )
Point 2: I've read a lot of statistical surveys on illicit drug use, and in terms of subsets of the general population, the highest percentage of people with lifetime histories of psychedelic drug use I've seen wasn't homeless people, or high school dropouts. It's medical students. And those statistics didn't date from the 1960s. They date from the 1980s and 1990s. Exactly how does this square with the pop-media image of psychedelic drugs turning people into mentally impaired losers?
Point 3: Political radicalism was never all that popular with American youth. Consider that in 1972, the first year that 18 year olds were granted the vote, 11.5 million potential new voters were added to the rolls, and 55% of them voted. Do you think the "psychedelic hippie movement" was responsible for making American youth apathetic? That percentage of youth voters has never been equaled since. How did they vote? According to the estimates I've run across, the youth vote split about evenly between George McGovern and Richard Nixon. A couple of links to back up that claim.
You want to blame that on Tim Leary and Ken Kesey? LSD and flower power did that?
Do you require a "stab-in the-back" theory that badly, to explain the failure of the Left to attract or retain the sympathies of any significant percentage of American youth, even during an era of social upheaval and questioning of authority?
Point 4: The Abbie Hoffman quote- used to buttress the viewpoint that Hoffman was disdainful of hippies, flower children, and hedonism- is most certainly a far cry from the usual run of his public utterances in the 1960s and early 1970s. I'd like to get the reference for that quote, incidentally. Not that I doubt that he could have said it, but it doesn't sound like a remark he would have made in the contest of the Yippie era of the 1960s. Back then, Abbie was doing nothing but cheerleading for a trinitarian litany of "dope, revolution, and fucking in the streets"...haven't any of the 60s revisionists around here read any of his books? I read Revolution For The Hell Of It, Woodstock Nation, and Steal This Book while I was in high school, as well as Ed Sanders hilariously hyperbolic canonization of Abbie and the Yippies, Shards Of God. Believe me, Abbie slung as much pro-LSD propaganda as Timothy Leary ever did. In one of his books, he spoke of taking LSD well over 100 times, as well as being "mistrustful of anyone who hasn't had the experience." And one of his most well-known pranks was getting on the floor of the 1972 Republican Convention in Miami, and dosing some of the delegates with a super-potent, high-THC cannabis extract known as "honey oil", or "The One."
The ironic thing is that the only semblance of appeal the political Left ever had at any point in the 1960s for any serious fraction of American youth was when it was being pitched- by people like Abbie and Jerry Rubin- as an anarchic personal liberation movement. It was a tactic that won them a lot of attention and camaraderie- although in the process, the Yippie types sacrificed much of what is necessarily entailed in building a substantive political movement with any staying power. And, like it or not, whenever the serious Left politicos did show up, and the Little Red Books and Communist Manifestoes came out, the vast majority of the youth of America had no time for it. Not even in the ghettoes, or the poor rural areas. And the headline-grabbing shit the Weathermen pulled got nowhere in terms of increasing the popular appeal of the Left in those days. Among other people, John Lennon knew that, and said as much...
That's the way it is, here. If a progressive movement ever does manage to coalesce and become formidable political force in this country, it isn't going to center around a collectivist doctrine like Marxism.
Abbie Hoffman was a complex cat. There are things I really like and admire about him, and things about his act- and his politics- that really rubbed me the wrong way. That's a topic for another discussion. But it's a huge inaccuracy to paint him as some towering figure of sober and serious political activism, undone by all the wild doper weirdos cutting into his act.
And let us not forget that later in the 1970s, Abbie was busted for dealing a pretty hefty quantity of cocaine- at least a kilo- and had to go underground for some years as a result, before resurfacing and receiving a relatively lenient and merciful treatment from "America Babylon". Cocaine, the epitome of Chemical Materialism, Mammon crystallized...Abbie said he was dealing coke as part of research on a book. Well...maybe so. Should have found a different book project.
That's all the space I care to take up on this page, for now. But I could go on.
Hey Shrub, don't despair. I enjoyed your thoughtful post on T.E. Lawrence and things Arab/muslim.
Might be good to remember that Lawrence betrayed the Arabs after they helped 'win' WWI for the English banker elites et al.
Be that as it may, try this on for size...Is it a bunch of psy ops, or just fanatics being used, or doing the using themselves?
I do not know.
Following below is a brief paraphrase of today’s “most emailed article” from the Los Angeles Times.
Talk about “Chanting down Babylon”...it is about chanting down Jerusalem, Tehran, and the plain of Megiddo, and forcing the appearance of a messiah. Well, which messiah, you may ask? Take your pick. The choices include Jesus, part deux; the Mahdi, or twelfth Imam; and the still awaited Jewish Messiah. So many choices, so little time.....uh, yeah.
The illuminati’s cardboard cutout messiahs must be getting antsy waiting in the wings to see who gets to step up to the plate first. I wonder who will be the cleanup batter? Check this out:
--------------------------------------------------------------
“For thousands of years, prophets have predicted the end of the world. Today, various religious groups, using the latest technology, are trying to hasten it.
”Their endgame is to speed the promised arrival of a messiah.
”For some Christians this means laying the groundwork for Armageddon.
“With that goal in mind, mega-church pastors recently met in Inglewood to polish strategies for using global communications and aircraft to transport missionaries to fulfill the Great Commission...
“In Iran, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad... hopes to welcome the Mahdi to Tehran within two years.
“Conversely, some Jewish groups in Jerusalem hope to clear the path for their own messiah by rebuilding a temple on a site now occupied by one of Islam's holiest shrines.
“Artisans have re-created priestly robes of white linen, gem-studded breastplates, silver trumpets and solid-gold menorahs to be used in the Holy Temple — along with two 6½-ton marble cornerstones for the building's foundation.
“Then there is Clyde Lott, a Mississippi revivalist preacher and cattle rancher. He is trying to raise a unique herd of red heifers to satisfy an obscure injunction in the Book of Numbers: the sacrifice of a blemish-free red heifer for purification rituals needed to pave the way for the messiah.
“So far, only one of his cows has been verified by rabbis as worthy, meaning they failed to turn up even three white or black hairs on the animal's body...
“...Ahmadinejad in an address before the United Nations last year:
"O mighty Lord," he said, "I pray to you to hasten the emergence of...the promised one...that will fill this world with justice and peace."
“At the appropriate time, according to Shiite tradition, the Mahdi will reappear and, along with Jesus, lead Muslims in a struggle to rid the world of corruption and establish justice.
“For Christians, the future of Israel is the key to any end-times scenario, and various groups are reaching out to Jews — or proselytizing among them — to advance the Second Coming.
“A growing number of fundamentalist Christians in mostly Southern states are adopting Jewish religious practices to align themselves with prophecies saying that Gentiles will stand as one with Jews when the end is near....
“Bill McCartney, a former University of Colorado football coach and co-founder of the evangelical Promise Keepers movement for men...:
"Our whole purpose is to hasten the end times," he said. "The Bible says Jews will be brought to jealousy when they see Christians and Jewish believers together as one — they'll want to be a part of that. That's going to signal Jesus' return."...
“Jews and others who don't accept Jesus, he added matter-of-factly, "are toast."...
“Meanwhile, in what has become a spectacular annual routine, Jews — hoping to rebuild the Holy Temple destroyed by the Romans in AD 70 — attempt to haul the 6 1/2 -ton cornerstones by truck up to the Temple Mount, the site now occupied by the Dome of the Rock shrine. Each year, they are turned back by police.
“Among those turned away is Gershon Solomon, spokesman for Jerusalem's Temple Institute. When the temple is built, he said, "Islam is over."
"I'm grateful for all the wonderful Christian angels wanting to help us," Solomon added, acknowledging the political support from "Christians who are now Israel's best lobbyists in the United States."
“However, when asked to comment on the fate of non-Christians upon the Second Coming of Jesus, he said, "That's a very embarrassing question. What can I tell you? That's a very terrible Christian idea. What kind of religion is it that expects another religion will be destroyed?"
[Umm, but wait...Didn’t you just say that when the temple is built, “Islam is over”? Just asking...]
“Over in Mississippi, Lott...wants to raise a few head of red heifers for Jewish high priests. Citing Scripture, Lott and others say a pure red heifer must be sacrificed and burned and its ashes used in purification rituals to allow Jews to rebuild the temple.
“But Lott's plans have been sidetracked.
“Facing a maze of red tape and testing involved in shipping animals overseas — and rumors of threats from Arabs and Jews alike who say the cows would only bring more trouble to the Middle East — he has given up on plans to fly planeloads of cows to Israel. For now.
“...fears of hoof-and-mouth disease and blue tongue forced Lott to relocate his only verified red heifer...to Nebraska.
“Cloning is out of the question...because the technique "is not approved by the rabbinical council of Israel."
"Something deep in my heart says God wants me to be a blessing to Israel...But it's complicated. We're just not ready to send any red heifers over there."
If not now, when?
..."That time is soon. Very soon."
--------------------------------------------
--------------------------------------------
Or not.
Recognise the quote?*
I had long hair and took acid in the sixties but I never considered myself a "hippie" at the time; that was a media term for Hallmark mindsets, and it still is. What me and my friends called ourselves, if pressed, was "freaks" or "heads". Not that it mattered. What did matter was the values I learned; all of them spiritual, not one of them negative, and they're with me still. The LSD remains a glimpse of possibilities. I haven't taken it for nearly four decades. Don't need to. The reading! That's something that rarely gets mentioned. Reading (books!) was always there. Always a name to pass on to someone else, a book to give. My house is full of books, a lot of them from that time, and the habit of reading I picked up back then (totally unschooled in a formal sense) has never left me. I'm just rediscovering Cat's Cradle (Vonnegut), and it's blowing my mind all over again. What else? Norman O. Brown's "Love's Body", oh, hundreds of them. Great voices I may never have heard if it wasn't for the loose, informal, loyal, heartbreaking, funny, stupid, blessed bunch of people I spent my late teens and early twenties with.
When I read critiques of the "hippie movement" I have two concerns; the media construct that informs the criticism, and the media construct it criticises.
*"Blow Up". Another eternally renewing mindfuck. (I AM in Paris, BTW.)
Slightly off-topic, but HOLY CRAP!
http://youtube.com/watch?v=Yz5AdRVjSIE&search=iran%20the%20secret%20government%20edit
(Iran The Secret Government edit)
Amazing.
If there is anything that I consider to be central to the countercultural movement of the sixties, it is the apprehension of certain self-evident truths that become apparent during the entheogenic experience. Among them: that we are all versions of each other, that we arise from and are embedded in an environment that includes all life on earth, and that this environment can be characterized as nested wholes which obey certain mathematical laws.
At the same time that the drug-takers were getting these truths on an intuitive level, the scientists and Los Alamos were getting them on a mathematical level with their study of massively-parallel, non-linear, dynamical systems. But their mathematical insights are only beginning to gain real currency in science, just as the insights of the entheonauts are only beginning to gain real currency in culture.
Civilizations have enormous inertia. "Science progresses--one death at a time." The requiems I hear being played sound like so much impatience. These things take time to build critical mass, and the black ops folks are as much a part of the movement of the whole as is the counterculture.
Does the idea that you become your enemy only apply to us, or do those who attempt to squash the emerging consciousness also become infected with the memes?
Real change will probably look like a phase change and the baddies are doing their damnedest to bring it about, whether they know it or not. A collective NDE, a period of disorder is inevitable. But the severity and length of the disorder are not positively correlated with the extremity of the phase change. Thus, we must work diligently to minimize the damage while taking heart in the mathematical inevitability of it all.
Short Story:
http://tinyurl.com/l6tru
Dan said -
Does the idea that you become your enemy only apply to us, or do those who attempt to squash the emerging consciousness also become infected with the memes?
Incredibly, heartbreakingly true.
I initially tried to say something like this as part of what I posted above about sacrifice -- but I couldn't get the words to come right, and it was getting all tangled up with carrots and Sumerian signet-rings, so I just left it out.
But Dan has it exactly right.
Whatever eats you, becomes you.
There is hope, then there is despair, awareness' come in waves, followed by mind-numbing repetitiously propagated state sponsored messages. Learn to build up your thought shields but base them upon vibratory states - block the coarse and mundane but be receptive to the purer and higher frequencies that emanate from those with real 'heart based' modes of being.
Mr. RI, is there anyway to convert the text on the MySpace version of your blog to the far more eye appealing color and font schemes that have been the norm on your blogspot versions? The black and green schema on MySpace hurts my eyes! And I too believe that this Murdock the Media Mogul's "toy" is some how deeply, darkly, and directly connected to those whose actions you so adroitly attempt to expose.
Thanks mucho to the poster of Mae B.'s links - it led to some wonderful mp3's of her early KLRB radio programs!
Dan,
Well said. You had me wavering a little with that "mathematical certainty" bit. At first I wanted to take it metaphorically, but then I figured that what you meant could be expressed by this truth, derivable from the calculus:
1 = 0 = ∞ = 1 = ∞
Here is something really profound I heard Jimmy Rothstein say one time:
"If the mothers just made the fathers do their job, this world would be a different place."
or something along those lines.
That's a good man; that's a wise man. It is as simple as that because it all starts in the home, and it doesn't matter if it's a 20 million dollar home or a 20 thousand dollar home...the equation is the same
Yes, and if men were women, menstruation would be a sacrament.
But your point is overly simplistic, if I understand what you are implying.
Women make war, and reward men who do. Aristophanes knew this and satirized it in "The Birds" where the women of Athens use their pussy control to bring peace.
But that was a satire, wasn't it?
Not like real life...
If most men were in the home full time they might have more empathy for their wives, or feel more beleagured, but they wouldn't likely to a better job raising children. They'd problem let them watch even MORE tv and raise them to be more violent.
And women who have children are now in the workplace in droves, something upwards of 80-90 % in the US. Has it made this a more peaceful, less warlike nation????
Hardly, mon ami.
C'est la vie. C'est la guerre.
Your fantasy is just that. It is not even human nature that is the problem. It is the nature of the beasts who run things, and strive to keep most decent humans, men and women, ignorant, enslaved, afraid, and selfish.
We are better than that. And we must start acting like it damn soon. Or else the whole thing is going to go up in flames while we watch it on tv, or blog about it.
Wake up and go do something meaningful besides this.
My senility is showing.......
I meant LYSISTRTA, not the Birds.
Both satires of Aristophanes.
I can't type either:
That's LYSISTRATA
I live in a part of the world full of old hippies. We are about to experience the 70s sell out in a different way. The yuppies finally found our little secret, and cos they have poisoned everywhere else, they come here.
And someone who bought a share on a commune, for 5 gran, and spent the next 20 to 30 years building their version of paradise...
It must be pretty tempting to have someone offer you half a million bucks for it.
Thats the empires final attempt, join us here this was a lot of money when you went bush.
Out of the hippie movement came the rainbow power company, in Nimbin, and the concept of permaculture, which for all its branded wankiness has some very good ideas and spread them well.
Probably a lot of other stuff, good and bad.
But the nightcap range wasn't logged, the Franklin not damned, and our local electricity service offers 100% non carbon polluting electricity for about an extra 70 bucks a year, (less than5%).
What role did psychedelics play in the develpoment of this network we now use to communicate?
Zappa is awesome, but someone who referred to tobacco and coffe as a food group probably didn't need to be cancered - they did it for themselves. Please excuse me while I go put on an expresso and light up. (Funny how we never learn).
PS Shrub we're cool. I was being a smartarse on that other thread. But I would definitely fit that group you refer to as the bottom 10%. By our societies standards, not the worlds. Not that i give a shit. I have everything I need, if I find I need or want other stuff. I get it.
the world will look after me. It told me so ;).
Starroute—your posts make good reading. I was wondering what you meant by the “real work” undertaken by your friends in the ‘60’s-- social activism? Spiritual transformation? Both? Just curious.
I have noted the comments in this thread with interest, because ever since I’ve been able to look back on the ‘80’s and view the ‘60’s/70’s in the context of the latter 20th century (I guess that would be since around 2000), I’ve marveled at the U turn taken by America in the span of a few decades—specifically the ten years of social upheaval before I was born compared to the Eighties of my adolescence. Maybe other people who are in their thirties find their position in the space-time continuum similarly mind-bending.
I was born in the early seventies into a cult whose members naively believed they were part of a “religious community.” In this specific instance, the spiritual leader, who had ties to Malcolm X, also had ties to the criminal underworld, and these elements tainted and eventually overwhelmed the more positive aspects of the community.
The sad irony that both the black Muslim movement and the American Indian Movement have in common is that their leaders-- and many later followers-- became radicalized in prison. Despite the noble aspirations of these leaders, and the worthy mission of liberating the minds of the imprisoned, this trend resulted in movements founded and pervaded by people with criminal pasts, criminal habits, and criminal connections.
Members of our group with darker agendas took cover behind the starry-eyed young majority whose intent was to live a spiritual life, reclaim their cultural identity and create a real community of brothers and sisters. The Man, in our case, took an active and overt interest in dismantling our community. Certainly, black militants posed a threat to the establishment-- which my parents and others were led to believe was the reason for the FBI surveillance-- but on a less romantic level, genuinely illicit activities were in fact being conducted by our fellows.
Most members left the group, profoundly disillusioned, after several men went to prison acting on a deluded plan of our leader that ended tragically. My parents spent the ‘80’s putting as much distance between themselves and the past as possible. Much later, my mother recalled that she did find happiness in this community and made lifelong friends there, while recognizing that everyone was young and of course foolish to place such trust in a deeply flawed leader. I have fond childhood memories and think a communal environment is ideal for raising children, but I myself couldn’t’ve coped long-term with the male chauvinism, racial paranoia and religious/ cult ideology that made true spiritual growth and true fraternity practically impossible. (And the women’s liberation movement is one major development that I view as crucial to social evolution, but had not taken place during the “free love” era of “Camelot.” This gives me hope that the sixties were just practice for a more meaningful and enduring social movement, the next step being an end to the criminalization of drug users and people of color.) Peace-- out.
Y'know, everything I learned about the 60's has been secondhand. I had the misfortune of spending my teen years in the 60's asshole, the late 70's. I was 13 when the US withdrew from Vietnam, so I'm ill-equipped to argue about the "spirit of the times' & what real part drug use played in its demise.
But, for what it's worth, i'd have to argue that what really killed the counter-culture was achieving its major goal which was ending the war.
Of course, you could argue that so much more could have been done but I think it would have been a hard sell without the impetus of that Vietnam guillotine hanging over kid's heads.
Not that there weren't knives at our throats, it's just that they became more subtle & hard to define.
&, after all, humans are naturally selfish. They don't need to be led down that road. To insist otherwise, is really really really fucking naive.
Almost as naive as believing that humans need video games & violent movies to coax them to kill.
I grew up in a lower middle class neighborhood. One that, by today's standards, would be a ghetto.
If anyone would have approached us with that peace & love shit we'd have beaten the snot out of him, plain & simple.
The only use we had for hippiedom was all those drugs y'all left lying around after y'all went disco.
That was the counter-cultures big unintended side effect, wasn't it?
Drugs were now everywhere. Mainly being sold by ex-hippies.
If I sound critical, i don't mean too. I liked drugs. Did a helluva lot of them. Loved acid & mushrooms & I even tried Hawaiian Baby WoodRose seeds on a couple of occasions.
Still smoke pot on occasion.
If it wasn't drugs, it was booze.
Booze was even easier to get.
Contrary to what most anti-drug propaganda preaches, that pot is the big gateway drug, I know different. Every druggie I knew started with booze, the biggest state sponsored drug on the market.
Anyway, our economic system eats rebellion for lunch & then shits out a marketable version right before bed.
As Bill Hicks said:
"By the way, if anyone here's in Marketing or Advertising....kill yourself.
No joke here. really. Seriously, kill yyourself.
There are no rationalizations for what you do, you are Satan's Little Helpers.
Kill yourself, kill yourself, kill yourself now.
there's no fucking joke...suck a tailpipe...hang yourself...borrow a pistol from an NRA buddy...do something to rid the world of your evil fucking presence,ok?
Y'know what bugs me though, is that everyone here who's in Marketing is saying, "Oh cool! Bill's going for that anti-marketing dollar. That's a huge market."
Aaaaaaaawhawha.....quit it, quit it. Don't turn everything into a dollar sign, please.
"Oooooooo the plea for sanity dollar....huge...huge market. Look at our research."
Even better, from Tool:
"All you read and
Wear or see and
Hear on TV
Is a product
Begging for your
Fatass dirty
Dollar
So...Shut up and
Buy"
Even better part 2:
From henry Rollins:
A thousand miles an hour going nowhere fast
Clinging to the details of your past
Talki about your damage and your wasting my time
Wanna be the king or queen, stand in line
All the numbers and the colours and the facts
Backed by the rumours and the figures and the stats
I think i'm gonna download my mind
Too damn bad if at the end of the day the only thoughts
In your brain are all the things that they say, what a waste
Too damn bad if at the end of the line you got no idea
What's on your own mind, you got no one to blame but yourself
Too much to know, too much to see
It might mean something to you but it's nothing to me
Its just another ad for someone's version of how they think it should be
Whatever else Richard you have great taste in music.
This thread got me spinning some late night webs, to spend some time on a project of snipping the content out of wildly subjective spiels about rock and roll in the 1960s that I saved several months ago. It all relates to the "parapolitical" history of the 1960s.
'Pissedoffcabbie' above has a good quote on this:
The Rockefeller gang really did buy themselves a revolution. They wanted a movement that was much farther left than their own, so as to seem centrist by comparison. They also wanted a leisure class whose politics were just an extension of their own self-righteousness, and they wanted a criminal class raised on hard drugs, and with a strong sense of hopelessness. And, they wanted to get down to the business of cult-building in order to grow cells of willing slaves. I'd say they got all that and more.
You read the below--and try to say the cabbie's not pissed for a good reason!
Sorry it's so long, so I placed it outside of RI. Though RI is the place to see it and tease dangerous facts together. It's bits picked from around seven articles I have found on the web (cited at the end). Some from a very questionable source (John Coleman), where I have removed his unattributable statements; though many other people write about this as well.
I would call it
"It Was Twenty Years Ago Today,"...That Crowley Drugged World Away: The Occult, CIA Drug Trade, and MKULTRA Dimensions of the 1960s as a Mass Psychological Operation
I suppose you could call this how Beatles, the Stones, MKULTRA, military intelligence 'live action social experimental projects', Project Mockingbird (already in place since WWII in the U.S. and only left in place after wartime for ongoing propaganda), Crowley-ism, drug pushing, drug muling, entertainment covers for CIA operations and MKULTRA, all got morphed rather sickly into being so huge it became a "social movement of psyops."
Quotes below only [any comments will be in brackets]:
TABLE OF CONTENTS
PART ONE: CROWLEY: 33RD DEGREE MASON CROWLEY AND THE GNOSTIC CATHOLIC CHURCH (THE OTO).
PART TWO: THE OTO AND THE OCCULT EUROPEAN AND U.S. INTELLIGENCE SERVICES AND MILITARY INDUSTRIAL COMPLEX
PART THREE: UPDATING DIONYSUS: FUTURE SHOCK, SYNTHETIC DRUGS, RECORDED MUSIC, AND THE MASS ELECTRONIC MEDIA
PART FOUR: OTO, SEX, AND U.S. ROCKET ENGINEERS WHO CALLED THEMSELVES THE ANTICHRIST
PART FIVE: TAVISTOCK'N'ROLL: MEET THE BEATLES AND THE STONES (SIGNED BY ELECTRICAL AND MECHANICAL INSTRUMENTS (EMI), ONE OF U.K.'S LARGEST PRODUCERS OF MILITARY ELECTRONICS AND POST WWII NAZI LEANING MUSIC RECORDINGS)—FORGET JFK AND KING
PART SIX: MKULTRA SEX, CIA DRUGS, AND SATANIC ROCK AND ROLL
PART SEVEN: PENTAWOOD AND THE FOURTH REICH: VISUAL PROGRAMMING BY THE MILITARY INDUSTRIAL-ENTERTAINMENT COMPLEX
INTRO QUOTE
"Clearly, the Beatles' album was dedicated to Satanist Aleister Crowley. It was released 20 years, nearly to the day, after Crowley's death in 1947, and its title song began with the lyrics, "It was twenty years ago today..." The album's cover featured a picture of Crowley. [Eerie, eh?]
...
read here
(There's one error that I see--I placed RFK's assassination in 1967 instead of 1968, otherwise I would stick by it.)
23.
Richard,
Couldn't agree more with you and Bill Hicks on advertising. Yesterday I heard a local DJ say this as his sign off for the day:
"It sucks to have to go to work to pay for something you already bought, that you didn't need. Think about that."
Aye, there's the nub.
Has anyone who frequents this website or Jeff himself ever read anything by Carlos Castaneda, such as Journey to Ixtlan, Tales of Power, etc. He wrote a long series of books which popularized a sort of Native American form of mysticism, which in fact was probably more esoteric than the common lore passed down from generation to generation by Native Americans. So much of the content of this website and people who post here seem to evoke the same ideas and aspirations of transcendence as evidenced in Castaneda's books. There was also something of a controversy surrounding the books whether they should be classified as fiction or non-fiction (non-fiction was the classification by their author).
Castaneda's books were not merely fiction, but bullshit. He was a fraud from stem to stern, a consummate bullshit artist. And that is from direct personal contact with, and knowledge of him personally, one of his actual teachers in Mexico, his followers, and his colleagues. To call him a 'trickster' would not even be to damn him with faint praise, but to defame even that low form of life.
Jeff: The news has finally caught up with you and, it seems, flown by at hypersonic speed. This is almost too much to grok:
Framing Nuwaubians as “al-Qaeda” Wannabes
Friday June 23rd 20006
Reading the ill-informed and hysterical garbage put out by the corporate media about the alleged Miami terrorists, or patsies rather, it becomes obvious the people arrested are not Muslims at all.
Instead, they appear to be “just a local African-American cult which mixed Judaism, Christianity and (a little bit of) Islam. It seems to be a of vague offshoot of the Moors group founded by Dwight York [aka Malachi Z. York ],” writes Juan Cole. York is the leader of the United Nuwaubian Nation of Moors.
“Nuwaubianism is an esoteric cosmology, a collection of religious teachings, and a set of cultural practices that is multifaceted and ever-changing,” explains Wikipedia.
It has influences and borrowings from many sources—such as a white new-age Blavatsky-influenced movement like Astara, the Rosicrucians, Freemasonry, the Shriners, the Moorish Science Temple of America, the revisionist Christianity and Islam of Mirza Ghulam Ahmad, the numerology of Rashad Khalifa, the ancient astronaut theories of Zecharia Sitchin, the alien cryptozoology of David Icke including the UFO mythology of greys and reptilians, more terrestrial cryptozoological stories like that of the chupacabra, the political theories of patriot mythology, modern scientific and pseudoscientific legends like those of Area 51, the Philadelphia Experiment, Project Blue Book, Montauk Project, and MJ-12, popular conspiracy theories such as those about the Illuminati or multiple clones of members of the Bilderberg Group, a paperback on fortune telling, and hollow earth theories.
Earlier today, reading sketchy corporate media accounts, I considered the possibility the members of this alleged terrorist group were actually members of the Nation of Islam. In order to spread anti-Muslim hysteria far and wide, and give it a “homegrown” spin, it makes perfect sense for the FBI and the Justice Department to go after the Nation. In fact, according to the Wikipedia write-up linked above, some “of the Nuwaubian racial doctrine borrows from Moorish Science and the Nation of Islam. York’s racial philosophy explicitly indicates that certain blacks—’Nubians’ or ‘Melanites’—are of a superior race in fact as well as in descent. Nubian explanations of racial differences are quite complex and “draw on the Hebrew creation myths from Genesis.”
It is interesting to note the Nubians, or Nuwaubians, believe in a tailored version of the New World Order conspiracy: “The Illuminati have nurtured a child, Satan’s son, who was born on 6 June 1966 at the Dakota House on 72nd Street in New York to the Rothschild/Kennedy families. The Pope was present at the birth and performed necromantic ceremonies. The child was raised by former U.S. president Richard Nixon and now lives in Belgium, where it is hooked up bodily to a computer called ‘The Beast 3M’ or ‘3666.’”
“York and the Nuwaubians came under increased government scrutiny in the early-1990s after building Tama-Re, an ancient Egyptian-themed ‘city’ featuring pyramids, temples, and living quarters for hundreds of his followers, in Putnam County, Georgia near Eatonton. He was arrested in May of 2002, charged with over 100 counts of child molestation and other charges, and was convicted in 2004 and sentenced to 135 years in prison,” Wikipedia notes. In October, 2005, a federal appeals court upheld York’s conviction. “The federal government seized the 476-acre Nuwaubian compound in August 2004 and sold it in June,” the Associated Press reported at the time.
In short, York and the Nuwaubians have nothing to do with Islam or “al-Qaeda,” as the dissembling corporate media would have us believe. Obviously, Osama bin Laden, or the myth of Osama bin Laden, would consider the Nuwaubians infidels, even more than the phantom al-Zarqawi considered Shi’ites infidels to be slaughtered in numbers, or so the Pentagon has told us over the last couple years.
It appears the FBI informer assigned to this case spent a lot of time convincing the young Nuwaubians in the poverty-wracked Liberty City section of Miami that “al-Qaeda” was interested in their struggle against the “white devils,” but then, considering the shameful history of entrapment and law-breaking on the part of the FBI, we will probably never know what sort of enticement, if any, was used to snare these apparently deluded young African-Americans.
"The smellier the hippy,the bigger the trust fund..." Peter Bagge Hate magazine Fantagraphics mid 90s
The 60s in the UK was essentially 12 people in a room in Kensington,10 of these had titles.
My own opinion PUNK was more profound and far reaching and last but not least
"We had the experience but lost the meaning" TS ELIOT
Yeah, within a decade, I would say "they" were definitely far more terrified of the punk music movement than the roped-and-doped hippie politico-music movement.
What was the title of this film? If you have ever seen that Sex Pistols documentary film where the Sex Pistols and particuarly anarchist-hyper-wit Rotten were surrounded by what looked like thousands of London police around the Themes, there was real fear in the establishment's eyes by the late 1970s to early 1980s. It really looked like the Sex Pistols had locked down London, instead of visa versa.
Comments on that welcome.
Sid and Nancy perhaps?
All PUNk can be attributed to is: the exposure of governments use of rasism to keep the masses distracted, AND the MIGHTY JELLO BIAFRA!!!
Whatever eats you, becomes you.
I respectfully disagree. I think it's more like Bulimia when talking about Empire/Babylon. In order to satisfy its insatiable appetite for pain, suffering, flesh and blood, it devours its willing, and unwillingly victims only to vomit the wretched remains shortly thereafter.
Afterall, The White Man has not become the Indian. In fact, an argument can be made for the opposite. The Indians have become The White Man; see Casinos.
This piece, "The Original Captain Trips," may be of interest and relevance in the current discussion.
Link
Your fantasy is just that. It is not even human nature that is the problem. It is the nature of the beasts who run things, and strive to keep most decent humans, men and women, ignorant, enslaved, afraid, and selfish.
We are better than that. And we must start acting like it damn soon. Or else the whole thing is going to go up in flames while we watch it on tv, or blog about it.
Wake up and go do something meaningful besides this.
Amen, Brother Ben!!!
I agree.....it's getting silly, at this point. It's not anough for us to go on our merry ways and be better people, individually. Thta won't change a God Damned thing.
I have to laugh at this [seudo bickering over historical events, i.e. were the hippies a CIA Contravention.
Folks, the fuses have been lit. This is not the time to put on our red velvet jackets and puff on our pipes whilst grappling pedanticly.
The time has come. We must get off our asses. The salvation of mankind, both spiritually and physically, is at stake.
I'm not just Whistlering Dixie.
Sorry to stray from the topic, but 7:18 makes a good point. It appears to me that the public is being prepared for the meme that common criminals can easily be enlisted by terrorists to do their bidding. Therefore the distinction between criminal and terrorist will blur. Those who already have trouble distinguishing between law-abiding people of color and gangster / criminals and live in fear of being robbed or raped by such could soon be asked to ponder the possibility that robbers and rapists could be plotting to bomb their office buildings. They'll be relieved when the government takes the necessary measure of melding the police with the military is introduced, and the currently redundant supermax prisons will provide a perfect repository for these supercriminals.
Nice segway into another powerful movement called Punk. John Lydon (aka Johnny Rotten) is and was my hero as were Iggy Pop and the MC5, who knew how to put together mind-blowing music and send shockwaves through their audience. The success of these bands and others was in the simple articulation of working class rage and youthful dispossession. There were a number of bands in the days of Punk (almost too many to name and give their due) that shook a fist at the face of control and the bullshit disposable lifestyle and screamed... "I want more! I'm opting out of your fake, meaningless world and reject your control!". Being one of the hardcore veterans of that war, I remember the military/intelligence concerns were very distressed and active in their drive to sabotage, contain and divert the Punk/Hardcore youth movement. They tried the drug pacification tactic on them and watch the implosion, but it only worked for so long until some kids in Washington D.C. came up with 'Straight Edge' which was no drinking, no drugs and no fucking around (abject promiscuity). Then there was an influx and attempted coup by skinheads and organized white supremacist thug elements, that sometimes had to be literally be beaten back. Before that, they sometimes used thug intelligence cut-outs to attack, threaten or attack. Like when Johnny Rotten was attacked on at least 2 occasions, one of which was with murderous intent. Of these in particular, I have no doubt of MI-6 and MI-5's orchestrations. The NSA through the INS made stipulations that harrassed and prevented political music artists with criminal records from entering the states. Later it was cooperative CIA involvement and even Mossad (defending threatened financial interests) and I also don't rule out that the prostitute Nancy Spungen, could have been secured and inserted as an agent of final destruction. It certainly has the stink of it. And Johnny Rotten himself is documentated as stating that as soon as the Sex Pistols hit the shores of America the CIA and FBI were stalking, spying and monitoring them.
All this aside, what we had was yet another viable, and for the most part progressive movement, undermined by the Hell-Bringers of our oppression. One has to also realize that this was a successful youth movement in the face of complete media hostilities! Will there ever be another youth movement like the Hippies/Yippies and Punks? Possible, but doubtful, as there's PSYOP programming and enough bread and circus to keep the lid firmly in place.
But still where there's a will, there's a way... it only takes a very, very few motivated and disciplined people to start a ruck up! Theres an saying that goes - "When the means to freedom are made impossible then revolution is inevitable"
For a better picture of the working class underpinnings and revolutionary continuity of Punk check out the 2 great documentaries:
The Filth and the Fury
Punk: Attitude
The intelligence agencies were in large part responsible for the destruction of Punk and they used sophisticated means to achieve their ends. A lot was done through media co-option, sell-outs and a movement with sustainable drive that couldn't bridge out of a recycling pigeon-hole of music. It was so much more... and once the attitude, focus and creativity was lost, so was the motion.
We've learned a lot form the previous youth movements and it behooves us to take the successes and positives from it and form another strong move forward.
The Hippies:
Pros - Large counter culture movement, the fostering of love, acceptance and the rejection of backward living and thinking.
Cons - Drugs, lethargy, promotion of passivity.
Yippies:
Pros - Creative activism, progessive ideals, unity across all lines, and total rejection of the degenerate system.
Cons - Drugs, intelligence infiltration, agent provocateurs, liberal (as in white dominated, middle class, collaborationist) co-option.
Punk/Hardcore/Reggae:
Pros - Strong fuck you attitude with a reason and focus, DIY (Do It Yourself) extreme creativity through multiple artistic disciplines, truth as-it-is philosophy, articulated rage and angst; rejection of the system and it's backwards, life-destructive lifestyle and suffocatting ennui. Global movement with youthful progression, musically centered and self-limited. In the case of Reggae it was the critical empowerment of the African and working class massive, anti-colonial, anti-system and anti-oppression lyrics within an undulating drop down rhythm that was easily relatable to most.
Cons - Drugs, thugs, co-option by media, joke bands that diluted the message and self-deprecated Punk; limited focus as a progressive force, music as self-containing regurgitating center.
Rap/Hip Hop:
Pros: Infusion of new energy and focus, global appeal accross all racial & cultural lines, strong DIY ethic, articulation of African oriented concerns and interests, powerful messages and rage against oppressive environment, unity and bold fresh musical innovations.
Cons - Intelligence contrived and financed 'Gangsta' rap, drugs, alcohol, sexist (misogynist) denigration of women, insipid propagation of base materialism, promotion of genocidal violence, generally musically centered with self-limiting political progressive action.
This is just a small, off-the-top of my head summarization of the movements that any positive contributions from others, would bring about a necessary clarity that we can all benefit from. I thought about the inclusion of the Jitterbug, Swing, Beat, and the Rock & Roll era's however I wanted to limit the scope to more recent generations and politically threatening movements rather than cultural progressions.
Musical movements have no inherent political significance. They provide soundtracks for individuals and like-minded groups who share the same tastes, nothing more. In all but the most didactic examples, musical lyricism is easily subordinated to individual political predilections.
Speaking of lyricism- having done a bit of study on ritual performance, I've learned that lyrics are about invocation or evocation. The human mind does sarcasm poorly when it's propelled into the liminal space, which is one of the main functions of amplified, beat-heavy music. It tends to react to verbal suggestion literally, and with immediacy.
Given that context, what are the lyrics of that Tool song really invoking- empowerment, or disempowerment? Resistance, or resignation?
I find the Rollins lyric a lot more thoughtful.
And the "chronological linear progression" idea of music is simply laughable. It should be plain by now that genres of music and cultural movements don't supplant each other. They're more like overlapping ecologies. The adaptive and the broad-minded are able to discern value beyond constraints of form, which are often simply verbal pigeonholes and mythologies contrived by professional critics and reified by their naive readership.
The factors I've noted as following chronological linear progression in the field of popular music are the increasing corporate control over venue access, the increased emphasis on pre-recorded music over live skills, the increased reliance on simple mass-appeal formulas, and the formatting of musical taste through narrowcasting genres by commercial broadcast outlets.
When it comes to media outlets for music, there are countervailing trends- listener-supported and programmed radio and Internet broadcast outlets, podcasting, and the increased diversity represented by some satellite radio channels.
Mostly, you're on your own. Just like always.
The invoking of ubiquitous "intelligence manipulation" is a poor excuse as an explanation for the shortcomings of cultural movements- which are oft exaggerated by those impatient for results, or for other reasons. It's all too esy to hurl recriminations and accusations of failure. But it's ultimately immature, the cry of a dependent child that their elders have betrayed them.
Your favorite artists are not your parents. Neither are they political leaders, unless they explicitly declare and assume the role. The sort of infulence they wield is different.
Meanwhile, you're supposed to be an adult- after a while, anyway. That means taking personal responsibility for your decisions. There's often a definite problem with the attitude of many of the posters I've seen on this forum in that regard. They seem to want to claim that every slip, obstacle, untoward consequence, or thwarting of their goals is the result of a Grand Unified Satanic Right Wing Intelligence Project that the victims are powerless to resist.
Cultural alternatives are works in progress, they were never destined to be instantaneous tidal waves of Utopia.
RDR stated - "The invoking of ubiquitous "intelligence manipulation" is a poor excuse as an explanation for the shortcomings of cultural movements- which are oft exaggerated by those impatient for results, or for other reasons. It's all too esy to hurl recriminations and accusations of failure. But it's ultimately immature, the cry of a dependent child that their elders have betrayed them."
That to me is a very short-sighted and ill informed view of the events that transpired to take down cultural/political threats to the empire. Sure there was infighting, betrayal, apathy and a host of other all too human frailties. But it is an absolute fact that intelligence manipulations and illegal intrusions were used to calculatingly exacerbate and derail these movements to failure. Read up on COINTELPRO, Operation Chaos, MK-ULTRA, the IRAN-CONTRA crimes, ultra-fascist Louis O. Giuffreda and the creation of SWAT, military exercises REX-84 & GRECIAN FIREBOLT-96 and you'll see the incontrovertible pattern of military and intelligence subterfuge and intervention throughout every single progressive movement to this day.
I didn't deny the existence of counterintelligence projects and black ops by State forces of reaction, some of which may conceivably have been directed at the manipulation, control, or suppression of cultural phenomena as well as political movements. But I'm recurrently hearing it being used as a catch-all accusation, with no evidence offered in support. I'm not simply going to nod my head in agreement every time someone hurls the charge. In many cases, there are plain indications that contradict the accusations. Although in the usual case, they're simply offered as vague insinuations rather than providing any clear-cut specifics, which makes it difficult to bring up any attempt at refutation. Anyway, it's often the nature of such facile accusations that they assume the form of Articles Of Faith, rather than evidence-based indictments. And anyone who attempts to critique such statements is subject to accusations of being an infiltrator, agent provocateur, counter-revolutionary, etc. A heretic...and this remains the case even if the accused knows more about the specifics of actual historically proven political conspiracies than their accusers.
A thought on Rap HipHop.
Went to the grocery store to get some Fennel and Hummus for lunch, and as I walked accross the parking lot to the store, some dipstick had his windows rolled down blaring Hip Hop. The dipstick was a privileged, suburban, white brat driving ever so slowly, and boastfully through the parking lot in his Mommy's and Daddy's Mercury SUV.
Priceless......and for everything else there's Mastercard....including the Mercury.
The lyrics may be meaningful (on occasion), but the rest of it's for shit. Once again, it's containment, whether purposeful, or not. Fans are better than revolutionaries, afterall.
RDR-
The evidence remains documented and incontrovertible despite one's cognitive dissonance to see it. If are making the argument that denies said evidence, the onus is on you to provide objective substantiation for such general and arbitrarily spiteful claims.
I contributed positively as always, with the intent and spirit of mass enlightenment, sharing of knowledge and progression of topic. Without need of curiously reactive and rude individuals to provide snide, derisive commentary. It's one thing to prove a contrary case objectively, towards the pursuit of edification for all, and it's quite another to use disrespect and derision to prove one's own ambiguous point. Please build your self-esteem at some else's expense.
And then there was this:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j4jKJVQp0ns&search=emergency%20broadcast%20network
or just go to Youtube and search EBN We Will Rock You version 2.
Media jamming at its best
To RDR, on this quote:
"I didn't deny the existence of counterintelligence projects and black ops by State forces of reaction, some of which may conceivably have been directed at the manipulation, control, or suppression of cultural phenomena as well as political movements. But I'm recurrently hearing it being used as a catch-all accusation, with no evidence offered in support. I'm not simply going to nod my head in agreement every time someone hurls the charge. In many cases, there are plain indications that contradict the accusations. Although in the usual case, they're simply offered as vague insinuations rather than providing any clear-cut specifics, which makes it difficult to bring up any attempt at refutation."
Don't look now. You're guilty of failing on your own standards of documentation and specifics in the inverse to back up your own claim. It would certainly be more germane to walk your own talk to benefit us all, instead of philosophize on abstracts you yourself seem to depend upon more than this thread really has.
It would be useful to provide details and specifics of what you are thinking about for us, if you want to, so I invite you to do that.
Whatever eats you, becomes you.
I also must respectfully disagree. If that were the case, surely all the souls consumed by British-American “free trade” violence over the last hundred and fifty years or so would have had a more tangible effect on our current situation.
Love isn’t all you need. In addition you need awareness/consciousness and knowledge/discernment, without which every choice/action is equivalent and it would make no difference, to your, your neighbor’s or the world’s karma whether you loved your neighbor or killed him. It makes all the difference in the world….
Just got done watching a great movie on IFC called Matewan. It was about the Coal Miners' rebellion in West Virginia in the early decades of the 20th Century.
Close to 100 years may have passed, but the strategies employed to divide and conquer are still alive and well today, if you use your eyes as they were meant ot be used.
Actually, it is *extremely* possible to argue that the White Man has 'become' the Indian -- or, to phrase it more modestly, that whatever is valuable and distinctive in American culture bears a strong imprint of Indian influence.
For example, here's one quote I come up by a little googling:
Because historians tend to focus on military engagements and changes in national boundaries, our population has little understanding of cultural and social interactions. In an interesting twist of interpretation, Felix Cohen proposed, in a 1952 article called "Americanizing the White Man," That "(historians) have seen America only as an imitation of Europe," but that "the real epic of America is the yet unfinished story of the Americanization of the white man."
He defines Americanism as largely a product of the influence of Indian culture on the white European settlers. In an equally bold statement, Francis Jennings in The Invasion of America: Indians, Colonialism and The Cant of Conquest (1975) states that "What white (American) society owes to Indian society, as much as to any other source, is the mere fact of its existence." . . .
During the era, Benjamin Franklin published twenty-six treaty accounts and represented the state of Pennsylvania as an Indian commissioner. In the pre-Revolutionary period, when he and his friends were advocating a federal union of the colonies, no European model was found to be suitable. Franklin's contact with the Iroquois influenced many key ideas for a new form of government -- federalism, equality, natural rights, freedom of religion, property rights, etc. At the 1744 treaty council, by Franklin's account, Canassatego, speaker for the great council at Onondaga, recommended that the colonies form a union in common defense under a federal government: "We are a powerful Confederacy, and by your observing the same methods our wise forefathers have taken, you will acquire much strength and power; therefore, whatever befalls you, do not fall out with one another."
In arguing for such a plan, Franklin stressed the fact that the individual nations of the confederacy managed their own internal affairs without interference from the Grand Council.
Twenty years after Franklin 's plan was defeated at the Albany congress, it reappeared in the Declaration of Independence and the Articles of Confederation. Franklin, Jefferson, John Adams, and George Washington were all familiar with the Iroquois polity. There is also strong scholarly evidence that European philosophers such as Locke, Roussea, More, and Hobbes were familiar with the societies of the American Indians. The integration of this knowledge into their theories of utopias and natural societies further inspired the U.S. founding fathers.
I've also seen it argued that American folk religion, as it developed in the early 1800's, bore -- and still bears -- a strong Indian imprint.
It is the affectation of conquerors to pride themselves on being entirely distinct from and innately superior to the conquered, but this is rarely, if ever, the actuality. In the case of America, our elites have regularly pretended to be far more European than they truly are. But the true mythic ancestors of modern Americans are primarily akin to the literary figure of Leatherstocking -- colonists who had died to the ways of the Old World and assumed the garb of the New as the essential means for their survival.
Tal:
I agree that along with love one needs to bring to bear discriminative intelligence (awareness/consciousness must be present for either love or discriminating wisdom to exist, so it is irrelevant).
But what the heck do you mean by your second paragraph? I don't get it at all. Please elaborate.
O-man: You list a "fuck-you attitude" as if it's some kind of positive value. Not hardly. Tried to accomplish anything in the real world lately? FUA is rarely of help. Amost never.
RDR: I don't think you are snide, just disingenuous, and with an over-inflated vocabulary. I agree with O-man's rebuttal.
Shrub: Keep on trucking, bro'. Just remember, it's a long haul. Illegitimi non carborundum.
Star: I respectfully beg to disagree almost completely with what you just wrote. Just because Ben Franklin may have borrowed an idea from the Iroquois (I guess that puts him and you in league with Dwight Z. York, imprisoned leader of the Nuwaubian cult, progenitor of the Liberty City 7 in Miami), it is nevertheless a far cry and a leap across a chasm too far to claim that whitebread, darkie-killing, poor people hating American imperialists are anything like the Indians against whom they commit literal genocide and from whom they stole this continent at gunpoint, rifle point, cannon and gatling gun muzzle.
To put it mildly......GET REAL.
In today's world it is the Muslims, especially the Arabs, who are the new "Indians". They are tribal in their ways, more tolerant and trusting and thus exploitable than the Western White man, and they are the object of well over a century of hard targeted imperialism and an ongoing program of genocide.
Wake up and smell the parallels.
tal -- to address your comment, yes, of course, love makes a difference. No doubt the US wouldn't be as thoroughly fucked as it is at this moment if it had absorbed the contributions of the Indians without wholesale slaughter.
But that doesn't negate the fact that the the merger of cultures did happen. It happened most strongly and productively where it was marked by love and mutual respect -- but it happened in all cases where there was contact, willy-nilly.
In the same way, all of present-day American culture bears some degree of hippie imprint, even though the original hippies were trashed over thirty years ago. Some of those marks are deeply serious and sensible -- from childbirth practices to recycling -- while others are more frivolous, like the current revival of hippie fashion. (I mean, pink and purple paisley ties for businessmen? Who's kidding whom with that?)
But very little in this world is ever truly lost, and when cultures collide -- no matter how much violence and bad feeling may be involved -- there is a tendency for the most useful and productive ideas of both to emerge in a new synthesis.
To jules: thanks for giving me a chuckle. I just re-read what I posted & thought 'what a bunch of horseshit. The only good thing here are the goddamn quotes from other people.' Then I read your post & I had to laugh. You politely said pretty much the same thing.
I'll just put it down to my ability to pretty much massacre any idea I have by the time it exits my fingertips.
I also have a way off topic question for everyone here.
On the night that Gorge Bush declared slaughter on Iraq, I read a news story on the Yahoo home page about a video gaffe that occured before GW's speech. Apparently someone left the video feed on between the press room & the place where Bush gives his speeches. Mr. Bush was observed pumping his fist in the air Arsenio style while saying "Feels good" right before his 'Let's blow Iraq to hell' speech. I wanted to save this but I was called away from the computer for about 20 minutes & when i returned it was pulled from Yahoo's web-site. I've never been able to find a reference to this since that time.
Does anyone else remember this or did I hallucinate the whole thing?
Star: I think that is a very insidious kind of wishful thinking, to wit: I kill you and annihilate your culture but, gee, it's okay because I assimilate a little of it or syncretically carry on some fragment of it? What's that new doctrine: You are what you kill?
Nah. No way. I ain't buying that load o' bull. Nothing but self-justification for murderous world-destroyers.
Anonymous 10:15 -
And I would argue that if we're going halfway around the world to make war on the Moslems, it must mean there is something we need to learn from them very badly.
But I can see this is one of those points where it is extremely difficult to make myself clear and where I can too easily lay myself open to charges of endorsing violence or worse.
So let me say merely that events in this world are not always what they appear to be on the surface -- and that factors which appear to be acting in opposition may not be doing so in actuality.
Call it mythopoeic thinking if you will -- in which it is a truism that the executioner, the victim, and the recipient of the sacrifice are all the same god -- or an exercise in the reconciliation of opposites.
And to anonymous 10:29 -- yes, this sort of thinking *can* be a dangerous tool in the wrong hands -- but then, so is the erection of hard dichotomies between good guys and bad guys. I tend to believe that "you become what you kill" might be more of a discouragement to war and invasion in the long run than the contemporary American notion that you can kill at long-distance and never be touched by it.
I sense a pattern here:
http://www.thenation.com/doc/20060710/greider
Amid all his other troubles, Vice President Richard Cheney is now stalked by a ghost from his past--the Richard Cheney who for five years was CEO of the Halliburton Company. When he left Halliburton in 2000 to become George W. Bush's running mate, the Republican ticket was touted as two tough-minded business executives running against wimpish politicians. "The American people should be pleased they have a vice presidential nominee who has been successful in business," Karen Hughes, Bush's then-communications director, enthused.
A rather different story is told by a class-action investor lawsuit against Halliburton, recently revived after languishing for four years. It describes Cheney as not much different from other corporate titans ensnared by accusations of fraud. Brushing aside facts and subordinates' warnings, CEO Cheney made a series of daring but wrong decisions that were disastrous for the company. The managerial incompetence was compounded by fraudulent accounting gimmicks that concealed the company's true condition. Cheney, however, relentlessly issued bullish assurances, hiding the losses and pumping up the stock price.
Eventually, the truth caught up with the company--its stock tanked--but Cheney was already off to Washington, $40 million richer and running the country. He sold his shares at the top. HAL, the Halliburton stock symbol, began falling a few months after his resignation, from $53 to an eventual low of $8. By then Bush/Cheney were rolling out another bold venture--the invasion of Iraq.
But I can see this is one of those points where it is extremely difficult to make myself clear and where I can too easily lay myself open to charges of endorsing violence or worse.
No, I think it's just a weak argument. It's true, but only on a limited and abstract level, like me setting my neighbor's house on fire and then telling them that they shouldn't get mad because ultimately, all is one.
Someone who steps on ants all the time gets nowhere near the understanding of ants as a myrmecologist would. And I consider meditation a much better path to self-awareness than suicide.
He defines Americanism as largely a product of the influence of Indian culture on the white European settlers.
Besides which, it's cultures, plural, and the indigenous people of this land never called it "America," that was the name the settlers gave it.
silly rabbit said:
"No, I think it's just a weak argument. It's true, but only on a limited and abstract level, like me setting my neighbor's house on fire and then telling them that they shouldn't get mad because ultimately, all is one."
Star is trying to make a point that William Irwin Thompson made very well in his examination of the ways that ideas have spread, through conquest, in the past.
But the pattern only appears in retrospect. You can't say, "I am spreading an idea so conquest is okay." And this is not what Star is saying.
In the past, the tribal mind was so insular that conquest was the only way that ideas could effectively spread.
Currently, I am not sure that the U.S. has any useful ideas that can be spread to the tribal Moselem world. We do, however, have useful technologies. The pressure that we are putting on them is forcing them to adopt cell phone technology, in order to protect themselves.
This is utterly subversive, both to their cultures and to our own. Think of it as the ways that information moves. In the past, information had to move up a hierarchy before it was filtered and redistributed to the masses.
Now, information is simply moving from end-user to end-user. It will take a while for this all to shake down. But don't underestimate the effects.
The hierarchy in the U.S. is currently trying to channel all of this information flow through the old hierarchies so that they can control it. Good luck, fuckers.
The fact is that, right here, right now, you're staring at a computer, and (maybe) telling yourself that *this* *here* IS "doing something" to change the world/yourself. Which is exactly the way "they" like it.
Close down your computer, go outside. Everything else is vain self-deception. No matter what you read or write "here".
"The fact is that, right here, right now, you're staring at a computer, and (maybe) telling yourself that *this* *here* IS "doing something" to change the world/yourself. Which is exactly the way "they" like it."
I don't think this is good advice at all. There is no single monolithic "they" and none of the many "they"s active out there todayy are anywhere near omnipotent. "They" have not mapped out everybody's life and endgamed every option. Talking on the Internet is not futile - in fact, discussion and communication is the *only* way change happens. Action without understanding is merely empty, noisy spectacle, and action in a void, by individuals believing they are each isolated and alone, doubly so.
You can't change either the world or yourself if you don't know what needs to be changed, is what I'm saying. And you don't know what needs to be changed unless you start doing some seriously frivolous chatting.
I should add: I don't see the Internet as some mystical saviour. But looking at the history of communications, the advent of one-way, centralised mass media like TV and radio is pretty recent, and I think has skewed our dialog pretty heavily. Electronic many-to-many communications media like blogs (and BBSes before them, and ham/CB radio before that) are only just now retipping that balance back to what was halfway normal *before* radio and TV started dumbing us all down.
And already the powers that be are starting to figure this out and try to find ways of exploiting and/or shutting down the budding Internet conversation before it shakes the world too much. We've got a pretty short window of opportunity here. We may not have this technology, and this level of conversational freedom, forever.
Let's not waste time *not* chatting on the Internet.
Dan said:
Star is trying to make a point that William Irwin Thompson made very well in his examination of the ways that ideas have spread, through conquest, in the past.
But the pattern only appears in retrospect. You can't say, "I am spreading an idea so conquest is okay." And this is not what Star is saying.
Yes, and I understand the point she's making, and like I said, it is true to a limited and abstract extent. But by citing "the indians" as an example of "a culture" that benefited from and influenced the American culture, she's ignoring the fact that entire tribes were wiped off the face of the earth-- their cultures and languages lost.
You make a good point Nate, but I'll call you on one assumption we are asked to agree to, which may or may not be valid.
you said,
"There is no single monolithic "they" and none of the many "they"s active out there todayy are anywhere near omnipotent. "They" have not mapped out everybody's life and endgamed every option."
It is easy to assume that this is so, but I think that take is mostly that you can't see it any other way. That is, actual evidence isn't there to support it.
So, it could be that it is merely coincidence that all this bad shit is happening by the efforts of unrelated perps, or it could also be that these puppet perps are all in the same program, perhaps aware only of a small part of it.
To the question of How are they controlled, I would suggest the usual, threats, blackmail, mind control, greed. One gets in too deep too fast, and cannot extract himself if he changes his mind.
My opinion is that we are not seeing a natural devolution of human nature, but instead a truly evil and ingenius influence intended to break/enslave, weaken humanity.
I'll leave it that for now.
Anonymous (love that "Anonymous") said:
"You're guilty of failing on your own standards of documentation and specifics in the inverse to back up your own claim. It would certainly be more germane to walk your own talk to benefit us all, instead of philosophize on abstracts you yourself seem to depend upon more than this thread really has.
It would be useful to provide details and specifics of what you are thinking about for us, if you want to, so I invite you to do that."
Let's start by unpacking Omega Man's comments:
"1) Prolific CIA/DoD insertions of LSD and other psychotropics to distract and disorient. Then have your paid PSYOPs stooges (Timothy Leary) propagate the benefits of drug use to the burgeoning youth culture, and you have an MK-DELTA field operation."
A cartoonish oversimplification and misconstruing of the social history of the 1960s. Typical of such oversimplifications, no paragraph-long reply could serve as convincing refutation. If Omega Man wants to turn it into a topic for debate on the forum, I'll be glad to do it. ( But it will take a while, I don't always have an of time to spend on such a project, like I do today. )
Even more ironic that Omega Man, who claims to deplore "the use of LSD and other psychotropics", considers himself to be "down" with "the Yippies"- the epitome of the politicized prosyletization of LSD.
As for the characterization of Tim Leary as a "psyops stooge"- for one thing, you're completely over-valuing his role in the rise of the popularity of LSD- such as it was, it was never all that popular as a mass phenomenon. It would be illuminating if more people read Leary's own personal accounts of the era, or Richard Alpert/Baba Ram Dass's Be Here Now, or the Hoffer and Osmond's research studies on topics like the role of LSD in combatting alcoholism, or LSD discoverer Albert Hofmann's autobiography, LSD: My Problem Child, instead of signing off on LaRouchean canards and the same tired, skewed interpretations of Acid Dreams and Storming Heaven, two books that get quoted out of context ad nauseum by those with no historical memory of their own. Expand your reading, and your research. Shit ain't as simple as your Power Point Presentation makes it appear.
"2) The FBI's COINTELPRO, otherwise known as America's Phoenix Project."
Total hyperbole. Look no further than the statistics. The Phoenix Program took out tens of thousands of Vietnamese with bullets, knife blades, and garottes. If there had been a Phoenix Project in the USA, there would be no surviving leaders from the radical Left in the 1960s. I don't want to minimize the raid that killed Fred Hampton in his sleep, but it was obviously the exception, and not the rule. Where is Elaine Brown today, for instance? Or Angela Davis, or Bernadine Dohrn, or David Hilliard, or Bobby Seale? Did the CIA put the crack pipe in the mouth of Huey Newton, or Eldrige Cleaver, both of them having survived the 1960s by 20 years? I don't recall any Vietcong being assasinated by that method in Vietnam.
I keep hearing COINTELPRO invoked at every turn to account for the failures of every militant Left group in the USA in the 1960s. It's an easy cop-out.
Furthermore, it's disempowering to the reformation of progressive moements in the present day- first, by engendering a sense of hopelessness and paranoid catatonia; second, by not encouraging the much-needed self-examination and self-discipline required to keep activist organizations from foundering on character weaknesses and ego trips. Much of what COINTELPRO did was to simply play on the pre-existing tensions and conflicts in radical groups. The way to deal with that is to develop the maturity to required to serve as an immune system. Power-trippers, egotists, those who glorify the "direct action" of reckless militancy, violence, and terror are always prone to getting caught in their own paranoid snares...read Robin Morgan's The Demon Lover, it's all in there. No government manipulation required.
"3) The use of cut-out black ops like the Manson family to castigate hippies as psychotic and consumed with bloodlust."
The idea that Manson was being run by some government black ops COINTELPRO program is sheer conjecture. Wider occult involvement, quite possibly. Given the openess and innocence of the era at the outset, its exploitation by forces of criminal and even radical occultist evil was inevitable. But considering the paucity of evidence, deeming Manson a government project is simply paranoid wishful thinking- much along the lines of Dave McGowan's book that attempts to link the inspiration of every serial killer in the USA to an ongoing CIA psyops project.
"4) The use of pseudo-gang terrorists such as the SLA, Karenga's US organization, Team Zodiac, the Zebra Killings, and others to wreak havoc on the populace. The Problem-Reaction-Solution dynamic that has "crazies" wreak havoc on the populace, then in comes the government with paramiltary solutions like SWAT."
I can accept the idea that the SLA may have been a government-ispired provocateur organization- but I haven't seen any evidence that any of the others were. I mean, really- the Zebra Killers, a CIA mind-control project? They had no control over their actions, the CIA-Devil made them do it? You think you know who the Zodiac killer is, right down to their intelligence connections? Would you please apprise the rest of us about the damning details? For that matter, the importance of any of those incidents and organizations to the Zeitgeist of the late 1960s and early 1970s is exaggerated, in order to buttress a pre-conceived thesis. No one I know was saying "the Zebra killers...another dagger in the heart of the counterculture."
5) "Use of spies, agent provocateurs, moles and other destructive elements to destroy the leadership and reputation of legitimate progressive organizations."
First, you've already mentioned that one- characterizing it as "America's Phoenix program." But that doesn't account for what happened to the Weathermen. Neither does it account for Huey Newton doing things like pistol-whipping his tailor. Blaming every last division in radical Left organizations on COINTELPRO is simply revising history to suit a cherished political line. The fact is that radical Left politics- as a coherent ideology per se- never made any serious inroads with American youth, even at the height of the 1960s.
"6) Use of a Viet Nam draft as a side cull of some of the potentially 'troublesome' working class youth."
More oversimplification and shoehorning, for the sake of buttressing a pre-conceived vulgar Marxist political thesis. It disregards the fact that the heart of anti-Vietnam war opposition was never found in the working-class of the 1960s and early 1970s, it was in the colleges. In fact, the voting demographics clearly indicate that they were among the groups most firmly in the Nixon camp. When working-class youth were found in organized demonstrations in the streets, it was most frequently on the other side of "the barricades" (such as they were- that's more of a French thing) the vanguard of the pro-Vietnam war faction. Because I'm not a Marxist, I'm not going to spend time wringing my hands, belaboring or bemoaning that fact. There were a lot of reasons for it, it doesn't lend itself to facile reductive analysis of vulgar Marxism or Freudianism. But it was a fact. The number of working-class youth in the 1960s radical Left was miniscule. And the urban Black Panthers largely emphasized organizing the "lumpenproletariat"- a category separate from the working classes of their communities.
"7) The final coup de grace... pump massive amounts of Heroin into America as a pacification agent ala the 'Opium Wars' that was used to counteract the insurgent movement in China. The problem of not enough 'customers' was solved by Nixon and the Narcotics Bureau, who effectively dried up the pot supply. This in turn drove the prices for weed up extensively and made Heroin a more attractive option. Not to mention all of the money to be made for intel black bugets, mobsters and violent freelancers whose trade destablized familes and destroyed neighborhoods. You also have the law and order crowd satiated with new freedom and privacy destructive laws and draconian enforcement methods."
That's a complicated topic, worthy of a separate discussion. For now, all I can say is that it's completely inadequate as an explanation for the demise of the 1960s counterculture. For one thing, except for perhaps a few weeks following 1969s Operation Intercept, the narcotic police never effectively "dried up" the pot supply in the USA. And the widespread introduction of heroin and its increasing availability outside of New York City (home for half of all heroin addicts), while significant, was simply not a powerful enough or pervasive enough phenomenon to kill the counterculture. Anyway, I reject the whole "the CIA made us do heroin" hypothesis. It ignores free will.
Above all, it's ironic that Omega Man starts out with a Stright-edge anti-drug polemic ("Prolific CIA/DoD insertions of LSD and other psychotropics"- cannabis presumably being one of those "psychotropics", since it was about 30 times as popular with American youth as LSD), and ends by lamenting the (mythical) disappearance of the marijuana supply.
But a thesis along that line loses all of its power unless no matter what happened, the marginal status of the American political Left is All Their Fault. When it isn't the fault of all of the "hippies for Reagan", that is...
I like Mae Brussel. She did a lot of valuable research. But she did have an unfortunate habit of fitting all of the facts into a grand scheme. I don't view the overdoses of several famous rock musicians in the 1960s as anything but a result of their own personal reckless decisions, personally. If the counterculture had behaved more responsibly and cautiously, none of its members would have gone for the okey-doke of Henry Anslinger's maxim that "marijuana leads to heroin" in the first place. Naive, hubsristic kids, thinking they were immortal...not a problem exclusive to the American youth of the 1960s, by any means.
And then, a few posts following Omega Man's "politicized Yippie vs. hedonistic hippie" hypothesis, comes the Antithesis, which shares the similarity of being largely sheer conjecture:
"Come on. Get a bit more savvy. These people were FBI/CIA agent provacateurs attempting to discredit the democratic 1968 challenge that year. It worked. Rockefeller's Nixon was elected."
Paranoia here, paranoia there.
Later, from "pissedoffcabbie":
On Frank Zappa: "There is a reason why he is no longer with us."
We're left to guess why...am I the only one who thinks that he's saying Zappa was murdered by induced prostate cancer, the result of a shadowy government plot?
"The Rockefeller gang really did buy themselves a revolution. They wanted a movement that was much farther left than their own, so as to seem centrist by comparison. They also wanted a leisure class whose politics were just an extention of their own self-righteousness, and they wanted a criminal class raised on hard drugs, and with a strong sense of hopelessness. And, they wanted to get down to the business of cult-building in order to grow cells of willing slaves. I'd say they got all that and more."
Well...doesn't leave much hope for the Resistance, does it? But I don't think pissedoffcabbie is interested much in resistance. Gloom, doom, hopelessness, alienation, paranoia, and self-indulgent misanthropy, yes. But those characteristics make a poor mix with effectual resistance. Although he's not the only person I've encountered who seems to regard them as cherished essentials of their political worldview.
Myself, I resist even the popular notion that the "hippie counterculture" is in "demise." It simply keeps a low profile, and the core of it is not as unconditionally welcoming as it used to be, you have to pay some dues to earn acceptance. It was never a popular mainstream movement in the first place. But it has the advantage of not existing solely as a reactive movement dependent on alienation, nihilism, and negativity for sustenance. The ideas championed by it 30 and 40 years ago keep getting "rediscovered" and appropriated by the wider society, as time goes by. It isn't the nature of such movements to have instantaneous acclaim and approval. They typically have to undergo severe tests, condemnation, and persecution in order to prove their worth and resilience.
Omega Man, your comments on music and politics appear to me to consistently confuse matters of esthetics with political activism. I find this an especially puzzling inspiration for developing a "Left political consciousness":
"John Lydon (aka Johnny Rotten) is and was my hero as were Iggy Pop and the MC5, who knew how to put together mind-blowing music and send shockwaves through their audience. The success of these bands and others was in the simple articulation of working class rage and youthful dispossession."
John Lydon, hero of the political resistance? aka Johnny "nihilism for fun and profit" Rotten, lyricist of such stirring revolutionary anthems as "Belsen Was A Gas"? I've read more than one interview with him where he had nothing but contempt for politics, insisting that it was always "something to be avoided." I remember him mocking the Clash for the Left-wing didacticism of their lyrics- as well as disdaning them for being a media-hype invention of Maclolm McLaren, which I always found ironically amusing. And I remember Lydon/Rotten knocking "pot-smoking hippies"- presumably, it was much more iconoclastic and revolutionary to simply get 12-bottles-to-the-6pack drunk for all your public appearances instead- only to show up in a photograph in High Times magazine a few years after the demise of the Sex Pistols, in the PiL era, wearing a tam and smoking a big spliff.
Who's fooling who, there?
John Lydon's reported last words at the Sex Pistols reunion concert, which grossed $1.8 million: "...remember, we were underpaid to do this!"
And Iggy Pop...if ever there was a poster child for the nihilistic, radical individualist axiom "if it feels good, do it", it was Iggy. Read Danny Sugarman's Wonderland Avenue, if you doubt me. Southern California in the glitter-rock era, now there was a real hotbed of political activism...
I remember listening to a hilarious interview with him on WHFS-FM once, around 1980. When he got to talking about his time as a drummer with J.B. Hutto and the Hawks, his comments would have pegged- or broken- any Left Political Incorrectness Meter monitoring the conversation. And he claimed that he got his inspiration to start his own band after smoking a joint of the bank of a river...how "60s hippie" can you get? But Iggy and the Stooges were never considered "hippies", because of regional and stylistic factors. Their esthetic was different from the hippie scene, noisier and more based around having a physical "stage act."
But how that translates into an automatic identification with being politically radical, I fail to see. I mean, really...check the lyrics for "Lust For Life" or "1969." Activist political commentary? Is that what it is?
By the way, exactly what TV commercial has "Lust For Life" been serving as the soundtrack for, recently? Some car commercial, right?
Iggy managed to put together some articulate political and social commentary for his record Brick By Brick, in the 1990s...good record. Not exactly a Left polemic, though.
Musical taste simply resists such easy pigeonholes. Consider that Henry Rollins is a huge Ted Nugent fan.
As for the MC5...yeah, for the duration of their shortlived career, they were political. They also took more LSD than Timmy Leary, and had a reputation for once posing in flagrante delicto in a "group grope" orgy heap with some of their groupies, for an underground newspaper.
Given those facts, where's the coherent indictment of "hedonistic hippie self-indulgence" versus "heightened revolutionary activist consciousness" to be found?
I think it's some made-up rock critic tripe from the 1970s, plagiarized and rehashed to the point of becoming Conventional Wisdom, for those who require such a mythology to package the unwieldy and often contradictory sprawl of the spectrum of 1960s sociolcultural movements and other emergent phenomena into a neat and tidy package. A Just-So Story, with perhaps a few dreary, doomsaying admonitions attached, like "never trust a hippy."
To RDR:
Just one brief comment on your multitude of errors of commission, omission, conjecture, and confabulation:
You wrote: "Did the CIA put the crack pipe in the mouth of Huey Newton, or Eldrige Cleaver, both of them having survived the 1960s by 20 years? "
Well, yes, actually. Via the Mena, Arkansas Bill Clinton/ George Bush/ Iran-Contragate gate connection. Journalists have been killed for uncovering this.
The only thing the aforementioned "they" didn't do, was make Cleaver inhale. Cite your reference viz. Huey Newton. This smacks of tarring with an overly broad brush, at best.
"People are crazy and times are strange...
I'm locked in tight, I'm out of range...
I used to care...
but things have changed..."
- Bob Dylan, Things Have Changed
If a resolutely non-conformist and balding old hippie can squeeze a word in edgewise here, let me simply begin by saying that without my generation's outright rejection of a seriously fucked-up status-quo, most of you here wouldn't be able to have, (let alone voice), your displeasure at anything, particularly with the kind of wild abandon or the degree of confidence and comfort that is presently enjoyed.
You only "presume" that we are entitled to have these thoughts of ours' and to freely express and share them with one another for whatever they may be worth.
No such freedom existed during the time my generation was coming of age, nor were the vast majority of adults at the time even aware of it's absence!
Needless to say I must include our gracious if somewhat misguided host on this particular issue, who also sees no incongruity in taking his many cutlines and cues for his writing from the same Bob Dylan who simply gave a voice to what my entire generation already knew and deeply felt... back when it all seemingly began.
Had we not simultaneously raised our voices in protest right along with him you wouldn't have known of either Dylan or many of the countless other things you simply take for granted that my generation so simply and effortlessly "popularized" in our times...hmmm?
I suggest you re-think that term "popularized" for it was hardly easy, effortless, or even popular when it came right down to it, including our overrated propensity to so-called self-indulgence.
It was the merest chance of fate that our numbers were simply too large to ignore or that the repressive attacks taken against us or the form that they took finally drew enough sympathy to make the little if not unimportant difference that we did manage to create.
Without us and what we simply went through during those times, we'd all be towing the same line now like the mindless little conformists and domesticated consumers the system has always wanted to make us into; totally unaware of that alternatives to it might actually be possible or even preferable for they certainly wouldn't have been "permissible" if the powers that be had had their way about it.
Nor would they have ever tolerated venues such as this in the first place to actually express and discuss their relative merits in.
Al Gore may not have invented the internet, but his generation, my generation most certainly did. We were the ones to recognise and use the huge human, rather than commercial potential, in computing.
It may seem excessive to say it, but we can stake a small claim to the keyboards beneath your fingers and the tremendously real power and control they have given us all rather than seeing it used to take even more away if it had simply rolled out as "officially" planned.
Had my generation simply gone along with all the so called "progressive" things that were so gently unfolding we'd all be either thoroughly brainwashed or completely intimidated into accepting that everything and anything the establishment dishes out is always for the best in the best of all possible worlds.
Of that I am quite certain as well as the fact that we'd still believe that the people who make the decisions that affect and influence our lives most directly are not only better and more knowledgeable than we are, they are completely entitled to dictate how, or even "if" we should live.
To be blunt, we'd be drooling like Pavlovian dogs and never hearing or heeding any warnings in the continual tolling of our would-be masters' bells.
The only reason we don't is because my generation was large enough, intelligent enough, vocal enough, and demonstrative enough to not just challenge that well entrenched viewpoint but to ultimately force it to make it make way for many, many others.
That fight didn't take place without a struggle either, nor has it ever let up, and a certain price continues to be exacted from each and every one of us that dares to be different in even the smallest of ways.
Any reactions to that, even to this day, are still over-reactions, heavy-handed, brutalizing, and out of all proportion simply to force us into submission and try to make an example out of us for any who might be tempted to do likewise.
The gross level of ignorance and intolerance that feeds that bloody mindset has never left the scene my friends merely reoubled it's efforts over the ensuing years.
As Shakespeare bemoaned "The evil that men do lingers, the good is oft interred with the bones."
The best we were ever able to manage.. still able to manage, is just enough wiggle room between the pockmarked wall and the firing squad that mindset has in store for us.
Now that thoroughly conformist attitude was the outcome our parents' seriously bad bummer of a trip, not that we could ever fault them for having it or the hideous way it was foisted upon them.
Try to remember that we "Boomers" weren't just the largest single generation to ever exist, we were also the first and quite possibly the last, most formally educated one.
We did in fact "know better" in every concievable sense of that expression.
We can hardly be faulted for being human and having no particular guidebook for what to do about that somewhat unique situation though we've diligently searched and tried every one we could possibly lay our hands on. Many if nort most of us are still searching, in fact, if you wonder where we seemingly "are".
But we clearly saw all of the hurtfull, disasterous and self-defeating hangups that came bundled with the program we simply inherited. We were quite inadvertently and unintentionally raised to.
Our parents generation and all those that had preceeded them had not. After living through the trauma of the Great Depression and then the greater nightmare of WWII, anything and everything was, in fact, "better" in their eyes by comparison, regardless of how shallowly sentimental, deliberately exploitative, or even cravenly materialistic it also happened to be.
The fears that underpinned their minset demanded a degree of sympathy as well as a recognition of the clear and present dangers they represented. That too was something there was no way for us to adequately resolve, for we could not do either without harming those we loved or ourselves as a consequence.
Cheif among those dangers was an acquiesence to the notion that war and it's subsequent slaughter and destruction was something that you couldn't or shouldn't do anything about beyond rallying around the flag or volunteering to go and do your duty for "God and country".
Above all else you certainly didn't show how "stupid" you were by asking any silly questions about whatever it might be about, before, during, or after...hmmm?
Now I'm sorry to have to dissappoint most of you but the so-called counter-culture and it's reaction towards all such notions wasn't ever an American invention or even as large a phenonmenon in North America as it was in many other places that had lived with their very real consequences in a far more deadly fashion.
It was the universality of the University world, primarily in Europe that set off the intellectual sparks. The tinder was quite litterally everywhere, but in being forced to rebuild their entire world anew the Europeans better than most understood what had burned down all those bridges behind them.
So it was essentailly a world-wide "happening" that really had nothing to do with politics and everything to do with trying to restore some sane and civilised personal freedoms to overcome the lingering post-traumatic shock and regimentation of life that didn't simply stop with the end of WWII, it had grown to dominate postwar societies everywhere. That dominance is still in the seat of power the battle is merely being handed to you along with enough room to continue to fight against it.
It was that same shell-shocked attitude and stupidity that blindly and unthinkingly waltzed into even more death and disaster in Korea, Vietnam, and places too numerous to mention. You cannot blame us for that. We did what we could, it wasn't enough, it never is.
The parallels with today aren't simply some mere coincidence, just more of the same from the very same folks that sponsored all those particular "hit" shows.
In a nutshell, the social revolution of the 60'sa and 70's was all about being able to "do your own (personal) thing" without any fear of reprisal or being ostracised, coerced, blackballed or simply beaten-up by authorities of virtually every stripe for something that was never within their jurisdiction to control...
your absolute right to peacefully be and become who and what you are on your own terms and for your own benefit and peace of mind. Not anything or anyone else's.
It's not selfish or self-indulgent to want that for yourself, your children, your friends, or the rest of the human family everywhere.
It only appears that way if you do while others still hesitate or are motivated by fear or jealousy to begrudge you your all too brief moment in the sun. Everyone deserves that, sacrificing it will hardly advance any possibility of saving it.
That is what makes human society vital and worthy of the name. Life's intrinsic and altogether diverse and creative qualities, not simply the outward displays of material wealth or prosperity that can be just as easily had without them. By some, of course, and always at the expense of others.
The authorities then, just as now, and throughout human history, were trying to advance and exert the kind of authority and control that only comes from war. The guises are many but the word "war" is constantly applied to cover the same excesses. A war on poverty, a war on drugs, a war on terrorism.
All simply excuses for using power, force and violence and growing rich at squandering the people's resources on them. Never an appeal to genuinely help those who are turned into enemies instead.
War is an unatural, criminal, and barbaric state. It justifies exactly nothing and accomplishes even less. It is an entirely contrived and artificial state of "emergency" that pits man against man and man against nature.
The beneficiaries of that are always plain to see. The ways in which they accomplish it, and the power they use to blackmail us to into both accepting it and then forgetting how we've been used and abused are not.
Now I'm certain most of you have read this. But I'd advise you to do so once again, and ask not for whom the bell tolls...
http://www.commondreams.org/views03/0316-08.htm
Fondest Regards From the Fox
people try to put us d-down (talkin' 'bout my generation
From We to Me.
By reading some of these comments, I think a few people here could use a few good tokes.
For Gods' sake- lighten up, man!
Marijuana helped me cope with penny loafers and highwater pants!
BTW, actually it was the Sex Pistols themselves that hired Malcolm McLaren- the Clash had Bernie...
And yes, Carlos was a liar- (see "The Don Juan Papers"), but a lot of what he proscribes actually works- that's the trick.
Are you admitting to being murdered by Shrooms, cuz that's apparently what toking to cope means?
Another "Anonymous" poster, offering counterpoint to my earlier remarks:
Just one brief comment on your multitude of errors of commission, omission, conjecture, and confabulation:
You wrote: ""Did the CIA put the crack pipe in the mouth of Huey Newton, or Eldrige Cleaver, both of them having survived the 1960s by 20 years? "
Well, yes, actually. Via the Mena, Arkansas Bill Clinton/ George Bush/ Iran-Contragate gate connection. Journalists have been killed for uncovering this.
The only thing the aforementioned "they" didn't do, was make Cleaver inhale."
Which was exactly my point. That's the decision that any one with a pretense of having political savvy and responsibility as an activist leader ought to know better than to make. But in the case of both Cleaver and Newton, their days of upholding the banner of radical Left activism were long past.
"Cite your reference viz. Huey Newton. This smacks of tarring with an overly broad brush, at best."
I get tired of having to do ther people's legwork. It seems that they can't even be bothered to do their own searches on the Internet, much less visit the library for a more extensive selection of books than the same dog-eared Top Ten of social history bestsellers that they keep drawing from to buttress their arguments and cherished mytholiges, often by quoting them out of context.
But anyway, here goes:
Reference 1
Newton developed the crack addiction that would lead to his death, and Cleaver, who appeared to overcome his own crack problem, died a few years later. Hilliard himself fought a cocaine and alcohol habit.
Reference 2
August 22, 1989, Huey Newton had come out of jail on a misdemeanor charge, a drug-possession charge. By this time we're talking about a man who is very much addicted to cocaine. His organization no longer exists -- the Black Panthers were practically defunct by 1982 -- and he is heavily addicted to crack cocaine. So he goes to West Oakland on this particular night that you are speaking of, and he tries to get some more cocaine because what he's doing is he's not paying for the crack cocaine in the way most customers pay. Basically he is pressuring drug dealers to give him drugs because "I'm Huey Newton." His whole thing is like "I'm Huey Newton. I used to be king of the streets; you have pay respect to me because of who I am."
So drug dealers are giving him money, but it was this very complex thing. There are organizations that are running drugs on the streets of Oakland, and one organization is the Black Guerilla Family, which is prison-based. Now, there are Black Panthers who became part of the Black Guerilla Family while they were in prison because there were a number of people who were in the Black Panther Party who ended up going to prison. Huey Newton -- there is a lot of anger against Huey Newton because of him abandoning these Panthers while they were in prison and no longer allowing the Panther Party to take care of them and their families to the extent that they did before he got out of prison in 1970. So you have a lot residual anger in the BGF resulting from that as well as the fact that he is taking drugs from these guys without paying. So a contract is put out on the life of Huey Newton, and on this particular August night, a young man, Tyrone Robinson, decides to take up the contract because he thinks he's going to move up in the organization, and on that night he puts three bullets in the head of Huey Newton and Huey Newton dies...
"...the Mena, Arkansas Bill Clinton/ George Bush/ Iran-Contragate gate connection. Journalists have been killed for uncovering this."
I don't suppose that you know who you're lecturing. I had a radio program on KDVS-FM in the late 1990s, devoted to the topic of history of U.S. (and other) government connections to the illicit drug trade. I featured interviews with Michael Levine, Cele Castillo, and Terry Reed on my show. I interviewed Gary Webb in person.
But if you're talking about the notion that Gary Webb was murdered- his widow and children are satisfied that Gary committed suicide. And I'm not even going to gainsay that conclusion, much less insist on his murder as axiomatic. There's a plausible argument to be made that Gary was driven to suicide by financial distress, due to his blacklisting by every newspaper in the U.S.A. But that's a bit different than alleging that the CIA wrote the suicide notes addressed to his family for him.
To some extent, I feel as if I failed Gary, for not staying in better touch with him. But at the time, I was involved in looking into the same extremes of weirdness that Jeff is pursuing in the RI blog today, and I questioned the value of filling his head with those ideas. And he was the one with the wife and family, the settlement from the Mercury-News, and the book. I was the one who felt in danger of going around the bend at that point, not him.
( I've had some reasons to think I was the target of a "counterintelligence project" myself, over the years. But despite my own experiences, I recognize the difference between having an organized political opposition make plausibly deniable efforts to attempt to play with my mind and discredit my credibility, and the Phoenix Project. )
The memory of Gary Webb that will always stay with me was his reponse after I asked him about his reputation among his colleagues in the media. He replied, with a Hollywood grin, "Oh, I'm a pariah!" He sounded as if he didn't have a care in the world, that day.
Unfortunately, he found out what a terrible burden being a pariah could be.
But Gary would have made a legendary cab driver, in Sacramento. Most of my customers were down with him. He would have gotten a lot of personal calls. I should have told him that...
Back to your comment, "Anonymous":
About my "multitude of errors of commission, omission, conjecture, and confabulation"- you've attempted to catch me out on one or two. Where are the rest?
And, one more thing, "Anonymous"- got activism?
From yet anonther of the Anonymae:
"For Gods' sake- lighten up, man!
Marijuana helped me cope with penny loafers and highwater pants!"
Exactly.
None of the anti-hippie detractors seem to acknowledge any awareness of what the American social, cultural, and political scene, particularly among the youth, was like before the hippies showed up.
jc on the forum posted the following:
You see some terrible images from Israel and the Occupied Territories, but somehow this one has bothered me in a way that even children shot through the head or rescuers scouring bus stations for bits of stray flesh haven’t. It is something to do with the sheer arrogance of a child who is brought up to think there is an entire sub-group of humanity that it is perfectly normal to humiliate on the street, and worst of all that he is being confirmed in his superiority by the fact that the responsible adults around him stand around and watch. The armed representatives of his government and his people tell him by their action – or lack of it – that yes, this is how an Israeli treats a Palestinian.
Most of us who were brought up on stories of Israelis as good guys and Zionism as a noble, pioneering, victimless project, probably understand now that a lot of what we were fed then was a myth. But even after you have understood that, it can still be very unsettling when you see the representatives of official Israel looking on indifferently as a settler mocks and humiliates a Palestinian passerby like this. The uncomfortable thought sneaks into your mind that only a couple of generations ago this kind of casual hatred would have been handed out to Jewish people, while another nation's soldiers looked on, and you wonder what on earth is going to happen to Israel.
Looks to me like the Jews became the Nazis, and not vice versa.
"....While a few dozen chanted, a few thousand marchers bypassed the parking lot for the Pentagon entrance. They were met by 2,500 federal troops and 200 U.S. marshals. The troops formed a human barricade protecting the Pentagon steps. Ropes also demarcated how close the demonstrators could get. U.S. Marshals arrested anyone who got past the lines of troops, or stepped over the ropes...."
Reminds me of the dead line at Andersonville, the South's prisoner-of-war camp during the Civil War.
RDR:
Since you still wish to disrespect me and attempt to ignorantly and casually deride and distort facts. I'll just take my gloves off now since you seem to be spoiling for a fight.
A previous poster was absolutely correct when he labeled you disingenuous, but I believe at this point that you're much worse and harbor a concealed agenda. Either that or you are just a swaggering, noxious boor that has never been called out. I read through the cacophony of your catty blather; as you nitpicked elements in a classical disinformation style, which you conceal behind a veneer of effete psuedo-academia. What's laughable is throughout your tired diatribe I actually looked for any pieces of gold that might lay strewn within your excrement laden ranting. Sadly, for you and quite apparent to others who do their research, you have no idea what you are talking about. Your tact is to attempt to supplant logic and documented fact with boisterous generalities and disparaging inanities. Choosing to obfuscate facts with snide little remarks without a single concrete substantiation of your fallacious reasoning.
You come to the forums clearly for reasons of ego, harrassment and vain condescension of others to satiate a deficit of self-esteem. You're not here to get at the truth like the rest of us, or dissent civilly and respectfully. You're a narcissistic parasite who derives his self-worth off of the belittlement of others with pompous and arrogant assertions.
Who and what the fuck are you supposed to be anyway Hannity or Colmes? You're just a cheap punk with a payload of bankrupt assumptions, maliciously augmented by misquotes, distortions of statements, and outright falsifications encased within tirades to make me your straw man.
Well chief, for one, I come here and give everyone, their theories, evidence and postulations RESPECT; UNTIL, much like yourself, they have proven otherwise. It is a matter of common courtesy extended as professional protocol between the civilized. As such I expect it back and will not tolerate any attempts of summary ridicule with intent to discredit. Clearly this is beyond your scope of rectitude and it reveals your motives to be suspect.
The people who came to read, contribute and learn are able to discern with complete lucidity, those who foster and initiate hostilities. It is assumed by all that this is an adult forum with a loose league of associates that strive for a common edification. I do not believe it to be the intent of the great majority of us to enter into discussions with poisonous designs, malicious agendas or pernicious dischord. People arrive at R.I. with a hunger for evasive and compelling knowledge and not to witness or fall victim to baseless and subjective vilifications.
In summation, if this is about your pursuit of redress for some glaring personal shortcomings, inadequacies, or childhood humiliation I implore you to seek proper counseling. If, and I said IF, this is about something more sinister and perhaps 'work-related' you have failed in your mission and achieved nothing.
Here's lies thine crown... O' champion of nothing.
Omega Man: ad hominem attack is no substitute for reasoned factual counterpoint in a dispute. However long-winded it might be.
Don't you know it's gonna to be alright.
RDR, you wrote "I feel as if I failed Gary [Webb]..."
Reminds me of another apology:
Richard Clarke, former director of counterterrorism on Bush's Nastional Security Council, opened his testimony to the "9/11 commission," the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States, with an apology to the relatives of the 3,000 people killed on Sept. 11, 2001.
"Your government failed you," he said, his voice close to breaking. "Those entrusted with protecting you failed you, and I failed you."
"We tried hard," Mr. Clarke went on, "but that doesn't matter, because we failed. And for that failure, I would ask -- once all the facts are out -- for your understanding and your forgiveness."
I almost believed him. But of course, his apology meant something quite different, whether he was apologizing for the failure to take down the U.S. Capitol building as well, and thus ensure the immediate instigation of martial law, or perhaps he was actually apologizing for having been a part of the conspiracy that led to such loss of life in the first place.
I suppose we'll never know.
One question: Why do you feel compelled to trash anyone who writes anonymously? Do you think the initials RDR mean anything to me or most others on this site? Does that give you some superior status in your mind??
Some of us, at the least, do not wish to agree to the terms of Google/Blogspot, and refuse to accept the contract which delineates the terms of use.
Do you think that makes us in some way inferior beings to you, or less trustworthy?
I would quote Dick Cheney's words to the Senator from Vermont at this point.
RDR sounds uncannily like he is a very hostile person, perhaps comes from his job.
Perhaps he "knows too much."
Perhaps the bad vibes have something to do with RDR hailing from the CIA's hometown of Mclean, Virginia, though I would hate to cast aspersions on someone belonging to the CIA or FBI, simply because of them being so obviously viscious and violent in their prose:
Though I will. RDR is a troll, a big fat under the bridge troll from McLean, Virgnia.
quote:
-0-0-0-0-0-
RDR
* Gender: male
* Occupation: researcher
* Location: McLean : Virginia : United States
About Me
Three letters on a computer screen, trying to do you a favor...
-0-0-0-0-0-
Thanks. Just trying to do others a favor. I'm sure you'll understand.
RDR's sudden appearance is Exhibit B for all that above about the CIA and cointelpro in the 1960s.
This RDR dude's a total toolbox.
I for one appreciate RDR's skepticism. Don't take his criticism as an insult, there's well reasoned thought in his posts.
Hippyism gave rise to the modern spiritual revolution which is massive. The genesis can be seen in the beat writers even thiugh they were only kidding themselves on drugs.
Although from a previous generation, Aldous Huxley made the transition from '60s drug guru to "The Perennial Philosophy" which is a wonderful piece of spiritual commentary.
Hippyism also gave rise to modern music as art rather than entertainment.
Over 20 years ago I read an article that was written by a Toronto University professor that accused the American hippi movement of becoming the worst of any previous generation.
The title was HIPPI-OCRITE. Their make love-not war was total BS, {they went on to support all military actions} and right after the 1970's started up they bought the biggest houses, the largest gas guzzling cars, had brats for children , bought every materialistic gadget they could find and started the ball rolling for heavy drug use, making pornography acceptable and selfish behaviour. Even the most brutal decade in hockey history was in the 70's.
The hippi was a total fraud. The message of true love and true peace {not an upside down broken cross that some jewish guy created as their peace symbol} got lost.
Billy Geier
"The people who haunt the corridors of power today were the fucking squares of the 60s, not the hippies. "
Wake up.
Hello? Bohemian Grove?
Hello? CIA/LSD mass experimental control over Woodstock.
Hello? Tavistock?
Your client personality is fraying...to have to ignore more information than integrate to make such a statement.
"Just ask the Axis,
He knows everything."
I keep seeing that guy above's spam in pretty much every blogspot blog I come across
Hair Transplant Charlotte
The home of the infamous european toxic clan, psycho urban fraggers that pawn the virtual return to castle wolfenstein enemy territory battlefields.
Just Pub, a dumb return to castle wolfenstein enemy territory comic strip by feuersturm.
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