- michael jordan May 14th, 2007 12:14 pm replies
We stopped the Viet Nam War, that was a GREAT Accomplishment that no redneck starch head can take away from us.
Now we have another few wars to stop started by the same bunch who started the other one. Why not put an end to that same bunch so we can get back to smiling again?
- artistannie May 14th, 2007 1:00 pm comments
The times have changed but for many of us the core values have remained the same. It wasn’t about long hair, free-sex and drugs - it was about finding ways to live peacefully and humanely on the earth.
- PJW May 14th, 2007 2:30 pm comments:
The Hippies contributed much to the cultural shifts of the 1960s and 1970s, and have at times been unfairly scapegoated by critics on the right and on the left.
Still, if we look back at the hostility felt toward Hippies by many in the Black civil rights movements, by many Chicano and Native American activists in New Mexico, and by many within the feminist movement, we might come to a more balanced sense of the “movement’s” strengths and limitations.
Clearly, the counterculture’s critique of conformity, consumerism, and militarism is important. Yet none of these problems have abated. They may be worse. And let’s be clear: the anti-war movement was not the Hippie movement; they were two distinct if overlapping things.
This is not to say the Hippies were inauthentic but to point out that the dominant culture only accepted the part of the message from the counterculture that did not threaten the dominant stuctures of power.
I’m left wondering if any movement based on the individual can ever achieve lasting structural change.
- michael jordan May 14th, 2007 4:08 pm
PJW: You said “And let’s be clear: the anti-war movement was not the Hippie movement; they were two distinct if overlapping things.”
In what vein do you make this assertion? Is it through hindsight, or some historical account which attempts to bifurcate the movement into acceptable bites of history? When you cite the Black Civil Rights movement, Cezar Chavez, Russell Means, Angela Davis, and Gloria Steinem and when you consider the makeup of the Chicago Seven how can you say that all of us who were marching with them in Chicago and Miami were not passing around the same joints taking the same acid and getting hit by the same billy-clubs? Are you unwittingly making an assumption that Hippies are White? Do you know who Jimi Hendrix was. People who were really making sacrifices and mobilizing the timid to step outside of their comfortable cocoons were definitely taking drugs, and marching in the streets and writing polemics, and editing newspapers like the Berkeley Barb’s editor and owner Dr. Alan Coult who wrote for the American Anthropological Association on the new still legal discipline of Psychedelic Anthropology, lectured to thousands in Berkeley and provided direction to the entire People’s Park Movement through the pages of his newspaper. Do you think that Country Joe McDonald never smoked dope and took acid? Do you think that he was stone cold sober when he led the “Fish Cheer”?
Consider:
Bobby Seale: “From the Sixties…to the Future!,” is about “getting to the future via the whole synthesis of the quantum, computer and DNA molecular revolutions, and within the cyberspace non-linear range.”
Jerry Rubin: attempted to merge political and lifestyle liberation under the Yippie banner
Abbie Hoffman: described himself as “an orphan of America” and “a child of Woodstock Nation.”
Rennie Davis:lecturer on meditation and self-awareness. A recent Davis workshop was entitled “Room Without Veils.” The workshop promised to “unlock a unique toolbox” that would “allow connection to your own organic intelligence.” Topics covered in the workshop included “Navigating Armageddon,” “Understanding Your Energy Signature,” and “Unlocking Your Innocence.”
Lee Weiner: He spent most of his trial hours reading science fiction paperbacks or books on eastern philosophy;
I read this as a confirmation of applied Hippie philosophy made possible by the use of psychedelics.
The women’s movement in the US started at the ‘fin de siecle’, the American Indian Movement started in 1492, the Black civil rights movement started in 1619. It is an insult to these people to assume that they were not participants in consciousness raising activities of psychedelic drug use. All that it took to take Acid was nerve and once you took it it changed your life forever, and there is/was no turning back. These people did not lack nerve. There is a need to distinguish speed, heroin, and cocaine from the sacraments of peyote, and the LSD of Albert Hoffmann, Leary, Alpert, Kesey, and even Tom Wolfe. There was so much revisionist history during those times that the reality of the situation gets lost. If not for the transcendent insights afforded to people who were brave enough to drop these drugs we would still be in Viet Nam today.
The status quo is still worried that it will happen again so the disinformation campaign continues. The only reason people are not doing these quality psychedelics in greater numbers today is because there are more police, stiffer penalties, they keep building more jails, they listen to more private conversations, tap more phones, and have more and more bizarre weapons and tortures because they don’t want anybody thinking freely.
Stay Radical, Keep Thinking, don’t give up and don’t swallow their media lines.
Sunday, May 27, 2007
The Hippies were right
The hippies were right continued
- communitarian May 12th, 2007 12:02 pm
michaelkjordan,
It’s happening, not in 20 years, not in 10, or 5, but now, today. Face it and deal with it, if there is still time, impeach Bush and Cheney. Otherwise, suffer an American holocaust and World War Three.
- michael jordan May 12th, 2007 2:56 pm
communitarian,
It certainly is happening today but it started several decades ago and even the fourth reich moves slowly. The problem of the genetically flatlined electroencephalograms of the center of the country remains. Remember the “dull as a mud fence” resistance to the pronouncement by the Dixie Chicks that they were ashamed that George Bush claimed to be from Texas. The reaction is chronicled in a documentary which came out last year. The folks in the middle have had high starch diets for generations and there is barely enough cortex remaining there to enable them to drive a car. They are quite clearly physically unable to think. These people think Harry Potter is the devil, they burned their Beatles records when I was growing up, and want to guillotine Michael Moore today. They are extremely uncomfortable and paranoid when around any sort of creative endeavor designed to help them achieve community. They just don’t have the mental equipment to deal with complexity.
They were a problem in the 60’s and they remain a problem today. The only thing that wakes them up is a slasher movie or a slaughter like Kent State. Then they will move into action and take the credit. I have the surreal belief that these people may not have come from earth originally. They still carry with them an insupportable drive to breed uncontrollably like they came here to colonize this planet from some other. And they really just don’t get it. If you help them across the road they will often think that you are really dragging them into traffic.
It’s a long way to the top if you want to rock and roll. There is a great group in Ohio I just became aware of called Ohio Peak Oil Action…and they have a great website http://www.ohiopeakoilaction.org/ It is necessary to act on all fronts at once to meet the challenge presented by the nearly human GOP. Although I support it, I’m not so sure that impeachment will work other than to provide a small bump in the road to empire because of the way Dr. Strangelove Rove has packaged the attack on us American Natives. The ethanol bamboozle has poured billions into the midwest as they turn food into energy and drive up the price of corn masa in Mexico by 30-40% according to my local taco parlor in Albany, CA. And since the Mexicans refuse to act responsibly and stop having so many babies that they can’t support they are all starving down there and coming north to graze our meager job markets. This increases the pressure on us who are already living here and we are becoming more and more like the Israelis dealing with the most unabashedly prolific group in the world, the Palestinians. The average age in Gaza, Palestine is 14.5 years, the age where the most physical growth takes place in the human body and where the need to vast amounts of food is critical. Birth control is frowned upon by the Muslims in the same manner as with the Roman Catholics and since the citizens in both areas are very young and ignorant they are used to attack political structures and promised a place in heaven for their sacrifice. It is either sacrifice or misery and they choose sacrifice in ever increasing numbers. We are ready to build a bigger wall and containment structure on the Mexican border because the state of American business is so bad now through outsourcing, that the guest worker argument is losing ground. People in America now need jobs. We need to support our small families now. We can no longer allow people into the country who will place an increasing burden on the limited resources by their refusal to take their responsibility in limiting their family to one child.
The most telling moment in the early Bush presidency was when he under the direction of Fallwell, Roberts, and the Pope; stopped family planning information and materials from going to the geographic “South”. No more money from the US to the UN if the UN was to get people to practice birth control. This one action was infinitely more damaging than the war in Iraq, or Lebanon, or Afghanistan. This one action of Bush assured that the enormous problems in the “South” would continue indefinitely and that wars would ensue and that misery would continue without end.
Progressives like to kid themselves that if Bush went the way of the dinosaur that he is, everything would be just hunkey dorey but even with the impeachment of Bush, Cheney would be able to appoint another vice president, before being ousted. Nancy Pelosi will never be president under succession rules. The last time this was tried we got rid of Spiro Agnew and Nixon appointed Ford. Then Nixon resigned and we got Ford and then Ford pardoned Nixon and the speaker of the house never got the job. The same thing will happen today if it is tried. Someone who will be guaranteed to maintain the ruinous policy like James Sensenbrenner, or even Jeb Bush will become the appointed vice president and the problems will continue while orchestrated behind the scenes by the same Texas Chainsaw Crew of Jim Baker, Andrew Card, Karen Hughes, and Rove. Remember that the last time we tried to rid ourselves of a rogue elephant we had large Democratic margins in the House and the Senate, and even had a good bunch on the Supreme Court.
I apologize for going off-thread with this rant but I’ll take my audience where I find it and I appreciate your willingness to comment on my screed.
Probably the most fun in the hippie days for me was skinny dipping in the quarry in back of Lynn Phares place in Potomac, Md with fifty other freaks on acid; makin’ it with my wife on a rock beside the road along the trans canada highway watching the caribou do the same thing; and finally attending the nude chamber music party with the Los Angeles Symphony at Jimmy Webb’s place in Encino along with Little Feat, Joni Mitchell breast-feeding her new baby, and 100 other LA music and TV folks in 1970. Then there were the nightly jams at the Moonfire Inn in Topanga, jumping into a ditch to get out of the way of an out of control Neil Young on a gas powered micro-bike, John Farringtons silver Mercedes with his bead collection in the trunk and in one drawer it was packed with Clear Light Acid from Augustus Stanley Owsley. Driving a cab high on acid competing for orders with Danny Glover.
You can’t get memories like these anymore because people are too scared to compete with the authorities. The interesting thing in all of this licentious behavior was that nobody got hurt and everybody coped. I wonder if that could happen today?
Hippies Were Right!
- michael jordan May 11th, 2007 5:27 pm
The Hippie era extended from 1966 until the collapse of Richard M. Nixon. At Dick’s resignation the tenseness subsided somewhat and people relaxed too much and the Justice Department started going after soft drugs such as acid and pot and started allowing hard drugs to become more available. The plan of the Justice Department was that the hippies would be unable to differentiate between the benefits of enlightenment afforded users of pot and acid and the highly destructive consequences of cocaine, speed, and opiates. I remember that in D.C. pot and acid busts were increased and Owsley had to disappear, and Leary had to leave the country; while cocaine was starting to be pushed as a cheap alternative to psychedelics. Increasingly, in the early 70’s, pot and hash were being mixed with opium and people were being truly drugged. To get out of the stupor of short term hard drug withdrawal they were offered speed.
Good psychedelics were increasingly hard to find and became increasingly hard to afford. Decent pot could be had for $10 (ten) dollars a lid (ounce) in 1966 and by 1973 it went to $40 to $50 dollars an ounce. Now it is $80 or more an 1/8 of an ounce. Acid which was relatively easy to make; was $1 a hit in a sheet of $100 and it sold for $3. a hit. But a bust involving a $3. hit of acid to the wrong customer could get you a life sentence. It was legal to take it in 1966. Judges, lawmakers, and presidents felt that enlightenment of a large number of people which had been going on for 7 years or so was costing them. The corrupt president and Justice Department were afraid that they would no longer be able to control the free-thinkers. People were thinking for themselves and coming up with solutions which were socialistic and all inclusive. Birth control was working and labor wages were stabilizing. People were thinking. This was considered dangerous for the prospects of the status quo authoritarian class so they primed those who were happy with being told how to think and increased their access to guns all the while pouring cheap cocaine and opium and heroin into the streets. This is how the same group of people and their identical selfish interests conquered the Chinese. The British forbears of Tony Blair and George Bush and Dick Cheney got the Chinese hooked on opiates in order to conquer them
It is not as if these things are difficult to comprehend but it is to our everlasting peril to assume that these tactics are not at the top of the motivations of the authoritarians in government today. Ask yourself why poppy fields are NEVER bombed, while benign pot farmers are perennially harassed even in California and other places where the people want it. The uncomfortable truth is that the government will go out of its way to bring opiates and cocaine into the country to weaken the foolish just as they recently were seen to do in L.A. Ask Maxine Watters, or Gary Webb, or Daniel Sheehan about this one. They were stonewalled because there really is a right wing stranglehold on the world’s citizens and it keeps it’s grip by making more addicts; diluting labor movements by discouraging birth control and family planning; de-funding education so that people can’t think straight, and placing more guns into the world and baiting fights, and using bizarre immigration policy to increase hostility between workers. And progressives lap up the conservative swill like it was nectar from the gods.
The last thing any of these authoritarians want is peace. The hippies came from a very tuned-out historical legacy and developed positive awareness in spite of centuries of cultural programming solely because of the mass enlightenments of the acid tests in New York, San Francisco and Berkeley. People could travel easily and work was plentiful. The U.S. borders were relatively secure from diluting immigration and the power of Acid was making a difference in the way people interacted with the world. Art and music flourished to a degree not seen since the early 1800’s. Even Catholics were seen to be practicing birth control. Science was looking toward sustainable sensibility and management of the Earth’s resources. Solar power was birthed. The first microprocessors were made. Human genetic research blossomed.
All of those elements were seen to endanger the Oil and Coal based business model. The authoritarians could not figure how to control the population if they were able to harness free energy and didn’t need to send money to PG&E and Con Ed. “We’ll keep destroying the solar energy movement until we can figure out how to put a meter on the Sun.”
A plan for war was developed by Dick Cheney and Don Rumsfeld back in the early days of the Nixon Administration and the main thrust was to shut the Hippies up, because from their view they had no worth which was not measured with money. So they proceeded to kill Hippies, drug Hippies, jail Hippies, had the media grossly misrepresent Hippies. They shot John Lennon, overdosed Janice, Jimi, and others. They had earlier killed MLK RFK, JFK, & Malcom. And it continues today with the jailing of Democratic fundraiser Martha Stewart, the threatened jailing of Michael Moore, etc. They have us on the ropes and hope that we will try and escape so that they can shoot us in the street just like at Kent State.
Acid showed Hippies how to think when the authoritarians wanted to tell us what to think. There will always be eras where people need to get their collective heads in sync and Acid was the key. In 1649 there were the Diggers who maintained that all land be held in common for the common good. They were slaughtered. In 1969, 320 years later there were the Hippies. They are a dying breed who valiantly tried to take the wheel of history with peace as a guiding ethic, but with the increased burden of completely unchecked population growth in the “South” and with it; migration to the “North” in search of food which is in short supply, the pressures of competition for sustenance are going to bring the planet to a state of horrible war which will last for hundreds of years. Within 20 years this nation is going to be a complete military dictatorship and as the spirits wither and the souls long for release the dream will be over and the nightmare will own the planet.
We need to do much more than we are doing right now and the first thing on the agenda is to stop having children after 1. Without Zero Population Growth being worldwide law in the next five years the scenario outlined above will be unavoidable. The doors of perception only open up about every hundred years so the next opening will start about 2062. Even if you don’t plan to be around then help guide those who will be around. And as anyone who has been to the “Other Side” knows You never come back and so you don’t need drugs to get you where you already are. So stay sane, care for others and don’t add to the misery around you by having more children.
Al Gore --Shameless self-promoting wimp!
- michael jordan May 25th, 2007 2:21 am
Albert Gore:
I just don’t know how to parse your refusal to stand up for the obvious electoral fraud in the 2000 election which trashed the world forever. Your thoroughly gutless response to Bush and his henchmen lead me only to conclude that you did not have the stones to be running for President to begin with.
Why Oh why did you waste all of our collective energy and skills on such a completely wimpy and ultimately devastating abandonment of the people’s faith and trust by not fighting the power?
Was there some sort of a back room deal involving Clinton which prevented you from being a MAN? Life is transitory Al, maybe the best of us leaves no mark upon the earth; and even in the light of your cause of global warming and your professed commitment to cooling it why did you chicken out when the chips were down? I have always wondered if you had a rational reason like maybe “George W. Bush’s men were threatening to kill my family if I didn’t concede the election…” That would have been the only reason which would have been valid for me and I would have supported you for it. But I didn’t hear a peep in that direction, instead I heard the whiny comment that you had to give up in the face of their calumny for the good of the country, to show unity, with the ?”Victor?”.
You let James Baker bully you like he had your balls in his hands and was squeezing the manhood from you. What did James Baker have on you that prevented you from being the kind of man that we Americans had thought we had obviously elected? Why did you fail us, -you miserable slut? Your lack of guts and the lack of guts of John Kerry could not even fill a small crack in the cosmic egg of history.
What in the cotton pickin’ world ever led either one of you punks to think you could lead the world to sanity when you were so gutless and slavering when confronted by the mad dogs of the Republican Party?
Let me tell you one thing that you need to take to heart to your grave and that is that you owned the moment and you let it slip away. By comfortable comparison for your tormented soul John Kerry too, had it and threw it away as well but he being a much weaker man threw it away through the bad example that you provided him.
You Sir are a complete and total disgrace and a mockery of the authoritarian class which wields political power without wisdom and responsibility to those citizens who offer it to you. We are only a year different in age and I also an Episcopalian might have actually been classmate with you at St. Albans and Episcopal in D.C. I certainly wonder sometimes if I had decided to go there if I could have made a difference in the forming of your maturity. With the world trashed now as it is my regrets come much too late…
I like your comments about these people not being of this earth. I remember Jim Morrison’s song:
What have they done to the earth
What have they done to our fair sister
Ravaged and plundered and ripped her and bit her
Stuck her with knives in the side of the dawn and
Tied her with fences and dragged her down
I hear a very gentle sound
With your ear down to the ground
WE WANT THE WORLD AND WE WANT IT NOW
This pack has taken over the world for their own destructive ends. It reminds me of Marlon Brando’s character in Apocolypse Now. He was completely mad from so much war and misery. This is a glimpse into the souls of the war-mongers and the elites who support them. It’s a scary glimpse. Imagine a world run by people like him.
michael jordan:
You namedropper you!Ha!Had to add the “ha” as my jokes have been misinterperted on this site before.Wanted to add a brief personal history.Nothing as star-studded as your story but perhaps informative anyway.
I was a student at the UW-Madison from 1965-1970-a Political Science major.I was a vet with one child. In spite of being classmates with the most “radical” elements on campus-my first vote for Prez. was Goldwater and my 68 vote was too embarassing to mention on this site. What changed me as my health failed over the years was the knowledge that there are major differences among politicians and parties. Also-Progressives should always keep in mind that some wealthy people are needed for changes to be made {short of a bloodpath}. Thus-please don’t quibble with people like The Nation’s publisher over small differences in philosophy.Gratitude can be effective and shouldn’t be confused with kowtowing.
Others mentioned the use of undercover agents to sabotage movements.Those here in Madison faced a particularly virulent form of that in the Cointelpro.
Regardin drug usage- of course weed was demonized by the warmongers-you can’t mold killing machines out of young dopers.The opposition of the pharmaceutical companies and drug cartels to the legalization of this benign drug is a scandal of about 80 years duration. Just noticed the lack of a g in regarding above. That’s appropriate as Madison’s offering to the 08 Prez. race-Toxic Tommy Thompson” always drops his g’s. Talk about a schizophrenic political climate- we have The Progressive Magazine- Freedom From Religion Society-John Nichols & Tommy Thompson.
Were it not for the prohibitive price of-and punishment for using-weed I’d be celebrating this thread by lighting a very large doobie.But at age 65 I won’t risk a term in our ever-expanding jail.