Leary, Liddy and Hunter Thompson


Joe Bageant has a must read here, salvaged from notes taken during Gordon Liddy and Timothy Leary's nationwide tour...
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... and delving into the question, among others, of why the net is still 'uncensored'.

Snips:


Late terrestrial species architecture, mostly silica fusion and inorganic slab construction, erected by the musculotoic legions of the late Twentieth Century industrial feudal dynasties." From his pocket he extracts "a packet of aromatic hydrocarbon sticks," bringing one to his lips and lighting it, drawing in the smoke deeply, obviously savoring the tingle nicotine is sending through his bloodstream. Timothy Leary has arrived in Boulder, Colorado.

Obviously, I retain a special affection for Uncle Tim. If any of these men could legitimately be called complex, it is probably Leary. A brilliant scientist, he was often reviled by traditional scientists, whom he called "arrogant motherfuckers who deny their role in the military industrial complex's manipulation of the American people." Leary rejected what hecalled the "grim Newtonian mechanics of objective fact" for the "free flowing quantum physics approach to consciousness" that the changing, not the static, governs consciousness and the outcome of the world."Understanding this even intuitively," he said, makes people unmanageable by agents of the criminal government syndicate that runs and ruins America."That sort of talk was why Nixon called him "the most dangerous man in America."

In retrospect, I would have liked to have stirred more discussion of personal freedom and authoritarianism between Liddy and Leary who, after all, personified the giant struggle between the authoritarian state and sixties-style self-realization. How did these philosophical and ideological enemies accommodate their ultra-serious differences? We often hear, historically, about enemies able to call a temporary truce, which of course gives us valuable insight into the nature of warfare. What are the mechanics of such a truce, however brief? Here were two modern men, a microcosmic example in the persons of Liddy and Leary. But this wasn't Truman against Stalin or Caesar against Pompey. They were simply ambitious men who overshot their expectations and found themselves to be serving as symbolic gladiators over an immensely important issue in the media coliseum, but there only for the amusement, revulsion and/or adulation of the throng. And their success or failure depended upon the persona they created and sustained.

"Computers are going to replace hieroglyphics text as communication. Computers will be THE drug of the future... Then we'll have computer addiction and computer abuse,..."

I had no idea that Leary's comments on the cult of authority's war on individual freedom and the future importance of computers was the closest thing to political prophesy I'd ever hear. I stopped under a streetlight and jotted down their words merely because they sounded cool. By next morning however, there was an epiphany afoot. There was that electro-metallic tang of truth stinging the mind, the kind that only someone who has taken lots of LSD toward good purpose can perceive.


HERE:
http://www.counterpunch.org/bageant05162007.html

Posted: Thu - May 17, 2007 at 12:47 PM            

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