Editor's Note:� I felt that Dick Eastman's brief put-down of pot a couple days ago (see below) deserved a thorough response because, after all, he's one of the very most perseverant cutting-edge 9/11 researchers.�� --� kl, pp
������������� GOVERNMENT OF THE USA IN EXILE
�� Free Americans Reaching Out to Amerika's Huddled Masses Yearning to Breathe Free
�������������������������������������������������������Via <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
������������������������������������������������������������������July 27, 2004
Dear Dick,
�������� I'm delighted to have this from you because it allows me to deal with this enormously important topic without feeling I'm taking-a-side-trip.
�������� Sure, there are too many potheads out-of-it politically--but the percentages of them who are with-it are significantly higher than those of tobacco smokers or coffee drinkers or beer drinkers or scotch drinkers or gin drinkers, etc.� The Fourth Reich encourages alcohol while suppressing marijuana because alcohol's next-morning hangover assures there's no net gain for the user.� People able to use marijuana (either smoke it or eat it)--especially in legal circumstances (e.g., medical)--gradually decondition themselves from the general fear-ridden propaganda and relatively frequently become confident activists.� That potheads are ipso facto outlaws is helpful psychologically to them as activists.� And pot keeps them relaxed enough to deal coolly with the police.
�������� We started Yippie back in '68 as a corrective to what you cite.� It also began because some of us noticed that at the '67 Pentagon demonstration the straight shorthair nonpsychedelic New Left controlled all the rhetoric with their bullhorns, then fled when the federal marshalls attacked, leaving the potheads/acidheads/hippies to take the skull bash, tear gas and jail time.
�������� Also potheads/acidheads/hippies were predominant in the early days ('69-'71) of the eco-movement till straight shorthair nonpsychedelic David Brower slyly took control of it--mainly via Faustian Alliances with corporate media and corporate foundations.� The movement then went swiftly downwards to bureaucracy.� Gary Snyder had the best field theory for an eco-solution at that time:� "Transfer of prime human attention from objects to states of mind."�� Well, you can imagine how much the corporations would loathe a suggestion like that: hardly anything threatens more deeply their relentless push for rabid consumption of "big-ticket" consumer items.� (Snyder himself took no further chances with the corporate police and by the mid-'70s had bought into a safe effete literary role.)
��������� Potheads/acidheads/hippies also were predominant in the back-to-the-land movement of that same period.� If you knew anybody who at that time moved from a high-population-density place to a low one, chances are that he or she had dropped acid within a year or two before that.� Meanwhile the culturebound left (and center and right) in general masochistically continued to inhabit the polluted paved-over cities.� As a result, their average mood has been considerably lower than that of the back-to-the-land folks.�������
��������� The biocentric transformational politics of potheads/acidheads/hippies is much more helpful for general home-planet survival than is the mere anthropocentric revolutionary politics of straight shorthair nonpsychedelic commentators like Noam Chomsky and Howard Zinn--both of whom remained totally silent throughout the USSP's (US Secret Police's) vicious wipe-out of the hippies' culture--especially its tremendously effective underground press--during the late '60s and early '70s (cf. the anthology UNAMERICAN ACTIVITIES).� The left's revolutionary politics was an element within the hippies' transformational one.�
��������� Much of my strategizing for the anti-Vietnam-War movement occurred with the late Robert M. Ockene, then executive editor of Bobbs-Merrill Publishing Company, while we were on about 300 mikes of clean acid.� What a precious political/cultural/spiritual luxury to drop acid back when it was legal!
��������� The most helpful archive imaginable for young people these days would be one devoted to lost pothead/acidhead/hippie history.� Hardly any young people currently have an opportunity to learn, for example, that the hippies' underground press was more imaginative, wide-ranging, confident and liberated than any other journalistic community in US history.� Since he has functioned as an historian, Howard Zinn must accept a large slice of the blame for this widespread youthful ignorance.�
��������� Most historians have preferred to pretend to themselves and others that there never were any hippies and that they never had a culture of their own.� Other historians--even more perverse--allege that hippie culture was a product of "the agenda of elite Anglo-American social engineering," or a mind-control project of the CIA and/or British intelligence.
��������� While the CIA did conduct early experiments with LSD as a possible mind-control tactic, they didn't have to become very bright to notice that they'd chosen the wrong substance, that young people in very large numbers were using LSD successfully as a way to decondition themselves from fascist/capitalist/bankster/consumer-goods propaganda.� If the secret police hadn't noticed this, they wouldn't have bothered to pressure CBS Records to stop advertising in the underground press or to pressure a printer in New Jersey to stop publishing one of the underground periodicals.
�������� And this above all:� the potheads/acidheads/hippies of the late 60s and early 70s had more confidence in themselves than any other community of that size in US history.� We all know that confidence today is such a precious and rare quality.� I'll close with a story about my own confidence when it was at its peak.� This is from something I wrote last year:
���� I can remember clearly when my confidence crested.� (Fortunately, it fell very very gradually.)� June '68.� For more than two years I'd been doing LSD with my best friend, Bob Ockene.� He was executive editor of Bobbs-Merrill and was the very most valuable player in the NYC activist scene of that time.� For example, his relationship to Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin in terms of Yippie was almost identical to the distinction between Wisdom and Skillful Means in high Himalayan culture.� Abbie and Jerry were the principal Media Character Actors of Bob's notion.
���� Anyway, we'd had the tremendous spiritual luxury of doing acid with each other and with our dear wives back when it was still legal.� We had a few transfabulous trips together in Spring '66.� By autumn of that year it was illegal.� During these trips Bob and I had gotten accustomed to doing quite a bit of strategizing about what this or that movement or sub-movement might do next.� So in May '68 we were tripping and also working on a good caper for Yippie.� Just a few weeks earlier King had been murdered----leading to large-scale burning and looting in at least a dozen US Sector cities.� So we got to talking about looting.� "You know, all the lootings have been taking place at times so inconvenient for the general public that they're over before the public even knows about them."�� "Yeah, so why don't we do some sort of pre-scheduled looting at a time convenient for everybody?"� "Yeah, but maybe it's better to refer to it as a loot-in."� (We were so high that I can't remember which of us was which.)� "Yeah.� So where?"� "What about Macy's?"� "Okay."
���� So we put a flyer together.� Though we were relatively confident, we nevertheless retreated from using the actual word "loot."� Here's the language:
���� "MACY*S GIANT NEW-NATION CELEBRATION:� To help free us from the property fetish, Macy's will become a liberated zone Saturday, June 8, from 1 to 3 p.m.� Wear middle-class costumes and infiltrate.� Ask straight shoppers not to enter.� 'Property Is Theft.'� Give away your clothing inside and demand replacements for leaving.� Spontaneous sculpture in the aisles.� Anti-property demonstration surrounding the store.� Donate second-hand objects to Macy's.� Start free stores at the entrances.� NEW-NATION CELEBRATION SHEEP MEADOW 4 P.M.� Caution:� Cops love property & probably will be fierce.� Youth International Party."� So in effect we were planning a satire of private property, private ownership.
���� The action was too heavy for Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin.� They both came up with fancy excuses for not helping me.� The only help I had was from one or two teen-agers.� We'd decided Bob shouldn't relate to it publicly because he might jeopardize his helpful gig at Bobbs-Merrill where he was bringing out important books like LSD AND PSYCHOTHERAPY, THE MARIJUANA PAPERS, a volume of A. J. Muste's writings plus I'm sure I'm forgetting a few other major titles.� My memory is dim on this but I'm pretty sure he was arranging for a book from Garrison (that New Orleans DA) just before Garrison got taken out.
���� Anyway, I did an extensive press mailing with the flyer and sent it also a few other places.� Couple days later I got a call from a friend at the ACLU who'd represented me earlier in a couple civil-disobedience busts.� "Well, we just got your flyer and we had a meeting right away and we sure wish you'd have talked to us before sending it out because we figure you can get twenty-two-and-a-half years."� Then he enumerated four five-year felonies plus some small change.� Wow!� Can you feel my confidence cresting, Bonnie?� I had a nine-week-old daughter, Issa, whom I was already madly in love with.� Did I not want to be with her again till she was twenty-two?� I yearned for an excuse to "postpone" it but knew I'd be unwilling to settle for anything less than a genuinely respectable excuse and knew also that the chances of figuring one out were nearly nil.
���� Then:� can you believe it?� Shall we call it deus-ex-machina?� Or is it more appropriate to see it in terms of Allies in the Castaneda/Huichol sense?� In any case, I was able to phone the press a couple days prior to it and say:� We have decided to postpone this event out of respect for the memory of the late Senator Robert Kennedy.� Can you believe it?� I GENUINELY didn't want to be capering in a department store simultaneously with the funeral procession just a few hundred meters away of the latest murdered liberal.� Wowww!
���� The press was so less closed in those days that I was able---despite such short notice---to get word of the "postponement" out to almost everybody planning to attend.� But as a back-up, I covered the main entrance of Macy's starting a half-hour before the scheduled start of it.� Not many people showed up for it.� My favorite moment of the whole episode happened when a beautiful young hippie couple arrived for it from the far end of Long Island.� They were broken-hearted!� They stood there for a long time saying nothing, their bodies drooping.� Finally he said:� "Well, do you want to go on in anyway?"� She was silent again a long time, then said with a resonant sigh I'll never forget:� "Oh. . . all right."
������ Okay, Dick.� I'm glad you're gonna start judging me on a post-to-post basis.� I don't want "automatic" followers.� Meanwhile, let's hope that Amerika's huddled masses get a grip on themselves and develop enough confidence to walk into better department stores everywhere, take off their clothes and demand free replacements.� I'm sure they'd enjoy the surprised looks on the sales-clerks' faces.
�������������������������������������������� Yours for all species,
�������������������������������������������� Keith Lampe, Pondo Pine
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From: "Dick Eastman" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Date: July 26, 2004 5:32:39 AM GMT+07:00
To: "President, USA Exile Govt." <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Re: I Can Hardly Cheneyin' Believe This!
You just lost me� --� I've seen too many pot-heads escape into Cheech-and-Chong reality from which they never emerged as effective responsible people again.
�
I favor legalization of cocaine and heroin -- the cheap government provision of it to addicts�IN ORDER TO CUT THE REVENUE SUPPLY OF GLOBAL ORGANIZED CRIME -- pot is not distributed by the big boys, and so is less important�from a national survival sense -- but pot is catastrophe and to see it praised by you�ends my unqualified support of you -- from now on I go on a post-by-post basis.
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