meshugginah posts

[David Casseres]

Greg sez
>...The LSD and amphetamines I indulged in liberally, and yet -- CRIMINAL that
>I have been -- neither I nor my (then) large circle of friends ever stared
>at the sun 'til we burned out our eyes, jumped off a building thinking we
>could fly, robbed and raped any grandmas or little school girls, or
>indulged in any of the other folkloric horror tales that surrounded the
>media terror over "the drug scene."...

Funny thing, ain't it.  I knew dozens of LSD eaters, and just exactly one 
of them became permanently (or at least long-term) crazy, and he only did 
LSD once, and most of us thought he was going to lose his grip no matter 
what and the acid just happened to be the thing that precipitated it.  
And as for the pot smokers, I couldn't even count the number of people I 
know who are highly productive and/or successful scientists, lawyers, 
business people, educators, engineers, you name it, who smoked *lots* of 
marijuana all the time for years and years, and guess what, many of them 
still do. 

>YES there were assholes in the
>"movement" and the "revolution" -- but you don't have to look too far to
>see that they were, are, and always will be everywhere.
>
>'Nuff said?

Almost.  No one has yet made serious mention of the great-grandaddy drug 
of them all, back in the 60's and 70's, and yes foax I do mean 
everybody's favorite, the Vietnam War.  If you were of military age, then 
one way or another that motherfucker was in your head 24 hours a day, 365 
days a year, pounding away, warping every perception, poisoning every 
emotion, no letup and no shelter except maybe with a little sex, drugs, 
or rock'n'roll, for a couple hours at a time.  That War drug killed more 
people and fucked up more minds than all the other dope (all kinds) 
consumed this century, and if it wasn't the original reason for 
everything weird that went down back then, it sure as shit moved in, took 
over, and *became* the reason.  And man oh man, did They ever get high on 
it.

So I get just a bit exercised when I hear about how we who were young in 
the 60's were such a lame and pathetic buncha losers because we Used All 
Those Drugs.  It was a decade when American youth came face to face with 
unbelievable evil right here at home, and reacted against it.  That 
reaction, in all its failures and lameness just as much as in its 
triumphs and heroism, was the best thing there was in these United States 
in those decades.

We had a damned difficult hand to play:  We had Lyndon Johnson and 
Richard Nixon in the White House.  We had an unbelievable bunch of 
career-maddened freaks in the Pentagon.  We had J. Edgar Hoover running 
the FBI and the likes of Judge Hoffman on the Federal courts and Ronald 
Reagan as Governor of California, slouching toward Washington.  Some of 
us were in the miltary, getting ready to slaughter or be slaughtered for 
the aforementioned freaks in the Pentagon (certainly not for anyone 
else); others were trying not to get drafted into that slaughter; women 
were seeing men they loved get drafted, slaughtered, etc.  Our elders 
abandoned us, our parents turned us over to the cops.

We played that hand at least as well as any other bunch of frightened 
20-year-olds could have played it.  Drugs had about as much to do with it 
as sex and rock'n'roll, and as little.  The hardest thing about it all, 
now, is reading the pontifications of people who weren't involved, and 
who believe the che
ap revisionism launched under Reagan and perpetuated 
by essentially 100% of the media to this day.  Thank god for Thomas 
Pynchon and others who insist on the truth.


Cheers,
David