GRGR(4) Re: TS's session, X and a Spengler ?

[Doug Millison]

At 11:36 AM -0400 6/20/99, Paul Mackin re Max's fine post:
>I see what you're saying and of course agree. However you don't literally
>mean, do you, that  Pynchon or his book promotes or intends to promote any
>kind of belief  that  mad scientists were prevalent in or typical of  the
>historic Allied war effort with respect to psychiatry or in general?

If you accept the notion that one of the things TRP is doing in GR is
writing about the 60s (the extended cultural sixties which back a bit into
the 50s to catch the post-war Cold War and ahead a bit into the 70s, not
the calendar's decade) but shifted back into a WWII setting, then the
depiction of psychologists/psychiatrists as mad scientists might be more
palatable than the picture Max paints. It was known, in certain hepcat
circles in the 50s and 60s, that CIA experimenters were giving massive
doses of LSD to unwitting subjects, to see how LSD might be used for mind
control, for intelligence and military purposes.  See _Acid Dreams The
Complete Social History of LSD:  The CIA, the Sixties, and Beyond_ by
Martin A. Lee and Bruce Shlain (1992, revised edition).

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