still more Re: GRGR(12) LSD, for good and evil

[Doug Millison]

Terrance,

I appreciate your POV in this. I just don't think that TRP makes it that
clear-cut about LSD being on the side of death. It's true that in GR he
shows it in the hands of the death-dealing cartels, but he also seems to
clearly allude -- with his OSS reference -- to the way that LSD got out of
the CIA's control and beyond the CIA's use of LSD as a weapon.  Does LSD's
introduction into U.S. society by a former OSS spook-- or its synthesis by
a member of the European chemical industry cartel --  taint it forever, and
remove all possibility of its being a life-affirming force?  Before you
answer that, you might go back to TRP's Luddite essay and recall what TRP
had to say about technology; he seems to acknowledge its potential for evil
as well as for good, a point of view that would seem to be endorsed, by the
way, by his old buddy Kirkpatrick Sale in his book about the Luddites,
_Rebels Against the Future_ -- it's not technology per se, but how it's
used and for what ends; likewise with LSD, I'm arguing here.

If I understand you correctly, you're arguing that TRP makes a clear
distinction between LSD and naturally-occuring (not synthesized by humans)
psychedelic substances, with the former on the side of death and the latter
on the side of life -- I just don't see it as being that clear. Not the way
he affirms LSD, and the drug's power to reveal the fascist death culture in
all its disgusting splendor, and to affirm the continuity of life after
death, in Vineland.

"Remember that windowpane, down in Laguna that time?" Zoyd asks Mucho on p.
313, "God, I knew then, I knew. . . ."  Mucho: "Uh-huh, me too. That you
were never going to die. Ha! No wonder the State panicked. How are they
supposed to control a population that knows it'll never die? When that was
always their last big chip, when they thought they had the power of life
and death. But acid gave us the X-ray vision to see through that one, so of
course they had to take it away from us." Zoyd: "Yeah but they can't take
what happened, what we found out."  Mucho:  "Easy. They just let us forget.
Give us too much to process, fill up every minute, keep us distracted, it's
what the Tube is for, and though it kills me to say it, it's what rock and
roll is becoming--just another way to claim our attention, so that
beautiful certainty we had starts to fade, and after awhile they have
convinced us all over again that we really are going to die. And they've
got us again."  And the narrator concludes:  "It was the way people used to
talk." ---I don't know about you, but that sounds like a pretty powerful,
and positive role for LSD that TRP describes here in Vineland, even if the
forces of death and corporate control manage to undercut it, co-opt it,
pervert it.

I also don't agree that Vineland shows the '60s revolution as a failure;
TRP's is a highly nuanced treatment. We talked about this a lot in VLVL.
Near the end of Vineland, TRP seems to put the 60s revolution in a line of
anti-fascist revolts that keep bubbling up despite the incredible array of
repressive and oppressive forces aligned against them (by specifically
mentioning the IWW and thereby bringing in the whole history of the U.S.
labor movement that leads up to that), thereby testifying to the
essentially irrepressible nature of the anti-fascist spirit. Because the
IWW was crushed, does that make it a failure?  The power of the '60s LSD
peace and love and life against death vision in Vineland rings through loud
and clear -- to my ears at least -- despite what happens to Frenesi and
despite the way that Brock Vond and the Reagan fascists undermine the
revolution.  (TRP does leaven this vision with a hard look at some of the
grungier consequences of the drug culture, of course, but overall his seems
a balanced view of LSD and other drugs, not the fanatic anti-drug obsession
that serves as the platform for continued fascist power expansion in the
novel.)

Vineland's ending  has its dark and disturbing elements, but on the whole
I've come to believe that it is an optimistic one -- it shows us, after
all, a family that has been through hell but is still family, still
chugging along, living and loving and having fun. Likewise with Mason &
Dixon -- darkness, even bitterness in the ending, but much that is
life-affirming and positive to grasp, too.

Within the frame of GR exclusively, perhaps your argument holds up, but I
don't think it does when we look at the way TRP revisits LSD specifically
in Vineland, and the place of drugs more generally in the history of U.S.
fascism in Vineland and M&D.

Cordially,
Doug

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