Re: VL-IV (15): Ché For Children, pages 325/327

[Paul Mackin]

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Robin Landseadel" <robinlandseadel at comcast.net>
To: <pynchon-l at waste.org>
Sent: Wednesday, April 08, 2009 2:18 PM
Subject: Re: VL-IV (15): Ché For Children, pages 325/327


> On Apr 8, 2009, at 11:01 AM, Paul Mackin wrote:
>
>> I think that distinction is important. I mainly meant the thinkng 
>> they're going to live forever part (or was it never dying)
>
> Don't know if you ever have been in Zoyd & Mucho's shoes, but if you  were 
> in on all that psychedelisized spirituality of the sixties—Baba  Ram Dass, 
> Aldous Huxley, the Luces—there was the sense that LSD was a  direct path 
> to enlightenment. I don't think that our collective  "flash" was 
> wrong—Gaia seems like a direct result of that flash— but  the 
> counter-reaction against that flash was very wrong.
>
> On the other hand, MKULTRA may have blossomed into "The Summer of  Love", 
> it may have been a deliberate goal of MKULTRA to derail the  emerging 
> anti-war and civil rights movements, can't rule that out.
>
> Seems like that this issue will pop up in "Inherent Vice."

Hope so and Pynchon had enough to work with in VL to make an interesting 
hypothesis about the drug crackdown.

>From what we learned later about mkultra he might have even gone a step 
further and had his young people as unwitting participants in the 
experiments.

What a setup. First you sell them the stuff, then you pick them up for 
extensive study.

Actually I came along a little ahead of the baby boomers and got short 
changed on some of their experiences.

About all I knew about mind control was seeing the movie The Manchurian 
Candidate.

P.