Ghosts of Tim Leary and Hunter Thompson (Joe Bageant)

Freedom vs. Authority under the 40-foot pulsating rainbow vagina

By Joe Bageant -- World News Trust

Everything Americans think they know, they learned from a televised morality play. It's all theater. You root for some good guy and boo some bad guy. You pick your own, but you dance to the tune of the men running the show. It's mind control, pure and simple, and if there is an American immune to it, then he is probably living in a snow cave somewhere in Alaska.

-- Gypsy Joe Hess (1919-1988), prospector, self-educated philosopher and horse trader

In my ragged-assed 40 years of writing, I've been lucky enough -- or sometimes unlucky enough -- to meet and write about many of America 's "somebodies," mostly vapid asshole movie and TV stars and rock musicians. When I was young, so-called "media journalism" then was just what it is now, what we called "starfucking," and amounted to writing PR for media corporations in "music journals" of the time. But we covered a few worthwhile iconic figures in the mix as well -- the kind that stick around in the background of one's thinking forever. At my age now, I find a lot of them are dying off, the Hunter Thompsons, Susan Sontags, Ken Keseys and Kurt Vonneguts. However, I have a self-imposed policy not to eulogize them because the hundreds of sentimental Internet tributes that flourish upon their deaths somehow seem ghoulish, and because it is a universal truth that we writers will do anything for an audience, and celebrity death is one of the easiest ways to attract one.

On rare occasions though, usually while writing late at night, the ghost of one of these people, the shade of an especially prescient writer or thinker, sneaks up, slaps me across the back of the head and says: "I told you so!" And when two appear in a single night, well, you gotta write about it.

So here I am at 2 a.m. pretending to write -- at least until I've killed the rest of this bottle of Old Granddad -- but actually thrashing amid my old files, when I stumble upon personal notes from 1982, rough drafts and clips regarding Hunter S. Thompson and Timothy Leary, written and published around the same time. Both of them now strike me as brilliant in their defiance of American mediocrity, and symbolic actors in the media's Great Cultural Outlaw Game.

I say symbolic because the news media then and still does require all types of symbolic actors to hold the nation's attention and shape its reality. Today they range from Paris Hilton and Bill O'Reilly to Rosie O'Donnell, or political actors such as Barack Obama and John McCain. Or heroic figures in sport and war such as Patrick Tillman (which didn't work out as well as planned by its Pentagon managers.) Even the most insentient lump of flesh may serve the purpose. Terry Schiavo comes to mind.

But the media also needs cultural outlaws, and allows a few of them either to serve as national examples of our supposed freedom of expression, or to serve as definitions of deviation from the norm and how it is punished. Tim Leary called it "The Outlaw Game," and he and Thompson were two examples of the outlaw's part in the superstate's instructive televised morality play. Real cultural outlaws are still allowed on stage. But to be acceptable to the corporate media state's manufactured reality, they must construct a persona (or be assigned one based upon what their behavior symbolizes) and maintain that persona, for which they are either rewarded, as Thompson was, or imprisoned as Leary was, according to the role they play out in the TV news non-reality show. Ever it was thus since the advent of television.

Yet, what strikes me about this folder of wrinkled notes is the hardening of the media model, and the changes in the American attitude regarding freedom and state authority since then. Not to mention the sheer outrageousness of permissible persona then, and the ominous prescience of some of Thompson's and Leary's quotes, scrawled down so long ago. And so I write the following from those old notes.

more

http://www.worldnewstrust.com/commentary/ghosts-of-tim-leary-and-hunter-thompson-joe-bageant.html

I can't think of anyone I like reading (or editing) more. : )

There is a lot being said here...

and remember thinking, "damn, that fucker is STILL lucid as hell." He was ranting about the DEA and the Drug War, if I remember right. They put him on with some DEA hack or something. He let loose about illegal survelliance and big brother and some such and ended up storming off the stage.

I may be misremembering, but that's what I recall. I was probably high as a kite myself at the time...back in those days life wasn't complete without at least a few bong hits.

So I Googled, and here's one hit: http://www.dissidentvoice.org/Apr05/Bageant0429.htm

I like it, and will be on the alert for his name from here on. THANKS for that!

pnorman
(Edited to include my THANKS)

"Writing politics is not like it used to be. Even covering a war has no kick. It's like writers are being ordered back to cover the farm teams. Some new kind of rot is creeping into the scene. Something more dangerous than Nixon ever was."

"I have been here a hell of a long time, son. I ain't going to compromise, I don't need to. I'm perpetually drunk, and you know as well as I that these are the values that make America great."

thanks for the link.