The Acid Guru’s Long, Strange Trip (review of Timothy Leary biography)

In September 1970, the Weather Underground helped Timothy Leary escape from a federal prison. It wasn’t a natural alliance. Leary was a hippie icon, but he usually kept the Left at arm’s length, preferring psychedelic spirituality to armed revolution. The Weathermen, meanwhile, came from the most Stalinist recesses of the New Left. Their heroes included Kim Il Sung and Mao Zedong, and their methods were aimed less at blowing people’s minds than at blowing people up.

Nonetheless, Leary played his new role with gusto, issuing a “P.O.W. Statement” that reads like a parody of revolutionary rhetoric. “Brothers and Sisters,” he wrote, “this is a war for survival. Ask Huey and Angela. They dig it. ... To shoot a genocidal robot policeman in the defense of life is a sacred act.”

Less than six years later he wrote another essay, this one gracing the less Mao-friendly pages of National Review. It was an unrestrained attack on the ’60s and its celebrities. The Weathermen who rescued Leary were dismissed (accurately) as a “bewildered, fugitive band of terrorists.” John Lennon was accused (less accurately) of ripping off the slogan of Leary’s aborted gubernatorial campaign in California, “Come Together.” (In fact, Lennon had written “Come Together” to be Leary’s campaign song.) Pages of bile were directed at Bob Dylan and his “snarling, whining, scorning, mocking” songs. At one point Leary declared, “Squeaky Fromme stands in a Sacramento courtroom … for believing exactly what [Dylan] told her in the Sixties” and blamed her attempted assassination of Gerald Ford on the fact that “she was unlucky enough to have owned a record player in her vulnerable adolescence.”

"How Our Paranoias are Hyped for Fame and Profit" by Timothy Leary Here is an extract from this article which originally appeared in The National Review, 16 April 1976.Also reprinted in Neuropolitics(1977) by T.Leary. Rock Music, Bob Dylan and the Outlaw Business The pop music contribution to the Outlaw Business cannot be overestimated.Successful pop stars are skillful market researchers, anticipating trends, performing for their constituencies the same function as the Establishment media - saying what their public wants to hear.With shameless sincerity they croon the messages of the moment, accurately reflecting the up to date counterculture-adolescent fad... Most successful in skimming the energies of the Outlaw Assembly Line, and much more malevolent, [compared to Mick Jagger and John Lennon] is Robert Zimmerman, who first conned his way onto the media stage by taking the name of a Welsh lyric poet and chanting plastic protest songs to a barbiturate beat....Sneering hatred and contempt, amplified and broadcast electronically, he created hateful realities for millions of adolescent listeners. Once stardom is achieved, the snarling rebel retires as a millionaire and adopts a scornful posture to those unfortunate enough to have opened their nervous systems to the imprint of his cosmic snivel. Then in 1972, smarting from the accusation that he had copped out, Dylan electrifies the counterculture with his elegy for George Jackson.Once again hatred is turned against the Establishment.The record is a sensation.Zimmerman fans weep in gratitude that the bard has come back to fight injustice.Enormous air-play! The single rockets to the top! Dylan is again the Messiah! There is only one little flaw in the operation: there is one person who is not around to share the royalties and the applause.The slain martyr, George Jackson is dead.[Hey,an early Zimmerman song was about another slain martyr,Medgar Evers.] But no matter, there's a new seeding of discontent, a new victim to sanctify, a new generation of gullible youth thus encouraged to nihilist sacrifice and stupid rebellion.And a new wave of popularity for the clever kid who in one album made more money in imitating Guthrie than Woody ever saw in his life.It's the Outlaw Exploitation Game folks, more fun and easier than Texas oil-drilling. Just wait until the next martyr is discovered and watch it gush.Who's next? Here comes Hurricane Carter and another cheap shot at the charts.... The profound neurological mischievousness of the Zimmerman Effect is not understood because of its invisible pervasiveness.Electroids, primates robotized by electronic brain programing,are, of course, unaware that they inhabit a reality that has been selectively imposed on them. The post-Hiroshima generation was the first completely electroid generation.At exactly the time when this enormous genetic wave opened to receive a post-Einsteinian reality,Shazam!...4,000 years of Old Testament pessimism popped up in the person of the Electronic Pad-Trip Evangelist. The one song "It's All Over Now Baby Blue" probably caused more biological and philosophical suicides than any poem in Western history.This is a tribute, not to the dismal poet, but to electronic amplification. Give a close reading, if you can, to the Zimmerman lyrics of the 1960's - snarling, whining, scorning, mocking:"It's Alright Ma","Just Like a Woman","Positively 4th Street","It Ain't Me Babe","Like a Rolling Stone".[Also "Most Likely You Go Your Way","Idiot Wind"]... Read, if you dare, the lyrics to "Like a Rolling Stone" and cringe at the deliberate trampling on hope and self-confidence.Barbiturate Barbarism."How does it feel"?It feels like that Old Testament Masochism, Bob. The evil of the Zimmerman Effect is not just that it imprints destructive, nasty realities on young brains, but that it produces a fake alienation from direct experience.The Zimmerman Effect alienates because the media manipulator broadcasts about other people's experiences, not his own.To an anonymous audience. Did Dylan stand on picket lines?Get his head busted by company police?March at Selma in the hard rain?...Yes, we know what he was against.But what was [is] he for?(Besides fake nostalgia.) When an entire generation was on the move, swirling into unchartered neurogenetic territory, where was the young millionaire waif?Protected, dear boy, in the arms of manager Al Grossman, promoter Bill Graham, Allen Ginsberg, Joan Baez, Golda Meir, and a supporting brigade of mother figures. Looking back at that wretched reality we see that Dylan truly never understood that it ain't no good to let other people get your kicks for you. Academic Zimmerman groupies will protest that it is not the function of the minstrel to storm the walls of Troy or beat against the wind on the Argo, but rather to pass on, in verse, the myth of the era. But there are two factors that make the Zimmerman Effect a perversion of the ancient and honorable bardic role: 1.Zimmerman portrays not the glory and the heroic pride of an evolving species, but the dark, craven themes of the loser cult.[He rides on the misfortune of others to promote the Dylan cult.] 2.The true minstrel sings in person;wanders around in face-to-face contact with those he is influencing.He is forced into eyeball confrontations with Mr. Jones and Maggie's Father and everyone watches to see if he's for real or if he's all talk... It's no accident that the Weathermen, the most publicized group of Dylan groupies, that bewildered, fugitive band of terrorists now cut off from their culture and condemned to underground existence, took their name from a depressing Dylan song... We can now speak frankly about the Zimmerman Effect because it is waning.We can now view with compassion, not only the passive, but the active casualities of Electroid Brainwash.Zimmerman, like Manson,was the original victim of the Effect, which occurs when electronic and chemical neural-vulnerabilities are ripped off by commercial exploiters.Dylan whined endlessly for himself and his own Lost Innocence.In recent statements and actions however, it is clear that Dylan is beginning to sense that it was no accident that he was propelled into premature popstar status by forces he himself detests.He is beginning to discover that you can't look back...Don't retire Bob, you haven't started yet.

Sorry. Forgot about formatting. (Oh and you already read that, geez, sorry sorry) "How Our Paranoias are Hyped for Fame and Profit" by Timothy Leary

Here is an extract from this article which originally appeared in The National Review, 16 April 1976.Also reprinted in Neuropolitics(1977) by T.Leary.

Rock Music, Bob Dylan and the Outlaw Business

The pop music contribution to the Outlaw Business cannot be overestimated.Successful pop stars are skillful market researchers, anticipating trends, performing for their constituencies the same function as the Establishment media - saying what their public wants to hear.With shameless sincerity they croon the messages of the moment, accurately reflecting the up to date counterculture-adolescent fad...

Most successful in skimming the energies of the Outlaw Assembly Line, and much more malevolent, [compared to Mick Jagger and John Lennon] is Robert Zimmerman, who first conned his way onto the media stage by taking the name of a Welsh lyric poet and chanting plastic protest songs to a barbiturate beat....Sneering hatred and contempt, amplified and broadcast electronically, he created hateful realities for millions of adolescent listeners.

Once stardom is achieved, the snarling rebel retires as a millionaire and adopts a scornful posture to those unfortunate enough to have opened their nervous systems to the imprint of his cosmic snivel.

Then in 1972, smarting from the accusation that he had copped out, Dylan electrifies the counterculture with his elegy for George Jackson.Once again hatred is turned against the Establishment.The record is a sensation.Zimmerman fans weep in gratitude that the bard has come back to fight injustice.Enormous air-play! The single rockets to the top! Dylan is again the Messiah! There is only one little flaw in the operation: there is one person who is not around to share the royalties and the applause.The slain martyr, George Jackson is dead.[Hey,an early Zimmerman song was about another slain martyr,Medgar Evers.]

But no matter, there's a new seeding of discontent, a new victim to sanctify, a new generation of gullible youth thus encouraged to nihilist sacrifice and stupid rebellion.And a new wave of popularity for the clever kid who in one album made more money in imitating Guthrie than Woody ever saw in his life.It's the Outlaw Exploitation Game folks, more fun and easier than Texas oil-drilling. Just wait until the next martyr is discovered and watch it gush.Who's next? Here comes Hurricane Carter and another cheap shot at the charts....

The profound neurological mischievousness of the Zimmerman Effect is not understood because of its invisible pervasiveness.Electroids, primates robotized by electronic brain programing,are, of course, unaware that they inhabit a reality that has been selectively imposed on them.

The post-Hiroshima generation was the first completely electroid generation.At exactly the time when this enormous genetic wave opened to receive a post-Einsteinian reality,Shazam!...4,000 years of Old Testament pessimism popped up in the person of the Electronic Pad-Trip Evangelist.

The one song "It's All Over Now Baby Blue" probably caused more biological and philosophical suicides than any poem in Western history.This is a tribute, not to the dismal poet, but to electronic amplification.

Give a close reading, if you can, to the Zimmerman lyrics of the 1960's - snarling, whining, scorning, mocking:"It's Alright Ma","Just Like a Woman","Positively 4th Street","It Ain't Me Babe","Like a Rolling Stone".[Also "Most Likely You Go Your Way","Idiot Wind"]...

Read, if you dare, the lyrics to "Like a Rolling Stone" and cringe at the deliberate trampling on hope and self-confidence.Barbiturate Barbarism."How does it feel"?It feels like that Old Testament Masochism, Bob.

The evil of the Zimmerman Effect is not just that it imprints destructive, nasty realities on young brains, but that it produces a fake alienation from direct experience.The Zimmerman Effect alienates because the media manipulator broadcasts about other people's experiences, not his own.To an anonymous audience.

Did Dylan stand on picket lines?Get his head busted by company police?March at Selma in the hard rain?...Yes, we know what he was against.But what was [is] he for?(Besides fake nostalgia.) When an entire generation was on the move, swirling into unchartered neurogenetic territory, where was the young millionaire waif?Protected, dear boy, in the arms of manager Al Grossman, promoter Bill Graham, Allen Ginsberg, Joan Baez, Golda Meir, and a supporting brigade of mother figures.

Looking back at that wretched reality we see that Dylan truly never understood that it ain't no good to let other people get your kicks for you.

Academic Zimmerman groupies will protest that it is not the function of the minstrel to storm the walls of Troy or beat against the wind on the Argo, but rather to pass on, in verse, the myth of the era.

But there are two factors that make the Zimmerman Effect a perversion of the ancient and honorable bardic role:

1.Zimmerman portrays not the glory and the heroic pride of an evolving species, but the dark, craven themes of the loser cult.[He rides on the misfortune of others to promote the Dylan cult.]

2.The true minstrel sings in person;wanders around in face-to-face contact with those he is influencing.He is forced into eyeball confrontations with Mr. Jones and Maggie's Father and everyone watches to see if he's for real or if he's all talk...

It's no accident that the Weathermen, the most publicized group of Dylan groupies, that bewildered, fugitive band of terrorists now cut off from their culture and condemned to underground existence, took their name from a depressing Dylan song...

We can now speak frankly about the Zimmerman Effect because it is waning.We can now view with compassion, not only the passive, but the active casualities of Electroid Brainwash.Zimmerman, like Manson,was the original victim of the Effect, which occurs when electronic and chemical neural-vulnerabilities are ripped off by commercial exploiters.Dylan whined endlessly for himself and his own Lost Innocence.In recent statements and actions however, it is clear that Dylan is beginning to sense that it was no accident that he was propelled into premature popstar status by forces he himself detests.He is beginning to discover that you can't look back...Don't retire Bob, you haven't started yet.

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