Tear The Roof Off The Sucka

Video Find of the Day

Way too much acid was incorporated in the making of this music. The show can't end until the Mothership lands. P-Funk on Earth Tour, with Sly and the Family Stone joining in?

Video: Tear The Roof Off The Sucka

The OK Generation

At the unveiling of the Martin Luther King Jr. logo for King County, one of the speakers made it sound like Baby Boomers made the sixties civil rights movement happen. This reminds me once more of one of my pet peeves.

There seems to be two general opinions regarding this Baby Boomer Generation of mine. They are both wrong.

The first wrong view is that we were glorious idealists who brought about the end of segregation and ended an evil war.


The second wrong view is that we are and were a bunch of spoiled brats who, in our endlessly selfish quest for new kicks and turn ons and toys and debauched sex and rock & roll, are responsible for everything that is currently wrong with America, including but not limited to AIDS, crack, meth, crack whores, too much sex, too little sex, American Idol, SUVs, wussy foreign imports, The Dixie Chicks, Al Gore, Newt Gingrich, delaying the fall of soviet communism, causing the fall of soviet communism, Clinton's blowjobs, making Reagan look good, making George Bush look good, George W Bush himself, rap, the Christian Right, LaRoucheys, besmirching liberalism, bringing liberalism into being, too much Monty Python on KCTS, Trekkies, and you can't get good weed [pussy / acid / shrooms] anymore, they used it all up between '67 and '71, and now all the weed [pussy / acid /shrooms] smells like burro butt.

A big load of duck drip.


Contrary to everything you've been told, Baby Boomers did not all march with Martin Luther King Jr. They did not become Freedom Fighters en masse. They did not even rally against the Vietnam war to the degree the media at the time portrayed. When Seattle had its Freeway March against the war, the march was well publicized in advance at UW. Five thousand students participated, which the local news played up as if it were a youth revolution in the making. But there were over 30,000 students enrolled at UW at the time. 85% of all UW students sat that one out. 85% OR MORE of all Boomers everywhere in the land sat almost everything out you've read about.


Boomer drug use was no greater than that of the Roaring Twenties, when the drug war really got started, with what was seen through the distortions of the media of that era as an "epidemic" of heroine addiction. The popularity of weed was well known to boomers as having been firmly entrenched among the Beats, who were not Boomers, and the Beats knew they were copying behaviors stereotypic of participants of the Harlem Renaissance. The free sex was definitely more free back then owing to the lack of AIDS, which we did NOT invent or cause, but it was also more free in every earlier generation, as long as no one talked about it. And who talked about it when we did it? The media.

Now I will tell you the real achievement of the Baby Boomer Generation. Every generation before us had been bad mouthed in the media of their day. But none of them before had to grow up in a television age with only 3 or 4 channels, in the middle of an explosion of knowledge about psychological manipulation.

Advertisers used the fact that they could mount focused hot media blitzes on the few channels to reach all of us cheaply. TV was at its utmost effective. It was more immediate than radio. It was less fragmented than now and the internet didn't compete with it. While our own government researched and experimented with psychological operations techniques inspired by the KGB, the Nazi propaganda machine, and Chinese brainwashers, to wage the Cold War, those techniques filtered down to the corporations that collaborated with the government and the military and they deliberately employed them to manipulate the general public.

[Shown: A US Psy Ops insignia adopted in 1967, for the 5th Psychological Operations Battalion.]

The chief tool in all this was the same systematic perversion of normal human socialization that made the Milgram experiments work. The advertisers told us day after day we had to get our parents to buy us the next thing that ever body is going to have to have. Be the first kid on your block... don't be left out... So I got chaps, and toy six-shooters at one point. At another point I had to have a coon-skin cap like Davy Crockett, or I would be a disgrace. Hula Hoops and Frisbees became necessities. Not knowing the latest hit dance was taboo. Learn the dance, buy the single.

Then the civil rights movement made serious headway, thanks mainly to older heads. About that time growing numbers of Boomers caught on to what was happening all at once. There was already a large literature on the dangers of conformity. But Boomers figured out that something more insidious than mere undirected conformity was happening. It wasn't undirected.

There was a common feeling, that emerged over the course the second half of the sixties, that the civil rights movement was all about making the US a place where you could be free to be Black, i.e., a place where you could be free to do what you had no other choice but to do, but that it was remaining a place where, thanks to government meddling & demands of employers and schools & reactionary social pressures bolstered by media in the pocket of corporations, there was barely any freedom to make choices.

The absurdity of the situation first became evident when the same media that brought us the Beatles, also portrayed us as dangerous filthy radical revolutionaries when our guys started copying the Beatles and growing their hair longer. Today it may all seem silly, but remember that we Boomers grew up being told that WWII was fought to make us free. If my freedom is only to wear a crewcut and slacks uniform & if a simple frivolous choice like choosing to grow my hair two inches longer than boot camp style is going to get me branded as an enemy of the state and I'm not going to be able to get a job and my school is going to suspend me, what's going to happen to me if I choose to do something significant that isn't universally approved? I'm only free to do what 100% of America says I can?

So a bunch of us tested that out. And we found out you could get your skull cracked if you did virtually anything out of line. Like for instance oppose a war instead of support it.

The opposition to the Vietnam War was partly about the draft. It was partly about the war itself, that it went on too long and it was pointless. But deep down it was a generation's test of the promise of freedom in this country, and the country failed. "You call this a free country and say we have free speech, but when I take you up on that and exercise my right to speak out against the war, you call up the National Guard." It was a test. It was about an entire generation being told that you're free to be any color you happen to be, but don't let it go to your heads.

So we let it go to our heads. There were excesses, but bear in mind that the excess were all committed by a minority. The only thing the general majority of Boomers had in common was that we all knew how absurd the media's coverage of it all was. That was the glue that held us together.

The sense of the absurdity of the media's manipulation of us coupled with its simultaneous stereotyping around the outcomes of its manipulations, was encapsulated in the ironic phrase, "Stop making sense." The media was trying to make our sense for us. Even people who didn't do drugs, like me, knew what it was the drug use was rebelling against. Everyone was looking for another channel, one that wasn't owned and programmed by the Man.

Then, in the late sixties, Boomers learned how to turn the tables on the corporations and the government and the media, by using the power of the media itself, stealing the show and exploiting the media right back.

Our great achievement was half shaking off the media's grip on us. We didn't completely shake them off. But we made a start. And every generation after us has had it that much easier to see through the media lies about them and to shake off the continuing efforts to manipulate them. Because we created a template of attitudes and tricks to cope.

John Cunningham Lilly

At the lunch Wednesday for Robert (Mexican Lunch -- Tahitian Music, posted Feb. 28) the topic of conversation turned, as it often does when you have two hippy-aged old farts like Robert and me in the room, to the question, "What kinds of drugs did you do, or can't you remember?" People are often surprised to learn, especially after reading my writing, but also after looking at me, that I have never done any hallucinogens whatsoever. To excuse myself for that, I always mention the natural auditory and visual hallucinations I had during that little teenage psychotic episode of mine, that convinced me that I shouldn't do those kind of drugs for the same reason I shouldn't smoke while pumping gas.

Then, to explain why I didn't change my mind and try some acid or mescaline in graduate school, say, when the psychosis would have been far enough behind me as to encourage my native recklessness, I mention the caution inspired by the story of John Lilly, the great dolphin scientist and famed acid-neuronaut . When I did this at our lunch only Anitra, who is exactly eight days younger than myself, knew of whom I was speaking. I expected Robert wouldn't know, even though, as I've said, he's about my age, because Robert isn't that into the details of the Persian Carpet of Life, so to speak. Except for Tim Harris, our Director, I thought youth and 9-11 excused the rest of the party for not knowing who Lilly was. Most of his celebrity was achieved before they were born, and the fact that he picked 19 days after 9-11 to die meant there wasn't the usual national 5 minutes of obituary for the old guy that might have clued the younger generation in.

But when Tim didn't know I have to say I was a little surprised. Here's a guy whose blog (Apesma's Lament) is named for a Captain Beefheart lyric. He's posted a medical illustration of an extended hemorrhoid on said site, as well as a 5-7-6 Haiku. So he NEEDS to know who John Cunningham Lilly was and still is. Therefore I am talking about that.


















In this picture, found on a web page titled "John C. Lilly Community of One Love" we see, from left to right, Allen Ginsberg, Timothy Leary, and John C. Lilly, hanging out in 1991. This gives you one idea who he was.


Another way you can get an idea of him is to read the fourth book of the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy trilogy. Chapter 31 of So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish introduces a character called Wonko the Sane, and named John Watson, who lives in the outside part of an inside-out house called Outside the Asylum (the inside part being the part the rest of us are living in.) The Wonko character is obviously an amalgam of about 80% John C. Lilly with about 20% James Watson (of Watson and Crick.) John C. Lilly was the dolphin scientist of the two. But both had interests in neurology.

Lilly was the one guy most responsible for the popular notion that if Cetaceans aren't really really smart, they're at least like, really sensitive, and wise. One of the things he worked hard on, besides attempting to learn how dolphins talk to one another so we could join in their conversations, was at understanding how dolphins see with sonar. Lilly came to the think that dolphins and whales have the neurological capacity and the sensory equipment necessary to see in sonar not only in stereo (like we do with our eyes) but in true 3-D. The difference between stereo and true 3-D is the difference between seeing the surfaces of your surroundings and seeing the insides as well. John Lilly arrived at the tentative conclusion that dolphins could see the workings of each others internal organs and so could read moods and feelings off internal states. He realized that if true this could make understanding a dolphin language beyond all human capacity because we could never grasp its context. We don't have any way to relate to that kind of continuous unrelenting intimacy.

These ideas spawned the best Star Trek movie with the original cast ever, IV, The Voyage Home, with humpback whales in place of dolphins. We also got Day of the Dolphins, sadly.

Before trying to understand the different ways another species might conceptualize reality as a context for communication, Lilly thought of going back to square one and seeing what happens when you remove the context altogether. That was the gist of the idea of sensory-deprivation tanks. Lilly may not have been the first to think of exploring sensory-deprivation, but he made it work. He solved the engineering problems and he wrote about his experiments and fired the public up about it. That got us Altered States and at least one Simpson episode.

Lilly's involvement with LSD was big-time. Like Timothy Leary, John Lilly's career was begun in league with the CIA and the Military-Industrial Complex. The military probably funded his earliest research, which involved mapping brain activity on cathode ray tubes. The sensory deprivation research began in 1954. By the early sixties Lilly was incorporating LSD in his sensory-deprivation experiments. The LSD was provided by the CIA as part of a project called MK-ULTRA.

In MK-ULTRA, also called MKULTRA, and later MKSEARCH, the MK apparently stood for Mind Kontrol. Maybe they wanted to avoid MCULTRA for fear their acronym would end up on a fast-food menu. Anyway MK-ULTRA was all about the CIA's attempt to discover cool new ways to manipulate people's minds. MK-ULTRA research included sensory-deprivation studies from the outset, and they may have funded all of Lilly's 1950s experiments on that. But by the sixties they were definitely supporting Lilly.

I don't think Lilly took part in it himself, but some of the other research involving sensory-deprivation for the CIA explored its use as a means of enhancing the impact of psychological torture.

I read about Lilly's work with dolphins before I got to graduate school. By the time I got to grad school, Lilly had written Centre of the Cyclone, which documents his LSD experimentation, both official and personal. One of his stories details a singularly bad trip in which he saw his wife as a hairy ape and freaked out. That was enough to convince me that I didn't want the stuff, because I was looking to get laid, and didn't need those sorts of complications. Reading the book I got the impression that Lilly was pretty scared by the whole thing.

It must not have scared him too much though, because not much later he was back at it, this time with ketamines. He is reported to have tried to warn President Ford at one point that computers were trying to take over the world.

By the end of his life Lilly had his own website, so he must have decided to stop fearing the computers and learn to communicate with them from within their own frameworks. Lilly lives on at that website.