Joe Bageant

Skinny Dipping in Reality

A coot's account of the great hippy LSD enlightenment search party

 

By Joe Bageant

 "There's nothing better that 250 mics of good acid to kick start the cosmic coonhunt for Enlightenment. It takes juice. After all sonny boy, you don't knock down stars with a bee bee gun."
-- Mad Dog Howard, Hippie Doper/Philosopher

First LSD trip, 1965: Tumbling, tumbling, tumbling inward with eyes closed, I could hear the spider plant hanging in the basket overhead singing in its green subatomic plant language, a hymn to the sunlight charging my bedroom atmosphere. On the back of my eyelids spun a great wheel of existence, turning both ways simultaneously generating an unearthly mournful chant that seemed to be composed of every human voice on earth. It rose in some unknown universal tongue singing, "Wheel of life, wheel of death, Bangladesh, Bangladesh. Wheel of life, wheel of death, Bangaladesh, Bangaladesh." Millions of starving faces, young men, girls, old men, babies, crones, materialized in uncountable swarms, each face transfigured by some unnamable mutual understanding that I could not share. Then they atomized, leaving the room filled with the scent of wood smoke, shit and citrus blossoms (an odor I would instantly recognize decades later in poverty stricken Central American villages.)

Expat in Norway cries about America

Dear Joe,

One score and seven years ago my Norwegian girlfriend and cohab, Aud, then studying preliminary psychology courses said, "Evan, you should study psychology! You've got a varied background and some social intelligence." Back then I split my time between painting (the house kind) on the one hand, and social science studies, specifically social anthropology, on the other. "Fuck that shit!" I said, "All those guys do is glue together those poor bastards getting fucked by the system. Emancipation ain't gonna come from there!"

Well, though my next five years entailed immersion in macro economics, comparative politics and education, and -- like any rebel too burdened by egocentric causes to actually embark on social rebellion -- overindulgence in local spirits (Aquavit) and German beer. Guess what? One score minus five years ago I became a clinical psychologist. Irony? Hell, yes! Laziness? Apathy? No doubt. Once in the "school," nothing could be easier. My toil since has for the most part been with/for/about the sickest of the poor bastards. Certainly, organic pathology plays a role for some, yet for them, too, the road out of insanity/implosion lies within the context of the real human relationship with a real human being.

A Commodity Called Misery

By Joe Bageant

Our authorized sanities are so many Nembutals. "Normal" citizens with store-dummy smiles stand apart from each other like cotton-packed capsules in a bottle. Perpetual mental out-patients. Maddeningly sterile jobs for strait-jackets, love scrubbed into an insipid "functional personal relationship" and Art as a fantasy pacifier ... And we all know this ... Slowly, very slowly we are led nowhere.
-- San Francisco Digger Papers, 1965

HOPKINS VILLAGE, BELIZE -- Sitting down here in Central America happily abusing my health, occasionally, between the hangovers and the bouts with sand fleas and mosquitoes comes an  insight or two, or at least what passes for insight in my lowbrow take on life. One of these is just how damned lucky the Third World is that it cannot afford a sophisticated mental health system. By that I mean the kind in the "developed countries," where murder and suicide rates are quintuple what they are here in this village. Not that we are without own village resources. My Garifuna buddy Eljay, was in what we would call a depressed state a few months ago, and went to a local "spirit doctor." The wizened old spirit mojo man cured Eljay with a single utterance: "Quit smokin' da ganja for one month."

Europeans bristle at 'Leader of free world'

Hi Joe

 

I was pleased to see my last email quote in your latest essay, North Toward Home, which I have just finished. A reading for the second time (I can't take in all your dense prose in one go!!), even if you only quoted my quotation of someone else - long forgotten, alas. Yes, The government got in again... Go Bama!!

 

But I have correspondents in the US who genuinely hope for change in this new administration and are willing to look hard-eyed at the demands that must be made of the American way of life (or is that Way Of Life?). As one wrote to me yesterday, O'Bama (sic) is an educated man, and we surely mist all acknowledge that this is some kind of a breakthrough after the last half dozen Presidents. In fact I cannot think of one since Roosevelt, who could be relied upon to act upon your own deathly sentence, the one that tells us we should be "Looking upon the world with eyes as cold as ashes but with a heart like a furnace."