Recent reading

Acid Dreams: The Complete Social History of LSD: The CIA, the Sixties, and Beyond 
by Bruce Shlain, Martin A. Lee


Very engaging and full of fascinating info new to me.

Juxtaposed with the grim realities of nine-to-five and the nuke, LSD seemed to herald an alternative, a new way of life. During the peak of an acid high one could wink at a turned-on sister or brother, who might also catch a glimpse of a happily-ever-after ending. Or beginning. No need to pin it down. No mix of words or meanings could recapture that overwhelming sense of promise.

 America may not have approved of its flower children, but commercially it ate them up.

 But the Yippies paid a high price for a ticket on the publicity loop. As four-star attractions in an ongoing radical soap opera, they inadvertently trivialized the very issues they sought to dramatize. The result was a parody of left-wing politics that may have undermined serious efforts to reform America.

 It was a typical sixties scene: a group of scruffy, long-haired students stood in a circle passing joints and hash pipes. The setting could have been Berkeley, Ann Arbor or any other hip campus. But these students were actually FBI agents, and the school they attended was known as “Hoover University.” Located at Quantico Marine Base in Virginia, this elite academy specialized in training G-men to penetrate left-wing organizations.

 While Woodstock showed the vast size of the rock audience, it also symbolized the rapid growth of the music industry, which by 1969 had become a billion-dollar enterprise. Rock and roll was a victim of its own success, and the new music, despite its frequent anti-authoritarian overtones, was easily coopted by the corporate establishment.

 “It’s like television, loud, large television,” Jerry Garcia of the Grateful Dead said of acid rock after it became institutionalized. “It was a sensitive trip, and it’s been lost. . . .[It] hasn’t blown a new mind in years.” The capacity to absorb its critics is among the chief characteristics of American capitalism, and one of the keys to its enduring hegemony.

 Even as the ghosts of the Cold War continue to haunt us, the psychedelic underground marches on. According to U.S. drug authorities, a recent study showed that more high school students have tried LSD than cocaine.