Program Notes
Guest speakers: Timothy Leary and G. Gordon Liddy
This program is another selection from the Timothy Leary archive. It features an October 23, 1990 debate at Penn State University between Dr. Leary and his arch-enemy, the scandalous G. Gordon Liddy. One of my favorite segments in this debate, which wasn’t all that polite at times, is when Leary pointed out the fact that he had spent more time in the U.S. Military service than Liddy had, but that Liddy had spent more time in prison than Leary had.
[NOTE: All quotations are by Timothy Leary.]
“My advice to you is: 1) don’t rely on politicians to solve you problems; 2) work to the fullest of your power to decentralize and to take power away from the central government in Washington, bring it back to the villages, to the cities, to the neighborhoods.”
“It politics, scum rises to the top. Let me say it again, in politics mediocrity rises to the top.”
“As far as this election is concerned, I urge you, don’t vote for either a Democrat or a Republican. It just encourages the bastards.”
MENTIONED IN THIS PODCAST
The Maze Game by Diana Reed Slattery
http://astore.amazon.com/matrixmasterscom/detail/1889471100/180-8219517-6683564
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Transcript
00:00:00 ►
Greetings from cyberdelic space.
00:00:20 ►
This is Lorenzo and I’m your host here in the Psychedelic Salon.
00:00:24 ►
Cyberdelic Space. This is Lorenzo and I’m your host here in the Psychedelic Salon.
00:00:31 ►
And once again, I would like to begin by thanking some of our fellow salonners who have either made donations to the salon or who have paid for a copy of my Pay What You Can novel, the audiobook version of the Genesis Generation.
00:00:51 ►
are John C., Timothy F., John S., Melissa S., Eric B., Ewan M., Fred S., and Jeremy S., who not only made a significant donation to the salon, but did it with an interesting
00:00:56 ►
number.
00:00:57 ►
Very clever, Jeremy.
00:00:59 ►
And the last donor I’d like to thank this week is Diana Slattery, who, as you know,
00:01:04 ►
has already contributed significantly to the salon
00:01:07 ►
by sending me a big box of Terrence McKenna recordings,
00:01:11 ►
which included the two recent podcasts of some of his earliest recordings,
00:01:15 ►
among many others that she sent.
00:01:17 ►
And while Diana has never asked me to mention it,
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her work not only includes the creation of an entirely new language called Glide,
00:01:26 ►
she has featured it in her novel The Maze Game, which has been called a work of genius
00:01:32 ►
and compared to work by Nabokov, Echo, Foucault, and Pynchon, just to mention a few of my favorite
00:01:37 ►
authors, and I’ll put a link to it in the program notes for today’s podcast in case
00:01:42 ►
you’d like to check it out.
00:01:43 ►
So again, thank you one and all for your continuing support of these podcasts. Now, today I’m going to play
00:01:50 ►
another recording from the Timothy Leary archive that I received through the good graces of Dennis
00:01:56 ►
Berry and Bruce Stamer. And the one I’ve selected is a debate that was recorded on October 23,
00:02:02 ►
- And it was held between Dr. Leary and a person I consider
00:02:08 ►
one of the all-time over-the-top assholes of America, G. Gordon Liddy.
00:02:13 ►
As you may recall, it was Liddy who orchestrated the infamous Watergate break-in
00:02:18 ►
that eventually led to the downfall of another arch-villain of American history,
00:02:23 ►
Richard Nixon, the father of the war
00:02:25 ►
on drugs. I think that it was about a year ago when I played another Timothy Leary talk in which
00:02:31 ►
he very amusingly pointed out that Liddy’s only claim to fame before Nixon hired him was that he
00:02:37 ►
raided Leary’s compound at Millbrook and got a lot of publicity for doing so. Otherwise, Nixon
00:02:43 ►
probably never would have heard of that
00:02:45 ►
smarmy little jerk who eventually did him in. And I guess that bringing Nixon down is at least one
00:02:51 ►
thing Liddy did to make up for being such a fascist jerk. Now, if you fast forward about 25 years
00:02:58 ►
after Liddy’s break-in of Leary’s bedroom, we come to 1990, and now have Leary and Liddy debating one another on college
00:03:06 ►
campuses in a somewhat carnival atmosphere, but on a speaking circuit that earned them both a tidy
00:03:12 ►
sum. Personally, I really don’t understand why Leary lowered himself to participate in these
00:03:18 ►
debates, but I guess that when you don’t have much money, you’ll do most anything to make ends meet.
00:03:24 ►
Anyway, as you’re about to hear, they actually did provide an entertaining evening of stimulating thought.
00:03:29 ►
But I should tell you first that around 47 minutes into this recording, there was a break.
00:03:35 ►
And my guess is that the cassette tape ran out.
00:03:38 ►
So when the recording picked up again, Dr. Leary was already in mid-sentence during the question and answer session, so we probably missed a bit of this talk, but I think you’re going to enjoy it anyway.
00:03:50 ►
Now let’s travel back in time to the evening of October 23, 1990 at Penn State University
00:03:57 ►
and hear a little bit about the differences between a proponent of personal responsibility,
00:04:03 ►
Dr. Timothy Leary, versus the proponent of personal responsibility, Dr. Timothy Leary,
00:04:10 ►
versus the proponent of state control of the individual, the notorious G. Gordon Liddy.
00:04:18 ►
Mr. Leary believes that the individual is sacred and must be protected from the bureaucracy,
00:04:31 ►
government, and law enforcement agencies in order to be free. Before we get started tonight, I’d like to introduce one of our guests, Dr. Timothy Leary.
00:04:37 ►
In 1959, Dr. Leary was appointed to the faculty of Harvard University, and for three years
00:04:42 ►
he was the director of the Harvard Psychedelic Research Project.
00:04:52 ►
The project was a clinical study of the effects of psychedelic drugs
00:04:57 ►
until 1966 LSD was legal in the United States.
00:05:00 ►
After being dismissed from Harvard in 1963, Dr. Leary established a research center
00:05:09 ►
in Millbrook, New York, and it became a beacon for the leaders of a new generation. It was Dr.
00:05:14 ►
Leary who coined the phrase, turn on, tune in, and drop out. In 1970, Dr. Leary was imprisoned and charged with the possession of half an ounce of marijuana.
00:05:30 ►
He narrowly escaped prison and was later granted political asylum in Algeria and Switzerland.
00:05:35 ►
He eventually was captured in Afghanistan by DEA agents and extradited back to the United States.
00:05:42 ►
Mr. Leary was paroled in 1976. Please join with me in welcoming Dr. Timothy Leary. Our next guest tonight…
00:06:12 ►
Our next guest tonight is a supporter of the power of government.
00:06:23 ►
Mr. Liddy was a law review graduate, and he holds a doctorate from Fordham University in law.
00:06:32 ►
He became, at age 29, the youngest supervisor at the FBI national headquarters.
00:06:37 ►
After serving with the FBI, Mr. Liddy practiced international law and then served as an assistant district attorney.
00:06:42 ►
and then served as an assistant district attorney.
00:06:45 ►
His name became well-known outside of political and law circles when he led two raids on the headquarters of Dr. Timothy Leary,
00:06:49 ►
leader of the 60s psychedelic movement.
00:06:55 ►
Dr. Leary lost the 1968 Republican congressional primary in New York’s 28th district.
00:07:03 ►
He then took command of Richard Nixon’s presidential campaign. When Nixon won, he was
00:07:09 ►
appointed to various university and Nixon administration positions. He then became
00:07:14 ►
general counsel to re-elect the president in 1972, and the rest, as they say, is history.
00:07:21 ►
Mr. Liddy was sentenced to 21 years in maximum security prison for his role in the Watergate scandal.
00:07:31 ►
President Carter released Mr. Liddy from prison in the interests of justice.
00:07:38 ►
Please join colloquy in welcoming Dr. G. Gordon Liddy. Got to make sure I can keep the room covered here.
00:08:15 ►
Tonight’s debate is going to include a question-and-answer period,
00:08:18 ►
but first we will start with G. Gordon Liddy, who will address you to begin with,
00:08:23 ►
and then Dr. Leary will address the audience after that.
00:08:33 ►
I won the coin toss about going first, but Tim Leary and I, as you’re going to find out
00:08:42 ►
right from the beginning, don’t even agree on the facts and circumstances surrounding our first meeting.
00:08:49 ►
And I think probably we better clear that up because we were arguing about that just inside here again.
00:08:55 ►
So, Tim, why don’t you just start off this evening by just telling them how we first met,
00:09:01 ►
or your version of it, as best you can remember it under the circumstances.
00:09:22 ►
I first met G. Gordon Liddy, I think, in the spring of 1967, at that time, I was living in a large estate near Poughkeepsie, New York.
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We had formed there something called the Castalia Foundation.
00:09:39 ►
And we’d assemble there a group of psychologists, philosophers, doctors, and various artists
00:09:48 ►
and poets.
00:09:49 ►
And we were conducting, very diligently, researches in altered states of consciousness.
00:09:59 ►
I must say that this was not a very exciting, lurid organization.
00:10:06 ►
We were most of us were middle-aged professorial or academic people.
00:10:13 ►
We were publishing a well-known academic scholarly journal.
00:10:19 ►
We were writing articles, we were giving lectures, and we were performing controlled studies.
00:10:27 ►
Indeed, our center at Millbrook, New York, at that particular time in world history,
00:10:31 ►
had become the world focus or center of this discipline of the careful study of
00:10:42 ►
alter states of consciousness, a discipline which goes back for thousands of years,
00:10:46 ►
which has appeared in every high civilization in world history,
00:10:50 ►
and is an unbroken string of visionary poets, mystics, philosophers.
00:10:59 ►
Basically, you’re talking about the central thread of human philosophy.
00:11:02 ►
talking about the central thread of human philosophy.
00:11:13 ►
However, in the spring of 1967, it came to our attention, via a network of many informants,
00:11:27 ►
that there was in the county seat of Poughkeepsie a very ambitious young district attorney, a man who burned with zeal and fervor and fanatic desire to defend the American way as he saw it
00:11:31 ►
and to stamp out sin and evil.
00:11:35 ►
We learned that this man was going to lead a raid
00:11:39 ►
upon our scientific scholarly center.
00:11:44 ►
Now, it might occur at the first blush that this is unusual,
00:11:50 ►
that cops would be busting a center where conscious alteration
00:11:57 ►
and visionary philosophy was being studied.
00:11:59 ►
But I’m sure your knowledge of history, being well-educated Penn State students,
00:12:11 ►
I’m sure you know that throughout human history,
00:12:18 ►
the issue we’re going to debate tonight has always been a central concern of human society.
00:12:22 ►
There are people who want to look within, who want to expand,
00:12:27 ►
who want to push the frontiers of human knowledge out,
00:12:30 ►
and there are those who want to keep the status quo.
00:12:33 ►
Okay, the raid was supposed to happen on a Saturday night.
00:12:44 ►
At the time, LSD was legal nationally, but because of a local option, was illegal in the state of New York.
00:12:47 ►
So we told everyone, if you have any illegal drugs,
00:12:48 ►
stash them outside in the bushes.
00:12:53 ►
And we sat down on a Saturday night to wait for the Keystone cops to raid us.
00:12:56 ►
Well, we heard reports they got lost in the bushes.
00:12:58 ►
They went to the wrong place.
00:13:01 ►
Police cars were wandering around this large estate.
00:13:05 ►
Obviously, it was a typical military police organization.
00:13:16 ►
And about midnight we gave up and went to bed. My wife and I were just settling our brains for a long springtime nap when all of a sudden on the hallway outside the door
00:13:20 ►
we heard a clatter and rumble of feet.
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The door of our room was rudely pushed open.
00:13:35 ►
And there, leading a band of guerrilla terrorists,
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dressed in the uniforms of the local deputy sheriff’s booted armed helmet,
00:13:45 ►
they’re leading this band of midnight raiders.
00:13:50 ►
Is that Peter Sellers as Inspector Clouseau?
00:14:00 ►
G. Gordon Liddy, with great command and hardline presence,
00:14:07 ►
looked around my bedroom, saw a pot by the fireplace, picked it up, found some brown vegetable substance, and put me under arrest for what turned out to be possession of peat moss.
00:14:16 ►
Now,
00:14:29 ►
cops never admit a mistake, and military people never admit mistakes,
00:14:32 ►
so there are all sorts of reasons given why the case was thrown out of court.
00:14:35 ►
Actually, the case was a laughingstock in New York State. It was called the case of the missing marijuana, or the invisible marijuana.
00:14:42 ►
I must say, though, Mr. Liddy is relentless and indomitable in his pursuit of justice as he sees it,
00:14:49 ►
and he continued to make raids on our headquarters and harassed us and hassled us so much
00:14:55 ►
that we realized that this was no place for a civilized American to live.
00:15:00 ►
So we moved out of New York State and moved to California,
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a migration for which I’ll always be grateful to Mr. Liddy.
00:15:09 ►
Mr. Liddy, however, as a result of his exploits, or probably because they wanted to get him out of the county,
00:15:17 ►
was transferred to Washington, D.C. and joined the Nixon White House, where he led other midnight raids of dubious legality
00:15:34 ►
and equal inefficiency. I will now allow Mr. Reedy to give you his distorted version of
00:15:44 ►
these events.
00:16:00 ►
Well, as you’re about to see, Tim and I really don’t agree on just about anything in this world,
00:16:04 ►
and that certainly does include the facts and circumstances surrounding our first meeting.
00:16:11 ►
There are elements of truth in there, and at no time would I suggest that Tim was lying to you about it.
00:16:12 ►
His condition that evening was not conducive to being able to remember very much.
00:16:19 ►
But here is the situation we found ourselves in. We kept getting reports from the 64-room mansion and this
00:16:28 ►
several thousand-acre estate in Dutchess County that Tim and his cohort were occupying, and
00:16:37 ►
that they were distributing and using controlled dangerous substances out there. We’ve managed to get sufficient people in to be able to go before a judge and get a search warrant.
00:16:51 ►
But we had a problem, a legal problem, in the execution of the search warrant.
00:16:55 ►
If you go to a hotel, say it’s a 64-room hotel, and you search it,
00:17:09 ►
room hotel and you search it and you find some contraband in room 39 you know whom to charge with possession of that contraband in room 39 because one there is a number on the door two
00:17:13 ►
there’s a register downstairs it says who’s in there but of course in tim leary’s establishment
00:17:18 ►
there were no numbers on the doors, there were no registers downstairs.
00:17:31 ►
This scientific laboratory, this group of middle-aged scholars,
00:17:37 ►
included persons of all ages, including little children and babies.
00:17:40 ►
There were quite a few goats wandering in and out,
00:17:46 ►
some of whom may or may not have had laxative administered to them, I don’t know, but they never cleaned up behind them.
00:17:49 ►
And in any event, it was a pretty weird setup there.
00:17:55 ►
And so what we decided to do was we would wait until they went to bed so that we could
00:17:59 ►
sneak in the front, they never left the door locked, and go up this massive staircase.
00:18:05 ►
It was something like the one that Clark Cable took.
00:18:12 ►
What was her name? What was her name?
00:18:15 ►
Vivian Lee up, you know, and gone with the wind.
00:18:17 ►
And we were going to trap everybody in his or her rooms,
00:18:19 ►
and then we would know if we found anything whom to charge.
00:18:24 ►
So we waited for them to go to bed. Now what they were
00:18:27 ►
doing before they went to bed, they were in a place that I think originally was a dining room,
00:18:31 ►
and they had a motion picture projector and screen in there, and for several hours they ran a movie
00:18:38 ►
of a waterfall. This waterfall was colored by having a little can with a light bulb in it, revolving, and various colored lights, so that it was a multicolored, variegated waterfall.
00:18:59 ►
While the water fell for several hours, they smoked something.
00:19:04 ►
The place was full of smoke. At any rate, they finally
00:19:07 ►
staggered off to bed. And that was when we decided, all right, now we’ll go in and trap them in the
00:19:12 ►
rooms by sneaking up the stairs. We had 12 helmeted and booted deputy sheriffs. And that night I
00:19:19 ►
learned something important. 12 helmeted and booted deputy sheriffs cannot sneak.
00:19:24 ►
Important. Twelve helmeted and booted deputy sheriffs cannot sneak.
00:19:31 ►
We started up the stairs and those guys made so much noise behind me that everybody started coming out of the rooms,
00:19:38 ►
which of course was not the plan, led by His Eminence, the chief scholar, Dr. Leary.
00:19:43 ►
He was wearing a Hathaway shirt, period.
00:19:49 ►
And my first view of the doctor as I went up the steep stairs and he came down was spectacular at least.
00:19:50 ►
I mean, there he was.
00:19:56 ►
We, of course, searched the premises.
00:19:59 ►
We found lots of things, peat moss and other things too.
00:20:04 ►
But we also found LSD, I think some psilocybin and some marijuana and what have you, and so they
00:20:05 ►
were arrested.
00:20:06 ►
And the trial was funny because the defense rested on two things.
00:20:14 ►
One was the fact that in the interval, the Supreme Court of the United States had decided
00:20:21 ►
the case called Miranda v. Arizona, and they were attacking the warnings that we gave to people when we arrested them,
00:20:26 ►
and it ultimately fell on that ground.
00:20:30 ►
But their chief reliance was that this was part of their religion,
00:20:35 ►
and this was their religious practice and experience.
00:20:39 ►
And in order to establish that,
00:20:41 ►
establish that in order to establish that
00:20:46 ►
they had a series of so-called
00:20:48 ►
expert witnesses
00:20:50 ►
there must have been 20 of them
00:20:51 ►
they were all swamis of one kind or another
00:20:53 ►
with the turbans and the crystal balls
00:20:54 ►
and all this stuff
00:20:55 ►
and I’ll never forget the judge
00:20:57 ►
jumping up and down
00:20:58 ►
saying you know you bring one more swami in here
00:21:00 ►
and I’m going to hold you all in contempt
00:21:02 ►
at any event
00:21:03 ►
as I said, the case failed on the basis of Miranda v. Arizona,
00:21:10 ►
but then we raided them again, and this time we got them and they made a deal.
00:21:14 ►
You know, you leave Dutchess County and we will stop busting you,
00:21:17 ►
and that’s really what happened.
00:21:19 ►
And he did indeed go off to California, for which he is very grateful,
00:21:23 ►
but for which California has never forgiven
00:21:26 ►
me.
00:21:30 ►
Now, at this point, inasmuch as I won the coin toss, we will start the debate.
00:21:38 ►
What we’re talking about here, and when I say we, I mean specifically to include you,
00:21:43 ►
because in the question and answer period,
00:21:46 ►
we are going to solicit your questions and your views, and you may ask either one of
00:21:50 ►
us or both of us, and we’ll get into a three-way conversation on this.
00:21:54 ►
But there is a natural tension between individual rights and the claims upon us that the state
00:22:02 ►
has. But I think it’s probably best to first examine the understructure
00:22:11 ►
of this whole concept of having a state. Why do we even have one? You’ve got two chief
00:22:19 ►
theories abroad in the world today about the nature of man. The first is held by individualists.
00:22:24 ►
They say that the only ontological reality is that of the human individual
00:22:27 ►
and that to the extent that communities or societies have any reality at all,
00:22:33 ►
which is dubious in their mind,
00:22:34 ►
it’s just a gathering together of individuals
00:22:38 ►
for the self-ordained purposes of the rational animal.
00:22:42 ►
Now, the opposite view is held by the collectivists,
00:22:46 ►
most particularly the Marxists. And lest you think that that is no longer relevant because of what is going on in
00:22:52 ►
the Soviet Union, I would point out to you that the largest in terms of population nation on the
00:22:56 ►
face of this earth, China, is Marxist. So is most of Central Africa, Cuba, Yemen, North Korea,
00:23:05 ►
and the English lit departments at Harvard, Stanford, and Yale.
00:23:14 ►
Now, the collectivists believe there is no individual ontological reality at all.
00:23:22 ►
As far as they’re concerned, the only reality is that of
00:23:25 ►
society, and society’s nature is completely determined at any given time by the means of
00:23:34 ►
production currently in use. Now, if you simply use your common sense and powers of observation,
00:23:40 ►
you’re going to find out that they are both wrong. You look around you, you are going
00:23:45 ►
to see a world filled with individuals. Tall ones, short ones, fat ones, thin ones, black ones, white
00:23:50 ►
ones, yellow ones, red ones, smart ones, stupid ones, etc. But you may have observed something about
00:23:57 ►
the human individual in contrast to the lesser animals, and that is that we, the humans,
00:24:09 ►
are animals, and that is that we, the humans, lack the individual weaponry, say, of the fang and the claw or protective coloration and things of that sort in order to be able
00:24:14 ►
by ourselves to realize our individual existential human ends.
00:24:22 ►
We cannot do that by ourselves.
00:24:26 ►
individual, existential human ends. We cannot do that by ourselves. Unless we have mutual supplementation and cooperation among us, we cannot create such vastly different things as,
00:24:33 ►
say, an armed forces on the one hand and a ballet on the other, a health care delivery system,
00:24:37 ►
a road system, police departments, garbage collection, anything. None of those things are achievable by ourselves.
00:24:48 ►
And so the ineluctable conclusion one comes to is that man has an equally viable,
00:24:56 ►
equally ontological, real, dual nature.
00:25:02 ►
Now, that being the case, you can recognize that there is a distinction between morality,
00:25:13 ►
on the one hand, and law, on the other.
00:25:17 ►
Indeed, they are intrinsically different.
00:25:21 ►
If you confuse them in your minds, you get into a lot of trouble.
00:25:25 ►
You can’t resolve any kinds of arguments or disputes.
00:25:30 ►
If you were the only individual on the face of this earth, what need would you have for a law?
00:25:35 ►
Who is to be controlled? There’s only you.
00:25:39 ►
But you would still have your morality.
00:25:41 ►
That’s your relationship with your maker.
00:25:44 ►
The study of morality, the academic discipline, is called ethics.
00:25:48 ►
The study of law, the academic discipline, is called jurisprudence.
00:25:53 ►
Different because they arise from the different sides of mankind’s nature.
00:26:02 ►
When one goes over to the social side is where one finds laws because a law is defined as an
00:26:08 ►
order of society liable to enforcement that gives certain powers of control over individuals
00:26:14 ►
and groups of individuals communities
00:26:16 ►
and it is also from our social nature that we derive rights.
00:26:31 ►
A right is the power to have or to claim something free of the unreasonable interference of someone else.
00:26:35 ►
It’s a sphere of autonomy with the power to act.
00:26:40 ►
And no right is ever limitless.
00:26:46 ►
Indeed, all rights are intrinsically limited.
00:26:47 ►
I’ll give you a common example.
00:26:59 ►
My right to worship God the way I see fit never extends to coercing anyone else into worshiping God as I see fit rather than they do.
00:27:01 ►
Limited. Limited.
00:27:01 ►
limited.
00:27:04 ►
Now the common good is that
00:27:06 ►
state of affairs, if you will,
00:27:09 ►
which makes it possible
00:27:11 ►
for all of the individuals
00:27:14 ►
to combine through mutual cooperation
00:27:16 ►
and supplementation to achieve
00:27:17 ►
the human existential ends.
00:27:21 ►
And that common good,
00:27:23 ►
because it subsumes in itself as a whole the individual good,
00:27:29 ►
transcends the individual goods and has a superior claim.
00:27:35 ►
Thus, in times of war, when the nation is in danger,
00:27:39 ►
they can have a draft, which is involuntary servitude,
00:27:49 ►
which is specifically prohibited by the Constitution, and yet you can have one.
00:27:53 ►
Because of the superior claim of the common good.
00:27:59 ►
So there’s the undergirding of why we even have a state. can get into a discussion where reasonable men can certainly differ as to the nature
00:28:05 ►
that state ought to take, totalitarian, democratic, republic, etc. And there, I think, is chiefly
00:28:13 ►
where my opponent and I disagree. He, of course, can speak for himself. It’s my view that as
00:28:22 ►
messy and as sloppy as it is oftentimes in practice,
00:28:27 ►
the system that was set up by our founding fathers is a superior one.
00:28:34 ►
They broke up our system of government into three parts.
00:28:40 ►
One group, representing the people through direct election
00:28:45 ►
to create laws
00:28:47 ►
the executive
00:28:50 ►
to carry them out
00:28:52 ►
and where the inevitable conflicts come
00:28:55 ►
which is what we’re going to be debating here today
00:28:57 ►
of course there’s going to be conflicts
00:28:58 ►
you had the judiciary
00:29:00 ►
to sort of act as an umpire
00:29:03 ►
and an interpreter to sort it out and to be able to
00:29:07 ►
achieve a final solution of a difference now that was an excellent system and indeed there was an
00:29:12 ►
ingenious one because with respect to the creation of laws in the legislature the founding fathers
00:29:19 ►
wanted to have it both ways they They wanted institutional memory and continuity, but they also wanted constant influx of fresh blood and new ideas.
00:29:30 ►
Their solution was a bicameral legislature with the stability of the Senate, six-year term, and never any more than only one-third of that body up for re-election at the same time. Thus the continuity and the institutional memory.
00:29:47 ►
In the House of Representatives, constant fresh blood new ideas, every single one of
00:29:52 ►
them up for re-election every two years.
00:29:54 ►
That was the idea.
00:29:56 ►
And that was the way, in the beginning, it worked.
00:29:59 ►
And it worked magnificently well.
00:30:01 ►
In George Washington’s day, when the by-elections, 40% of the House of Representatives used to be wiped out. Now, 99% are re-elected. You can’t get them out of there
00:30:11 ►
with a howitzer. Why? Because over the years, slowly, it’s an accretion process. It’s not a
00:30:20 ►
big conspiracy or anything else. It was an accretive process. They loaded the dice
00:30:27 ►
in their favor against any challenger. And the load kept getting heavier and heavier
00:30:33 ►
and heavier. Until finally, you have a situation where you no longer have a House of Representatives.
00:30:43 ►
You now have that from which the colonialists fled from Europe, a House of Lords.
00:30:48 ►
And if you don’t think that they’re a House of Lords, look at the way they behave.
00:30:54 ►
They pass laws to govern the conduct of every single one of us, but not any one of them.
00:31:02 ►
but not any one of them.
00:31:10 ►
I want to give you some examples.
00:31:14 ►
Civil Rights Act of 1964, generally attributed right now as being one of the great laws ever passed,
00:31:16 ►
does not apply to the Congress of the United States.
00:31:20 ►
They exempted themselves.
00:31:22 ►
Minimum wage law applies to you and me and everyone else,
00:31:24 ►
not to the Congress. Fair Labor Standards Act does not apply to the Congress, only to
00:31:28 ►
you and me. Age discrimination laws applies to us, but not to the Congress. OSHA applies
00:31:40 ►
to us, not the Congress. All of these things do not apply to the Congress, only to us.
00:31:49 ►
So where does that leave us?
00:31:50 ►
What it leaves us with is an absence of accountability.
00:31:56 ►
The system that was set up by the Founding Fathers is that we are their boss.
00:32:01 ►
They are accountable to us for what they do, supposedly. Only now they’re not,
00:32:06 ►
because they no longer need fear, failure to be re-elected. They’re set in concrete,
00:32:14 ►
so they don’t really care what you think. Thus they are contemptuous of you. There’s
00:32:21 ►
the problem. And that is the genesis of the movements in places like California and Colorado
00:32:28 ►
and other places
00:32:29 ►
to limit their terms
00:32:31 ►
or indeed of an even more powerful grassroots unit
00:32:34 ►
movement
00:32:36 ►
to just fire everybody next general election.
00:32:40 ►
Doesn’t make any difference whether they’re Democrats or Republicans.
00:32:43 ►
The reason for that is that one thing you can be sure of,
00:32:47 ►
whoever comes in as a result of the action of the people firing everybody in the Congress,
00:32:51 ►
is those people will fear you, they will respect you, they will listen to you.
00:32:55 ►
And you’ll once again have a House of Representatives instead of a House of Lords.
00:33:01 ►
Those are the kinds of things that we should be discussing and debating.
00:33:06 ►
These are issues that you can act upon within weeks now.
00:33:13 ►
And so I’m very heartened by the fact that so many of you are here,
00:33:17 ►
because it’s clear that you care.
00:33:21 ►
Because what these people do down there, these people who are no longer accountable
00:33:25 ►
to you in passing these laws that apply to you and not to themselves, will ruin your
00:33:30 ►
lives. And your lives are just beginning. And they’ve already got a shackle on you.
00:33:39 ►
And so you should come here and listen and partake and participate this evening. But you shouldn’t
00:33:46 ►
stop at that.
00:33:48 ►
You should participate in the political process.
00:33:51 ►
Because if you
00:33:52 ►
don’t,
00:33:54 ►
then no one’s going to listen to
00:33:56 ►
you when you complain.
00:33:59 ►
And you’ll really
00:34:00 ►
have no right to complain.
00:34:02 ►
Because it’ll be your fault.
00:34:04 ►
Thank you very much.
00:34:06 ►
Thank you.
00:34:24 ►
I have come to know Gordon Liddy pretty well.
00:34:30 ►
Midnight raids and evening debates.
00:34:38 ►
I think I should point out something that I’ve learned about Mr. Liddy that you may not know.
00:34:42 ►
Number one, Mr. Liddy is a lawyer.
00:34:46 ►
Now, he’s a well-trained lawyer.
00:34:49 ►
Mr. Liddy is a very articulate and well-educated man.
00:34:53 ►
He was trained by the Jesuits in such skills as rhetoric.
00:35:01 ►
I want to tell you, if you’re ever in trouble and you’re really guilty as hell,
00:35:06 ►
and you need a lawyer, hire Liddy.
00:35:12 ►
Now, to a lawyer or to a partisan,
00:35:18 ►
and Gordon Liddy is a partisan party member,
00:35:22 ►
there’s no scientific evidence.
00:35:35 ►
party member. There’s no scientific evidence. Exchanges of this sortline, right-wing nuts who run this country want you to believe.
00:36:13 ►
Let me give you an example. You notice that Mr. Letty said, back in the 60s, the Supreme Court, in its stupid wisdom, saw fit to rule on something called Miranda v. Arizona.
00:36:25 ►
Now, what that case was about was, it said that police have no right to grill, cross-examine, question suspects without warning them of their rights. That protects police from brutalizing or extracting confessions from uneducated or frightened
00:36:32 ►
or ill-advised arrestees. I mean, if there’s any issue of common sense in a democracy with
00:36:41 ►
any pretense of civil rights, you have to have some check on the power of the police
00:36:45 ►
in that back room of the station house
00:36:46 ►
when they’ve got some poor, scared, uneducated,
00:36:49 ►
probably guilty, maybe not, person,
00:36:51 ►
and they start questioning him
00:36:52 ►
and waving instruments of pain in front of him.
00:36:57 ►
But the Supreme Court,
00:37:00 ►
which ruled in favor of Miranda against Arizona, of course,
00:37:02 ►
was taking power away from whom?
00:37:06 ►
From the cops, from the central government.
00:37:11 ►
Now, you may not remember it, but during the 60s,
00:37:15 ►
the Supreme Court, Mr. Liddy and his right-wing ring-ding-nut fanatics,
00:37:23 ►
they were attacking the Supreme Court,
00:37:25 ►
the Supreme Court, the Supreme Court.
00:37:26 ►
Why?
00:37:26 ►
Because the Supreme Court was standing up
00:37:28 ►
in a series of issues,
00:37:29 ►
of civil rights,
00:37:30 ►
of racial equality,
00:37:32 ►
of equality for the sexes.
00:37:34 ►
There was a glorious Supreme Court then
00:37:37 ►
defending the rights of the individual.
00:37:41 ►
Now, in glorious 1990,
00:37:43 ►
you notice Mr. Liddy is not criticizing the Supreme Court today
00:37:46 ►
because the Supreme Court now has been packed by really fanatic right-wing Republicans.
00:37:54 ►
Are you cheering for them? Yes, you are. Okay, yeah.
00:37:59 ►
Good.
00:38:00 ►
But I want to point out to you all this bullshit that Reagan told us
00:38:04 ►
about we’re going to get the central government power off our back.
00:38:10 ►
Every single decision by the Reagan-Bush Supreme Court has come down on the side of the government against the individual,
00:38:18 ►
the big against the small, and has consistently eroded our civil rights.
00:38:23 ►
and has consistently eroded our civil rights.
00:38:27 ►
So the Supreme Court is no longer the object of derision because the Supreme Court now is against the individual.
00:38:31 ►
Now the only obstacle to the authoritarian right-wing running this country is Congress.
00:38:40 ►
And before I refer to Mr. Liddy’s advice that you should try to vote out the incumbent,
00:38:55 ►
let me point out to you some flaws and rhetorical devices in Mr. Liddy’s long lecture on morals and judo’s prudence.
00:39:04 ►
He said that they’re the individualists, like me, fuzzy-headed people that don’t believe in any state at all, anarchists and that sort of shit.
00:39:08 ►
On the other side, you have the Marxists.
00:39:10 ►
Well, that’s not true.
00:39:12 ►
On the other side, it is true you have the individualists.
00:39:16 ►
On the other side, you have the authoritarians.
00:39:18 ►
The authoritarians.
00:39:23 ►
Now, Mr. Liddy, I hope you can prove to us that you’re not an authoritarian. But I want to tell you,
00:39:26 ►
I’m not a raving individualist. I believe in rules. I believe in laws. I believe three
00:39:33 ►
strikes, you’re out. Four balls, you walk. I stop at red lights, believe it or not. I
00:39:41 ►
believe in team play. As a matter of fact, I believe we need a military.
00:39:46 ►
We need a police.
00:39:51 ►
You may not know this, but the first four years of my life,
00:39:54 ►
I was brought up on military reservations.
00:39:56 ►
I know a lot about the military.
00:39:57 ►
I went to West Point one time for a year and a half
00:39:59 ►
until I saw what the fuck that was all about.
00:40:15 ►
I was a volunteer for military service in World War II,
00:40:16 ►
and I served five years. As a matter of fact, when it comes to bragging rights here,
00:40:22 ►
Mr. Lady served more time in prison than I did.
00:40:29 ►
I’ll give him that.
00:40:31 ►
But I served more time in the military than he did.
00:40:35 ►
Matter of fact,
00:40:36 ►
when I was honorably discharged after five years of service,
00:40:40 ►
I was given the victory pin,
00:40:42 ►
and I several times won grape leaf clusters on my good conduct medal.
00:40:49 ►
I learned something.
00:40:50 ►
I believe in the military, but I believe in the basic American tradition that we do not want a military caste.
00:40:57 ►
We do not want an entrenched career military.
00:41:01 ►
The wonderful thing about America has always been that when a war breaks out, we can call upon civilians to rush
00:41:08 ►
the defense of our country. And I did that in World War II and I’d do it again
00:41:11 ►
if our country is obviously threatened.
00:41:16 ►
The problem was, though, that during World War II, oh, by the way,
00:41:19 ►
I’ll tell you, the terrible thing about World War II is
00:41:22 ►
for many people that were in it, it was the greatest buzz, hit, flash they’ve ever had in their life.
00:41:31 ►
And people like George Bush and a lot of these old-time World War II warriors, they never got over it.
00:41:39 ►
That was their moment of real glory.
00:41:42 ►
They’ll tell you that they’ll always bring up World War II.
00:41:46 ►
Vietnam was like World War II.
00:41:47 ►
And now Noriega is like World War II.
00:41:49 ►
Noriega is Hitler.
00:41:50 ►
Now we got a new Hitler over there in Saddam.
00:41:54 ►
They’re always, if you give in to Noriega, that’s Munich all over again.
00:41:59 ►
Huh?
00:42:02 ►
And I do believe in the military
00:42:06 ►
but I want to point out to you
00:42:07 ►
you probably don’t realize this
00:42:09 ►
but World War II was not won
00:42:11 ►
by a professional military officer cast
00:42:14 ►
I was at West Point in 39 and 40
00:42:17 ►
when the war was just breaking out
00:42:18 ►
I want to tell you
00:42:19 ►
all those peacetime military people
00:42:22 ►
they had yellow gloves and cavalry sabers.
00:42:27 ►
World War II was won by G.I. Joe and G.I. Jane, who were drafted and went in
00:42:31 ►
and gave up their jobs and fought for three or four or five years.
00:42:33 ►
And the minute the war was over, went back home and continued civilian life.
00:42:38 ►
That’s the American tradition.
00:42:40 ►
But unfortunately, a military caste developed after World War II.
00:42:47 ►
They had the Cold War, and for 40 years we had the Cold War and when the Cold War ended
00:42:48 ►
Jesus Christ we ought to have some reason
00:42:52 ►
we ought to have a devil
00:42:53 ►
yeah the Grenada
00:42:55 ►
no that’s not going to
00:42:56 ►
Noriega hey that’s great
00:42:58 ►
Noriega was threatening the American way of life
00:43:00 ►
oh yeah the war on drugs
00:43:04 ►
the worst scourge cancer evil ever faced by the civilization the American way of life. Well, then, oh, yeah, the war on drugs.
00:43:08 ►
The worst scourge, cancer, evil ever faced by the civilization
00:43:09 ►
is marijuana.
00:43:11 ►
Yeah.
00:43:17 ►
Now, I’m not rambling here.
00:43:23 ►
I was talking about this, the issue of Mr. and Lady going after Congress right now.
00:43:32 ►
Oh, by the way, yeah, I do ramble, no question of it.
00:43:36 ►
I’ll probably ramble tonight.
00:43:38 ►
And one of the reasons is that I don’t have, see, one point of view.
00:43:42 ►
I don’t have one party line. My job tonight and my job
00:43:45 ►
for the last 40 years has been to encourage you and to empower you to think for yourself
00:43:52 ►
and to question authority.
00:44:04 ►
Now, that puts me at a disadvantage when I’m dealing with a tough-minded, hard-liner authoritarian like Mr. Liddy.
00:44:10 ►
He’s got the fucking answers to everything.
00:44:14 ►
And I don’t.
00:44:14 ►
My job is to question Mr. Liddy and to question the nutcases running around the White House, and to remind you that the basic tradition and the basic
00:44:26 ►
duty of an American citizen is to stand up and question authority. That’s the tradition we
00:44:31 ►
inherited from Jefferson and Franklin and Thoreau and that long line of Yankee Doodle Dandy Americans
00:44:38 ►
that thumb their nose at authority. That’s what the world loves about America, the fact that we
00:44:42 ►
can stand up and question authority.
00:44:48 ►
All right, to go back to Mr. Liddy and his advice to you.
00:44:52 ►
Mr. Liddy tells you, you’ve got to vote.
00:44:55 ►
And when you vote, you’ve got to vote against the incumbent.
00:44:57 ►
What does that mean?
00:45:03 ►
Well, the problem, you see, that Bush is having is that Congress is democratic.
00:45:04 ►
Get it?
00:45:06 ►
So what, Mr.? No shit, Sherlock.
00:45:12 ►
She wants us to vote Republican. Well, what is new? I mean, is the Pope an Arab? I mean, really?
00:45:18 ►
My advice to you, I agree, I must say I agree with Mr. Liddy
00:45:21 ►
that politicians, both Democratic and Republican, are absolutely corrupt and in power just for themselves.
00:45:30 ►
Isn’t that the lesson of the glorious revolutions of the 1980s?
00:45:34 ►
Doesn’t everyone in the Soviet Union and East Europe know?
00:45:42 ►
every individual in the world with more than two fingers of the planet know that every political power and every politician
00:45:46 ►
has only one aim, to keep their butt in office
00:45:50 ►
at the expense of the common good?
00:45:54 ►
Now, Mr. Liddy, you remember,
00:45:57 ►
said that the rights of the individual
00:46:01 ►
must be suspended, boys and girls,
00:46:07 ►
when the common good, the common must be suspended, boys and girls when the common good the common good
00:46:08 ►
well
00:46:09 ►
as I’ve said to you
00:46:11 ►
I believe in groups
00:46:12 ►
I believe in organizations
00:46:13 ►
I believe in democracy
00:46:16 ►
but
00:46:16 ►
this thing about the common good
00:46:19 ►
I’m rather skeptical about it
00:46:22 ►
you see the way this country started, 1776,
00:46:28 ►
it was a democracy in which you’d send to Washington
00:46:32 ►
a representative of your village or your city or your county
00:46:37 ►
or your senator for your state.
00:46:40 ►
Now, in those days, you knew who your candidates were.
00:46:44 ►
You’d meet them at the town hall. They’d go around in their buggies, and you knew who your candidates were. You’d meet them at the town hall.
00:46:45 ►
They’d go around in their buggies and you’d know who they were.
00:46:47 ►
And it took like two weeks to send them to Washington by horse.
00:46:50 ►
So they’d go there and they’d come back.
00:46:52 ►
And that’s how democracy worked.
00:46:54 ►
Obviously today, democracy does not work.
00:46:57 ►
Because democracy now, obviously, works for him who controls the press and the boob tube.
00:47:09 ►
My advice to you is, number one, don’t rely on politicians to solve your problems.
00:47:16 ►
Number two, work to the fullest of your power to decentralize
00:47:21 ►
and to take power away from the central government in Washington.
00:47:25 ►
Bring it back to the villages, to the cities, to the neighborhoods.
00:47:35 ►
As far as this election is concerned, I urge you, don’t vote for either a Democrat or a
00:47:41 ►
Republican.
00:47:42 ►
It just encourages the bastards.
00:47:50 ►
I want to point out that in the last three elections,
00:47:52 ►
Reagan, Reagan, and Bush,
00:47:57 ►
the majority did not vote for… Matter of fact, in the last three elections,
00:47:59 ►
more than 50% of the eligible voting constituency
00:48:03 ►
voted for none of the above.
00:48:07 ►
Nobody won the last three elections.
00:48:11 ►
Mr. Reagan twice won with majorities of about 26 or 26 and a half, 27% of the eligible voters.
00:48:20 ►
And Carter, Bush, and what was his name, Dukakis, got about 22%.
00:48:25 ►
The obvious lesson is there.
00:48:29 ►
People didn’t want either one of those.
00:48:31 ►
In politics, scum rises to the top.
00:48:35 ►
Let me say it again.
00:48:35 ►
In politics, mediocrity rises to the top.
00:48:41 ►
I’m going to go to voting the ballot box in the primaries and in the November election.
00:48:50 ►
I’m a registered libertarian, and I’d probably vote for the libertarian candidate.
00:48:55 ►
Or if you don’t want to do that, vote for yourself or vote for John Lennon.
00:49:01 ►
The more people that go and vote for none of the above
00:49:06 ►
is a lesson there.
00:49:08 ►
The lesson, Mr. Lee says,
00:49:11 ►
if you don’t vote, which means
00:49:14 ►
if you don’t vote Republican, you’re going to have to
00:49:16 ►
complain. Well, I don’t think so.
00:49:19 ►
The answer is to
00:49:22 ►
give less and less importance and power
00:49:24 ►
to the central government.
00:49:26 ►
Now, I’ve mentioned the tendency on the part of the hardline right-wing group
00:49:36 ►
which is running this country for the last ten years.
00:49:39 ►
I just want to point out, number one, in the last ten years,
00:49:52 ►
Number one, in the last ten years, the Bush-Reagan-Kleek regime has looted more money from the American people than all the crooked regimes in history, going back to Attila the Hun.
00:49:57 ►
The Marquesses are petty-ante people compared to what’s gone on with the blatant greed, the corruption, the fraud, the S&L loans.
00:50:11 ►
Every one of you, every one of this country, they say,
00:50:14 ►
it’s going to take $5,000 of my money and your money to repay these people.
00:50:20 ►
I mean, that money just didn’t go down a drain.
00:50:23 ►
It went to the hands of people who were making those deals,
00:50:27 ►
mostly Republicans, some Democrats.
00:50:29 ►
Not only did we have Neil Bush involved,
00:50:31 ►
we got the other son of Bush involved.
00:50:34 ►
I mean, this money was looted by cynical…
00:50:38 ►
How about Wall Street?
00:50:39 ►
How about Wall Street?
00:50:41 ►
How about this current practice of just coming in,
00:50:44 ►
taking a hard-working,
00:50:46 ►
productive company and buying it, the stock majority, and then looting it and then turning
00:50:51 ►
it back to the workers? I mean, the debt, the national debt. Boys and girls, you know,
00:51:00 ►
you’ve watched the voodoo economics of the Bush-Reagan administration for the last 10 years running up this enormous debt
00:51:07 ►
we’re now the largest borrower
00:51:09 ►
beggar country in the world
00:51:12 ►
and you know who’s going to pay back that debt?
00:51:15 ►
long after Ronnie Reagan is just a memory
00:51:17 ►
you and your children are going to be paying back that debt
00:51:20 ►
for the biggest narcotic money dope scam in history, the Bush-Reagan
00:51:25 ►
administration.
00:51:26 ►
God, whatever you call her, I deliberately use the female.
00:51:36 ►
Number one, because it drives right-wingers crazy.
00:51:40 ►
And number two, because I do seriously believe that women, I would say vote only for a woman.
00:51:47 ►
Why? Because the men have certainly fucked it up for 25,000 years.
00:51:54 ►
And I’ll tell you one other thing.
00:51:55 ►
The reason that Gordon would never say humankind, he still uses uses words like manhole
00:52:05 ►
and salesman
00:52:07 ►
because Gordon doesn’t want to appear to be a wimp
00:52:10 ►
he wants you male machos out there to know that he’s a male macho too
00:52:13 ►
he’s not going to give in to liberals like us that want him to change
00:52:17 ►
words to bring in the smarter half of the human race
00:52:21 ►
just as a
00:52:24 ►
what we call in debating a point of personal privilege, with respect to the politics
00:52:31 ►
of it all, I can say it might surprise my distinguished opponent to learn that if I
00:52:36 ►
could pick anyone to be President of the United States tomorrow, I would pick Margaret Thatcher,
00:52:42 ►
who’s got more balls than any of them.
00:52:43 ►
I would pick Margaret Thatcher, who’s got more balls than any of them.
00:52:52 ►
Our next question is for both Mr. Liddy and Mr. Leary.
00:52:53 ►
Mr. Leary will respond first.
00:53:00 ►
Mr. Leary, you made a very effective point when you were talking about the individual’s rights to make decisions in their own lives and to decide whether or not drugs are for them.
00:53:06 ►
My question for you and both Mr. Liddy is that don’t you think that society has a right as well
00:53:13 ►
that transcends the individual’s rights when minority communities are becoming culturally
00:53:19 ►
devastated by the effects of drugs, when babies do not have a choice and are born addicted
00:53:25 ►
to drugs, and when others are affected by the actions of those people who have brought
00:53:31 ►
themselves down into the depths, into the clutches of drugs.
00:53:52 ►
Number one, the cause of cocaine-cracked babies is due to the total neglect of the inner city by the Republican administrations. If you had…
00:53:56 ►
Right-wingers and born-again Christians get very upset about fetuses and babies, but how about the adults?
00:54:09 ►
about fetuses and babies, but how about the adults? Number two, the rumors and the lies about drug devastation in the inner city are exaggerated. Cocaine deaths, there are about
00:54:16 ►
3,000 cocaine deaths a year. There are 50,000 to 100,000 alcohol deaths, about close to
00:54:22 ►
a quarter of a million nicotine deaths,
00:54:26 ►
and deaths due to marijuana.
00:54:28 ►
Deaths due to marijuana.
00:54:32 ►
There have been 25 deaths due to marijuana in the last 25,000 years.
00:54:40 ►
And those are caused by, in other words, you’re just waving the flag.
00:54:44 ►
Naturally, you come in and you wave the flag of words, you’re just waving the flag.
00:54:47 ►
Naturally, you come in and you wave the flag of the babies, the babies, the babies.
00:54:53 ►
Well, if you care about the babies, putting pot smokers in jail ain’t the way to do it.
00:54:55 ►
And I’ll tell you this.
00:54:58 ►
Look what happened in the 60s and the 70s.
00:55:01 ►
In 1976, we had a Democratic president, Jimmy Carter.
00:55:04 ►
Marijuana was legalized in 14 states.
00:55:10 ►
During the Carter years, the inner city had a sense of hope because the black people in this country knew that Carter was on their side.
00:55:14 ►
In every way possible, we had a country that was unified in race.
00:55:17 ►
And the first thing that Reagan did when he came in was to cut down the minority groups.
00:55:21 ►
And by the way, now because of the Republican platform on drugs,
00:55:30 ►
they’ve made marijuana hard to get.
00:55:31 ►
I can hardly get marijuana.
00:55:33 ►
I mean, see?
00:55:36 ►
I mean, marijuana in Beverly Hills
00:55:39 ►
costs $500 fucking dollars an ounce.
00:55:42 ►
It used to cost $30 an ounce.
00:55:45 ►
But you can get crack for $10 in any city in the country.
00:55:51 ►
Mr. Liddy, do you have any response to the last question?
00:55:55 ►
My response, of course, is that I agree with what the young man said. But the situation, just so you understand the situation with respect to crack and other cocaine being more available and marijuana,
00:56:10 ►
the persons who import it have a problem.
00:56:13 ►
Cocaine is a very concentrated, valuable thing.
00:56:20 ►
It’s sort of like bringing in diamonds.
00:56:21 ►
You can get high value in small volume.
00:56:23 ►
It’s much easier to smuggle.
00:56:24 ►
thing. It’s sort of like bringing in diamonds. You can get high value in small volume. It’s much easier to smuggle. When you have marijuana, you know, you’ve got the practical equivalent of
00:56:29 ►
bales of hay, and it’s a lot more difficult for them to smuggle it in. There’s the difference for
00:56:33 ►
you. Our next question. I had wanted to direct my question to both of the gentlemen in a slightly different way,
00:56:45 ►
but Mr. Liddy has already more or less answered the first one,
00:56:48 ►
because I was going to ask whether he felt any degree of responsibility
00:56:52 ►
for the havoc and the devastation and the loss of lives,
00:56:56 ►
primarily in the inner city, due to drugs,
00:56:58 ►
but he’s so detached from reality that he doesn’t even acknowledge that it exists.
00:57:03 ►
So instead I’ll address the second part of my question to Mr. Liddy
00:57:09 ►
and ask him in the same vein whether his disregard for the Constitution
00:57:13 ►
that he waxed so eloquent before us this evening about during the Watergate scandal
00:57:19 ►
might in any way be responsible for the widespread disregard for constitutional values
00:57:25 ►
and for authority that he obviously believes in.
00:57:29 ►
Mr. Liddy?
00:57:36 ►
One of the things that one does in this great country of ours
00:57:40 ►
is that if you believe in something strongly enough, you are not at all at loathe to break a law for it.
00:57:48 ►
For example, you have people who violate the law by chaining themselves to the gates of the embassy of South Africa
00:57:54 ►
and things of that sort.
00:57:55 ►
We have people during the civil rights movement days who would be arrested and so forth.
00:58:01 ►
And every one of them, when they were caught, paid whatever the penalty was,
00:58:05 ►
because they knew that that was part of it. And I certainly paid it, and it was part of it. And
00:58:09 ►
you don’t hear me up here playing a violin for having had to go into prison.
00:58:14 ►
It’s really an old, long-standing American tradition. With respect to the situation with drugs,
00:58:27 ►
if you believe, as some people do, that it is part of your religion,
00:58:33 ►
some of the American Indian tribes take psilocybin,
00:58:35 ►
and you get locked up, you get locked up.
00:58:39 ►
There’s no problem with that.
00:58:41 ►
What I have a problem with are the people who start to snivel when they get locked up for breaking the law.
00:58:50 ►
One can have respect for someone who will break the law for purposes that he believes in.
00:58:54 ►
One does not have respect for people who break the law and then snivel at whatever the consequences may be.
00:59:04 ►
It’s about 9.30
00:59:06 ►
and the time has come
00:59:07 ►
what we’re going to do is
00:59:08 ►
I’m going to make a closing statement
00:59:11 ►
and then Mr. Liddy will
00:59:12 ►
and then I’ll be around here
00:59:14 ►
if anyone has individual questions
00:59:16 ►
by the way I’ve mentioned to you
00:59:18 ►
that I’m working with new
00:59:21 ►
very inexpensive computer programs
00:59:23 ►
for education
00:59:24 ►
if any of you are interested in knowing more about this
00:59:27 ►
or want to get on my mailing list, you can put your name and address on a piece of paper and bring it up to this
00:59:32 ►
corner of the stage. Now, at this moment, I’d like to thank the
00:59:35 ►
colloquy group that invited us here.
00:59:41 ►
I want to tell you, this is the kind of audience
00:59:44 ►
I think I can speak for Mr. Lee, that Mr. Lee and I like.
00:59:48 ►
It’s impassioned, you’re certainly alert, and you’re certainly alive.
00:59:52 ►
And we thank you for your participation in making this a lot of noise tonight.
01:00:11 ►
I don’t want to get misty-eyed here, but I believe this is what America is about,
01:00:15 ►
the town hall meeting, people coming together, expressing opinions noisily.
01:00:18 ►
I want you to be irritated at what I say.
01:00:21 ►
I want to leave you thinking, and I hope Mr. Liddy joins me in that.
01:00:25 ►
Thank you very much for coming, uh stay free you’re listening to the psychedelic salon where people are changing their lives one thought at a
01:00:38 ►
time and unfortunately that’s where the tape ended, we don’t get to hear their closing comments, however, to tell you the truth, I’ve already heard about as much from Liddy as I care to.
01:00:52 ►
You know, I really have to hand it to Dr. Leary for being such an enlightened being that he could be so civilized in the presence of that jerk-off Liddy.
01:01:02 ►
in the presence of that jerk-off Liddy.
01:01:06 ►
Personally, I wouldn’t walk across the street to spit on his shoes,
01:01:10 ►
which tells you volumes about the sad state of my own personal growth.
01:01:14 ►
That said, I find it hard to disagree with Liddy’s answer when he was asked why he claims to support the U.S. Constitution,
01:01:18 ►
and yet he intentionally broke the law on many occasions
01:01:20 ►
in the pursuit of his own agenda.
01:01:23 ►
Basically, he seemed to say that if you are passionate enough about something,
01:01:27 ►
then you shouldn’t let a little thing like the law of the land get in your way.
01:01:31 ►
And that, my fellow salonners, seems to pretty well sum up the attitude
01:01:35 ►
of the worldwide cannabis and psychedelic communities as well.
01:01:40 ►
Too bad he only applied those rules to himself and not to Timothy Leary,
01:01:44 ►
who also had taken the exact same approach to what he considered the foolish and inhuman laws prohibiting the use of our sacred medicines.
01:01:53 ►
Now, I don’t know that I have to comment on it, but like you, I found it quite amazing that the outrage Leary felt in 1990 about the looting going on by the Bush crime family would be orders of
01:02:06 ►
magnitude greater if he were alive today. The savings and loans scandal that he was referring
01:02:11 ►
to only looted the U.S. Treasury of around 90 billion dollars, whereas little Bush Jr. and his
01:02:17 ►
Wall Street buddies looted the Treasury of over a trillion dollars in 2008. I can hardly wait to see
01:02:23 ►
what the next round of looters will raise the
01:02:25 ►
stakes to. Of course, there really isn’t much room to set new records like that, since the GDP of the
01:02:31 ►
entire planet is still under 60 trillion. And don’t forget, Obama still hasn’t put any of these
01:02:38 ►
criminals in jail. Mainly, I guess, because he’s focusing mainly on arresting as many medical marijuana patients as he can.
01:02:46 ►
Now, as much as I know that I shouldn’t do this, I’m going to drag my personal political opinion in here just for a moment to make a point,
01:02:54 ►
even though I do my darndest to keep politics out of these podcasts.
01:02:58 ►
But in the early part of this talk, when Liddy was telling his side of the story about the raids on Leary,
01:03:04 ►
didn’t he just make your
01:03:05 ►
skin crawl with his righteousness? What a creep. Now flash forward to today and think about the
01:03:12 ►
way the current U.S. administration is still pursuing the so-called war on drugs. Not only
01:03:18 ►
did Obama lie about leaving medical marijuana patients alone, he’s still raiding medical
01:03:23 ►
dispensaries. And on top of that, he’s still raiding medical dispensaries.
01:03:29 ►
And on top of that, he’s even threatening local officials with criminal charges if they so much as issue a license to a dispensary under their current state laws.
01:03:34 ►
And on the two occasions when Obama gave press conferences where he took questions from the
01:03:38 ►
internet, he was overwhelmed with questions about the war on drugs, but he refused to
01:03:43 ►
take a single question on that topic, and instead he smirked and made fun of the people asking the questions.
01:03:49 ►
The bottom line is that Barack Obama is no friend of anyone who believes that cannabis
01:03:54 ►
should be legal.
01:03:56 ►
He thinks we’re stoner jerks and has no time to even listen to our questions, let alone
01:04:00 ►
seriously consider his draconian policy about cannabis, which is even worse than Bush’s, by the way.
01:04:07 ►
So, next year, when you cast your vote for president,
01:04:10 ►
just remember that if you vote for Obama only because he’s the lesser of two evils,
01:04:14 ►
you’re voting for someone who thinks that you and your opinions aren’t worth listening to.
01:04:19 ►
He’s an active drug warrior who sees you as his enemy in this war.
01:04:23 ►
And personally, I’d rather not vote at
01:04:25 ►
all if it means that my only choice is to vote against my own interests by supporting any of
01:04:30 ►
the gutless major candidates. There, now I feel a lot better. And I promise to leave politics out
01:04:37 ►
of these podcasts for as long as I can. Now to change back to a more pleasant topic. In the beginning of this talk, we heard Dr. Leary say that at the Millbrook compound that Liddy raided,
01:04:50 ►
they had assembled a team of artists, philosophers, and psychologists.
01:04:54 ►
Well, besides Leary himself, one of the other psychologists there was our dear friend Gary Fisher,
01:05:00 ►
who you heard in podcasts 15, 97, 98, 156, 200, and 232.
01:05:07 ►
And just so that you know, Gary is going to be celebrating his 80th birthday this Sunday,
01:05:13 ►
and I’ll be there along with Charlie Grobe and dozens of others to celebrate the occasion.
01:05:18 ►
So I’ll be sure to tell Gary that you and the rest of our fellow salonners will not
01:05:23 ►
forget all of the important pioneering work
01:05:26 ►
that he did back in the early days of psychedelic research.
01:05:30 ►
Well, that’s going to do it for now,
01:05:32 ►
and so I’ll close today’s podcast by reminding you once again
01:05:36 ►
that this and most of the podcasts from The Psychedelic Salon
01:05:39 ►
are freely available for you to use in your own audio projects
01:05:42 ►
under the Creative Commons Attribution
01:05:45 ►
Non-Commercial Sharealike 3.0 license. And if you have any questions about that, just click the
01:05:50 ►
Creative Commons link at the bottom of the Psychedelic Salon webpage, which you can get to
01:05:55 ►
via psychedelicsalon.us. And if you are interested in the philosophy behind the salon, you can hear
01:06:01 ►
something about it in my novel, The Genesis Generation, which is available as a pay-what-you-can audiobook that you can download at genesisgeneration.us.
01:06:11 ►
And for now, this is Lorenzo, signing off from cyberdelic space. Be well, my friends.