297 - A Tribute to Robert Anton Wilson

Program Notes

Guest speakers: Douglas Rushkoff, Antero Alli, Tiffany Lee Brown, and Joseph Matheny

The featured audio that I play in this podcast is part of a two-CD collection produced by Joe Matheny and given to the salon to podcast by the distributor, The Original Falcon Press, which you can find via originalfalcon.com. The voices you will here are those of: Douglas Rushkoff, Antero Alli, Tiffany Lee Brown, and Joseph Matheny.

For the Occupy Segment, I first play a few minutes that I’ve taken from a three hour interview that Chris Hedges gave on CSPAN 2 on the first day of this year, and in it you will hear this Pulitzer Prize winning journalist explain how corporate personhood isn’t just a threat to American Democracy, it is a threat to humanity itself… . Following that, I play a short speech for you that Senator Bernie Sanders gave on the Senate floor as he introduced an amendment to the U.S. Constitution that will strip personhood from corporations. After those two kind of heavy duty pieces. I lighten it up with a two minute clip of country music star Willie Nelson and his wife reading a poem that he wrote about the Occupy Movement. Finally, I close with a song that was written and is sung by a young man from Salt Lake City named Noel. And this is from a YouTube video I found where Noel was singing on Day 1 of the Occupy Salt Lake City street theater.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player\_embedded&v=ow4lxtzBlqw

Books and links mentioned in this podcast
“The Terence McKenna Experience” a new film by Ken Adams

http://astore.amazon.com/matrixmasterscom/detail/1561840033/192-3609503-5106463

http://astore.amazon.com/matrixmasterscom/detail/1903083249/184-3501818-7619550

Pyramid Eclipse, a Symbiosis Gathering

RAW week at boingboing.net
A few random quotes from Robert Anton Wilson
“A monopoly on the means of communication may define a ruling elite more precisely than the celebrated Marxian formula of monopoly in the means of production.”

“An Enlightened Master is ideal only if your goal is to become a Benighted Slave.”

“Belief is the death of intelligence.”

“Every war results from the struggle for markets and spheres of influence, and every war is sold to the public by professional liars and totally sincere religious maniacs, as a Holy Crusade to save God and Goodness from Satan and Evil.”

“Horror is the natural reaction to the last 5,000 years of history.”

“Most of our ancestors were not perfect ladies and gentlemen. The majority of them weren’t even mammals.”

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 ►

And today is day 132 of Occupy Wall Street.

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And I want to again thank all our fellow salonners who have bought a copy of my Pay What You Can audiobook,

00:00:35 ►

my novel The Genesis Generation, or who bought one of my Amazon Kindle books, or made a direct donation to the salon.

00:00:43 ►

All those various forms of support are what keep me

00:00:46 ►

going and I deeply appreciate it. Now the reason you haven’t heard from me for a bit is that I’ve

00:00:52 ►

been wrapped up and getting ready for this weekend’s workshop that Bruce Dahmer and I are

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leading in Sierra Madre. And now that the event is sold out and I don’t feel like I’m trying to

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sell you something, I’ll be telling you more about that

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after today’s program. But the headline is that you’re going to be able to hear and see much of

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it online and for free as well as long as our tech plans come together. That’s always a what if, but

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I think they will. However, first I want to let you know about a festival that’s coming up in May

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that was one of the all-time great events that I’ve been to in the past.

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And the event this year is Symbiosis Pyramid Eclipse Gathering

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that will be held at Pyramid Lake, Pyramid Lake, Nevada, from May 17th to May 22nd.

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And if you’re a burner, you’ll recognize the location as being on your way to Black Rock City.

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Well, at least from the location as being on your way to Black Rock City. Well,

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at least from the way I come. You know, my wife and I participated in the 2009 Symbiosis Gathering. It was held just outside of Yosemite National Park, and the music, the exhibits,

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and the people were just fantastic. It was truly a magical experience for us, and I have

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no doubt but what this upcoming one in May of 2012 will be even better.

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Now, these events aren’t open-ended, and so if you’re planning on going, you should get your reservations in today,

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particularly because there is a discount for early reservations.

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Just go to symbiosispresents.com or pyramideclipse.com, and I’ll link to both of them in the program notes and there

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you can find out all about this wonderful group of people in this event and will i be there you ask

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well sadly not this year had i not already committed to attending this year’s burning

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man festival i would most definitely be attending but my lazy old bones are only good for maybe one of these events

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a year at best. So I won’t be able to make it this year, but hopefully that won’t be the case for the

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next one. Now one final announcement that I want to make comes from our fellow podcaster Jan Ervin.

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And until I received an email from Bruce Dahmer, I wasn’t really aware of this fact either. But did

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you know that that wonderful, that really

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huge cache of Terrence McKinnon audio that’s been floating around the net for years, you know, there

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must be, what, 70 items on it or something, and, you know, some of which I played here in the salon,

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well, they were all originally sourced from the Gnostic Media site. And what’s more, most of them were originally recorded by Jeannie Brittington Erstadt, who

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upon her death in April of 2004, left permission to Jan Ervin to place them online for us all

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to enjoy. And so I’d like to suggest that maybe the next time any of us listen to one

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of these recordings, which as I said must comprise at least 70 hours or so of McKenna material,

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well, maybe we should try to picture Genie sitting in the audience and recording them for us.

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And also, maybe we can thank Jan by stopping by his GnosticMedia.com site

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and maybe buying a CD version of one of these talks.

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You can find them there, actually, in the She Who Remembers archives.

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And my thanks go out to Jan and Jeannie as well.

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And, hey, you both have added immensely to the tribe,

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and we thank you for your contribution to our collective knowledge of the thought of Terrence McKenna.

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And speaking of Terrence McKenna, it was back in 1977 that, well, at least as far as I know, it was then that he was first mentioned by an already established celebrity on the consciousness circuit.

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And that was when Robert Anton Wilson wrote about Terence’s time wave zero idea in Cosmic Trigger.

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And so it is to the life of Robert Anton Wilson, then, that I’d like to turn today.

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Now, originally I planned on getting this podcast out last week because Boing Boing and others were

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celebrating Raw Week, and I’ll be sure to put the links to that Boing Boing section in today’s

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program notes. If you’re a Bob Wilson fan, you owe it to yourself to go there and read some of the

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great tributes to him, including one by Eric Davis, who has long been a friend of the Salon.

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So what I’m going to play for you now is part of a two-CD collection produced by Joe Matheny and given to the Salon to Podcast by the distributor, the Original Falcon Press, which you can find via originalfalcon.com.

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can find via originalfalcon.com.

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And a big thank you again goes out to Joe and the Original Falcon Press for letting me play these recordings for you here in the salon.

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Now we don’t have time to hear the entire collection,

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which is titled Robert Anton Wilson Remembered,

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but I’ve selected a representative sampling

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that I think gives a really well-rounded picture of this incredible mind, as well as giving us a little better idea

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of what a wonderful person that was, a guy that his friends

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called Bob and the rest of us called Raw. Well, the

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voices that you’ll hear in just a moment are, and in the order you’ll be hearing them are,

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Douglas Rushkoff, Entero Ali,

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Tiffany Lee Brown

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and although I don’t know where Tiffany stands

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on Occupy Wall Street

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her talk sounds right out of the movement to me

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and then Tiffany is followed by

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David J. Brown

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author of many books including Mavericks of the Mind

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which is one of my favorites

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along with Mavericks of Medicine

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and then the closing comments come

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from the producer

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and friend of the salon, Joseph

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Matheny.

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Hi, it’s Douglas Rushkoff here.

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One of my

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very first

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book readings,

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or book talks, I guess you’d call it,

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was

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at a bookstore called the Capitola Cafe

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down near Santa Cruz in, gosh, like 94.

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And I was talking about this book, Siberia,

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which had been, well, very influenced by, you know,

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folks like Timothy Leary and William Burroughs

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and I guess William Gibson, Bruce Sterling,

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and maybe most of all Robert Anton Wilson,

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because the book was called Siberia.

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And I felt like I was moving through a new world,

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this sort of new hypertextual. It was before the web

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or anything, but there was still computers and hypertext and fractals and psychedelics and

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rave culture. And I was moving through a new world of people who were extremely

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optimistic about the promise of what they were doing. I mean, these were folks who thought we were about to touch aliens

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and form the great cosmic, you know, colonial organism.

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And, you know, Terence McKenna thought we’d finally found the Philosopher’s Stone.

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And I wasn’t sure if we found the Philosopher’s Stone or just the Philosopher stoned.

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And I had a good time, though, moving through that world,

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and I was really psyched to go speak in Santa Cruz,

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which is the location for not only some great psychedelic trips of many people,

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but some extended research by Ralph Abraham

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and many other great mathematicians, thinkers, scientists.

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So I get up there to do this talk where, you know, I’m basically saying, don’t worry,

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things are great and something’s happening.

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But we’ve got to look, you know, sort of this Robert Anton Wilson sort of balanced approach,

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try on many, many sets of spectacles as you look at this stuff, you know, sort of this Robert Anton Wilson sort of balanced approach, try on many,

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many sets of spectacles as you look at this stuff, you know, because some of them will

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be dark and some of them will be bright, some of them you’ll understand, and some will be

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really chaotic and confusing. And I’m getting up there about to do this talk, which I think

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is going to be to sort of the general public. And there, you know, sitting in the front row are Ralph Abraham, sitting next to

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Nina Graboi, who was a great writer and was his assistant for a long time. And then next to them,

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right in front of my face, Robert Anton Wilson. And I didn’t know what to do. I just went for it.

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You know, I did my talk. and I saw them sitting there sort of,

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you know, maybe a little bit almost more serious than the others.

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I felt like, you know, they’d been through this.

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I sound like a fool.

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I’m just a kid talking to the people who really get this stuff.

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And I finally do this talk, and it was actually a good talk.

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It was exciting.

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The audience was really thrilled.

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I mean, the audience kept coming up with really kind of dark scenarios for the future of this stuff.

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And I would sort of try to turn it around and show how you could actually look at the brighter side

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and try to create other scenarios, how things might work out better than they were suspecting.

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And it was a good talk.

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And at the end, Robert Anton Wilson gets up

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and he goes

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hi I’m Bob

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and I go I know

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so uh

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want to come around for a

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cup of coffee or beer

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I’m like well sure

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where what

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and you know he lived

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turns out he lives

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around the corner

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literally around the corner

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from the Capitola Book Cafe in this little apartment you know, he lived, it turns out he lives around the corner, literally around the corner from the Capitola Book Cafe

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in this little apartment, you know, this garden apartment kind of a thing,

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you know, a one-bedroom condo or rental around the back of this strip mall

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in Capitola, California.

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And his wife is there and pops open a couple of beers

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and we just talk about stuff.

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You know, sure, a little bit of James Joyce,

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a little bit about Siberia and the future of nonlinear culture,

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but it kind of just felt like I was sitting there with my uncle.

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You know, it was the first and I dare say only time I’ve ever met one of my heroes

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and not been disappointed. You know, not been, I don’t mean that he was living up to this status of superstar. But I was not disappointed in that what I found was

00:11:27 ►

a totally human, human being was a guy who was regular, and who put all of his weirdness,

00:11:39 ►

his creativity, his thought, his philosophy into his work. You know, that’s where it belongs.

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And when he’s sitting in the room with you,

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he’s Bob sitting in the room with you.

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And it taught me at a pretty early age of around 30, I guess,

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never to worry about that other stuff. You know, to stay me as unadulterated

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and as unaffected by whatever might happen

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or however people might see me,

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whether they’re looking up to me one year

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or down at me the next,

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that it’s just me, that I’m just a guy.

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And here to help other people make it on their own journeys.

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And more than anything I’ve read, more than anything he specifically taught me,

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just being with me, with no affect and no effort, was like, I imagine what it’s like, you know, when

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two Tibetan, you know, Lama master dudes, you know, find each other in the mountains. You know,

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they don’t have some long conversation about the Buddha or something. When one master finds another, they just sit together.

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You know, they just sit. And that’s what Bob taught me. And may his legacy live on.

00:13:21 ►

This is Ancharo Ali, and I’m going to be reading from my book, The Eighth Circuit Brain, Navigational Strategies for the Energetic Body.

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I’m going to be reading from the final section of the book, a section called How I Got This Way.

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And that chapter in that section called The Cosmic Trigger Effect, or How I Met Robert Anton Wilson in

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the No Coincidences Department.

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Spring 1979, Berkeley, California.

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I’m sitting on the couch in Robert Anton Wilson’s living room, dumbfounded by the rapid-fire

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laughter and sheer brainpower of the intelligentsia

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bouncing off the walls around me.

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At 26 years old, I was clearly the youngest person in the room,

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the baby of this Illuminati of scientists, authors, mathematicians, magicians, and discordians.

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mathematicians, magicians, and discordians.

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The person who stood out beyond all the other lights in the room was Arlen Wilson.

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Bob’s wife, Arlen, struck me as almost mythic,

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wizened, yet totally human.

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A full-bodied woman with a body sense of humor

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and an astonishing literary intellect.

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There was also something about Arlen that was peculiar, complex,

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simultaneously severe and merciful, but very kind.

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Arlen was also clearly Bob’s muse.

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A serene, elegant-looking fellow with a well-clipped beard

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walked over to me and introduced himself as a Discordian.

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He shook my hand, saying,

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Greg Hill.

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I remembered his name from Cosmic Trigger

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as the author of the infamous Discordian manifesto,

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Principia Discordia.

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He asked me why I was there.

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I told him I didn’t know yet, but I had been invited by a friend after telling her about my writer’s block. Greg asked me what I was writing. I shared a few plot details from As the Worm Turns,

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a psychic soap opera, a stage play I was trying to write, and he cracked up.

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He walked over to where Bob was sitting and started talking.

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I couldn’t hear what they were saying over the buzz of words ricocheting off the walls

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like so much flying lasagna, but Bob was laughing.

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I felt lightheaded.

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My gaze drifted over to the window and the night sky beyond. That’s when I saw it.

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A slowly moving point of light, paralleling the horizon, took a sudden 90-degree vertical turn

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straight up and kept climbing. I sat there transfixed when I heard my name being called.

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Entourage! Entourage!

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It was Bob.

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Greg says you’re writing a psychic soap opera.

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Any chance you can give it a virgin reading at the next salon?

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My jaw must have dropped because my words came out sounding funny.

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Yes, I can, definitely can, yeah.

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I can have the first draft for sure ready in a month.

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My gaze drifted back over to the window and there was that light again.

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Only this time it was blinking.

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Or rather, winking at me. I knew why they called UFOs unidentifiable flying objects now. I didn’t know what it was, and

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that somehow made me feel very, very happy. One month later, As the Worm Turns was finished,

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or the stage play was finished,

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and it was just in time for Bob’s next Discordian Salon.

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I was stoked.

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My new play was scheduled for a virgin reading with Pope Bob himself.

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I also became a certified pope that night,

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at least according to the little yellow card Greg Hill gave me when I arrived, with seven copies of my play stuffed under my arm.

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There I was again, sitting on a couch in Robert Anton Wilson’s living room,

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wondering whether I would see another UFO, but mostly just plain wondering.

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wondering whether I would see another UFO, but mostly just plain wondering.

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The place was hopping.

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Jack Sarfati and Saul Paul Sirag, two cutting-edge quantum theorists,

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were riffing on something traveling faster than a speeding photon.

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They were jazzed about a superluminal theory that claimed information traveled faster than the speed of light.

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A wiry, heavily bearded, bespectacled Saul reminded me of Allen Ginsberg’s younger brother.

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Jack struck me as a kind of medieval science fiction wizard, brilliant, mercurial, totally present and not completely there.

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I sat there dumbfounded in the crossfire of the superluminal highway.

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Later that night, Bob was in fine form,

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reading excerpts from his upcoming book,

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The Trick Top Hat, from his Schrodinger’s Cat Trilogy.

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I sat there astonished by the highly compact,

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information-rich writing style he had developed. It was as if every other word triggered a different chemical in my brain. Bob had this unique way with words that acted on my ear-brain loop, just like drugs.

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I remember thinking to myself, this is what writing is all about.

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Writing is about magic.

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After the initial round of quantum banter and raucous limericks died down,

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Bob loved them, naughty Irish limericks, Arlen asked me them. Naughty Irish limericks.

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Arlen asked me to assign roles in my play

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to those who wanted to read.

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I assigned her the role of Sylvia,

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the trance medium who channeled the ghost of Marilyn Monroe.

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I gave Bob the part of Frank,

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her droll husband,

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in charge of putting Sylvia into a trance

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and, after the spook left her, bringing his wife back into her body. her droll husband, in charge of putting Sylvia into a trance,

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and after the spook left her, bringing his wife back into her body.

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They both got a big kick out of that idea, maybe bigger than I’ll ever know.

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The reading went far beyond my heightened expectations,

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and after a short break, the subatomic socializing fired up again. Now, at this point, I should mention that

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Bob and Arlen’s previous salon inspired me to create, with my limited cartoon panel talent,

00:20:34 ►

an entire deck of Neo-Torot cards based on the premises of Greg Hill’s book Principia Discordia,

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and specifically on the wildly decentralizing central principle of the holy cow,

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pronounced cow, you know, holy cow as in a cow, a c-h-a-o, a cow representing a single unit of chaos.

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I called the zero card in this deck no form, and named the number one card the Holy Cow and the number 1.5 card

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the Cowboy. I showed my cards to Greg. Nodding his head while slowly flipping through the deck,

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he mumbles, you’re one of us. He then showed me a tarot spread he called Five Card Catmoth,

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a kind of discordian five-card stud or evolutionary

00:21:27 ►

poker, where the winner was decided by the best creation story told using your final five cards.

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I asked Greg how he could tell which one was the best story.

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His pause created a big moment for me. He said, you’ll know. It’ll be obvious.

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a big moment for me. He said, you’ll know. It’ll be obvious. Sometimes the best story is the funniest.

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Sometimes it’s the saddest one. Other times it’s the most bizarre, but you know, usually people know right away which story is the best. I asked him, but what if there are two best stories?

00:22:02 ►

He laughed out loud and said, well, I suppose then we enter sudden death.

00:22:10 ►

Certain books can change your life, and Cosmic Trigger changed mine.

00:22:16 ►

Though it was not the first book to blur the lines between reality and fantasy, it was the

00:22:21 ►

first one to suggest that no such lines existed beyond my

00:22:25 ►

beliefs in those lines. It was the first book to challenge my beliefs about beliefs, period.

00:22:32 ►

Bob’s way with words acted like drugs on my brain, and reading this book set off a chain reaction of

00:22:40 ►

time-release psychic explosions lasting many years to come.

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Cosmic Trigger was also where I first discovered Timothy Leary’s eight-circuit brain model.

00:22:51 ►

The Bob Wilson I came to know circa 1979 through 1986, approximately,

00:23:01 ►

was at the peak of his game.

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And as far as I could tell, this game was initiating his readers, in books and in person during his many worldwide lectures, to the most operational

00:23:14 ►

Einsteinian language possible, and to do this in the most entertaining ways his imagination could

00:23:21 ►

conjure. I was, and still am am bewildered by how he was able to

00:23:26 ►

recontextualize quantum physics through the interactions of his fictitious characters

00:23:31 ►

and labyrinthian plot designs in the Schrodinger’s Cat Trilogy and also the masks of the Illuminati.

00:23:40 ►

Though Bob was clearly a master of this game, I never saw him treat actual living people as characters or their interactions as games.

00:23:53 ►

He knew the difference, and he took the time to show others that he knew.

00:23:59 ►

Bob was very soulful that way.

00:24:08 ►

soulful that way. He seemed to simultaneously belong to two generations, the caregivers of the World War II era and the hedonic seekers of the 60s, the baby boomers. I suddenly saw

00:24:16 ►

Bob as a psychedelic menschk with a genius IQ, which for me was as hilarious as it rang true.

00:24:28 ►

As I continued attending Bob and Arlen’s Discordian salons, now at their new home in a San Francisco

00:24:34 ►

condo, I began to notice a change in my attitude.

00:24:38 ►

Though my presence remained one of a gleeful fly on the wall who occasionally buzzed agreement, I also began to

00:24:46 ►

see important differences distinguishing Bob’s views from my own. I did not voice these at first

00:24:53 ►

for dread of appearing arrogant or stupid, but I did not disregard them either. One of the downsides

00:24:59 ►

of being in the personal presence of people with more brains and heart than yourself is a kind of gorgeous oppression that took the form, well, for me,

00:25:10 ►

of wanting to be just like Bob or wanting to write just like Bob.

00:25:15 ►

At the next salon, Bob announced,

00:25:18 ►

disciples are assholes looking for a human being to attach themselves to.

00:25:24 ►

Well, that was the moment I knew

00:25:26 ►

there would be no guru worship at Bob’s house, and that Bob would never wish that kind of oppression

00:25:31 ►

on anyone. Though I never felt any oppression from Bob personally, I do recall struggling in

00:25:38 ►

his presence with my own unmet and often unconscious childhood needs for a father figure. I never knew my real father

00:25:47 ►

growing up. As with many other young fans, my own starstruck projections oppressed me more than

00:25:54 ►

anything else. That he never encouraged or even accepted these projections enabled me to eventually

00:26:01 ►

release them and observe him closer as he was,

00:26:05 ►

with little or no emotional investment.

00:26:08 ►

What I saw was a man fully inhabiting a world of his own creation,

00:26:15 ►

a sophisticated, entertaining, and Byzantine network of reality tunnels

00:26:20 ►

where his consciousness traversed and crossed reference with astonishing artistry

00:26:25 ►

and humor. Whether he was high or sober, I noticed that whenever anyone questioned Bob,

00:26:32 ►

a consistent delay of silence followed. It was as if he was so abstracted into his internal

00:26:39 ►

labyrinth that it took him a few moments to gather his response and surface with it into present time.

00:26:53 ►

I began to wonder whether Bob had lost the capacity for direct experience and spontaneous response by living so profoundly in the multiple reality tunnels of his epic mind.

00:26:59 ►

Since I did not know Bob before his daughter Luna was murdered in the mid-seventies,

00:27:07 ►

I cannot say how deeply this trauma changed him.

00:27:17 ►

Having lost a daughter of my own, I know firsthand how that outside shock can alter consciousness for the rest of your life.

00:27:27 ►

How that goes depends, I think, on how committed one remains to staying emotionally open throughout the loss and coming out the other side intact. Funny thing about Bob and emotions. I never heard him say a good word

00:27:38 ►

about emotions, which he humorously dismissed as territorial signals or barnyard politics or soap opera antics.

00:27:49 ►

If Bob possessed a certain freedom from territorial signals,

00:27:55 ►

I think they acted out anyway whenever he felt or perceived that his publishers were withholding royalties

00:28:02 ►

or that his books were not getting the recognition they deserved.

00:28:07 ►

Bob seemed emotionally invested in his legacy as a writer.

00:28:12 ►

He also showed strong emotion whenever he protested

00:28:15 ►

any form of government oppression of the people.

00:28:19 ►

All these personal protests revealed his humanity to me.

00:28:25 ►

Something else.

00:28:28 ►

Despite all his so-called extraterrestrial communiques with the Sirius star system

00:28:34 ►

and his own Pookaville of invisible rabbits,

00:28:37 ►

Bob consistently struck me as one of the most authentically sane people I had ever met.

00:28:47 ►

Spring 1981, Berkeley, California. My presence at the Discordian salons began to wane as I grew

00:28:56 ►

more aware of certain key differences between my views and Bob’s. The main difference had to do

00:29:02 ►

with the body. I decided that Tim, Tim Leary, and Bob overlooked the body when writing their tomes on the 8th Circuit brain.

00:29:11 ►

Though they certainly wrote about the body, their language was still steeped in the language of the mind,

00:29:19 ►

of spelling things out in rational and scientific terms that stimulated the intellect but failed,

00:29:25 ►

in my opinion, in its appeal to the senses.

00:29:30 ►

This awareness marked a critical weaning stage for me.

00:29:35 ►

Two years later, summer, 1983, Boulder, Colorado.

00:29:43 ►

My bohemian California lifestyle ground to a halt. I had unwittingly become a parody

00:29:50 ►

of myself and was desperate for a big change. For me, this meant getting serious about my 30-year-old

00:29:56 ►

life. I migrated to Boulder, Colorado. Within a year, I was married and soon afterwards, a father.

00:30:04 ►

Within a year, I was married, and soon afterwards, a father.

00:30:09 ►

In the summer of 1985, I co-produced Bob Wilson’s first visit to Boulder to talk about one of his favorite topics, anomalies, coincidence, and synchronicity.

00:30:16 ►

I remember Bob reveling in the exquisite irony and high humor

00:30:19 ►

staged by the venue we booked him in, a church,

00:30:23 ►

complete with stained glass windows,

00:30:26 ►

a multi-tiered altar,

00:30:28 ►

and rows and rows of stained wood pews.

00:30:32 ►

I opened with a brief solo mime shtick,

00:30:35 ►

and then Bob the Pope of Chapel Perilous preached to the choir.

00:30:40 ►

A rollick in good time was had by all.

00:30:42 ►

A rollicking good time was had by all.

00:30:52 ►

Okay, so I’m living in Dublin for a year, and I’m young,

00:30:56 ►

and my brain is pretty much smashed wide open.

00:31:01 ►

My friend Bill sends me a book in the mail.

00:31:02 ►

It takes a while to get there.

00:31:04 ►

It’s called Prometheus Rising. It’s by Robert

00:31:06 ►

Anton Wilson. And Bill and I had spent many good times over the years exploring reality

00:31:17 ►

in, let’s just say, in all kinds of different ways. I had also taken a class at UC Berkeley on theory of knowledge,

00:31:29 ►

kind of undergraduate stuff. So I’d already been wasting a lot of time. Wasting? Spending? I don’t

00:31:36 ►

know. Thinking about the nature of reality, of how we perceive reality, and how it, you know, probably doesn’t really exist,

00:31:48 ►

at least in no way that we can conceive of.

00:31:51 ►

And these can be very disturbing thoughts.

00:31:54 ►

To this day, I don’t know if going through all of that philosophical insanity was good

00:32:02 ►

for me or not.

00:32:03 ►

philosophical insanity was good for me or not.

00:32:07 ►

But Prometheus Rising fit right into it and was a good laugh on top of it all

00:32:11 ►

and just felt like the absolutely right thing.

00:32:16 ►

It made sense. It made sense.

00:32:19 ►

Robert Anton Wilson made sense.

00:32:23 ►

So I continued reading Wilson

00:32:26 ►

and having all these many thoughts

00:32:28 ►

and trying to explain, expand,

00:32:31 ►

explain, expand my brain.

00:32:33 ►

And it brought me many friends.

00:32:36 ►

It’s interesting.

00:32:38 ►

I met a lot of people who were into Wilson.

00:32:42 ►

It seemed to be some kind of branding device, a marker,

00:32:47 ►

where if it came up in conversation and someone was into Wilson, you knew. You had more than

00:32:54 ►

just a little favorite author in common. You had a pretty big take on the whole world that might have something significant in common. For some reason, almost

00:33:08 ►

100% of these people that I met out in the world in my travels were male. I met one woman

00:33:15 ►

who had that response, the, ah, Wilson, let’s talk, response. So I met incredible people, mostly male, around this whole experience of sharing Wilson

00:33:28 ►

as a jumping off point for discussing reality and what we make of the world and what we want of it

00:33:36 ►

and what we want of our minds. The people attracted to Wilson and to these readings really ran the gamut. There seemed to be some commonality.

00:33:48 ►

A lot of the people were, and probably still are, kind of weirdos in some way or another,

00:33:55 ►

a lot of freaks and geeks, which seemed perfectly satisfactory to me, and a lot of people who had journeyed a lot into their consciousness

00:34:07 ►

and perhaps other consciousnesses as well,

00:34:12 ►

and taken various routes to get there.

00:34:15 ►

There seemed to be a profound level of dissatisfaction among these people too,

00:34:20 ►

which I certainly shared there was dissatisfaction with the world

00:34:28 ►

with how people look at the whole idea of the world

00:34:32 ►

of reality, dissatisfaction with politics

00:34:35 ►

and often dissatisfaction with one’s sense of personal power

00:34:40 ►

where we are in the world

00:34:43 ►

what we can do about it, whether we matter, whether

00:34:48 ►

we really wield any power at all compared to all the big guys who run the place.

00:34:54 ►

And that was part of the fun of the conspiracy aspect of these conversations.

00:35:00 ►

Of course, many people seemed to take those really literally and really seriously in a way that I thought was completely anti-Wilson, but whatever, that was just my thought.

00:35:29 ►

Bob is that he set in motion really an entire subculture of people who were probably ready to come together over other writings and other themes anyway, but he really sparked people.

00:35:37 ►

And I felt delighted and giggly and honored to be part of this whole thing.

00:35:49 ►

giggly and honored to be part of this whole thing. Out of those people, one was one of my closest friends. One was a date rapist, as I found out the hard way, on mescaline. One was just a really

00:35:58 ►

cool guy that I got to know for about a year and still correspond with online. That woman I mentioned, we only had one

00:36:06 ►

conversation, but she was cool. Some other people that I knew that were into the whole thing

00:36:12 ►

turned out to be on and off acquaintances through the early days of the internet revolution,

00:36:21 ►

quote unquote, and the whole cyberdelic scenario of the early 90s.

00:36:27 ►

So it wasn’t just that I’d read something that blew my mind,

00:36:30 ►

it was that I had also been immersed with a whole bunch of people.

00:36:34 ►

That, to me, is super-duper valuable.

00:36:38 ►

So I guess I’m throwing out thanks to all of you listening to this,

00:36:43 ►

because you’re probably one of that group

00:36:45 ►

too or you wouldn’t be listening um and and to bob for uh for putting it out there so that people

00:36:53 ►

had something to attach themselves to to discuss and um and sometimes have a good laugh over, which I think was a very important point of what

00:37:07 ►

he was writing and promulgating. With that, I’m going to end this little segment. I’m Tiffany,

00:37:16 ►

uh, Tiffany Lee Brown is my name, aka Magdalene. Anyway, I’m glad everybody’s getting together

00:37:23 ►

to, uh, to fly the flag and to say thanks.

00:37:33 ►

Hey everybody, Joseph Matheny here.

00:37:37 ►

This crazy audio book was my idea, so you can blame me for it.

00:37:42 ►

You know, I miss Bob.

00:37:44 ►

I met him the first time in 1988 in Chicago. so you can blame me for it. You know, I miss Bob.

00:37:48 ►

I met him the first time in 1988 in Chicago.

00:37:52 ►

I cornered him outside one of his lectures that I went to and got into a really good conversation with him about Timothy Leary’s Mind Mirror program,

00:37:56 ►

which I had just got my hands on at the time.

00:37:59 ►

I moved to Santa Cruz, California the next year

00:38:03 ►

and stayed in touch with Bob via mail and phone.

00:38:07 ►

And I invited Bob up to do a lecture in Santa Cruz, which became the video now for sale called The Eye in the Triangle.

00:38:16 ►

Not too long after that, Bob himself moved up to Santa Cruz.

00:38:20 ►

I think he wanted to be near his kids, and I think he’d had about enough of L.A.

00:38:24 ►

And I can commiserate with that.

00:38:27 ►

And settled down and started hanging out with me and some other people in a group we had called the Formless Ocean Group, Bob, Nina Graboi, Elizabeth Gipps, Patty Long, Bob Forty,

00:38:48 ►

Nick Herbert, a bunch of other people, In-N-Out, Ralph Abraham came over a lot.

00:38:54 ►

Timothy Leary would drop in if he was in town or coming through, John Lilly, the McKenna brothers,

00:39:00 ►

Dennis and Terrence. All in all, it was a great little group, and we just kind of hung out and studied the literature

00:39:07 ►

and talked about psychedelics and talked about religion and spirituality

00:39:11 ►

and pretty much anything we thought was worthy of our time.

00:39:17 ►

And in doing so, it came to light that Bob had a car,

00:39:23 ►

but he didn’t drive, which was kind of odd.

00:39:25 ►

He was like Salvador Dali in that respect.

00:39:28 ►

So I ended up becoming his driver.

00:39:32 ►

So I drove him around to his gigs, the ones in California,

00:39:36 ►

and kind of de facto became a bodyguard of sorts or a body shield of sorts.

00:39:43 ►

When you traveled with Robert Anton Wilson, a lot of times you would arrive at the venue

00:39:48 ►

and there would be people there to greet him who were enthusiastic fans, let’s put it that way.

00:39:54 ►

And a lot of them had some secret of the universe they wanted to either give to him or get from him,

00:39:59 ►

depending on who it was.

00:40:01 ►

So one story that I remember is when we went to San Rafael and there was a conference that

00:40:07 ►

was being put on by Sound Photosynthesis, and I don’t recall the name of the conference,

00:40:11 ►

but I do remember that when we pulled up and we walked out of the car and we were walking

00:40:16 ►

towards the front of the venue because it was the San Rafael Auditorium or something like that,

00:40:21 ►

we couldn’t get into the back door, so we had to walk into the front door, which,

00:40:27 ►

you know, arriving with Robert Antow Wilson through the front door,

00:40:29 ►

not always a good idea.

00:40:31 ►

But we had to do it, so we went in.

00:40:35 ►

And as we were walking to the door to get to the stage,

00:40:37 ►

I noticed that there was about four different people vectoring in on us from different directions.

00:40:40 ►

And I could see by the look in their eye and the purpose in their step

00:40:44 ►

that they were definitely coming to

00:40:45 ►

get or give secrets of the universe

00:40:47 ►

and I knew that we were running late

00:40:49 ►

so what I did was I turned around

00:40:51 ►

and I thought, you know,

00:40:52 ►

what would a good Discordian do in this situation?

00:40:55 ►

And the first thing that came to my mind

00:40:57 ►

was to shout something

00:40:58 ►

and I said,

00:40:59 ►

you heard the man,

00:41:02 ►

get him a donut!

00:41:03 ►

And everybody froze and got a look on their face

00:41:07 ►

and then kind of jittered and turned around and went looking for a donut.

00:41:10 ►

And in that window, we went on into the green room.

00:41:14 ►

The other time that I remember, which was a little personal, you know,

00:41:20 ►

moment for me was when I took Bob to meet with George Carlin. George was doing a show in San

00:41:28 ►

Rafael again, and they were friends, and so I drove him up to the show. We went backstage,

00:41:35 ►

and we hung out with George Carlin, and then afterwards we hung out in an all-night diner

00:41:40 ►

and got donuts. I’m not kidding you. So there’s a synchronicity there between the donuts because the George Carlin, Robert on Town Wilson

00:41:47 ►

late night Zim donut thing happened after

00:41:50 ►

I shouted about donuts in the same auditorium

00:41:53 ►

in two different times.

00:41:54 ►

So I just wanted to leave you with that.

00:41:57 ►

So wherever you are now, Bob,

00:41:59 ►

I’m sure that you’re flinging the lasagna

00:42:00 ►

and I’m sure that there’s people who are

00:42:03 ►

running around and getting you donuts.

00:42:34 ►

you’re listening to the psychedelic salon where people are changing their lives one thought at a time and that lovely voice that you just heard is the one and only Black Beauty, who you can hear each month in her BB’s Bungalow podcast

00:42:45 ►

over on the Cannabis Podcast Network at dopefiend.co.uk.

00:42:51 ►

And speaking of my friend the Dope Fiend,

00:42:54 ►

I want to congratulate him on his recent 300th podcast.

00:42:59 ►

You know, every Monday, as regular as clockwork,

00:43:01 ►

there’s a new podcast from the Dope Fiend.

00:43:04 ►

And I’m happy to say and proud to say that I’ve listened to every one of them.

00:43:08 ►

Not only do I kind of think of the Dope Fiend as an elder,

00:43:12 ►

simply because I’ve followed a lot of the good advice he’s given,

00:43:16 ►

but his podcasts also feature what has grown into a whole company of characters

00:43:21 ►

who feel like old friends to me, even though I haven’t met any of them. So if you haven’t done so already, you might want to surf over to dopefiend.co.uk and sample a

00:43:32 ►

selection of the various programs available for free on that network. And Dope Fiend, my

00:43:38 ►

congratulations, best wishes for the future, and much love go out to you my friend as terence mckenna often said keep the old faith

00:43:46 ►

and stay high also i want to mention that the terence mckenna beyond 2012 workshop that’s being

00:43:54 ►

held in sierra madre california on saturday has been sold out for a few weeks now and if you

00:44:00 ►

weren’t able to get a ticket in time i’m really sorry that I won’t be seeing you there, but as the next best thing, I hope to be podcasting much of the program,

00:44:09 ►

and if all goes well, there will also be a video recording made and posted on the net.

00:44:15 ►

Now, the one thing that you won’t see online is the new Terrence McKenna film

00:44:20 ►

that Ken Adams will be previewing at the workshop.

00:44:23 ►

As you may already know, Ken was a neighbor of Terrence’s from 1989 to 1993,

00:44:29 ►

and he still has about 100 hours of as-yet-unseen video of Terrence that he shot during those years.

00:44:36 ►

And after having seen a preliminary version of the movie,

00:44:40 ►

I’m willing to say that it is by far the very best video of Terrence McKenna

00:44:46 ►

yet made.

00:44:47 ►

In fact, thanks to the superb graphics that provide the backdrop for the words of McKenna,

00:44:53 ►

well, it’s maybe the first time that I’ve really been able to kind of grok some of Terrence’s

00:44:58 ►

more challenging ideas, like the world is made of language.

00:45:03 ►

You know, it’s truly a remarkable work of art

00:45:05 ►

that while centered on the words coming from the mouth of the bard McKenna,

00:45:09 ►

it carries several levels of meaning in each of its 12 segments

00:45:14 ►

thanks to the marvelous graphics.

00:45:16 ►

I’ll be saying a lot more about this movie in a future podcast,

00:45:19 ►

but if you’d like to see a preview of this film,

00:45:21 ►

you can go to www.tmckx.com,

00:45:28 ►

and there you’ll also find some screenshots that will give you a little better idea

00:45:32 ►

of some of the high-quality graphics that Ken has created for this project.

00:45:37 ►

In short, well, they’re the best I’ve seen in any psychedelic film,

00:45:40 ►

and stay tuned for another announcement about this project in the weeks ahead.

00:45:46 ►

So that’s all of the announcements for today, but that also means that it’s time to get

00:45:52 ►

to the news from the worldwide Occupy movement.

00:45:55 ►

And while there hasn’t been a lot of reporting about it in the mainstream media, that doesn’t

00:46:00 ►

mean that nothing’s happening.

00:46:01 ►

Quite the contrary.

00:46:03 ►

And while critics of the movement are still trying

00:46:05 ►

to claim that it’s been ineffective, well, I’d like to point out that just the other day, without

00:46:11 ►

any hoopla at all, Congress gave the president the okay to raise the debt ceiling another 1.2

00:46:16 ►

trillion dollars. Now, if you remember back to this past summer, all we heard from Washington

00:46:22 ►

was fighting about raising the debt ceiling.

00:46:30 ►

Now, suddenly, that issue seems to have become just another routine vote, and the president,

00:46:36 ►

most politicians, and even the financial elite at Davos this week are focusing on income inequality and are even talking about that dreaded bugaboo class war. You know, one day

00:46:42 ►

Congress is ready to pass the Censor the Internet SOPA bill,

00:46:47 ►

and the day after a few thousand people occupied Congress and a few hundred thousand Occupy-oriented

00:46:52 ►

people around the country phoned and emailed their congressional representative, well,

00:46:58 ►

the day after Congress was occupied, SOPA was taken off the table and stuffed back in its cage.

00:47:04 ►

Now, if you

00:47:05 ►

want to, you can say that all that would have happened anyway without the Occupy movement,

00:47:09 ►

and, well, you may be right. But you’ll never convince me that the movement isn’t already

00:47:14 ►

making things happen that had been kind of lying dormant for decades. So today, rather

00:47:20 ►

than play soundbites from some of the more in-your-face actions, I’m going to play a

00:47:24 ►

couple interviews. But first, I’d like to read a short quote from Alexa Bradley, who wrote,

00:47:29 ►

The beauty of Occupy is that it’s popular, wild, free. I don’t mean that in a romantic

00:47:35 ►

sense, although there is that appeal too, and it is part of its magnetism in the all-too-cynical

00:47:41 ►

time. I mean it in a political and social sense.

00:47:45 ►

It exists outside the non-profit framework

00:47:48 ►

that is all-too-captive to a set of assumptions, norms, limits, and needs.

00:47:53 ►

The resonance globally of Occupy is its clear roots in popular sentiment and movement.

00:47:59 ►

Not a professionalized staff or agenda,

00:48:01 ►

its power rests in the fact that it is uncircumscribed and therefore perhaps infinite in its circumference. And then from our fellow salonner, Andrew M., I received this email.

00:48:22 ►

fellow salonner Andrew M., I received this email.

00:48:27 ►

Dear Lorenzo, I’ve been enjoying your podcast for the past year and enjoy especially hearing your perspectives

00:48:29 ►

and the great job you’ve done in connecting the tribe.

00:48:33 ►

I thought you might be interested in seeing some new exciting ideas

00:48:36 ►

that have come out of the Occupy movement here in Canada.

00:48:39 ►

I forgot which podcast it was,

00:48:41 ►

but I remember the Bard McKenna saying that the 2012 shift could be something as simple as a website.

00:48:48 ►

There’s a good chance he was right on the money.

00:48:51 ►

We are starting to build tools that would pirate our parliaments and all power to the people app.

00:48:57 ►

Anyways, thought you might be interested in seeing what us young folks are up to.

00:49:00 ►

Keep up the fantastic podcast.

00:49:03 ►

They are the, and in quotes, with a wink,

00:49:06 ►

second. They are the second best food I know for the imagination. And then he provided three links,

00:49:12 ►

one that is a short essay about their idea. The next is a prototype parliament and then a rap

00:49:18 ►

video that describes your ideas in a more accessible rap form. And I’ll post those links

00:49:23 ►

in the program notes for this podcast, which, as you know, you

00:49:26 ►

can get to via psychedelicsalon.us.

00:49:29 ►

And thanks for sending that news, Andrew.

00:49:32 ►

You guys are doing some really wonderful things, and it’s a real honor to have you as a part

00:49:37 ►

of the salon.

00:49:39 ►

Also, I want to give a shout out to our fellow salonners in New Zealand who had managed to

00:49:44 ►

hold out for 100 days of awareness raising protests.

00:49:47 ►

And we’ll be waiting to see what you do for Phase 2, which I understand is already underway.

00:49:53 ►

And I also have it on good authority that the ideas of Terence McKenna have been floating around down there for a very long time as well.

00:50:00 ►

So thanks for what you’re doing, Occupy New Zealand.

00:50:02 ►

So thanks for what you’re doing, Occupy New Zealand.

00:50:07 ►

Now I’m going to play a few segments that I’ve recorded for you that better sum up what this struggle is all about here in the States.

00:50:12 ►

At least one of the focuses of the struggle, the beginning focus, Occupy Wall Street.

00:50:17 ►

And I realize that some of our fellow salonners in Europe

00:50:20 ►

are already tired of hearing about the Occupy movement.

00:50:24 ►

But not only is it here to stay, it’s really not a U.S.-led movement.

00:50:29 ►

You know, as models, we have the Arab Spring and then the great people of Spain, Italy, and other places to lead the way.

00:50:35 ►

But the reason that I think that what happens in the States is important is that, well, in my opinion,

00:50:41 ►

Wall Street is a primary bad guy, both here and worldwide.

00:50:46 ►

And the screwheads at the top of the Wall Street firms are the ones who, well, quite literally, they own the U.S. government.

00:50:54 ►

You see, by giving the status of a living human being to corporations and removing all barriers to corporate involvement in our elections,

00:51:02 ►

the U.S. Supreme Court has effectively ended democracy in this country. And that means that we the people are pissed. But rather than

00:51:11 ►

have me try to explain the seriousness of this issue, I’m first going to play a few minutes that

00:51:17 ►

about I guess 10 or 15 minutes that I’ve taken from a three hour long interview that Chris Hedges

00:51:22 ►

gave on our C-SPAN 2 channel on the first day of this year.

00:51:26 ►

And in it, you’ll hear this Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist explain how corporate personhood

00:51:31 ►

isn’t just a threat to American democracy, it’s a threat to humanity itself.

00:51:36 ►

And following that, I’m going to play a short speech for you that Senator Bernie Sanders gave on the Senate floor

00:51:42 ►

as he introduced an amendment to the U.S. Constitution

00:51:45 ►

that will strip personhood from corporations. And while there weren’t many other senators in

00:51:51 ►

the chamber when he gave his speech, I predict that a hundred years from now this will be played

00:51:55 ►

in schools across the land as the speech that saved the nation. So how’s that for a dramatic introduction? But, in all seriousness, I really believe that.

00:52:08 ►

And after those two kind of heavy-duty pieces,

00:52:11 ►

I’m going to lighten it up with a two-minute clip of country music star Willie Nelson and his wife

00:52:16 ►

reading a poem that Willie wrote about the Occupy Movement.

00:52:20 ►

And since he is one of the favorites of many of the Tea Party people,

00:52:23 ►

that will perhaps drive them to despair.

00:52:26 ►

Or better yet, maybe Willie’s support may be a reason for the Tea Party supporters to take a closer look and discover how much the two groups have in common.

00:52:35 ►

And if you live overseas and don’t know who Willie Nelson is, it may amuse you to learn that he is possibly the only really well-known stoner who is very beloved by

00:52:46 ►

almost every redneck conservative in the country. And Willie’s been publicly on the legalized

00:52:51 ►

cannabis side for a long time. He’s a real crossover star and a great hero of the cannabis

00:52:57 ►

community over here. Finally, I’m going to close with a song that was written and is sung by a

00:53:02 ►

young man from Salt Lake City named Noel. And this is from a YouTube video I found where Noel was singing on day one of the Occupy

00:53:11 ►

Salt Lake City Street Theater. So let me cue those up and get them ready to play. And after I do that,

00:53:18 ►

I’m going to start packing for my little jaunt up to LA.A. for this weekend’s workshop with Bruce Dahmer, Ken Adams, and musician-composer Constance Demby.

00:53:28 ►

And if all goes well, we’ll be hearing some of those workshop sessions in future podcasts.

00:53:33 ►

But right now, here is Chris Hedges, Bernie Sanders, Willie Nelson and his wife,

00:53:38 ►

and singer-songwriter Noelle from Occupy Salt Lake City.

00:53:52 ►

Chris Hedges, in your most recent book, The World As It Is, Dispatches on the Myth of Human Progress,

00:53:59 ►

you write, brace yourself, the American empire is over and the dissent is going to be horrifying.

00:54:01 ►

How did you come to that conclusion?

00:54:05 ►

Well, first of all, I spent 20 years on the outer reaches of empire as a foreign correspondent. So I’ve seen an aspect of empire that most people have not,

00:54:11 ►

unless you’re in the military or perhaps the Foreign Service. And I think all of the red

00:54:17 ►

signs, the sort of red warning signs are there. I think also the fact that I spent so long outside the United States gave me a kind of perspective when I returned. I understood how radically the country had

00:54:30 ►

changed in the two decades that I was away. I think for those who had remained within

00:54:36 ►

the borders of the United States, those changes had been more incremental and perhaps less

00:54:41 ►

perceptible.

00:54:43 ►

What are some of the symptoms, the signs, that the American empire is over?

00:54:47 ►

The biggest sign is the fact that we are following the trajectory of all empires,

00:54:54 ►

which is that they expand beyond their capacity to sustain themselves.

00:54:59 ►

We have run up the largest deficits in human history,

00:55:02 ►

which in the bottom line is we can’t repay it.

00:55:05 ►

We have done so at the cost of our infrastructure, our public education, our working class.

00:55:10 ►

We’re hollowing the country out from the inside, and the physical evidence is all around us,

00:55:15 ►

plunging roughly one-third of Americans into poverty or near poverty,

00:55:21 ►

according to the latest statistics.

00:55:24 ►

Our bridges, our roads are collapsing.

00:55:26 ►

Libraries are being closed.

00:55:28 ►

Fire stations are being closed.

00:55:30 ►

These are the signs of a nation, or let’s call it an empire,

00:55:35 ►

that is reaching a kind of terminal point.

00:55:42 ►

And if we don’t radically rechart our course,

00:55:46 ►

then the collapse is going to be very frightening and very chaotic.

00:55:51 ►

In Empire of Illusion, which you wrote and published in 2009, you write,

00:55:56 ►

Those captive to images cast ballots based on how candidates make them feel.

00:56:02 ►

They vote for a slogan, a smile, perceived sincerity and attractiveness,

00:56:07 ►

along with the carefully crafted

00:56:08 ►

personal narrative of the candidate.

00:56:11 ►

It is style and story, not content and fact,

00:56:15 ►

that inform mass politics.

00:56:18 ►

Precisely.

00:56:19 ►

And the structure of the corporate state,

00:56:24 ►

as well as the imperial state, remains untouched.

00:56:30 ►

It doesn’t really matter which political party holds office.

00:56:34 ►

The policies of George W. Bush have been assiduously carried out, for the large part, by Barack Obama.

00:56:41 ►

And even figures like Dick Cheney have confirmed this, whether it is the

00:56:45 ►

so-called war on terror, the refusal to restore habeas corpus, the eavesdropping, wiretapping,

00:56:51 ►

and monitoring of tens of millions of Americans, which under our Constitution should be illegal,

00:56:57 ►

passed for the FISA Reform Act, which Barack Obama supported, whether it is the looting of

00:57:01 ►

the U.S. Treasury on behalf of Wall Street. All of these are policies which are bipartisan,

00:57:08 ►

and that is because we have undergone, I think, in the last few decades,

00:57:12 ►

a kind of slow-motion coup d’etat, a corporate coup d’etat,

00:57:17 ►

whereby the citizen is rendered impotent,

00:57:19 ►

and it is solely the interests of corporations,

00:57:23 ►

which are paramount within the circles of the power

00:57:27 ►

elite. I mean, one could take many examples, but Obamacare would be a good one. I share the

00:57:32 ►

right-wing’s critique of Obamacare. It’s a disastrous bill. It was written by corporate

00:57:37 ►

lobbyists, 2,000 pages of it. It is essentially the equivalent of the bank bailout bill for the

00:57:42 ►

pharmaceutical and insurance industry, $400 billion in subsidies.

00:57:47 ►

Meanwhile, the White House handed out exemptions because these corporations do not want to

00:57:53 ►

insure chronically ill children.

00:57:56 ►

I mean, think of it in moral terms.

00:57:57 ►

It really means that we live in a country where it is now legally permissible for corporations,

00:58:03 ►

for-profit corporations,

00:58:05 ►

to hold sick children hostage while their parents frantically bankrupt themselves

00:58:10 ►

trying to save their sons or daughters.

00:58:12 ►

This is the kind of world the corporate state creates.

00:58:16 ►

And the Democrats and the Republicans are both handmaidens of corporate interests,

00:58:22 ►

which is why Congress has such a low approval rating.

00:58:24 ►

I mean, the American public’s not fooled by this.

00:58:26 ►

In 2010, Death of the Liberal Class came out.

00:58:30 ►

Here’s a quote.

00:58:30 ►

The election of Obama was one more triumph of illusion over substance.

00:58:35 ►

It was a skillful manipulation and betrayal of the public by a corporate power elite.

00:58:42 ►

We mistook style and ethnicity, an advertising tactic pioneered by

00:58:46 ►

Calvin Klein and Benetton, for progressive politics and genuine change. Sure, Obama

00:58:52 ►

functioned as a brand. Now remember, 2008, the financial collapse, Wall Street was terrified.

00:58:58 ►

They thought they’d been found out. They thought they would have to pay a price for their criminal activity, fraudulent activity,

00:59:05 ►

and malfeasance. And Obama functioned as a brand in the same way that people of color or HIV

00:59:12 ►

positive models were used by Bennington and Calvin Klein to associate their products with a risque

00:59:18 ►

lifestyle and progressive politics. But as with the function of all brands, we confused a brand with an experience.

00:59:26 ►

Obama won Advertising Age’s top annual award, marketer of the year,

00:59:32 ►

because the professionals knew precisely what he had done. He beat Nike, Apple, Zappos.

00:59:38 ►

And that’s what he was. He, you know, to quote Cornel West, became essentially a black mascot

00:59:43 ►

for Wall Street. One of the themes in a lot of your books is criticism of liberals. Why?

00:59:50 ►

Because the liberal class was never meant to function as the political left. The liberal

00:59:56 ►

class was meant to function as the political center. And I spent a lot of time in Death of

01:00:01 ►

the Liberal Class going back to the radical and populist movements

01:00:05 ►

at the turn of the century,

01:00:06 ►

which were very powerful.

01:00:09 ►

Anarcho-syndicalist unions like the Wobblies,

01:00:12 ►

the old CIO,

01:00:13 ►

Eugene Debs, the socialist candidate for president,

01:00:16 ►

polled almost 6% of the vote,

01:00:19 ►

900,000 votes in 1912.

01:00:22 ►

Publications like Appeal to Reason and The Masses,

01:00:24 ►

which were socialist publications,

01:00:26 ►

had wide circulations. Appeal to Reason was the fourth most widely read periodical in the country

01:00:33 ►

at the time before the war. And we had about two or three dozen socialist mayors. Well,

01:00:40 ►

what happened was the war itself. And Wilson had run for re-election in 1912 on the

01:00:47 ►

slogan, he kept us out of the war. But with the collapse of the Eastern Front, with Tsarist Russia,

01:00:54 ►

the collapse of Tsarist Russia and the Bolshevik Revolution, there was the capacity of the Germans

01:00:58 ►

to send, I think, upwards of 100 divisions to the Western Front. And the bankers on Wall Street,

01:01:03 ►

who had lent tremendous sums of money

01:01:05 ►

to the British and the French, were terrified that if the British and French

01:01:10 ►

lost the war, they’d lose their money.

01:01:12 ►

So there was heavy pressure on the White House,

01:01:14 ►

aided by the Kaiser’s decision to begin to try and create a naval blockade

01:01:18 ►

around Britain, which sank three or four American ships, to go into the war.

01:01:22 ►

But it had no popular support.

01:01:24 ►

And we created, and I spent a lot

01:01:26 ►

of time writing about this in Death of the Liberal Class, the first system of modern mass propaganda,

01:01:32 ►

the Committee for Public Information, known as popularly as the Creel Commission, because it was

01:01:37 ►

headed by a figure named George Creel. Now, the Committee for Public Information and the sort of,

01:01:42 ►

you know, dark figure, the grand inquisitor type figure,

01:01:46 ►

becomes Walter Lippmann, who ends up writing a public opinion in 1922,

01:01:51 ►

sort of the blueprint for control, manufacturing consent is his phrase.

01:01:55 ►

And it’s how you use propaganda effectively to manufacture consent.

01:02:01 ►

And you don’t actually need the harsher measures of the Espionage Act and Sedition Act, except for the most recalcitrant forces or radical forces. Randolph Bourne,

01:02:11 ►

Jane Addams, Debs himself ends up going to prison. But propaganda becomes in the right hands,

01:02:19 ►

in the hands of the state, a much more effective tool to herd people where you want them.

01:02:24 ►

And the most important

01:02:26 ►

thing about the Committee for Public Information is that it drew on the understanding of crowd

01:02:31 ►

psychology or mass psychology pioneered by figures like Le Bon, Trotter, and of course,

01:02:36 ►

Sigmund Freud. That people were not moved by fact or reason, but manipulated by emotion. And this system of mass propaganda, which created a kind

01:02:48 ►

of permanent fear of, of course, the Hun, was transferred the moment the war was over to the

01:02:55 ►

dreaded Red. And there’s a great writer I like very much, Dwight MacDonald, who writes of this

01:03:00 ►

period. And he said, essentially, the war, World War I, was the rock on which these movements

01:03:05 ►

broke. Now, this is absolutely vital to understanding what happened to American democracy,

01:03:11 ►

because these movements never took formal political power. And yet they were the true correctives

01:03:17 ►

in terms of opening up our democracy, the Liberty Party that fought slavery,

01:03:22 ►

the suffragists, the labor movement, later the

01:03:25 ►

civil rights movement. These were movements that pressured the liberal class to respond.

01:03:32 ►

Lucius Sorrentino emails into you, Mr. Hedges, the Occupy movement has been criticized for not

01:03:37 ►

having a political agenda, aim, or purpose other than creating an internet meme, the 99% versus the 1%,

01:03:45 ►

and drawing attention to the problem?

01:03:46 ►

What do you see as the future of Occupy Wall Street

01:03:50 ►

insofar as political activism goes?

01:03:53 ►

I disagree that it doesn’t have a message.

01:03:56 ►

I think the message is very clear.

01:03:58 ►

And the message is the corporate coup has to be reversed.

01:04:02 ►

The corporate overlords have to go.

01:04:06 ►

I covered the revolutions in East Germany, Czechoslovakia, and finally Romania. And we used to hear the same criticisms

01:04:14 ►

leveled against the organizers, for instance, in East Germany, that they, what are your

01:04:18 ►

demands? Well, the movement understands that, you know, there are certainly things that I think most people within the Occupy movement would support,

01:04:29 ►

revoking corporate personhood, campaign finance, a serious jobs program, especially directed at the young,

01:04:37 ►

a moratorium on foreclosures and bank repossessions, all of which I support and all of which I think are important.

01:04:43 ►

But they’re not going to come as long as the political system is held hostage to corporate interests, as long as we live

01:04:50 ►

in what Sheldon Woolen calls this system of inverted totalitarianism. And so they keep it

01:04:56 ►

focused on the fundamental problem. And of course, the powerly criticize it, criticizes the movement for not making specific demands, for not funneling this energy

01:05:07 ►

back into a dead system. And I think the most telling moment for me came when there was

01:05:15 ►

a coordinated effort by 18 cities to shut down Occupy encampments, including in Oakland, L.A., New York.

01:05:32 ►

And for me, that was an indication of how tone-deaf and out-of-touch those in power are.

01:05:35 ►

The idea that they could physically eradicate these movements and not address the injustices and suffering that had given birth to these movements.

01:05:43 ►

If they functioned as a liberal class should function,

01:05:47 ►

let’s go back to Roosevelt and Wallace,

01:05:49 ►

if they were serious about attempting to save corporate capitalism,

01:05:55 ►

they would have immediately announced a $1 trillion jobs program

01:05:58 ►

targeted at people under the age of 25,

01:06:02 ►

a moratorium on bank repossessions and foreclosures,

01:06:08 ►

and forgiving $1 trillion in student debt.

01:06:13 ►

I mean, these would have been the kinds of steps that might have been able to begin to ameliorate the anger,

01:06:20 ►

the legitimate anger that has gripped many, many, many Americans,

01:06:24 ►

and yet they think

01:06:25 ►

they can use militarized police forces. And I’ve been in the middle of it. I mean, it’s

01:06:29 ►

just like being in a Star Wars movie. They’re stormtroopers, in essence, command helicopters

01:06:34 ►

up in the sky. These are peaceful protests, directing traffic, you know, instances of

01:06:41 ►

very brutal behavior, pepper spraying, beating. I was arrested outside Goldman Sachs.

01:06:45 ►

People were being slammed into the cement.

01:06:49 ►

To think that they can counter this by force, I think, is deeply misguided

01:06:53 ►

and shows how out of touch those in power are.

01:06:55 ►

In terms of political figures, I don’t believe that,

01:06:58 ►

given the configurations of our political system,

01:07:02 ►

we are going to mount a serious challenge to it through the electoral

01:07:07 ►

process. I think the challenge will come through the Occupy movements, and I don’t think these

01:07:13 ►

movements are going away. You know, when you cover the revolutions in Eastern Europe, you became very

01:07:20 ►

cognizant of that timetables were impossible to predict. Overthrowing the communist regime in Poland took 10 years.

01:07:28 ►

In East Germany it took 10 weeks, and in Czechoslovakia it took 10 days.

01:07:32 ►

No one really knows.

01:07:33 ►

These movements have a kind of life of their own, how they spring.

01:07:37 ►

You know, I was in Leipzig on the afternoon of November 9, 1989,

01:07:43 ►

with the leaders of the East German opposition.

01:07:42 ►

on the afternoon of November 9th, 1989,

01:07:44 ►

with the leaders of the East German opposition.

01:07:48 ►

And they said, well, maybe within a year there’ll be free passage back and forth across the Berlin Wall.

01:07:52 ►

Within a matter of hours, the Berlin Wall,

01:07:54 ►

at least as an impediment to human traffic, no longer existed.

01:07:58 ►

And that was a huge lesson for me,

01:07:59 ►

that even those most closely associated with these movements

01:08:02 ►

don’t know where they’re going,

01:08:04 ►

and oftentimes don’t even know what their potential is.

01:08:08 ►

So I put my faith in movements.

01:08:11 ►

In his 2005 book, Losing Moses on the Freeway, The Ten Commandments in America,

01:08:16 ►

Mr. Hedges writes,

01:08:18 ►

We watch impassively as the wealthy and the elite, the huge corporations, rob us,

01:08:22 ►

ruin the environment, defraud consumers and taxpayers,

01:08:26 ►

and create an exclusive American oligarchy that fuses wealth and political power.

01:08:31 ►

We watch passively because we believe we can enter the club.

01:08:35 ►

It is greed that keeps us silent.

01:08:38 ►

The world is a big place, but certainly the most powerful entities are these huge corporations.

01:08:44 ►

Corporations like Goldman Sachs, for instance.

01:08:47 ►

Because I spent so much of my life in the developing world,

01:08:50 ►

places like Africa, Latin America, and the Middle East,

01:08:54 ►

just to give you a small example,

01:08:56 ►

I saw what happened when commodity futures were bought up

01:09:01 ►

by corporations like Goldman Sachs. And wheat, for instance, which it has in the last year,

01:09:08 ►

its price increased by 100%.

01:09:10 ►

I saw the human consequences of that.

01:09:13 ►

The children who were malnourished and even in some cases died of starvation

01:09:17 ►

because they couldn’t afford to eat.

01:09:22 ►

The wars in both Iraq and Afghanistan have very little popular support,

01:09:26 ►

and yet for a handful of corporations, Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, Halliburton,

01:09:32 ►

they’re immensely profitable, as war is for a certain tiny segment of the power elite,

01:09:40 ►

and always has been.

01:09:41 ►

As Smedley Butler said, you know, war is a racket.

01:09:46 ►

elite and always has been. As Smedley Butler said, you know, war is a racket. So I think that we unfortunately have created a world where power has become centralized in the hands of a select

01:09:53 ►

group of corporations that are more powerful than the state itself. That it is within the

01:10:00 ►

American political system impossible to vote against the interests of Goldman Sachs.

01:10:05 ►

And unless we thwart that power, we are doomed because corporations, unfettered capitalism,

01:10:14 ►

and Karl Pugliani wrote a great book about this in 1944 called The Great Transformation,

01:10:19 ►

turn everything into a commodity.

01:10:21 ►

In that sense, Karl Marx was right.

01:10:22 ►

I mean, unfettered capitalism is a revolutionary force. And human beings become commodities. The natural world becomes a commodity

01:10:30 ►

that you exploit until exhaustion or collapse. And that’s why the environmental crisis is

01:10:35 ►

intimately twinned with the economic crisis. And if we don’t somehow find a mechanism or a way to

01:10:41 ►

break the power of those corporations, they will continue to trash the ecosystem to the point at which life

01:10:50 ►

for huge segments of the human species will be unsustainable.

01:10:56 ►

Senator from Vermont is recognized.

01:10:58 ►

Thank you, Madam President.

01:11:00 ►

Madam President, I am offering today a resolution to amend the United States Constitution.

01:11:09 ►

I do not do this lightly, nor have I ever done something like this before.

01:11:15 ►

The U.S. Constitution is an extraordinary document which has served our country well for over 200 years,

01:11:24 ►

and in my view, it should not be amended often.

01:11:28 ►

But in light of the disastrous Supreme Court’s 5-4 decision in the Citizens United case,

01:11:37 ►

I see no alternative but a constitutional amendment.

01:11:43 ►

I should add that a similar resolution has been offered in the House

01:11:46 ►

by Congressman Ted Deutch of Florida.

01:11:50 ►

This constitutional amendment is supported by such grassroots organizations

01:11:55 ►

as Public Citizens, People for the American Way,

01:11:59 ►

and the Center for Media and Democracy.

01:12:03 ►

Madam President, let me go on record as strongly as I can,

01:12:10 ►

and as clearly as I can,

01:12:12 ►

in stating that I strongly disagree with the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision.

01:12:21 ►

In my view, a corporation is not a person. In my view, a corporation does not have

01:12:31 ►

First Amendment rights to spend as much money as it wants without disclosure on a political campaign. In my view, corporations should not be able to go into their treasuries, spend

01:12:49 ►

millions and millions of dollars on a campaign in order to buy elections. I do not believe

01:12:59 ►

that is what American democracy is supposed to be about. I do not believe that that is what

01:13:07 ►

the bravest of the brave from our country, fighting for democracy, fought and died to

01:13:16 ►

preserve. Madam President, almost two years ago, in its now infamous Citizens United decision,

01:13:47 ►

In its now infamous Citizens United decision, the United States Supreme Court upended over a century of precedent, taking a somewhat narrow legal question and using it as an opportunity to radically change our political landscape, unleashing a tsunami of corporate spending on campaign ads that has just begun.

01:13:56 ►

Make no mistake, the Citizens United ruling has radically changed the nature of our democracy,

01:14:02 ►

further tilting the balance of the power toward the rich and the powerful at a time when already the wealthiest people in this country have never had it so good.

01:14:09 ►

In my view, history will record that the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision

01:14:18 ►

is one of the worst decisions ever made by a Supreme Court in the history of our country.

01:14:26 ►

While there is no way of knowing for sure, since there are no disclosure requirements

01:14:33 ►

in place to track what was spent, it is no secret that already in the 2010 midterm elections,

01:14:54 ►

In the 2010 midterm elections, corporations and some very, very wealthy individuals spent a huge and unprecedented amount of money to further their political goals. And there is no question that this is just the beginning of their efforts.

01:15:09 ►

of their efforts. At a time when corporations have over $2 trillion in cash in their bank accounts and are making record-breaking profits, the American people should be concerned

01:15:14 ►

when the Supreme Court says that these corporations have a constitutionally protected right to spend, spend, spend shareholders’ money to dominate

01:15:29 ►

an election as if they were real, live persons.

01:15:35 ►

There will be no end to the impact that corporate interests can have on our campaigns and our democracy if we do not end this Citizens United decision

01:15:49 ►

and its impact on our nation.

01:15:53 ►

All of us in the Senate share one common characteristic.

01:16:01 ►

We all run for elections. We all live in the real political world.

01:16:06 ►

And let me just speak for a moment what I think many of my colleagues in their heart

01:16:11 ►

of hearts know to be true. And that is that while the campaign finance system we had before Citizens United was, in my view, a disaster, there is no question

01:16:29 ►

that a disastrous situation where candidates, members of the Senate, spend huge amounts

01:16:37 ►

of time having to raise money, and I know that is distasteful not just for Democrats,

01:16:43 ►

it is distasteful for Republicans, it is distasteful not just for Democrats. It is distasteful for Republicans.

01:16:47 ►

It is distasteful for an independent.

01:16:48 ►

That’s what we do.

01:16:55 ►

And now, as a result of Citizens United, that bad situation has become much worse because infinitely more money is going to come into the political process

01:17:02 ►

through non-disclosed donations suddenly appearing on TV screens in our states.

01:17:11 ►

According to an October 10, 2011 article in Politico,

01:17:17 ►

quote, the billionaire industrialist brothers David and Charles Koch, plan to steer more than 200 million, potentially much more,

01:17:29 ►

to conservative groups ahead of Election Day 2012. What do we think? Do we think that American

01:17:35 ►

democracy is about a couple of wealthy billionaires putting hundreds of millions of dollars into campaigns without disclosure?

01:17:46 ►

Is that really the democracy that Americans fought and died for in war after war?

01:17:53 ►

I think not.

01:17:55 ►

And it clearly is not just Republican operatives.

01:17:58 ►

There will be Democrats doing the same.

01:18:01 ►

So more and more money comes into the system.

01:18:04 ►

We don’t know where it comes from.

01:18:07 ►

And in order to defend ourselves, candidates are going to have to raise more and more money,

01:18:12 ►

become more and more dependent on big money interest. Does anybody really believe that

01:18:19 ►

that is what American democracy is supposed to be about? And let’s talk about the practical impacts. What happens here on the floor of the Senate? Madam President, the six largest banks on Wall Street have assets equal to over 65% of our GDP, over $9 trillion, six banks.

01:18:42 ►

Over $9 trillion, six banks.

01:18:46 ►

Now, when an issue comes up that impacts Wall Street,

01:18:51 ►

some of us, for example, think it might be a good idea to break up these huge banks.

01:18:55 ►

And members walk up to the desk up there and they have to decide,

01:18:58 ►

am I going to vote for this, am I going to vote against it?

01:19:07 ►

With full knowledge that if they vote against the interests of Wall Street, that two weeks later there may be ads coming down into their state attacking them.

01:19:11 ►

Every member of the Senate, every member of the House, in the back of their minds will

01:19:16 ►

be thinking, gee, if I cast a vote this way, if I take on some big money interest, am I

01:19:23 ►

going to be punished for that?

01:19:26 ►

Will a huge amount of money be unleashed in my state?

01:19:29 ►

Everybody here understands that that’s true.

01:19:32 ►

It’s not just taking on Wall Street.

01:19:34 ►

Maybe it’s taking on the drug companies.

01:19:37 ►

Maybe it’s taking on the private insurance companies.

01:19:39 ►

Maybe it’s taking on the military industrial complex.

01:19:42 ►

Maybe it’s taking on the military-industrial complex.

01:19:49 ►

But whatever powerful and wealthy special interests you are prepared to take on on behalf of the interests of the middle class and working families of this country,

01:19:54 ►

when you walk up to that desk and you cast that vote,

01:19:57 ►

you know in the back of your mind that you may be unleashing a tsunami of money coming into your state,

01:20:05 ►

and you’re going to think twice about how you cast that vote.

01:20:10 ►

Madam President, I am a proud sponsor of a number of bills

01:20:14 ►

that would respond to Citizens United and begin to get a handle on the problem.

01:20:20 ►

And I’d like to acknowledge them very briefly.

01:20:22 ►

One is the Disclose Act, sponsored by Senator Schumer, which would force corporations spending money on campaign ads to disclose

01:20:30 ►

their identity, just as candidates have to do. That is a good thing. I support it. Another

01:20:35 ►

is the Fair Elections Now Act, sponsored by Senator Durbin, which would move us finally

01:20:40 ►

to publicly financed elections. I think that is a very good idea. I support that.

01:20:47 ►

Third piece of legislation is a recent resolution for a campaign finance constitutional amendment

01:20:52 ►

introduced by Senator Tom Udall of New Mexico that would make it clear that Congress and the

01:20:58 ►

states have the authority to write laws to regulate campaign spending across the country

01:21:04 ►

and make sure our state and federal elections are what’s right for our democracy.

01:21:09 ►

And I support Senator Udall’s resolution.

01:21:12 ►

But even these excellent pieces of legislation are not enough.

01:21:17 ►

Madam President, the Constitution of this country has served us well for more than 200 years.

01:21:23 ►

But when the Supreme Court says that for purposes of the First Amendment,

01:21:28 ►

corporations are people,

01:21:30 ►

that writing checks from the company’s bank account is constitutionally protected speech,

01:21:36 ►

and that even attempts by the federal government and states

01:21:39 ►

to impose reasonable restrictions on campaign ads are unconstitutional, when that occurs, our democracy

01:21:47 ►

is in grave danger. Something more needs to be done, something more fundamental and indisputable,

01:21:56 ►

something that cannot be turned on its head by a 5-4 Supreme Court decision. We have got

01:22:03 ►

to send a constitutional amendment to

01:22:06 ►

the states that says, simply and straightforwardly, what everyone except five members of the United

01:22:12 ►

States Supreme Court seem to understand, and that is corporations are not people. Bank

01:22:21 ►

of America is not a person. ExxonMobil is not a person.

01:22:27 ►

Madam President, the resolution I am offering today calls for an amendment to be sent to

01:22:32 ►

the states that would do just that. It would make perfectly clear, one, corporations are

01:22:38 ►

not persons with equal constitutional rights as real-life, flesh-and-blood human beings.

01:22:43 ►

Two, corporations are subject to regulation

01:22:46 ►

by the people. Three, corporations may not make campaign contributions, which has been

01:22:52 ►

the law of the land for the last century. And four, Congress and states have the power

01:22:58 ►

to regulate campaign finance, as Senator Udall’s amendment would also say.

01:23:06 ►

finance, as Senator Udall’s amendment would also say. Madam President, this amendment is co-sponsored by Senator Begich of Alaska, and I would urge all of my colleagues to co-sponsor

01:23:13 ►

this amendment, which in fact does what its title suggests, saves American democracy.

01:23:20 ►

Thank you very much, Madam President.

01:23:47 ►

Thank you very much, Madam President. We’re the windows and we are the doors. We’re the ceiling and we are the floors. We’re the one that we’ve been waiting for.

01:23:49 ►

We’re the ones with the 99.

01:23:51 ►

Stand up against tyranny.

01:23:53 ►

You now have the floor.

01:23:56 ►

You’re the ones we’ve been waiting for.

01:23:58 ►

We’re the ones with the 99.

01:24:03 ►

The whole tax setup is a little unfair,

01:24:06 ►

but some of us don’t mind paying our share.

01:24:10 ►

We’re the ones that we’ve been waiting for.

01:24:12 ►

We’re the ones with the 99.

01:24:15 ►

We’re the ones we’ve been waiting for.

01:24:17 ►

You’re the ones we’ve been waiting for. We’re the ones with the 99.

01:24:20 ►

We stand with humanity against the insanity, and we’re the ones we’ve been waiting for.

01:24:25 ►

We’re the ones with the 99.

01:24:27 ►

Our hearts in Z Park against the oligarch.

01:24:31 ►

We’re the ones we’ve been waiting for.

01:24:33 ►

We’re the ones with the 99.

01:24:35 ►

And even though all our bodies can’t be there, we’ll be there in spirit because we care.

01:24:40 ►

We’re the ones we’ve been waiting for.

01:24:42 ►

We’re the ones with the 99.

01:24:44 ►

We stand with

01:24:46 ►

humanity against this insanity

01:24:48 ►

for all people

01:24:50 ►

to be free.

01:24:51 ►

Us and them, you and me,

01:24:54 ►

we’re the ones with the 99.

01:24:58 ►

And for now, this is Lorenzo

01:25:00 ►

signing off from Cyberdelic Space.

01:25:02 ►

Be well, my friends. Only looking out for number one Caught you in the back with Washington

01:25:26 ►

Cooking up a deal to make some gold

01:25:29 ►

It was your country that was bought and sold

01:25:31 ►

The story is just too old

01:25:35 ►

New York, New York, you’re laying low

01:25:38 ►

As Washington keeps your status quo

01:25:41 ►

California runs the show

01:25:45 ►

Keeping your brothers in a can

01:25:48 ►

And never knowing that the world’s a sham

01:25:50 ►

I think it’s high time that we took a stand

01:25:53 ►

And break down the walls, set the people free

01:25:57 ►

Break down the walls between you and me

01:26:00 ►

If we don’t stand together, then we’re nothing at all

01:26:03 ►

So let’s all help each other and take down the wall

01:26:06 ►

When you’re number one and feeling fine

01:26:21 ►

It’s easy to forget about the ninety and nine

01:26:24 ►

When did you decide to leave us behind? I’m feeling fine. It’s easy to forget about the 99.

01:26:28 ►

When did you decide to leave us behind?

01:26:33 ►

You traded your brother for a dollar bill and your sister for a house on the hill.

01:26:36 ►

You used them as a running bill.

01:26:40 ►

Mind of our wealth and few with me.

01:26:43 ►

Disregarded other people’s needs.

01:26:46 ►

Though you pay our cries no heed We’re getting closer to breaking down

01:26:49 ►

The barriers you set all around

01:26:52 ►

We’re gonna take off your crown

01:26:55 ►

When we break down the walls, set the people free

01:26:58 ►

Break down the walls between you and me

01:27:01 ►

If we don’t stand together, then we’re nothing at all

01:27:04 ►

So let’s

01:27:05 ►

all help each other and take down the wall. It’ll take some time. Everything is gonna

01:27:12 ►

be just fine. But you gotta start to change in your mind. You can’t stay the same and suddenly expect to see a change.

01:27:27 ►

Everybody’s got to play a part and an open mind.

01:27:31 ►

Well, that’s a running stone. Revolution is starting now

01:27:57 ►

Love and compassion are what it’s about

01:28:00 ►

And though you might not yet see how

01:28:03 ►

Our message is sounding loud and clear we’re gonna

01:28:07 ►

make some changes here the problems don’t just disappear get up put on your marching shoes

01:28:15 ►

don’t you see we got everything to lose the time has come for you to choose To put it in the history books

01:28:25 ►

The way we overturn these crooks

01:28:27 ►

A little passion was all it took

01:28:30 ►

To break down the walls, set the people free

01:28:34 ►

Break down the walls between you and me

01:28:37 ►

If we don’t stand together, then we’re nothing at all

01:28:40 ►

So let’s all help each other and take down the walls

01:28:43 ►

Yeah, take down the walls like it used to be

01:28:46 ►

Take down the walls between you and me

01:28:49 ►

If we can’t love each other, then there’s nothing left to say

01:28:52 ►

So let’s break down the walls like we break them today

⚗️ alembic

Explorer

297 - A Tribute to Robert Anton Wilson

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Program Notes

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