a word on the recent non-event...

When the U.S. congress was considering banning acid, a senate panel took testimony from people like Timothy Leary and Allan Ginsberg. They also interviewed Arthur Kleps. Kleps, of course, was the founder of the Neo-American Boo-Hoo Church. The chief hymn in the church was Row Row Row your boat, and the chief sacrament was LSD. Anyway, in contrast to the load of malarky that we have been treated to on Iraq, and the jabbering of a Democratic leadership that has given new life to the word Dupe and Traitor (insofar as new life can arise from malfunctioning automatons), Kleps gave the Senate something worth hearing. When questioned about the scientific soundness of the claimn that LSD deepened one spiritually, he said:

Listening to the testimony before your subcommittee on Monday, I was, of course, struck by Dr. Goddard's characterization of what we call consciousness expansion as 'bunk,' and I would like to reply to the reasons he gave for making such a judgment when Senator Dodd questioned him further.

"Dr. Goddard said that consciousness expansion did not occur with LSD because the results of objective tests of intelligence and so on given during the session showed negative results; a drop in performance. His argument contains the unspoken assumption that consciousness expansion is necessarily associated with a rise of measured IQ during the psychedelic session. I do not know of any psychedelic person who would agree that that is the case.

"If I were to give you an IQ test and during the administration one of the walls of the room opened up giving you a vision of the blazing glories of the central galactic suns, and at the same time your childhood began to unreel before your inner eye like a three-dimensional color movie, you would not do well on the intelligence test.
"LSD puts you in the mind of God, and God has little interest in our IQ tests. We might say that God has no IQ. God is not a verbal being as we are to such a large extent.

"Now this assumption that consciousness is somehow equated to, or is an aggregate of, those mental faculties which are measurable by objective tests is representative of an entire approach to the subject of psychedelics which is superficially plausible and yet is fundamentally erroneous. It is the only approach which finds favor in the eyes of those administering research grants. It is based on the assumption that if you cannot measure something, it does not exist. In psychology it is rooted in a kind of professional, if not personal, atheism. It produces the horror stories we read about in the field of animal vivisection experimentation resulting from a narrow-minded fixation on trivia, an almost trancelike inability to see the forest for the trees. It results in thousands of people each year earning advanced degrees because they have proved, in effect, that when you put 13 rats in one end of a box, lo and behold, 13 rats come out of the other end of the box in some combination or other.”

Unfortunately for the Boo-Hooists, the golden age in which American high hatters could put 13 rats in one end of a box and get 13 out of the other has long gone. Instead, they squat over the box, deliver a delirious load of their shit, and then assure everybody that, in God’s good time, we will see pure gold, oil, and the winds of liberty come out the other end. The twenty five percent of the self-lobotomized cheer. The newspapers report that the zombies like it, the serious people like it, and by God it tastes good and seems like progress. The oligarchs pat themselves on the back for having spent twenty five years destroying unions and having merged all other organizations into perfect little party pods, where they come out every four years to collect money for the election of a complete suite of ghouls. It is lovely. It is called democracy, or actually cacocracy, rule by the worst.

Row row row your boat…