Bob Schwartz

Don’t follow leaders
Watch the parking meters
Bob Dylan, Subterranean Homesick Blues

Psychedelics, including marijuana, have been part of our contemporary culture for decades. When we talk about them and act, personally and institutionally, we get some things right and some things wrong.

Jack Webb created the TV police series Dragnet twice. First during the 1950s, then revived in the late 1960s. Dragnet was famous, and sometimes mocked, for its deadpan dialogue and its hard-nosed establishment take on law and order in Los Angeles.

The first episode of its revival as Dragnet 1967 was The LSD Story. It opens:

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“This is the city—Los Angeles, California. It’s a fine place to enjoy life. There are places reserved just for kids…when they’re young and feel young. Places they go when they’re young and feel old…beginning the big search for something that often doesn’t exist in the places they look for it. They might find it here [church] or here [synagogue] or maybe here [church]. They could try looking here [Griffith Observatory]. Their search might end with a college degree. One thing’s sure—whatever they’re looking for—it cannot be found inside a number five capsule. When they try, that’s where I come in. I carry a badge.”

“It was Tuesday, March fifteenth. It was fair in Los Angeles. We were working the day watch out of Juvenile Narcotics. My partner’s Bill Gannon, the boss is Captain Richey. My name is Friday. A powerful new drug capable of producing weird and dangerous hallucinations had found its way onto the streets of the city. It had fallen into the hands of juvenile experimenters. We had to try and stop it.”

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Sgt. Joe Friday (Jack Webb) and Officer Bill Gannon arrive at MacArthur Park and find a teenager with his head stuck in the ground. Half his face is painted blue, half yellow. He identifies himself as Blue Boy. They discover he is under the influence of LSD, the newly popular psychedelic drug that was about to be declared illegal. Blue Boy is released. In the end, they go to an acid party he was hosting and find him dead from an overdose.

The LSD Story was not the last time Dragnet featured LSD. The following year, an episode called The Big Prophet included a lot of talk about the subject. In fact, the episode has no action and is entirely a conversation between Sgt. Friday and Brother William Bentley on the subject. Bentley, a Timothy Leary stand-in, had founded the Temple of the Expanded Mind (like Leary’s League of Spiritual Discovery) to promote the use of LSD:

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Bentley: You talk about young people in America. I don’t recognize them. I don’t think they exist. I think your kind creates them. You force them into little molds, and pop them out like little plastic figures off a production line. You stuff them full of preconceived ideas, praise them for turning out so well. But they’re not people, they’re machines! Then you wind them up like little tape recorders, and send them out into the world to spread another generation of lies. “This is the best of all possible worlds… this is a recording.” And the ones who escape your assembly line, the rare ones, you call them delinquents, weirdos, hippies, pillheads, freaks, potheads. You tell them they’re sick. They know better. They’re not satisfied with a little change. They want it all! They want it now! And they know they can’t change the world, so they change themselves. They seek others who believe as they do. They start communities, tribes. They grow, they share, food, shelter, and most importantly, love. All they ask is the right to live the way they want to live, without being harassed, without being told what they can or cannot do. Now, is that too much to ask, Mr. Policeman?

Friday: No, if that’s all they ask. But it’s not. They’re not asking to be left alone, they’re asking for a handout. If they really believed what you say they believe, they’d do something about it besides panhandle in the streets and use narcotics to escape reality. A lot of people started with an idea, and they’ve made it work, but not by begging or stealing or standing in line to get paid for not working. The Amish did it in Pennsylvania, they built self-supporting communities. The Mormons did it in Utah, they built a city. The Jews did it in Israel, they built a nation. But they were willing to work for it!

Bentley: We tried in San Francisco.

Friday: Yeah. Well, you learned something, didn’t you?

Bentley: What’s that?

Friday: If you’re gonna live with the rest of us, then you’ll have to learn to play the game by the rules. And in case you’ve forgotten the name of the game, we call it democracy.

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Speaking of words of Greek origin like democracy, the word iconoclast comes from the Greek word eikonoklastēs, literally “image destroyer.” We now use it mean someone who criticizes or opposes beliefs and practices that are widely accepted.

Today marijuana is legal in a majority of states (though still on the federal schedule of illegal drugs). In Colorado, criminal penalties have been removed for possessing and using psilocybin mushrooms and some other psychedelic drugs (distribution and sale are still illegal). Psychedelics are widely discussed as a boon to creativity. Research continues into the therapeutic use of psychedelics.

None of which is to say that psychedelics, from marijuana on up, are good or bad, right or wrong. Like all powerful tools, their use is situational: good for some people and situations, less good or very bad for others. It is the way we think and talk about them that should be as open, well-informed and careful as possible.

One thing The Big Prophet did get right. Ultimately the problem Sgt. Friday/Jack Webb had is that psychedelics are powerful tools capable of destroying social and cultural icons: “If you’re gonna live with the rest of us, then you’ll have to learn to play the game by the rules.” Which means that along with real health dangers, mental and physical, they are dangerous to social and cultural norms. That is something that scared the keepers and beneficiaries of the norms in the 1960s.

That is still their potential, for better or worse: to smash icons. This is not to endorse or recommend any psychedelics for anyone under any circumstances. It is only to acknowledge and recognize the relationship between two things. Psychedelics are a powerful tool. And certain icons could be, or should be, smashed.

© 2023 by Bob Schwartz

Talking about James Hillman, as I did in my last post, got me thinking about other iconoclastic thinkers that have influenced me. Ivan Illich came to mind. Summarized as “priest, theologian, philosopher and social critic”, he was well-known in the 1970s, but has fallen off the screen since. He deserves more attention than ever, since much of his criticism has proved out as circumstances have gotten more challenging.

I just visited some books by him and about him. In this interview he is talking about water:

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“There, in a dark, subtle, deep way, we also conceive stuff, that stuff which can gurgle, and chant and sparkle and flow and rise in a fountain and come down as rain. In other cultures, that stuff not only comes down as rain but also comes down as the souls of women who have died and who seek reincarnation. That’s how it’s imagined among the Lacandon Indians in the south of Mexico. In India that stuff flows around the sun as soma.

That’s where a distinction comes in between stuff and surface qualities, sparkle or stench, perhaps. It’s a distinction between that which, at least in old times, people believed they could actually sense with their inner senses, their phantastikón, their inner eye, ear, touch, ability to embrace, and, on the other hand, that which appears to their outer senses….

Now I want to do this history of stuff, because I believe that in this world into which I see the young generation now moving, it is not only their voice they are losing — by imagining themselves according to the model of the computer — it is also that they are emerging as a generation rid of stuff.

Now water is one of the traditional four stuffs from which our Western universe is made. There are other universes, in other bodies, world bodies, which are made of five or of seven elements. Ours is made of four, and water is one of them. In this little booklet, I wanted to raise a question about the historicity of stuff and the possibility of studying it….

I sat down and wrote, for a friend of mine, a little pamphlet, a long letter, which was then published as H2O and the Waters of Forgetfulness. I tried to trace the history of the stuff of water, and to get at the age-old ambiguity of water, which is a surface and a depth, which can wash off dirt from the skin, by flowing, but also purify the depths of the soul with just a touch. These are totally different activities, washing and purifying. And this gave me an exceptional opportunity to speak about a stuff which at this moment is escaping us socially.

I find it very strange to go to a tap, from which something comes out that is still called potable water but children are told, “Drink from the bottle in the icebox, don’t drink that stuff from the faucet,” and then to take this and baptize a child with it. That’s how things are. That’s what it means to live today surrounded by people baptized in that stuff. I’m not questioning baptism. I’m simply saying, Look at how humiliating it is, how horrifying it is, to live today. You will then learn how to appreciate the moments of flame and beauty….

Other people worry about the human organism not being able to find, sometime in the middle of the next century, any more of the appropriate kind of H2O to make it work. I’m talking about the deadness which sets in when people have lost the sense to imagine the substance of water, not its external appearances but the deep substance of water.”

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What Illich is calling stuff might be called the soul of things. Soul is central to Hillman’s vision, as in anima mundi, the soul of the world:

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“Let us imagine the anima mundi as that particular soul spark, that seminal image, which offers itself through each thing in its visible form. Then anima mundi indicates the animated possibilities presented by each event as it is, its sensuous presentation as a face bespeaking its interior image—in short, its availability to imagination, its presence as a psychic reality. Not only animals and plants ensouled as in the Romantic vision, but soul is given with each thing, God-given things of nature and man-made things of the street.”

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Soul has many meanings, but that imprecision does not mean we don’t know it when we see/experience it. Both Illich and Hillman recognize what it is and when it is ignored or unsensed.

I believe that our wisdom traditions—religious, spiritual, philosophical—and our arts are ultimately and ideally intended to get us past the surface to “that stuff which can gurgle, and chant and sparkle and flow and rise in a fountain and come down as rain” (Illich), “its sensuous presentation as a face bespeaking its interior image—in short, its availability to imagination, its presence as a psychic reality.” (Hillman).

To the soul of the world.

In this week’s Time Jamie Ducharme asks “America Has Reached Peak Therapy. Why Is Our Mental Health Getting Worse?” She writes:

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“The U.S. has reached peak therapy. Counseling has become fodder for hit books, podcasts, and movies. Professional athletes, celebrities, and politicians routinely go public with their mental health struggles. And everyone is talking—correctly or not—in the language of therapy, peppering conversations with references to gaslighting, toxic people, and boundaries….

But something isn’t adding up. Even as more people flock to therapy, U.S. mental health is getting worse by multiple metrics.”

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I’ve featured the psychologist James Hillman before. He has been called “the most lively and original psychologist we’ve had in America since William James”. Among his many valuable works is his published dialogue with journalist Michael Ventura, We’ve Had a Hundred Years of Psychotherapy and the World’s Getting Worse (1992).

No easy way to sum up that book, or the breadth and depth of Hillman’s thought (see Blue Fire: The Essential James Hillman for an overview). Hillman says in We’ve Had a Hundred Years:

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“We’ve had a hundred years of analysis, and people are getting more and more sensitive, and the world is getting worse and worse. Maybe it’s time to look at that. We still locate the psyche inside the skin. You go inside to locate the psyche, you examine your feelings and your dreams, they belong to you. Or it’s interrelations, interpsyche, between your psyche and mine. That’s been extended a little bit into family systems and office groups—but the psyche, the soul, is still only within and between people. We’re working on our relationships constantly, and our feelings and reflections, but look what’s left out of that.

What’s left out is a deteriorating world.

So why hasn’t therapy noticed that? Because psychotherapy is only working on that “inside” soul. By removing the soul from the world and not recognizing that the soul is also in the world, psychotherapy can’t do its job anymore. The buildings are sick, the institutions are sick, the banking system’s sick, the schools, the streets—the sickness is out there.

You know, the soul is always being rediscovered through pathology. In the nineteenth century people didn’t talk about psyche, until Freud came along and discovered psychopathology. Now we’re beginning to say, “The furniture has stuff in it that’s poisoning us, the microwave gives off dangerous rays.” The world has become toxic.”

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Follow the breath.

Many meditation practices begin with breathing. Sometimes you count your breaths—inhales, exhales or both. Sometimes you advance to following your breaths without counting, harder to describe than counting, better understood when practiced.

The Book of Ecclesiastes is known in the Hebrew Bible as Kohelet. The most famous line from Ecclesiastes reads in ancient Hebrew: Hevel hevelim, hevel hevelim, kol hevel. In the King James version, this is forever known as “vanity, vanity, all is vanity”. Modern translators, however, struggle with the translation, and some translate kol hevel as “all is breath”.

All is breath. Wisdom, experience and science say that slowing the breath is a key to calming. Trouble breathing is a sign and cause of physical distress. Not breathing is the end of life. All is breath.

Along with mindfulness, I suggest the parallel concept of breathfulness. It is surprising, or maybe not, how little attention we pay to breaths unless there is a particular observation, direction or difficulty. Even those who make breathing a part of practice, when we get up from meditation, may forget about breathing. Which we shouldn’t. Because all is breath.

© 2023 by Bob Schwartz

Recommending this book is not meant to compare Trump to Hitler. It is to view the upcoming trials of a contemporary demagogue in light of what may been the most consequential trial in modern history.

In 1924 Hitler was tried on charges of high treason for leading the Beer Hall Putsch, a failed coup d’état by the Nazi Party on November 8-9 1923. Before the trial, Hitler was a minor character with sympathizers, supporters and believers, but he was not yet the leader he would become. During his brief prison stay after conviction, he built his role and wrote Mein Kampf. Everything changed for him and Germany. The rest is history.

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From The Trial of Adolf Hitler: The Beer Hall Putsch and the Rise of Nazi Germany by David King:

On November 8, 1923, a slight young man in an oversized trench coat had crashed a beer hall rally and declared the overthrow of the government. The night, he vowed, would end in victory or death. Seventeen hours later, however, it had ended in neither. Hitler had fled the scene of an ignominious defeat. Many astute observers, from the New York Times to Frankfurter Zeitung, believed that this fiasco meant the end of his career, and it might well have been too, had it not been for his trial in Munich….

A large crowd gathered on the usually quiet Blutenburgstrasse west of Munich’s city center. Mounted guards, plainclothes detectives, and two battalions of state police troops patrolled outside the redbrick building. Nobody was allowed to enter without the proper stamped pass and accompanying photo identification. Once inside, in a small room down the long corridor, security personnel checked for hand grenades in purses or daggers in stockings.

It was February 26, 1924, the first day of the anticipated high-treason trial that would mesmerize the country. According to tips picked up by the Munich police, thugs and hooligans planned to swarm into town, disrupt the proceedings, free the accused, and perhaps even stage another insurrection….

On the eve of the trial, Adolf Hitler was a minor, if ambitious, local party leader idolized by a relatively small number of supporters. His name was still sometimes misspelled in the international press, and his background bungled—if he was mentioned at all, that is, besides in jest at leading his followers in what the New York Times dubbed a “Bavarian Opera Bouffe.” Once the trial began, those days would be numbered.

As the judges prepared to make their entrance, the two sets of doors on the side of the room were shut as a safety precaution. The foreign correspondent of the Associated Press watched Hitler and Ludendorff shake hands and chat amicably beforehand. Ludendorff looked cool. Hitler, on the other hand, appeared agitated and showed signs of emotional strain. There was good reason for his concern….

On November 8, 1923, a slight young man in an oversized trench coat had crashed a beer hall rally and declared the overthrow of the government. The night, he vowed, would end in victory or death. Seventeen hours later, however, it had ended in neither. Hitler had fled the scene of an ignominious defeat. Many astute observers, from the New York Times to Frankfurter Zeitung, believed that this fiasco meant the end of his career, and it might well have been too, had it not been for his trial in Munich….

Hitler was not prosecuted as the law demanded. The court slapped him with the absolute minimum penalty and then, instead of deporting him, ruled in favor of parole. Hitler was out of prison by the end of the year. He returned, just as the prosecutors Stenglein and Ehard had warned, to work where he had left off, though by that time he was much more dangerous to the republic. He had a clearer vision for the future, a more detailed plan on how to get there, and a much more confident perception of himself as a leader with the rarest of talents.

Hitler would later credit his experience in prison with giving him “that fearless faith, that optimism, that confidence in our destiny, which nothing could shake thereafter.” Landsberg was clearly an important period in his life, but had Hitler paused a moment from his triumphalist and self-serving legend-building, he might have considered another factor that contributed to his renewed sense of mission….

The trial of Adolf Hitler is not the story of his rise to power, but rather an episode that helped make that rise possible. It was this trial that catapulted this relatively minor local leader onto the national stage. Hitler’s speeches and testimony in Neithardt’s courtroom form his earliest major autobiography, defining himself before a public beyond the beer halls of Munich that previously neither knew nor cared that much about him. Hitler quickly turned the dock into a platform for himself and his party while putting the young republic on trial.

For twenty-four days, Hitler had hammered the government and its leaders with verve, his shrill, guttural voice rising and falling, choking on emotion, clipping his syllables, sometimes spitting on his toothbrush mustache as he barked a relentless stream of attacks against his accusers. All his rhetorical and stagecraft talents were on full display. Hitler’s performance in the former dining hall of the infantry academy included some of his most impressive and arguably most influential speeches of his career.

Reporters from Germany, the rest of Europe, and as far away as Argentina and Australia described his antics in detail. This was publicity that a local agitator could not have purchased, nor at this stage of his career even dreamed of achieving.

In the process, Hitler had transformed the beer hall fiasco into a personal and political triumph. He was no longer the buffoon who botched the putsch; he had become, in the eyes of his growing number of supporters, a patriot who had stood up for the German people against the treasonous oppression of Berlin, the cowardice of Bavaria, and the humiliations at the hands of the Allied powers. He was, in their view, a martyr taking the fall for his people, while his more distinguished allies sought cover, or, like Ludendorff, blamed everyone else for his own mistakes.

As previously noted, Trump will not be the Republican presidential nominee, no matter what. Trump decided not to attend tonight’s Republican Party debate. This means that the next Republican presidential candidate will be on stage.

Debate host Fox News, concerned that Trump’s absence will hurt its viewership, will be showing the debate participants videos of Trump talking and ask these debaters to respond—as if he was actually there. This wacky scheme reflects the mess that Fox News and the Republican Party are.

There are a million better things to do than watch this debate. All of these are more enlightening, informative, entertaining, fun, etc. So do one of those other things. Yes, it is possible that one of the participants will say something so outrageous and ridiculous that it will be laughable. You can see that video moment later. Just remember that it is unlikely but possible that the particular amusing clown might actually turn out to be the party candidate or…president?

© 2023 by Bob Schwartz

Rock and roll was bad enough for millions of American racists. Music that evolved from black sources (“race music” as it was called) infected young people, becoming the dominant sound of pop culture by the 1960s. (For a picture of this, see John Waters’ Hairspray). The haters eventually mostly gave in, at least expressly, as rock melded into other genres. Rock was everybody’s and anybody’s music, color deaf and blind.

But early on, black artists tried to reclaim the music, as messages started to creep in. In 1971, Marvin Gaye defied the Motown get-along ethos with the album What’s Going On. It was filled with protest tracks, epitomized by the cry “Make me wanna holler/throw up both my hands”. Just a few years later came the musical explosion.

This month marks the 50th year of the birth of hip-hop in 1973. By 1982 the message became The Message by Grandmaster Flash: “Don’t push me ’cause I’m close to the edge/I’m trying not to lose my head”. Today hip-hop is the dominant musical genre and style in the world. It not only took over culture. It made millionaires and billionaires out of black artists and entrepreneurs.

In 1990 Public Enemy released Fear of a Black Planet, including Fight the Power:

Elvis was a hero to most, but he
Never meant shit to me, you see,
straight outRacist—that sucker was simple and plain
Motherfuck him and John Wayne!
‘Cause I’m Black and I’m proud,
I’m ready, I’m hyped, plus I’m amped
Most of my heroes don’t appear on no stamps
Sample a look back; you look and find nothing
But rednecks for 400 years, if you check
“Don’t Worry Be Happy” was a number-one jam
Damn, if I say it, you can slap me right here
Get it—let’s get this party
Started right, right on, c’mon!
What we got to say?
Power to the people, no delay
Make everybody see, in order to
Fight the powers that be

Fear of a black planet. Fear. Hip-hop disturbed millions of Americans in 1990. It disturbs millions of Americans even more in 2023. While there are areas that have little to do with black culture, listening to contemporary music—just as with rock and roll—this is a black planet.

Makes racists wanna holler, throw up both their hands.

© 2023 by Bob Schwartz

By the time of the Republican National Convention in July 2024, Trump will have been multiply indicted, tried at least once, and very possibly convicted at least once. By the time of the election in November, more trials will have happened, along with more possible convictions.

Two scenarios for the Republican nomination, assuming that Trump has managed to win the requisite delegates by the time of the convention:

1. Trump gets the nomination and is the party’s presidential candidate. In the election, some number of Republicans will not vote for him, though they will not vote for a Democrat, and instead will simply not vote for president. Some number of Republican-leaning independents will do the same, while others of them may actually reluctantly vote for the Democratic candidate. This is close to assuring that Trump will lose.
2. Trump is somehow denied the nomination, as the party doesn’t want to be known for running an indicted or convicted felon for president. Lawyers and party operatives are secretly working on this scenario, since attempting to deny a nomination puts the party (not for the first time in the Trump era) in unprecedented territory. Chaos would ensue. A not-Trump candidate would have to be nominated, some number of delegates will walk out, Trump will run as an independent and get plenty of votes, etc. This is close to assuring that Republicans will again lose the presidency.

Experts will say that scenario #1 is easier and lower risk and it is the choice the party will make. Who knows? Trump may yet pull it off, as he has before (except in 2020 and 2022).

I predict scenario #2. It does involve a level of party mechanics that, as noted, the lawyers and operatives are secretly conjuring. How exactly do you tell someone who has the requisite delegates that, party rules be damned, you can’t be our nominee? But enough hard-headed Republicans, so far willing to wear the Trump brand, don’t want the party known for generations as the one that put forward an authoritarian coup leader—essentially a traitor—as their standard bearer. Anyway, if Trump couldn’t win as an incumbent in 2020, before his criminal character was glaringly spotlighted, how could he win in 2024? If the party is going to lose the presidency anyway, wouldn’t they like to go down with dignity and decency intact—or at least on the way to being recovered?

© 2023 by Bob Schwartz

All I want is the truth now
Just gimme some truth now

Gimme Some Truth

I’m sick and tired of hearing things
From uptight, short-sighted, narrow-minded hypocrites
All I want is the truth
Just gimme some truth

I’ve had enough of reading things
By neurotic, psychotic, pig-headed politicians
All I want is the truth
Just gimme some truth

No short-haired, yellow-bellied, son of tricky dicky
Is gonna Mother Hubbard soft soap me
With just a pocketful of hope
Money for dope
Money for rope

I’m sick to death of seeing things
From tight-lipped, condescending, mama’s little chauvinists
All I want is the truth
Just gimme some truth now

I’ve had enough of watching scenes
Of schizophrenic, egocentric, paranoiac, prima donnas
All I want is the truth now
Just gimme some truth

All I want is the truth now
Just gimme some truth now

—John Lennon
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UaiGABTj0aA