Although I came of age
physically during the later days of the counterculture, my first period of
creative maturity—in the late 1970s—coincided with the death knell of the
counterculture and the birth of punk. In Boston, the transition from one to the
other was more natural than one might guess. A lot of countercultural energy
had already turned dark by the beginning of the decade. We had stamped our
collective foot against the shadow of the empire, and still that shadow grew.
We could not stop Agent Orange from destroying 18,000 square miles of forest.
We could not prevent dioxin from disfiguring the limbs of the not yet born. We
could not stop napalm from burning at 2200 degrees, or Dow Chemical from making
billions. For evil to triumph, it was only necessary for good men to believe in
their own virtue, to assume that their good intentions were enough. Our
chanting had purged only two percent of the demons from the ocean. The rest
were perhaps annoyed.
Cults had vacuumed up the survivors of entheogenic breakthroughs, the wide-eyed, the fearless, the utterly unprepared. Did the “shattering of the ego” always lead to greater peace of mind? Without an ego, it was difficult to tell. It had just come out that the FBI had sent agents to teach bomb-building skills to the Weathermen, or so the rumor went. Taste in music was no guarantee that a radical could be trusted. The most violent of subversives could be agent-provocateurs. The Lords of Deep Time had appointed Altamont to be the Mother of All Battles. She had, quite unexpectedly, announced the end of an era. She buzzed like angry wasps. Rolling thunder was her jewelry. She set the tone for the next decade, but she only hinted at the disillusionments to come. The Age of Aquarius had lasted for five years or so. Seeds planted on February 18th, 3102 B.C., were only just then coming to fruition. Having skipped a beat, the Kali Yuga had returned.
There was, in fact, no shelter to be had. There was no deferment for the bourgeois psyche, no evolutionary saferoom at Big Sur. With breathtaking stealth, in a triumph of the behaviorist black arts, the Revolution had been corporatized. Many objects only looked like objects; they had morphed into commodities. The orgone would continue to darken until there was no way to distinguish a real vision from its logo. Mescaline was out; speed was in. It would soon be replaced by cocaine. Free love back-to-the-land communes had gone the way of Atlantis. The free love, in some approximate form, survived. By the mid-1970s, STDs had staged a full-frontal assault on the dream that sex led to liberation. AIDS—then working undercover in the Belgian Congo—would soon make its debut. Antibiotics would begin to lose their alchemical cure-all status. Already, having whet its teeth in the Golden Triangle, the CIA was testing its joint-venture model with South and Central American drug gangs. The scent of paranoia was as common as the scent of marijuana. A knock on the door meant that it was necessary to escape onto the roof.
It was said at the time, “All politics is personal,” which led us to assume that each small act was being scrutinized. It was also true that global forces were in motion, and we would learn that our anxieties did not go deep enough. There was no way to put a face on the decentralized plutocracy. It was everywhere. It was nowhere. Hundreds of thousands of jobs per year were already being outsourced, and once middle-class workers were beginning to suspect that they had been repurposed as serfs. Factories had turned into bird houses. There were no trains in the freight yards. Many sensed that there was something wrong. What is was, who knew?
Continue reading at Dark
Mountain:
https://dark-mountain.net/black-gold-plutos-helmet-of-invisibility/
My book Masks of Origin:
Regression in the Service of Omnipotence is available through Untimely Books.
https://untimelybooks.com/book/masks-of-origin/
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