Page 1 of 2 THE ROVING EYE Levitate the Pentagon By Pepe Escobar
"I read the news today oh boy." - The Beatles, A Day in the Life,
1967.
"The only enemy of Iraq is the occupation." - Muqtada al-Sadr, 2007.
Forty years ago down in sunny Monterey, California, an ultra-cool black cat
from Seattle named James Marshall Hendrix set the
world on fire. "Respect" by Aretha Franklin (written by Otis Redding) was the
No 1 hit single in the US (to be replaced, a month later, by "Light My Fire" by
The Doors). Hendrix and Otis in Monterey merged into the Summer of Love - the
apotheosis of Make Love Not War, vinyl treasures and Indian mottoes dressed in
caftans and granny dresses.
Already in the spring of 1967 a stirring wave of counterculture fusion between
London and San Francisco was irresistible. Dismissed Harvard sage Tim Leary
ordered everyone to "turn on, tune in, drop out" (The Beatles, already in 1966,
were quoting
from Leary's version of The Tibetan Book of the Dead - "turn off your
minds, relax and float downstream").
While the radically politicized were yelling "Kill the pigs!" the Beatles were
inventing whole new groovy sounds in the studio and beat poet Allen Ginsberg
was singing the praise of Bob Dylan's victims in "Chimes of Freedom" - and
assisting LSD experiments unsupervised by the Central Intelligence Agency.
The irretrievably fragmented consciousness of the whole Western world was
unifying, at least in the hearts and minds of young people everywhere, even for
a fleeting moment in time. It was a river flowing out of the postwar consumer
boom, from jazz to the beats to rebels without a cause to Dylan to The Beatles.
The Grateful Dead loved Allen Ginsberg's "Howl" (from 1955) so much they set it
to music. The doors of perception were being cleansed by what Ginsberg defined
as "the divine herbs and greases" and by LSD - the crucial catalyst.
Yippie icon Abbie Hoffman, who defined The Beatles' Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts
Club Band as "Beethoven coming to the supermarket", later recalled that
"at the height of the American Empire we had all the bombs, all the cops in the
world - and it was all ours - the Cadillacs, the two-car garages, the
split-level ranch houses".
But then young people, spiritually unfulfilled, started to think there might be
something else. Flower power met the East, met unbounded optimism - before, in
1968, reality came crashing down and despair set in.
From 1967 to 2007
Today Leary's motto would be "turn off, tune out, drop dead". At the decline of
American Empire, young people have all the bombs, all the post-September 11,
2001, cops in the world - and it is not theirs. They have Hummers, holidays in
Cambodia, neo-Byzantine condos. But then, spiritually unfulfilled even though
they have been to all the five-star healing spas in the world, they still think
there is nothing else - apart from a shot at TV celebrity.
Nobody gives a damn: the best lack all conviction (and take refugee in their
iPods) while the worst simply lord over all, unchallenged. In overwhelmingly
dumbed-down global medialand, airhead heiress Paris Hilton is the Queen of
News, governments are no more than "political commissars of economic power", in
the formulation of Portuguese Nobel Prize winner Jose Saramago, and the Bush
administration/industrial-military complex merrily fight proxy wars in Iraq,
Palestine, Lebanon and Somalia.
History does repeat itself - as farce. By early 1967, the US had half a million
troops in Vietnam. Massacres of civilians and torture - the precursors of Abu
Ghraib - were routine. Half a million Vietnamese - the precursors of Iraqis -
had already been killed. President Lyndon Johnson, another regular guy from
Texas, was not going to "negotiate with terrorists".
Vietnam was being destroyed with napalm and Agent Orange. Laos had been bombed
for three years without the US Congress even knowing about it (during the
administration of Richard Nixon, the victim would be Cambodia). By the Summer
of Love, young people everywhere in the affluent West - and all around
universities in the satellite global South - already knew the Vietnam War was
no less than undiluted state-sponsored terror.
Muhammad Ali refused the draft - joining the throngs of "hell, no, we won't
go". No one could possibly come up with a sound reason for shooting unknown
Asians in far-off jungles (as if there is a good reason for shooting unknown
Arabs in far-off deserts). The Vietcong were regarded as true freedom fighters
(as are Sunni or Shi'ite Iraqi nationalists today).
Hippies and blacks were uniting against the Man (the white, conservative
system) - but unfortunately there was not a lot of communal action, as blacks
increasingly started feeling themselves members of a separate nation led by
Eldridge Cleaver, Huey Newton, Bobby Seale and Stokely Carmichael. The year
1967 in San Francisco, London and Amsterdam was not exactly multi-racial: it
was in essence a white phenomenon.
But politics did cross culture. Jean-Paul Sartre and Bertrand Russell became
the executive and honorary presidents of a war-crimes tribunal set up in Sweden
to try the US government for its crimes in Vietnam, including dropping more
bombs than in the entire World War II, unleashing chemical poisoning and
herding more than 8 million peasants into barbed-wire gulags. The tribunal had
two sessions - in May and then in November 1967. In his speech, read by his
American secretary, Bertrand Russell, in pure beat/countercultural mode, said:
We
have no armies and no gallows. We lack power, even
the power of mass communication. It is overdue that those
without power sit in judgement over those who have it ...
We are responsible before history.
Never in Western
civilization had a war been stopped by public pressure - in fact, the pressure
of a whole generation - like the Vietnam War. Then there was a book - The City
in History by Lewis Mumford, in which the Pentagon is described as an
ancient malignant structure that has to be destroyed to ensure a peaceful
world. Magic realism met political theater. Why not try to exorcise and
levitate the Pentagon?
Abbie Hoffman dropped in to visit the malignant structure, measured it, got
arrested - but also got a lot of free publicity. The happening took place on
October 21, 1967. Norman Mailer, who
Head
Office: Unit B, 16/F, Li Dong Building, No. 9 Li Yuen Street East,
Central, Hong Kong Thailand Bureau:
11/13 Petchkasem Road, Hua Hin, Prachuab Kirikhan, Thailand 77110
from Leary's version of The Tibetan Book of the Dead - "turn off your
minds, relax and float downstream").
