Update on Gangreening of America

  

5/9/07
We still bear the weighty baggage of the drug-crazed lunatics of the 60s and 70s whose poisonous legacy has disturbed our system of justice, the political arena and burdened our healthcare system with drug addicts. Charles A. Reich, a drug-crazed ‘professor’ from Harvard ranted on about his three flavors of ‘consciousness’, numbered in sequence [I, II, III]so we might not forget. His manifesto was the Greening of America, a reference to the hemp plant as we can see from below. [1]
The book Greening of America, is a rambling, twisted rant against capitalism [I, II] and seems to recommend a substitution of attributes of capitalism with any and all forms of Marxism known to exist at that time. We can be sure some of his acid trips provided more social essays and solutions to American capitalism. Unfortunately, some of his ‘students’ may have taken his advice, delved deeply into LSD and marijuana, or worse, and found careers in politics or law, or both. Joining the exclusive club of the Beatniks, he found his ‘solutions’ to social problems in the usual Marxist and now left-liberal manner: Anti-capitalist rants appropriately guided by drugs.
LSD is a teacher we find:

The effect of psychedelic drugs des not end when the drug itself wears off; it is lasting in the sense that the user finds his awareness and sensitivity has increased, whether he is using drugs at the time or not. In other words, something has been learned. In fact, there may come a time when a drug user feels that drugs are no longer necessary to him, or at least that they have become of lesser importance; he has achieved the increased awareness he wanted and it is part of him now. [2]

One wonders about the minimum number of joints and crack pipe puffs are necessary to get a law degree from Harvard. One acolyte from Yale was characterized by his brother as having a ‘nose like vacuum cleaner.’

From an interview in 1987 :

Question by GUNN: I am curious as to why you didn't address in your paper the role of anti-Communism ideology in liberalism over the past fifty years. Since the nineteen-fifties, all Democrats - and I think most of them are liberals - have decided they will never be weaker on Communism than are the Republicans.


Answer by REICH: I did not address the issue of anti-Communism because I think it is more important to take care of our needs in this country and stop worrying about imaginary problems in other countries. People do a lot better when they deal with what is in front of them than they do when they fantasize about what is threatening them in the outside world. During the Kennedy era, the most lurid imagination took over reality.[3]



Ronald Reagan was the premier anti-Communist of the century and patiently waited for his chance to expose this farce and then tear it down. It was flushed in 1989 and is almost extinct save for such places as North Korea, Cuba and several garden spots in Africa, which are routinely touted as excellent examples of government by the New York Times and most left liberals. Havana must be a paradise.


The drugs speak loudly in that response. Here, LSD becomes an apologist for Marxism. Here, we presume, following Chomsky, that some imaginary problems such as the Genocide in Cambodia, the murder of millions of Kulaks, the starvation of millions of Ukrainians and 50 years of Cold War with tens of thousands of nuclear missiles pointed at the US must not be very high on the agenda, but tax hikes, legalized drugs, abortion and socialism are. We should add in here: sloth, sodomy, violent crime and racism, a few things that the left-liberals celebrate daily. I suppose that the Cuban Missile Crisis and potential nuclear war were the products of some unnecessary ‘imagination’ and can be safely dismissed if we vote for Democrats. Peace in our time. Clinton did appease North Korea with our tax monies and aided their research into nuclear weapons. Why be concerned? We wonder if Reich could label the Islamo-Fascists as figments of the imagination or some steamy fantasy cooked up by Republicans. After all, many liberals still think the 911 Twin Towers tragedy was engineered by President George Bush to gain some political power.

It is unfortunate that many left liberals high in our government still subscribe to this kind of thinking where drugs and a sense of ‘feeling good,’ citing Susan Sontag,  are important. Take enough drugs and the problems will just drift away, or in Senator Kennedy’s case enough Irish whiskey.
Just recall that many current candidates for President daily parrot this Marxist tripe as they attack our economic system and morality base . Given a chance, they would reverse what Ronald Reagan did to the USSR with churlish jeers. It appears that this ‘professor’ Reich was dreaming of the upcoming Fourth Reich patterned after National Socialism and his tangled theories of consciousness.

rycK

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[1] This book was a New York Times Best Seller in 1970 and 1971, and finally aspired to Number 1 in December , 1970
[2] From p 230 of Greening of America, Random House, 1970 p 230
[3] http://www.cooperativeindividualism.org/reich-charles_liberals-mistake-discussion.html