24-04-2018, 03:06 PM
(This post was last modified: 25-04-2018, 02:10 PM by David Andrews.)
Peter: for perspective, try reading Joe Hagan, Sticky Fingers: The Life and Times of Jann Wenner and Rolling Stone Magazine. So much of the counterculture was business, as is usual. You think I'm missing the big picture? Here's a bigger one:
If dope was out there and musicians were killed by it, it's not a lot different from, nor at all more important than, what drugs did to Central America, Mexico, and the ghettos of the US. It's just a flashier story, and those deaths tend to affect us more than the deaths of millions of nameless, impoverished, and once struggling people who never picked up a guitar. Too few tell their stories.
The counterculture of the 1960s was a leisure class phenomenon of its time. It failed for more than one reason, while the dope trail between Colombia and California is still producing terror that has affected generations of human beings for decades - including a multitude who never touched illegal drugs, or never grew old enough to even be tempted.
You know as well as me that Mae Brussell went places where she sensed an inkling and blew it up into a revelation, much like a millennialist prophet. This does not reduce the importance of the number of things she was correct about, and that we have to thank her for broadcasting. She was the first to warn us that John Lennon had been assassinated, and that I devoutly concur upon.
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If dope was out there and musicians were killed by it, it's not a lot different from, nor at all more important than, what drugs did to Central America, Mexico, and the ghettos of the US. It's just a flashier story, and those deaths tend to affect us more than the deaths of millions of nameless, impoverished, and once struggling people who never picked up a guitar. Too few tell their stories.
The counterculture of the 1960s was a leisure class phenomenon of its time. It failed for more than one reason, while the dope trail between Colombia and California is still producing terror that has affected generations of human beings for decades - including a multitude who never touched illegal drugs, or never grew old enough to even be tempted.
You know as well as me that Mae Brussell went places where she sensed an inkling and blew it up into a revelation, much like a millennialist prophet. This does not reduce the importance of the number of things she was correct about, and that we have to thank her for broadcasting. She was the first to warn us that John Lennon had been assassinated, and that I devoutly concur upon.
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