MB Civic

 Leary Bio:  Opportunity for Unfounded ’60s Revisionism

Tom D’Antoni

The reviews of Robert Greenfield’s biography of Timothy Leary have allowed “sixties” revisionists to spread unfounded and uniformly negative opinions on an entire era.Having been one of the publishers/editors of the same “underground” paper in Baltimore that P.J. O’Rourke, the first of such revisionists, made his mark lying about, I have some expertise on the subject.

Here’s the myth promoted by the revisionists: The sixties were all about hedonism and self-satisfaction.I wish.

First of all, the subject of “The Sixties” is so broad and complex, so full of contradictions and countervailing points of view that to generalize about it at all is not worth the effort. There are a few aspects that need attention, however.

Simply put, the ethos of the era for us can be summed up in these words: fairness, community, freedom of personal choice, and peace. Period. End of sentence.

Fairness in how government treated its citizens, and how people treated each other. After having been told that America was the land of the free, we saw people refused voting rights, freedom to reside where they could afford to, even denied service at lunch counters, hotels and rest rooms.

Imagine that? “Who would make rules like that?” we wondered.

We were told that America stood for peace in the world and then they sent us to fight a war of vanity in Vietnam. That didn’t make sense to us and we did everything we could to bring our peers out of that hell. Many of us refused to participate.

The women in our life knocked us upside the head and let us know that things weren’t so hot for them. Made sense to us. In the eyes of conservatives, hippies were girlie-men then, and stayed that way. And the hippie women were manly-girls, let’s not forget that. This is nonsense and shouldn’t be believed any more than any of their familiar lies which have come into current relief so clearly these days, but which are consistent with their history.

We were told that sex was, what a sin? With the development of the birth control pill we were the first generation, and maybe the last to be able to have unprotected sex anytime we wanted, with whom we wanted. Was there something wrong with that? Did we keep on with it? Nah, we got married and had kids. Did we have fun while we tried out everything under God’s Red Light? Fuck yes.

Is that hedonism? Only to those who didn’t’ get any.

When we dressed or acted in ways that seemed strange to the generation before us we got our asses kicked, literally. Would you like to know how many times I was arrested on trumped up charges simply because I was a long-haired hippie who worked for “that” paper? Don’t forget, people were killed and imprisoned for exercising the rights guaranteed them in the Constitution.

What we found out was that the America we were taught existed was a figment of a script writer at best, and the deliberate misrepresentation, at worst.

All this has nothing to do with Timothy Leary, and none of it was taken into account by reviewers, NY Times and New Yorker included, who lashed out at an entire generation.

Did we take LSD? Sure we did. I took tons of it. I loved my hallucinations, even the bad ones. Did I find God? I’m still looking. Did it change my life? Yes, in some ways. It loosened the reins. I think if you asked P.J. O’Rourke if he regrets taking LSD and smoking all that dope, he would say he took some good things away from it.

But don’t tell me that Timothy Leary is responsible for anything except talking a good game. I enjoyed what he had to say. Some of it made sense and some of it didn’t’. I guess a few people bought it all, but that’s just human nature.

The bluster and meanness of the revisionists who have attacked an era in which the driving idea was to make a better world reveals their own bleakness of spirit. They build the idea that Leary was much more influential than he ever was.

Take my word for it, he wasn’t. The stars of the “counter-culture” (which actually existed) were just that, stars. We liked them. They entertained us. We took from them what we needed.

As those of us who fought for the right to control every aspect of our lives grow old and begin the fight to control the manner of our own death, the record needs to be set straight. Don’t fuck with us. We’re old, we know the score and we’re still determined to “reflect from the mountain so all souls can see it.”