I Would Not Feel So All Alone -- Everybody Must Get Stoned

I remember reading a lot of existentialist writers at the time -- people like Sartre and Kafka. Writers who portrayed a mad, upside-down society, where the only antidote for madness was for people to take control of the world and society and establish their own values of good and evil. The sixties seemed like a decade of madness to me. If it got unstuck, when did it do so for you?

We'll get to that. At the point I entered college I was a science nerd -- I had not read much literature nor did it interest me. My biggest shock upon getting to Ann Arbor was that there were so many white people in the world. It was a sleepy campus that very little happened at during the whole span of the 60s, btw. Anyway, what did happen was that I discovered drugs and sex. Very much the awkward introvert at that juncture, I thank the glorious culture-du-jour for essentially thrusting both in my face--and pelvis, respectively.
So I guess it was marijuana that got my rebellious juices flowing--a society that made pot smokers common criminals (and even uncommon ones--you could at that time get 10-20 years in some states merely for possession; this happened not just in Texas, but to activist John Sinclair in Michigan) had obvious and basic flaws. And so I started to read some of the cultural literature--Wolfe, Barth, Vonnegut--and just kept reading.

Let me reiterate what I regard as a very important tale. What happened to you happened to most of the people I knew in our generation. I want to trace the changes you experienced:

Fire away.

You started out as a patriotic guy, with high hopes for society and your role in the world. When you got to college, you experimented with grass. Who didn't? Unfortunately, some very stupid and repressive laws turned you (potentially) into a common criminal. That put you on the outside of the society you had such high hopes for. Those stupid laws are still stinging good people -- just think of Ginsburg's nomination to the US Supreme Court. Was being a criminal (for whatever trivial reason) the first step in one's disaffection with his native country?

For many people this probably was the 1st step toward alienation. I think the first step for me, however, occurred in high school, when I realized that no matter what LBJ said (e.g., "We shouldn't be sending American boys to do what Asian boys should be doing."), he was not telling the truth. And I remember thinking, "What does this mean that when the president says something that directly affects my future, I can't believe him?"

When Agnew gave his famous speech about "effete intellectual snobs," how did his remarks make you feel?

Agnew was always a joke. I personally enjoyed his speeches, which he clearly did not himself write nor even recite very passionately, simply to hear a new turn of phrase, which I could then wear as a badge of honor along with all my other pins. And of course Agnew's character was borne out by the details of his downfall. He was governor of MD and sold out for $10,000. The governor; a lousy ten grand--what a small mind; what a pinhead.

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