If any of these men could legitimately be called complex, it is probably Leary. A brilliant scientist, he was often reviled by traditional scientists, whom he called “arrogant motherfuckers who deny their role in the military industrial complex’s manipulation of the American people.” Leary rejected what he called the “grim Newtonian mechanics of objective fact” for the “free flowing quantum physics approach to consciousness” that the changing, not the static, governs consciousness and the outcome of the world. “Understanding this …even intuitively,” he said, makes people unmanageable by agents of the criminal government syndicate that runs and ruins America.” That sort of talk was why Nixon called him “the most dangerous man in America.”

from an entertaining if not elucidating article by Joe Bageant here. He starts out:

Everything Americans think they know, they learned from a televised morality play. It’s all theater. You root for some good guy and boo some bad guy. You pick your own, but you dance to the tune of the men running the show. It’s mind control, pure and simple, and if there is an American immune to it, then he is probably living in a snow cave somewhere in Alaska.
– Gypsy Joe Hess (1919-1988), prospector, self-educated philosopher and horse trader

In my ragged assed 40 years of writing, I’ve been lucky enough, or sometimes unlucky enough, to meet and write about many of America’s “somebodies,” mostly vapid asshole movie and TV stars and rock musicians.

read the rest of the article …