Cyber-Ecstasy and the Visionary in American Politics

Abstract

In the instant Karmic History of the 1970s, “dreamtime” shaped American culture, beginning with the ganja and acid subcultures, and ending in the dispropriation of crystal-meth, heroine, and myriad other death-cult chemical hybrids of pharmocapital and narcoterrorist invention. Throughout it all, from its erotic birth to its Thanic end, the drug culture was seen, is still seen—except for “legitimate” pharmo-industrial treatment regimens—as narcissistic self-absorption by both the junkies of Neo-conservative certainties and the wizened academic epigones of New Left politics. To many, especially in academia, the warning cries of the 1960s denim revolution against dominant culture’s co-optation and reformulation of the drug-culture as chic countercultural rebellion went unheeded and led to predictable ends—the demolition of sixties radicalism and the birth of Reaganism’s narcissistic consumerism. The result of all of this chemical tumult and turmoil was the rejection at virtually all levels of political and cultural life of the use of hallucinogenic substances toward claimed spiritual ends. Eventually New Ageism channeled its earlier hallucinogen-fueled shamanic impulses into the pale visage of a kind of libertarian transcendence, without danger to the newly chastened body/minds of alternative culture.