One worthy meme that spread among segments of the global population during the second half of the 20th Century was the idea that war had become obsolete.

Throughout human history (and prehistory), families, tribes and nations had believed that these violent conflicts were necessary or even helpful to their survival and/or prosperity and — the horrors aside — that sort of worked out for the victors most of the time.  But with the introduction and use of the atomic bomb in 1945, whole systems thinkers and peace activists started spreading the notion that now that we had weapons that constituted an existential threat, the human drive towards war was now nothing but a menace to our survival and prosperity.

With the passage of time, and even with the development of the hydrogen bomb and the spread of weaponized nukes to at least eight nations, we have, broadly speaking, become smug about the nuclear holocaust that haunted the 20^th Century imagination.  There are two flavors of smug involved.  Flavor one is MAD — Mutually Assured Destruction.  No nation, however bizarre its politics, will launch a nuclear strike because that nation would immediately thereafter be reduced to cinders. The other flavor of smug is that a limited nuclear exchange would not be that apocalyptic.  I happen to think that both the environment and the “economy” and our sort of collective psyche are all way more fragile than some would like us to believe and that a limited nuclear exchange would bring about some sort of chain reaction that would bring about a new level of social chaos that nobody actually wants to experience, but I certainly can’t prove it.

But beyond that, there is the fact that with biotech, AI, nanotech and other technologies we will soon have more powerfully devastating weapons that will constitute — even more definitively — an existential threat.

This is one of the reasons that I cringe whenever upbeat futurists toss in glib segments about the future of weaponry and warfare in articles and books about how awesome the future will be, often without even acknowledging the actual nature of what they’re writing or talking about.

So I’m sticking with one of my favorite 20^th century hippie-dippie memes — war is obsolete.  But with a 21^st Century twist… if it’s definitively part of human nature — if it absolutely can’t be fixed by changing the conditions in which humans live, then we’ll have to change human nature itself.

Meanwhile, have a fun Memorial Day weekend and spare a thought for the common foot soldier (and the stay at home voter).

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“I went to a party on Nelson’s Sausalito houseboat and wound up in a house in San Rafael in a scenario that involved some folks I’d met at Nelson’s party — three beautiful hookers, John Gilmore and a chimpanzee wearing bondage gear and assless chaps…”

John Perry Barlow and Ted Nelson blew into Mondo space around the same time…  probably mid-1990, as the magazine was just taking off. At the time, Barlow was fresh off the farm… that is to say, it’s my impression that he’d been laying low as a gentleman rancher in Pinedale, Wyoming for many years and was just starting to get into the wind. (He’s been running around at a fair pace in the wider world ever since.)

Morgan Russell had met him at some public event and was bringing him around to meet us.  I remember that there was some fair warning that Barlow was coming around… and that he was a lyricist for the Grateful Dead, which I knew nothing about.  At the time, I thought Robert Hunter wrote all the words for the group.  I was not, obviously, a deadhead, but was nevertheless excited to meet someone connected to their scene.

The actual meeting is a blur, although I do remember we gathered around the fireplace and talked agreeably for a long time.  Did he give us $1,000 right then and there to help with the project, or was that later?   How the money happened for those transitional Mondo moments is a curiosity to me… one that will be explored in more depth in the History Project book.

I’m pretty sure that Ted Nelson smoked his first DMT on his first visit to the Mondo house and that he found it impressive.  Some time very soon thereafter, I went to a party on Nelson’s Sausalito houseboat and wound up in a house in San Rafael in a scenario that involved some folks I’d met at Nelson’s party — three beautiful hookers, John Gilmore and a chimpanzee wearing bondage gear and assless chaps…  but that story I will hold for the book itself.  (And I’m only lying about the chimp.)

In this unpublished segment from an hours-long chat between the two — really organized as an interview with Ted — Nelson goes into his rap about “biostatus.”  He had explained his biostatus concept to myself and Russell one time, sitting in his office at Autodesk and, to be honest, I couldn’t quite grasp the novelty of it as it sounded like basic sociobiology (Nelson seemed surprised that I knew of such things.).  Maybe it’s a behaviorally-specific exfoliation of sociobiology… a few years before people started talking about evolutionary psychology?

This was during a brief period where the hacker genius John Walker — cofounder of Autodesk,  the famously successful Sausalito, California-based producers of AutoCAD, let the experimental freaks in.

At some point around 1988, Walker, as head of Autodesk decided to use the company’s wealth to experiment. There was the Virtual Reality project, worked on by Eric Gullichsen among others. “Cyberpunk” SF writer and math genius Rudy Rucker was hired to create a Cellular Automata program called CelLab, and James Gliek’s CHAOS.  

And perhaps most interestingly, our man Ted was gifted with the opportunity to try to achieve the Xanadu vision —I always understood it as a hypertextual project linking everything to everything in an ever-evolving and highly intelligent way (and with much more intentionally than… say…  Google).

Owen Rowley was also there in some capacity, and those of you who know Owen Rowley (rhymes with Crowley) know just how cool that is.

A monthly speaker’s program featured Timothy Leary and Todd Rundgren, among others.

As you can guess, it was an interesting (and casual) place to spend an afternoon. I’m not sure exactly what happened, but at some point, fiscal responsibility (some might say sanity) returned, John Walker moved on, and Autodesk returned to its core task.  Carol Bartz became CEO.  You’ve heard of her.

The conversation between Nelson and Barlow took place in a restaurant in Sausalito and was published in 1990 in MONDO 2000 Issue #4 under the title “Caverns Measureless To Man: An Interview with Xanadu Founder Ted Nelson by John Perry Barlow.”

Listen to Nelson tell Barlow about “biostatus”

Previous MONDO History Entries

Psychedelic Transpersonal Photography, High Frontiers & MONDO 2000: an Interview with Marc Franklin

Gibson & Leary Audio (MONDO 2000 History Project)

Pariahs Made Me Do It: The Leary-Wilson-Warhol-Dali Influence (Mondo 2000 History Project Entry #3)

Robert Anton Wilson Talks To Reality Hackers Forum (1988 — Mondo 2000 History Project Entry #4)

Smart Drugs & Nutrients In 1991 (Mondo 2000 History Project Entry #5)

LSD, The CIA, & The Counterculture Of The 1960s: Martin Lee (1986, Audio. Mondo 2000 History Project Entry #6)

William Burroughs For R.U. Sirius’ New World Disorder (1990, Mondo 2000 History Project Entry # 7)

New Edge & Mondo: A Personal Perspective – Part 1 (Mondo 2000 History Project Entry #8)

New Edge & Mondo: A Personal Perspective – Part 2 (Mondo 2000 History Project Entry #8)

The Glorious Cyberpunk Handbook Tour (Mondo 2000 History Project Entry #9)

Did The CIA Kill JFK Over LSD?, Reproduced Authentic, & Two Heads Talking: David Byrne In Conversation With Timothy Leary (MONDO 2000 History Project Entry #10)

Memory & Identity In Relentlessly Fast Forward & Memetically Crowded Times (MONDO 2000 History Project Entry #11)

The First Virtual War & Other Smart Bombshells (MONDO 2000 History Project Entry #12)

Swashbuckling Around The World With Marvin Minsky In How To Mutate & Take Over The World (MONDO 2000 History Project #13)

FAIL! Debbie Does MONDO (MONDO 2000 History Project Entry #14)

Paradise Is Santa Cruz: First Ecstasy (MONDO 2000 History Project Entry #15)

William Gibson On MONDO 2000 & 90s Cyberculture (MONDO 2000 History Project Entry #16)

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“Cyberpunk today is mainly like a Pantone chip in the Pantone culture-wheel. ‘Those pants are sort of cyberpunk.’ ‘That video has a sort of retro-cyberpunk feel.’”

We were honored that William Gibson agreed to talk to us for the upcoming MONDO 2000 History Project book about MONDO… and about the ‘90s cyberculture in general and how it looks today.  The interview was conducted by Simone Lackerbauer (with my kibitzing).  These are a few fragments.

Gibson was incorporated into the first “cyberpunk” edition of the magazine via a somewhat devious route, as discussed here.

ABOUT CYBERPUNK, MONDO & UNDERGROUND MAGAZINES

Underground magazines had been very important to me. I started with Mad and Cracked, which may not have been formally underground, but were, initially and in terms of context, decidedly off-center, and I remember buying the issue of The Realist with the pornographic faux-Disney centerfold. MONDO 2000 was clearly an underground magazine, and as such I was definitely glad it was there.

I had never thought that the “cyberpunk” label was particularly a good thing, but it obviously wasn’t going away too quickly, so I’d generally shrug and go along with it. I doubted the immortality hackers were going to live forever, the idea of smart drugs didn’t do anything for me, but the attitude was fun. Just the fact that the thing existed, and popped up on fairly normal magazine stands, was cheering.

I’d say it was arguably the representative underground magazine of its pre-Web day. It was completely outside what commercial magazines were assumed to be about, but there it was, beside the commercial magazines. Could that even happen, today?

Posterity, looking at this, should also consider MONDO 2000 as a focus of something that was happening, rather than  exclusively as a broadcast-point. It was a brave magazine, but it was also a magazine of its day. Stuff was happening all over, with no Internet to pass it instantly around.

MONDO & TIME

I wasn’t surprised by the rise of Mondo. Something was clearly afoot, memewise. I wondered about the thing’s durability. Winding up on the cover of Time – what does that do? How alternative is something that makes the cover of Time? Of course, that was when Time was still Time, sort of, but I also wondered, after that, how seriously one should take Time? It wasn’t as though I ever read it, ordinarily.

MONDO & WIRED

Wired never felt like Mondo, to me. It never felt like an underground magazine, but neither did it occur to me that it was MONDO 2000 tuned down for straight people. I’d assume the difference had more to do with the business model. They definitely had one.

90S CYBERCULTURE

I think that whole scene in the 90s  was in some ways the cultural equivalent of all the glorious hype of the Space Age. The iconic babe in the VR goggles and gloves! Iconics, heroics… The difference would be that the end result was somehow akin to the invention of habitable space!

TIMOTHY LEARY

We’d bump into one another on the VR rubber chicken circuit. Barcelona, Linz, Venice…  He was really great to have at your table. Kept the evening in flux. And people would come up to him and give him drugs, which he’d give to someone else, usually a perfect stranger, as soon as the gifter was gone. He said that this was a win-win proposition, as the first person could now say that he’d given drugs to Timothy Leary, and the second person that Timothy Leary had given him drugs. I never saw him look to see what was in the envelope.

THE VR & SMART DRUGS HYPE

Evidently we didn’t need either one, at least not as we (sub)culturally imagined them then. We do, in fact, now constantly inhabit a sort of blended VR, but we now assume that we don’t need the goggles as long as whatever’s on the screen is sufficiently engrossing. And the distinction between real and virtual continues to blur. The virtual is colonizing the real, but generally in ways we don’t notice. VR was predicated on a notion of  real/virtual that now seems very last-century. Our grandchildren won’t be able to readily imagine where we were at, with that one!

Smart drugs were something I read about. After my time. Had I ever encountered anyone who struck me as 20 IQ points up from where they ordinarily were, I’d have paid it very close attention. (It’s difficult to imagine what that would even look like.) But if it was just a sort of temporary cognitive fine tuning, I didn’t find it that intriguing.

ON WRITING THE NEW “CYBER” SF

Whatever I did emerged from the need to find a way to write SF that I could stand to write, that I could live with. That led me to replace outer space with cyberspace, and everything I’ve done since has grown out of that. But I had the advantage of almost accidentally having latched on to the most powerfully emergent technology of my day as a subject.

REGARDING THE ’90S UTOPIANISM

I never though that cyborgs and virtual worlds were particularly utopian, so I’ve never been disappointed. The world is always more interesting than some futurist’s vision. If you think it’s not, you’re not really looking.

THE SINGULARITY

The Singularity has always sounded to me like a secular version of the Rapture. It seems to fit very neatly into that same God-shaped hole. We’re been there before. I like us better when we aren’t.

NOT A FUTURIST

I don’t have thoughts about the future. I probably have fewer than the average person. I’m not a fortune-teller. I construct very large, highly inaccurate models in my head, built from memory and random junk, and run them. Sometimes they seem to have predicted things, in some very vague way, that happen later, but I don’t think of that as prediction. It’s closer to augury, and I can’t do it without, so to speak, pulling the entrails from a real bird. Otherwise, the last thing I am is someone who walks around knowing what the future’s going to be.

CYBERPUNK TODAY

Cyberpunk today is mainly like a Pantone chip in the Pantone culture-wheel. “Those pants are sort of cyberpunk.” “That video has a sort of retro-cyberpunk feel.” We know what that means. If someone says “her attitude is very cyberpunk”, I don’t think we’re as certain of what’s meant. I’m not sure what this means, but I do think it indicates something. In a cyberworld, there’s no need for the suffix, and ours is a cyberworld. In a cyberworld, cyberpunk is punk. But it’s not punk if you call it “cyberpunk”.

WHO WE ARE

Who we are is largely who we meet. Cities are machines that randomize contact. The Internet is a meta-city, meta-randomizing contact. I now “know” more people than I would ever have imagined possible, because of that. It changes who I am and what I can do.

Previous MONDO History Entries

Psychedelic Transpersonal Photography, High Frontiers & MONDO 2000: an Interview with Marc Franklin

Gibson & Leary Audio (MONDO 2000 History Project)

Pariahs Made Me Do It: The Leary-Wilson-Warhol-Dali Influence (Mondo 2000 History Project Entry #3)

Robert Anton Wilson Talks To Reality Hackers Forum (1988 — Mondo 2000 History Project Entry #4)

Smart Drugs & Nutrients In 1991 (Mondo 2000 History Project Entry #5)

LSD, The CIA, & The Counterculture Of The 1960s: Martin Lee (1986, Audio. Mondo 2000 History Project Entry #6)

William Burroughs For R.U. Sirius’ New World Disorder (1990, Mondo 2000 History Project Entry # 7)

New Edge & Mondo: A Personal Perspective – Part 1 (Mondo 2000 History Project Entry #8)

New Edge & Mondo: A Personal Perspective – Part 2 (Mondo 2000 History Project Entry #8)

The Glorious Cyberpunk Handbook Tour (Mondo 2000 History Project Entry #9)

Did The CIA Kill JFK Over LSD?, Reproduced Authentic, & Two Heads Talking: David Byrne In Conversation With Timothy Leary (MONDO 2000 History Project Entry #10)

Memory & Identity In Relentlessly Fast Forward & Memetically Crowded Times (MONDO 2000 History Project Entry #11)

The First Virtual War & Other Smart Bombshells (MONDO 2000 History Project Entry #12)

Swashbuckling Around The World With Marvin Minsky In How To Mutate & Take Over The World (MONDO 2000 History Project #13)

FAIL! Debbie Does MONDO (MONDO 2000 History Project Entry #14)

Paradise Is Santa Cruz: First Ecstasy (MONDO 2000 History Project Entry #15)

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40 years ago, Monty Python, “for the first time ever on record, we proudly present the 1972 eclipse of the sun!” — seen through a superb piece of smoked glass….

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Meanwhile, behind closed doors there seemed to be a mild hubbub going on… Eventually the door opened and one could see a bunch of guys in a sort of ill-formed circle around the very tall Peter Stafford so that we could just see his naked chest, goofy grinning laughing face and wildly flailing arms.  Everybody seemed to be arguing with Peter.  Bruce sighed.  “Peter likes to get naked when he’s high.”….

The following entry is from the early part of the MONDO 2000 story, when “Somerset Mau Mau” and I were distributing the first newsprint edition of High Frontiers, the magazine that became MONDO.

Peter Stafford and Bruce Eisner were two psychedelic veterans who had produced a very interesting magazine called Blotter out of Santa Cruz in the late ’70s and early ’80s.   Both were widely noted writers on the topic of psychedelic drugs.  Stafford had written the widely distributed and highly respected The Psychedelics Encycleopedia.  Having gotten wind of the fact that I was planning a new psychedelic magazine, Bruce and Peter had visited me in my Mill Valley share when the magazine was barely gleaming in my eye.

Upon entering, Bruce had said, “The commodore wants to know why you haven’t called him yet!”  He then fetched the phone number for Timothy Leary out of his pocket and dialed him up. I was nervous and intimidated.  But once I started speaking to Tim and explained the idea for the magazine, he was very kind and funny and enthusiastic.  Bruce later told me that they were excited to meet me because — as I was living in upscale Mill Valley — he and Peter assumed I was a “business head” and the psychedelic movement really needed a “business head.”

Bruce and Peter contributed an entertaining and much needed professionally-written column to our first edition titled Psychedelic Scenarios. It would be an ongoing column bringing news bytes from the psychedelic movement.

A few weeks after publication, Bruce suggested that we really should hustle down to his and Peter’s hometown of Santa Cruz because there weren’t any copies available in the stores and people had already grabbed the few we had sent them for free.   Also, it would be good to meet the folks in the Santa Cruz psychedelic community.  We were invited to stay at Peter Stafford’s apartment.

We arrived at Peter’s place, overlooking the Pacific Ocean. Entering a spacious two room apartment with high ceilings and sunlight streaming in through huge picture windows,  Eisner greeted us in the living room.  Meanwhile, behind closed doors there seemed to be a mild hubbub going on.  We stood making small talk with Bruce as the door to this other room — it soon became clear it was a bedroom — would quickly open and close.

Eventually the door opened and one could see a bunch of guys in a sort of ill-formed circle around the very tall Peter Stafford so that we could just see his naked chest, goofy grinning laughing face and wildly flailing arms.  Everybody seemed to be arguing with Peter.  Bruce sighed.  “Peter likes to get naked when he’s high,” he said.  We assured Bruce that we had no problems with anybody greeting us naked.  Eventually, Stafford apparently compromised with his friends and came out to great us wearing a pair of white undies.  We immediately fell into a rapture with Peter, as he excitedly ran us through a full course in his personal psychedelic history; tossing books he’d written at us and waxing mega-enthusiastic — as I recall — about squeezing mescaline from a cactus among so many other trippy matters.

And then the party began.  Although I’m remembering it was just drink and powerful weed, the next few days were a blur of way-stoned, half-drunk but absolutely lucid lessons in drug history and psychopharmacology as preached by Peter interrupted by brief forays around Santa Cruz to meet the local heads.  Most impressive were two older women, probably in their 60s or 70s.  Nina Graboi lived in a neatly furnished modest but brightly colored apartment with huichol peyote paintings on the wall.  She had been the Director of the New York Chapter of the League for Spiritual Discovery (LSD), Timothy Leary’s earliest attempt at organizing for educating psychedelic explorers and defending their rights to trip and had continued to work with psychedelic substances and people ever since. Mau Mau and I felt ourselves in the presence of deep psychedelic history.

The other elder was Liz Gips — a funky gal in baggy blue jeans who seemed to have the hint of a southern accent.  I remember being very impressed with her intellect as she laid out the Santa Cruz psychoactive scene and told us about the radio show she hosted on a local public radio station.  She invited us to come on her show to talk about High Frontiers a couple of days hence.

The last day of our planned visit arrived and I woke up irritated that we’d stayed so loaded that we hadn’t done what we planned to do.  The drinking and lack of discipline weighed on me.  People who wanted to just stay high were clearly too irresponsible to stay on mission, I thought, even when the mission was pretty simple.

As everybody in the house came to consciousness, I pressed my case for getting out right away and getting to Santa Cruz bookstores with copies of the magazine.  My plan was hazily agreed to, but bowls of weed were smoked and lazy conversations sputtered along until the morning was completely gone.  I finally got openly pissed and Mau Mau and I got ready to haul ass out the door to distribute the zines.  Just as we were walking to the door, this absolutely perfect young blondehaired surfer-looking dude with blazing blue eyes and an almost blinding shiny white toothed grin walked in.  “Does anybody want some MDMA?”

Mau Mau and I had never had MDMA (ecstasy) so we eagerly purchased a few hits for ourselves, as did Peter and some other hangabouts — one of them being a rainbow tribe sorta guy named Verge Belanger (who will appear in a dramatic moment later in this epic.)  “Fine,” I said.  “Now let’s go distribute the magazines.”

That wasn’t going to happen.  “You’ve never had ecstasy?!” Stafford asked, stunned by our virginity.  You really need to try this now!”  After a few minutes intransigence on my part, irrepressibility prevailed and we downed our capsules.  I sat alone out on a porch that was attached to Stafford’s place feeling irritated and trapped.   Then there was a slight turning of the sky into deeper gentler pastels, a few seconds of mild nausea, and suddenly I was back through the doors and back into the living room where everybody at once started telling everybody else how wonderful they were; how the essence of that person was just a wonder to behold.   My concerns and irritation was gone.  The barriers between my self and the world melted.  Clearly, most of the things we let make us crazy are less important in actuality than they seem in our own heads.   We communed blissfully and I, for the first time, understood what actual contentment — the complete absence of an nagging doubt about the safety and rightness of being in that moment — felt like. Later that night, we went on Liz Gips radio show and promoted the magazine.  We were relaxed and funny and informative.  I had never done radio before and I’m sure if it had not been for the ecstasy, I would have been – and more importantly, sounded – nervous on my first try.

We stayed in la Cruz an extra day — me missing a day of work as a phone salesman — and finally got the magazines to the local outlets.  Meanwhile, I was pretty nearly convinced that ecstasy was the key to the psychedelic revival.  Surely, I thought, even mindless lugheads who could take acid and mescaline and learn nothing from it other than that it’s fun to stare at flashing colored lights couldn’t miss the point of this.  This one really was the magic bullet; the peace pill; the cure for cultural anxiety and neurosis; the start of an era of hedonic sweetness.  Surely, people couldn’t take this drug, this ecstasy, and not be changed by it.  Surely…

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In an interview that St. Jude Milhon conducted with Richard Preston for Thresher, Preston dropped a bit of “knowledge” that has always stuck in my head.  In an interview dedicated to the possibilities for bioterror, Preston said, “Martin Hugh-Jones told me that his all-time favorite bioweapon is Brucella.  It’s a bacterium that gives you a subtle long-term brain infection that changes your personality for the worse. That happens after you’ve received antibiotics that don’t completely wipe out the Brucella in your brain but make you think you’re cured.  The organism makes you prone to irrational rages and it also confuses your judgment.  ‘And the best part of it,’ he said to me, ‘is that you don’t know you’re going mental! Imagine the effects of this on a group of generals and leaders trying to run a war!”

A brief googling found no discussion of any relationship between Brucellosis and human behavior, but I’m going to run with it… since I’m probably infected and therefore my judgment is poor.

Now, dig this… from Wikipedia.  “It is transmitted by ingesting infected food, direct contact with an infected animal, or inhalation of aerosols… also by consumption of unpasteurized milk products.”  

So I’m thinking less about some nefarious terrorists than the avenues via which Brucella may be making everybody even crazier than usual (or haven’t you noticed?).

For starters, we’re hearing ever more about the distribution of infected meat as the result of careless factory farming and I suspect that what we know is just the tip of the iceberg.  Pink slime sounds like a Brucella factory to me.  Regarding direct contact with animals… who has lots of direct contact with lots of animals?  Ted Nugent… and the people in the heart of the heartland  of America who voted for Rick Sanitarium. I rest my case. And who drinks lots of unpasteurized milk?  The very sort of people who avoid factory farm-infected meat. Hah! We’ve hit all the major population centers.  Operation Zombie Apocalypse complete!

As I was wistfully imagining the scenarios that are likely to occur as people become even more rage-filled and irrational (It seems to crop up lately on airplanes.  Apparently, the Postal Service has been displaced as a major vector for Brucellosis.), I happened to go onto facebook where someone had posted a link to this summation of a Scientific American article from 2008 titled “Infected with Insanity: Could Microbes Cause Mental Illness?”

The culprit here is not Brucella but — among other things — the effect of prenatal influenza on children.

I imagine that the list goes on and that there are all sorts of invasive physiological factors that — in combination with species-wide genetic predispositions, bad memes, weird imprints and raging hormones make the possibility of ever having an actual “age of reason” about as likely as Donald Trump suddenly explaining Kierkegaard’s stage theory to Aubrey O’Day.

In conclusion, let me make it clear that — although this slight meditation is build on the flimsiest of substance — you can in no way trust your mental ability to judge it as anything less than the most important thing you will read today.

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Yikes!  You will be entertained and irritated by these douchebags as they “deconstruct” the satanic illuminati mind control experiment that is rock and roll.  It starts when Robert Johnson goes down to the crossroads and somehow relates to Anna Nicole Smith.  Try to at least make it through the second section… which is the most entertaining.

Enjoy!

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It was the Escape From New York tour with The Ramones, Blondie and Tom Tom Club. I was backstage at Berkeley’s Greek Theater with Bart Nagel interviewing Chris Franz and Tina Weymouth of Tom Tom Club and Talking Heads when Debbie Harry wandered in.   She came right up to me. “You’re the MONDO 2000 guy?”  “Yes.” She came up closer, lowered her voice to just above a whisper and asked, “Do you have any of those new drugs?”

Damn.  Not right now.  I offered to look into it for her the next day but she was otherwise occupied so my 30-second fantasy of doing 2cb or some other designer hallucinogen with Debbie Harry was nipped in the bud.  We exchanged contact info and I went back to the interview.  Meanwhile, Nagel got Debbie to pose for some photos.

During the process of prepping Mondo issue #3, we decided to do a section on “21st Century Fashion.”  Both Mu and I were fans of the look of those trendoid club culture magazines with a hint of surrealism like Wet and Fad and Impulse that were popular in the ‘80s and ‘90s.  We figured we could find a futurist SF twist on all that and not only would it look good but we could tap into a potentially rich vein for advertising revenues.  Man, did we ever wind up taking a ton of shit from (some of) the nerds and the righteous hippies and certain types of feminists for letting that bit into the mix.

Anyway, we somehow got Debbie to agree to be interviewed by phone on the topic of 21st Century Fashion.

Now, I’d read some pretty enjoyable Debbie Harry interviews. I mean, she wasn’t going to be Derrida or even Ted Nelson, but she could be pretty damned clever and epigrammatic in a sort of Warholish way.

This was not to be one of those instances. St. Jude’s daughter Tresca wanted in on the interview so she and Jude joined me at the MONDO house/office at the assigned time and we called Debbie.

As you’ll hear, she sounded vaguely drowsy and pretty much told us that she didn’t have anything to say about anything… particularly fashion.  Plus, she was having a difficult time hearing us… which will derail pretty much any exchange.  “This interview is gonna suck,” she told us

As anyone who has ever edited a magazine that has even a partial pop culture gloss will tell you, the planned celebrity interview that winds up being pretty vacant is a hazard of the game.  You have to somehow perform a save. You’ll find the few good lines and run them below some pictures; or maybe — if you’re daring — you’ll just turn the show over to the interviewer/author and have him/her cover the fail over with fancy bullshit or — if you don’t care about the celeb — with snark.  In any case, you’ll find some excuse to include the star’s name — maybe even her photograph — on your cover.

I liked Debbie Harry.  So I squeezed what I could from this uncomfortable exchange and later, Debbie agree to let me fax her a few more questions…  which bordered on aggressively obnoxious.  For example:

M2:  You have the opportunity to star in another Cronenberg film, but he wants you to have reversible plastic surgery on your internal organs. Would you rather:
A)    Have your stomach turned into a pollution-belching urban landscape?
B)    Have the collective information of all Haitian voodoo chiefs pass through your subconscious all at once via a microprocessor in the right brain.
C)    Have your cervix turned into a mongoose?
D)    Shoot R.U. Sirius for asking these questions?
E)    Act in Lassie Does Detox?
F)    Other?

DH:  B & D

But she wasn’t actually pissed and one day I returned to the office with a message that Debbie Harry had called and asked for me.  I called her back and I don’t remember what we talked about… and we never really talked again, but I’ll always treasure the brief interaction.

And now, because one should also show the warts sometimes, the uncomfortable and brief phone interview with Debbie Harry.

Previous MONDO History Entries

Psychedelic Transpersonal Photography, High Frontiers & MONDO 2000: an Interview with Marc Franklin

Gibson & Leary Audio (MONDO 2000 History Project)

Pariahs Made Me Do It: The Leary-Wilson-Warhol-Dali Influence (Mondo 2000 History Project Entry #3)

Robert Anton Wilson Talks To Reality Hackers Forum (1988 — Mondo 2000 History Project Entry #4)

Smart Drugs & Nutrients In 1991 (Mondo 2000 History Project Entry #5)

LSD, The CIA, & The Counterculture Of The 1960s: Martin Lee (1986, Audio. Mondo 2000 History Project Entry #6)

William Burroughs For R.U. Sirius’ New World Disorder (1990, Mondo 2000 History Project Entry # 7)

New Edge & Mondo: A Personal Perspective – Part 1 (Mondo 2000 History Project Entry #8)

New Edge & Mondo: A Personal Perspective – Part 2 (Mondo 2000 History Project Entry #8)

The Glorious Cyberpunk Handbook Tour (Mondo 2000 History Project Entry #9)

Did The CIA Kill JFK Over LSD?, Reproduced Authentic, & Two Heads Talking: David Byrne In Conversation With Timothy Leary (MONDO 2000 History Project Entry #10)

Memory & Identity In Relentlessly Fast Forward & Memetically Crowded Times (MONDO 2000 History Project Entry #11)

The First Virtual War & Other Smart Bombshells (MONDO 2000 History Project Entry #12)

Swashbuckling Around The World With Marvin Minsky In How To Mutate & Take Over The World (MONDO 2000 History Project #13)

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Take the self-enhancement/personal mutation aspect of transhumanism and marry that to the intentions of Anonymous and you have something sort of like what St. Jude and I wanted to achieve with a book titled How To Mutate & Take Over The World.  

There were multiple problems with this.  For all the huffing and puffing in both transhumanist and hacker circles, at that point any actual plans for mutating and/or taking the world were pretty vague.  Smart drugs and meditation techniques?  Nutrients for musculature and longevity? What? Where were the madpersons (things?) in secret laboratories diddling around with garage biotech?  Clearly we were premature.

Hacker Michael Synergy — who had promised to bring down everything imaginable — governments, banks, what-have-you — with a few lines of code, had slipped away mysteriously amidst rumors of double or triple or quadruple non-so-secret agentry (there’s a very likely rumor that the main character in Burn Notice is based on him.)  Whatever. We could have used some of Michael’s bullshit to fertilize the narrative.

And there was the deadline — six months — for a project that really required 2 or 3 years.  So we tried to turn it into a sort of role playing game, inviting people on The Well, particularly those in the MONDO 2000 Conference, to take on characters and interact.

It sorta worked.  The book is full of wonderful moments.  Mock deconstructions of the fictive hacker underground written in trendy overwrought academese.  St. Jude’s wonderful tough hacker feminism essays about how grrrls needed modems. Descriptions of fucking robots involved with excremental performance art.

And — perhaps most of all — Patrick Di Justo’s hilarious contributions.   Among these, there was an episode in which Terence McKenna and Marvin Minsky crash land and find themselves amongst a primitive tribe and an episode wherein a tiny K. Eric Drexler winds up in a terrarium.  Was this maybe a bit too “inside baseball” for a popular audience in the mid-90s?

Anyway, the entire thing turned into a recursive story-within-story-within-story in which two authors of a book struggle against deadlines and book company assassins within a narrative of world takeover ending with the world being smothered in self-replicating Key Lime Pie.

People either loved it or hated it…  and the people who loved it were mostly comprised of a small slice of the literary avant garde.

Anyway, presented for your amusement, an excerpt from How To Mutate & Take Over The World by the slightly pseudonymous Patrick Dijuju followed by Di Justo speaking about his participation in How To Mutate & Take Over The World.

Travels With Marvin: Swashbuckling Around The World With Marvin Minsky 

by Patrick Dijuju

Slowly regaining consciousness, I opened my eyes to see chunks of the Amazon jungle framed in the remains of the aircraft window. Remembering where I was,  I tentatively tried to wiggle my toes and was gratified to feel them scraping the inside of my boot.  One fear conquered: I wasn’t paralyzed.

I moved my legs a few inches from side to side.  They seemed fine.  I diffidently opened my legs wider and felt my crotch  Everything seemed in place there.  Another sigh of relief.

I looked across the small aisle.  Marvin Minsky was sitting bolt upright, fully conscious and still strapped in his seat.  The crash had torn huge rents in the fuselage of the plane, and Marvin’s eyes darted around the remains of the cabin and out into the jungle in great sweeping arcs.  He resembled a bird of prey on the lookout for anything moving.

“Hey,” he shouted at me when he saw I was awake, “are you all right?”

“I seem to be,” I replied.

“Yeah.  I figured when you grabbed your crotch you were OK,” he said. “That seems to be part of the algorithm.”

“What algorithm?”

“What appears to be the ‘Self Test Upon Regaining Consciousness after a Life Threatening Injury’ algorithm.  You wiggled your toes first, didn’t you?”

“Yeah,” I said.

“So did I.  They you checked to see if your legs worked, and then you grabbed your crotch.”

“Yeah,” I repeated.

“So did I.  In that order.  You were about to check your head, and save your torso for last, weren’t you?”

“Yeah,” a third time.

“So did I.  The algorithm is obviously a collection of smaller building blocks of activity hardwired into our brain.  Wiggle the toes.  Check the legs.  Scope the balls.  Pretty interesting.  By the way, you have, or you had, a bloody nose.”

I reached up to my face and felt around.  My beard and mustache felt hard, crusty and dry.  I had obviously had a nosebleed that stopped some time ago.  How long had I been unconscious?

“How long have I been unconscious,” I asked Marvin.

“We crashed about an hour ago.  Assuming you lost consciousness at or near the moment of impact, about an hour,” Minsky replied.

I had a headache that didn’t seem to be centered in any specific place in my brain; it seemed to be everywhere in my head at once.  An hour was plenty of time for a brain concussion to begin its voodoo.  For some reason that really bothered me.  My brain is my second favorite organ, and to think of it bruised or bleeding upset me greatly.

I looked around the remains of the fuselage. “Where’s McKenna?” I asked.

“About time you asked,” Minsky replied. “He went out to reconnoiter, I think he said.  Apparently he’s under the impression that he knows, and can speak to, the native people of the area.”

“Well,” I said, unstrapping myself, “I don’t want to sit around here.” I jumped to my feet.

I opened my eyes. I was on my back, staring at the ceiling of the plane.

“Don’t stand up too quickly,” Minsky said, when he saw I had regained consciousness once more. “I’m guessing that you’ve got a bad concussion. You’ll be prone to fainting for the next few days.”

There was a rustle in the leaves outside the cabin.  Terence McKenna stepped out of the jungle and hurried to the remains of the airplane.

“Marvin!” he called. “I’ve found them!”

“I have no idea what he’s found,” Minsky whispered to me.

McKenna stuck his head through one of the holes in the fuselage and saw me lying on the floor. “Hello,” he said. “Glad to see you’re up and about. If you are, that is.”  He turned to Minsky. “Marvin,” he said breathlessly,  “I’ve found some indigenous people of this tropical rain forest.”

“How nice,” Minsky said dryly. “Can they get us to civilization?”

“Oh, you’re such a reductionist,” McKenna snapped.

“It’s my job,” Minsky replied smoothly.

There was another rustle in the jungle, much softer this time, and as if by magic, two native men appeared in our clearing.  McKenna pulled his head out of the plane and looked at them.

Minsky stood up and was about to exit the plane when McKenna stopped him.

“Let me, Marvin,” McKenna said. “I know how to talk to these people.”

“Hi,” he said, extending his hand in greeting toward the natives. “Koyan teki. Koyan teki.” The natives looked at McKenna, then at each other.

“What’s he saying,” I asked Dr. Minsky.

“I have no idea,” Minsky said.  “But it stands to reason that it’s some form of local greeting.”

“Thanks, Marvin. I figured that out.”

“You’re welcome.  Aside from that, I have no data.  Come on.”

Marvin helped me slowly to my feet.  Supported by his shoulder, I staggered out of the remains of the airplane into the dappled sunshine.

The natives were muscular, brown skinned men wearing nothing but body paint and leather codpieces.  They each carried a long, relatively straight, fire hardened pointed stick.  Both men did a double take when they saw Marvin.

“Xochipilli,” one whispered to the other. “Xochipilli,” the other answered in agreement.

“Terence, what are they saying,” Marvin asked.

“I don’t know,” McKenna retorted. “I never said I was fluent in their language.”

“No, you never did,” Minsky purred.

McKenna shot Minsky a look.  The animosity between them that had begun at the conference was starting to fester now. Great, I thought, this was all we needed.

“Look, fellas,” I said to both intellectuals, “what do we do now?”

The natives took it upon themselves to supply the answer, (though they obviously could not have understood the question) because at that moment they both began talking a mile a minute.  I didn’t recognize any words except for the mysterious “Xochipilli, Xochipilli”, which they said every few seconds.

“Terence,” I said, motioning to the two men, “what IS this?”

“Um, they want us to follow them,” McKenna said, struggling to translate their jabbering. “They want to show us something …  no, they want to take us to their village chief, and the chief will show us something.”

“Well,” Minsky said, “considering we have no alternative, I suggest we go.”

I only fainted once on the way to the village.  When we finally reached the collection of huts that served as the native’s more or less permanent encampment, one of our escorts ran ahead of us, stamping his feet and shouting “Xochipilli, Xochipilli!”

“There’s that word again,” I slurred.

At that moment a large, regal man emerged from the large hut at the far end of the village. He stood well over six feet tall, and was adorned with a variety of feathers, bones, beads and other ornaments. This had to be the village chief.  The chief frowned at the man doing all the yelling, then he looked at the three of us.  And I’m telling you, when he saw Marvin, his jaws dropped, his eyes popped, his mouth opened.

“Xochipilli,” he whispered reverently.

“Terence,” Minsky said, “if you have ANY idea what this Hochifella stuff means, I’d really appreciate knowing.”

“Look, Marvin,” McKenna snapped, ‘I’m as worried as you are.  I don’t know if this word means they’re going to eat us, or sacrifice us, or what. OK?  I JUST DON’T KNOW!”

“OK, Terence,” Marvin said placatingly. “Just asking.”

We stopped in the middle of the clearing.  The chief motioned to two of his men.  They walked to the clump of ferns at the edge of the developed part of the village and quickly prodded and pulled the leaves of the huge plants to the right and left.

Hidden in the brush was a huge carved stone, approximately fifteen feet high, and a stone slab, about four feet off the ground, six feet long and six feet wide.  The slab was covered with a brown, crusty material that looked like dried blood.  The large stone had been carved into a statue of a humanoid creature looking up at the sky.  The creature was stocky and bald, had enormous eyes and an enormous beak like nose, and looked half man/half bird of prey.

“Mar-vin,” I whispered.

“Hmmm,” Minsky hummed.

“Mar-vin,” McKenna whined, “that looks an awful lot like you.”

“It does, doesn’t it,” Minsky replied in a hushed tone.

“Marvin,” I said hoarsely, “they must think you’re one of their gods.”

“I think you’re right,” Marvin whispered.

As if to punctuate Marvin’s comment, the tribal chief and his followers slowly knelt, then prostrated themselves face down at Marvin’s feet. “Xochipilli,” they chanted, “Xochipilli.”

The three of us were silent for a moment, then McKenna snapped.  “JESUS CHRIST!!! MARVIN??? MARVIN MINSKY???  Of the six billion people on this earth they had to choose Marvin MINSKY as their god???” He poked Minsky in the shoulder with a rigid forefinger.

The chief popped his head up and gave McKenna a very nasty look.

“Hey, Terence, cool it,” I warned.

“Jesus Christ. Minsky?! I don’t know why they chose YOU as their god,” McKenna snapped. “I’m the one who’s studied their culture.  I’m the one who’s shared their sacraments. I’m the one who’s lived among them.”

“Terence!” Minsky’s voice was like wet ice. “Knock it off!”

The chief muttered some words to his aides.  He then stood up, pointed at McKenna, looked at Minsky, and let forth a torrent of speech.  He stopped and looked at Minsky inquisitively.

“Notice the universality of body language,” Minsky whispered to me.  “We don’t know the words, but by the look on his face, the wide eyes and raised brows, we know that it was a question.”

“What did he ask,” I whispered back.

“I have no idea,” Minsky replied.  “Terence, can you translate what the chief said?”

McKenna ignored Marvin’s question.

“Terence,” Minsky said quietly, “did you catch what he said?”

McKenna didn’t say anything for about five seconds.  Then he snipped, ”No, I didn’t.  And even if I did, I doubt I would tell you.”

Minsky frowned. “We have no data.  We can just randomly choose a response, I guess, but in situations like this, I’ve usually found it’s safe to say yes.”

“Are you sure?”

“No,” he replied, “I’m not sure. I’ve just found that ‘Yes’ generally works better than no.”

The tribal chief repeated his question, and once again looked at Marvin with big eyes.

“Terence,” Marvin whispered. “How do you say yes in their lingo?”

“Hei”, McKenna said petulantly.

Marvin sat up straight, looked at the chief and firmly said, “Hei, chief. Hei.”

The chief barked out several short commands to his men.  They immediately stood up, grabbed Terence McKenna from behind, gagged him with a leather thong and dragged him to the stone altar.

I jumped to my feet once again.  You’d think I would have learned my lesson. As the jungle started to spin I grabbed one of the tree trunks to steady myself and yelled, “Marvin! I think you just gave them permission to sacrifice Terence McKenna to you!!”

Minsky slowly got to his feet. “Hmm,” he said, as he watched the tribesmen tie McKenna to the altar. “It would appear that I did, didn’t I?”

My agitation was making me woozy. “Marvin!”, I yelled with nearly all my strength, “stop them!”

“I’ll try,” Minsky promised. He walked to the altar, looked down at the bound and gagged Terence McKenna and said “Terence, how do you say ‘stop’ in their language?”

McKenna’s eyes blazed as he thrashed around. He was talking a mile a minute behind his gag, but all we heard were muffled nasal “m” sounds and occasional ululations.

The tribal chief took a flint knife out of his belt and majestically strode toward the altar. “Marvin,” I shouted with the final remnants of my strength, ”STOP HIM!”

Minsky turned to me. “It would appear that Terence, who is gagged, is the only one of us who knows the word ‘stop’ in the local language,” he said.

The chief raised his knife over his head as darkness crashed around me…

Patrick Di Justo Recalls His Participation In How To Mutate & Take Over The World

DijustoHow To Mutate – Part 1 of 6

Dijusto- How To Mutate – Part 2 of 6

Dijusto – How To Mutate – Part 3 of 6

Dijusto – How To Mutate – Part 4 of 6

Dijusto – How To Mutate – Part 5 of 6

Dijusto – How To Mutate – Part 6 of 6

Previous MONDO History Entries

Psychedelic Transpersonal Photography, High Frontiers & MONDO 2000: an Interview with Marc Franklin

Gibson & Leary Audio (MONDO 2000 History Project)

Pariahs Made Me Do It: The Leary-Wilson-Warhol-Dali Influence (Mondo 2000 History Project Entry #3)

Robert Anton Wilson Talks To Reality Hackers Forum (1988 — Mondo 2000 History Project Entry #4)

Smart Drugs & Nutrients In 1991 (Mondo 2000 History Project Entry #5)

LSD, The CIA, & The Counterculture Of The 1960s: Martin Lee (1986, Audio. Mondo 2000 History Project Entry #6)

William Burroughs For R.U. Sirius’ New World Disorder (1990, Mondo 2000 History Project Entry # 7)

New Edge & Mondo: A Personal Perspective – Part 1 (Mondo 2000 History Project Entry #8)

New Edge & Mondo: A Personal Perspective – Part 2 (Mondo 2000 History Project Entry #8)

The Glorious Cyberpunk Handbook Tour (Mondo 2000 History Project Entry #9)

Did The CIA Kill JFK Over LSD?, Reproduced Authentic, & Two Heads Talking: David Byrne In Conversation With Timothy Leary (MONDO 2000 History Project Entry #10)

Memory & Identity In Relentlessly Fast Forward & Memetically Crowded Times (MONDO 2000 History Project Entry #11)

The First Virtual War & Other Smart Bombshells (MONDO 2000 History Project Entry #12)

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After the confident declarations of inevitable cyberpunk youth takeover in the first edition of Mondo 2000 and the philosophically trippy and mostly utopian read on Virtual Reality in #2, it was inevitable that affairs in the world would bring us crashing down to earth… at least a little.  The third edition revolved largely around the hacker crackdown that was called Operation Sundevil — a situation in which a confused and clueless law enforcement establishment pursued crimes they didn’t understand on a terrain they hadn’t realized existed.

Issues #4 and #5 found us, meanwhile, reacting to Operation Desert Storm — the first full-on return to American Triumphalism since the Vietnam war turned sour in… what?… 1968?  We weren’t watching much TV at the Mondo house/office but I remember CNN being on as a sort of background phenomenon during the run-up to the war.

This was the first time the media’s inevitable participation in the sort of unquestioning jingoist war propaganda that we’re always treated to during the run-up to a major intervention was ginned up by computerized special effects.  And prideful current and former military leaders sharing technical details about shiny new weapons systems would bring irresistible frisson to certain types of technophiles.  Smart bombs!  Wowee!  Well, as John Fogerty sang, “It ain’t me.”

President George H.W. Bush even enunciated the idea of a “New World Order” spawning a million new byzantine conspiracy theories that have iterated and turned into ever-weirder and more complex alternative realities since.

As for me, I organized a radio show called “New World Disorder” on KALX fm in Berkeley with Don Joyce from Negativland and wrote an editorial in #4, also titled “New World Disorder.”  But more on that (including some audio) in a later post.

In issue #5, John Perry Barlow took up the antiwar banner identifying Desert Storm as the first Virtual War in the layout and text provided below.

Don’t get me wrong.  Mondo wasn’t freakin’ Mother Jones or something.  The rest of the edition featured an erotic quantum physics limerick; newer smart drugs; the cyber-surrealism of Mark Leyner in the immediate aftermath of his incomparable Et Tu, Babe; a gigantic section on industrial music; Mark Dery deconstructing machine sex and sex machines; a much criticized spread with lovely ladies with their bare nipples shining through microchips; and speaking of smart bombshells, that cover you see is Dr. Fiorella Terenzi who talked to us about her music of the galaxies.  I was told later that every male in the building — except me — stopped work that afternoon to gather in the art room where the interview took place.  Was I noble?  No,  I was shut in my office working on something… completely unaware.  I was the editor-in-chief and nobody told me a damn thing.

Oh it might also be worth mentioning that we scrambled the names of two avant-garde guitarists on the cover, leading to embarrassment followed by some theorizing about “Art Damage” in the next edition.

Anyway, here’s “Virtual Nintendo” by John Perry Barlow from issue #5 of Mondo 2000. 

R.U. Sirius

Below the scan of the actual magazine, you will find a purely textual version of the article.

Mondo2000 Issue 5

VIRTUAL NINTENDO 

by John Perry Barlow

It is precisely when it appears most truthful that the image is most diabolical.
-Jean Baudrillard

Like most Americans last February, I was hooked on the new CNN sports series War in the Gulf. It didn’t sound strange to me when a friend said he didn’t know whether he wanted to watch the War or the Lakers game that evening. They were fairly indistinguishable. Both commentated by fatuous men well removed from the action. Indeed, in the case of the War, one wondered if there even was any action. The closest one got to that was the occasional footage of people scurrying around in the darkness following a Scud warning, followed by a blurry flash of distant fireworks as the Patriot took out the Scud.

Which was, in a way, a perfect metaphor for the abstraction and bloodlessness of this new form of combat. A missile would emerge without any tangible point of origin, its senders anonymous and devoid of human characteristics. A machine would detect it, another would plot its trajectory, and a third would rush out to kill it. It was like an academic argument. Flesh and bone were miles away from anything that might rend them.

Finally, after weeks of this shadowboxing, it was determined that the map of Kuwait had been sufficiently revised that it was now safe to send in live Americans. Personally, I still had such fear of the Republican Guard that I thought we should soften them some more. What I thought we faced was an army as large as ours, toughened by almost a decade of the nastiest combat since World War I, comprised of Muslim fanatics, each convinced that death in battle was just a quicker trip to Paradise. Certainly more than a match for a bunch of rag-tag American kids who’d joined the military because they couldn’t get a job at the 7-11.

Then we saw them for the first time. Trying to surrender to the Italian television crew through whose cameras they were beamed to us, they looked hapless and confused. They were devastated refugees from the real world, trying desperately to enter the sanctuary of the Screen, a sanctuary we had enjoyed throughout this affair whether in an armchair in Terre Haute or at the bombardier’s workstation in a B-52.

More video arrived of the areas we had been softening. I realized for the first time, astonishingly enough — that there had been people down there. The Republican Guard was not a thing. It was a bunch of human beings, with wives, and best friends, and babies who loved to be thrown in the air. The charred and contorted remains I saw would toss no more babies. Indeed, they didn’t even look all that soft, more like briquettes than people.

A wave of revulsion and shame hit me. Like most everyone in America, I had been suckered. I had become part of what Hannah Arendt, referring to the Nazi bureaucratization of murder, had called “the banality of evil.” What I had seen of the war had been a computer generated simulation; with perhaps higher production values than Nintendo, but otherwise the same. I had been placed in a reality which was sufficiently complex to seem like the real thing even though it was entirely manufactured.

A far more persuasive reality had been in the bunkers where several hundred thousand human beings had been treated to explosives which first sucked all the air out of their lungs and then roasted them alive. Meanwhile, the object of this exercise — the Butcher of Baghdad — in whose place we butchered so many ourselves, is still in power. In fact, he is there because we want him there.

According to James Derderian, a defense analyst at the University of Massachusetts, the War in the Gulf was a precise replay of a computer simulation which had been constructed in the summer of 1990 before Saddam invaded Kuwait. Called “Operation Internal Look 90,” the simulation had been accurate all the way to victory. Trouble was, it had included no endgame. The screen went blank end of the tape, and so did the administration. They looked up, blinked in the light of the real world, and said, “Holy Shiite! If Saddam goes, he’ll be replaced by something worse!” No one had given that much thought while the exercise was in progress.

But never mind that. Saddam was old news. The camera was now on the Victory Parade. A patriotic exercise with my countrymen staggering on in TV hypnosis. The massacre, in which we may have incinerated as many as 400,000 while losing 179 of our own troops, was pronounced a great and courageous victory.

Not since Agincourt, when the technology of the English long-bow thoroughly undid the French, has there been such an unfair fight. But at least the English had the grace to mourn the French. They had been in direct contact with the humanity they had snuffed out. For us, it was a statistical exercise.

Suddenly, I realized that my America has become the most dangerous country the world has ever known. We are a country of unspeakable and unchallengable military power which is now under the impression that war is as easy, cheap, and fun as a Lakers game. In the field, we are so abstracted by our weapons systems that we can slaughter an army and never see a dead man. At home, we are so abstracted by television that we can commit these atrocities and then celebrate the courage of our executioners with ticker tape and Budweiser commercials.

Now America can’t wait to kick some more ass. America’s a vacant-eyed man in middle age, his lumpish belly barely contained in his Desert Storm t-shirt, yelling at his kids. The polls tell me he represents the overwhelming majority of Americans, 78% of whom say that the “victory in the Gulf’ makes them “feel better about America.”

Not me. For the first time, 1 am genuinely ashamed of my country.

And angry.

The object of my wrath is as virtual as its cause. I can’t blame Dick Cheney or Pete Williams, both old friends of mine. In removing the merciless eye of the camera from any real gore, they were only doing what I would have done in their position. Many lessons were learned from Vietnam, one of which is that if the folks back home can see Hell, they’ll want to leave it. Given that Cheney had been told by the President and Congress to conduct a war, he set about, in his crisp analytical way, to see that it was done right this time. This meant exposing no voter to its reality until it was too late for anyone to object.

Thus when Bush exulted “By God, we’ve kicked the Vietnam Syndrome once and for all,” he meant merely that he had figured out how to give war a new lease on death-by keeping it at a distance and transposing another, denatured, reality between the electorate and barbecued bodies.

The enemy then is Mediated Information. This is a new, almost concrete form of abstraction we have developed, which Jean Baudrillard referred to when he wrote: “Abstraction today is no longer that of the map, the double, the mirror or the concept. Simulation is no longer that of a territory, a referential being or a substance. It is the generation by models of a ‘real’ without origin or reality: a hyperreal”

It is this “hyperreality” which has become the new and terrible American Dream. And it is a lucid dream, subject to selective mutation by the Dreamer. As long as we remain in it, no atrocity is beyond us, for we have kicked the Reality Syndrome once and for all.

Previous MONDO History Entries

Psychedelic Transpersonal Photography, High Frontiers & MONDO 2000: an Interview with Marc Franklin

Gibson & Leary Audio (MONDO 2000 History Project)

Pariahs Made Me Do It: The Leary-Wilson-Warhol-Dali Influence (Mondo 2000 History Project Entry #3)

Robert Anton Wilson Talks To Reality Hackers Forum (1988 — Mondo 2000 History Project Entry #4)

Smart Drugs & Nutrients In 1991 (Mondo 2000 History Project Entry #5)

LSD, The CIA, & The Counterculture Of The 1960s: Martin Lee (1986, Audio. Mondo 2000 History Project Entry #6)

William Burroughs For R.U. Sirius’ New World Disorder (1990, Mondo 2000 History Project Entry # 7)

New Edge & Mondo: A Personal Perspective – Part 1 (Mondo 2000 History Project Entry #8)

New Edge & Mondo: A Personal Perspective – Part 2 (Mondo 2000 History Project Entry #8)

The Glorious Cyberpunk Handbook Tour (Mondo 2000 History Project Entry #9)

Did The CIA Kill JFK Over LSD?, Reproduced Authentic, & Two Heads Talking: David Byrne In Conversation With Timothy Leary (MONDO 2000 History Project Entry #10)

Memory & Identity In Relentlessly Fast Forward & Memetically Crowded Times (MONDO 2000 History Project Entry #11)

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