"So, Tim, here's a toast to 30 years of friendship." "And still counting. We've been playing mind tennis for 30 years. Isn't that great?" "The one thing in countless conver-sations we've had that sticks out in my mind is something you once said, that no matter what scientists do, they can decodify the DNA code, layer by layer, but underneath it all, there's still that mystery. And I've enjoyed playing with the mystery. Are you any closer to understanding the mystery, or further from it?" "Well, Paul, I watch words now. It's an obsession. I learned it from Mar-shall McLuhan, of course. A terrible vice. Had it for years, but not actually telling people about it. I watch the words that people use. The medium is the message, you recall. The brain creates the reality she wants. When we see the prisms of the words that come through, we can understand. Do I un-derstand the mystery?" "I guess the ultimate mystery is unconceivable by definition. But have you come any closer to understanding it?" "Understand? Stand under! I'm overstood. I'm understood." "The older I get, the deeper the mystery is." "The faster." "Let's get to a specific mystery. The mystery of you. Because everybody sees you through their own percep-tions. How do you think you have been most understood?" "Well, Paul, everyone gets the Timothy Leary they deserve. Everyone has their point of view. And everyone's point of view is absolutely valid for them. To track me, you have to keep moving the camera, or you'll have just one tunnel point of view. Sermonizing there. Don't impale yourself on one point of view." "Some people know you only through that 60s slogan, `Turn on, tune in, drop out.' I think a lot of people don't really understand what you meant by dropping out." "Everybody understood. Just look at the source." "All right, here's words. Fifteen years ago at a futurist conference you called yourself a Neo-Technological Pagan. What did you mean by that?" "Neo has all the conotations of the futurist stuff that's coming along. Tech-nological denotes using machines, using electricity or light to create reality. There are two kinds of techno-logy. The machine--diesel, oil, metal, industrial technology. And then the Neo-Technology, which uses light. Electricity. Photons. Electrons. Pagan is great. I love the word. Pagan is basi-cally humanist. I grew up in a Catholic zone, and pagan was the worst thing you could say. Of course, I'd never met a pagan in Springfield, Massachu-setts, going to a Catholic school. `Where do these pagans hang out? I wanna be one.'" "Was there any specific thing that made you turn from Catholicism?" "Yeah, Paul, there was a period, I know exactly what it was, I was 15 or 16, I was being sexually molested in my high school and actually totally seduced by a wonderful sexy girl, much more experienced than I. And, whew! She opened it up! The great mystery of sex. Wow! At that time I was going routinely to confession on Saturday afternoon. But I had a date with Rosemary that night. Sitting there in the dark church. Then you go in and say, `Bless me, father, for I have sinned.' Absolutely, totally hypocritical! They want you to confess and repent while I have every intention in the world of being seduced by this girl tonight." "The glands overshadowed the philosophy." "The glands? Shit, Paul, that statement is very mechanical." "I'm a Recovering Romantic." "Because you used the word gland? Glands are very interesting. People don't talk about glands very much." "Talk about machines then. What's the relationship you see between acid and technology?" Well, LSD is one of the many drugs which are based on neuroactive plants. Peyote and grain on rye. Those crazed experiences which happened in the Middle Ages, what did they call them? The madness of crowds, simply because of some plant they had chewed. The point is that the human brain is equipped with these receptor sites for various kinds of vegetables that alter consciousness. So our brains evolving over 50 million years have these recptor sites. The reason why certain people like to take these drugs is because these receptor sites acti-vate pleasure centers. Now this was not a mistake. The DNA didn't fuck up. The devid didn't do it. There was obvi-ously some reason for those receptor sites that would get you off on peyote, psilocybin. And there are dozens of compelling receptor sites and drugs we don't even know about." "In the changing counterculture, then, do you see a continuity from psychoactive drugs to cyberspace?" "Of course. It's a fact. Every generation developed a new counter-culture. In the Roaring 20s, jazz, liquor. In the 60s, the hippies with psyche-delics." "The counterculture now, it's not either/or, it's not necessarily drugs or computers. I'm sure some do them si-multaneously. But how do you think that the drug experience has changed the computer experience?" "I did not imply that you can't do both. The brain is equipped to be al-tered by these receptor sites. So we can see these receptor sites over-whelm the mind. The word-processing system. Then suddenly you can take psychedelic plants that put you in different places. I'm being too techni-cal. But there's an analogy between receptor sites for marijuana and for LSD or opium, which activate the brain and the way we can boot up different areas of our computers. Back in the 1960s we didn't know much about the brain. I was saying back in 1968, `You have to go out of your mind to use your head.' But head simply is an old-fashioned way of saying brain. We didn't know about brain receptor sites. But now, we can use bio-chemicals to boot up the kind of altered realities you want in your brain. So you smoke marijuana because it gets you in a mellow mood. Grass is good for the appetite. That's operating your brain. But now it's specific: `Use your head by operating your brain.' That's the new concept. Use your head! That's hot. Operate your brain because the brain designs realities." "Do you see a connection between the war on drugs and the attempt to censor the Internet?" "Oh, absolutely, yes, Paul. The cen-sors want to control. We have to have people to impose to keep any society going. I don't knock rules, rituals. We have to have them. The controllers censor anything that gives the power to change reality to the individual. You can't have that happen." "My theory is that the UFO sightings and all the people who claim to have been abducted by aliens, that this is really just a coverup for secret govern-ment experiments in mind control." "That's a very popular theory, Paul. I get like ten mimeograph letters a day about UFOs and the government. Boy, the governments are really fucking busy, trying to program our minds." "And of course those UN soldiers in Bosnia can hardly wait to get back in their black helicopters so they can attack Michigan and Arizona." "I'm happy about UFO rumors. I'm glad because at least people are do-ing something on their own. The 60-year-old farm wife in Dakota thinks she's been taken up and serially raped by UFO people. Wow! They came all the way from another planet a thousand light years away to get this lovely grandmother and pull her socks off and have an orgy with her. Wow!" "Or at least an anal probe. To your knowledge, is the government still doing experiments in mind control? We know they used to, with the MK-Ultra programs and all. Do you know if they're still at it? I can't imagine they would've stopped?" "G. Gordon Liddy would give you the current CIA line. Liddy says: `Yes, it is true. When we learned that the Chinese Communists were using LSD, the CIA naturally cornered the whole world market from Sandoz LSD. They didn't realize that LSD comes in a millionth of a gram. The CIA found LSD to be unpredictable.' Well, no shit, Gordon! Can you name one accurate CIA prediction? The fall of the Shah? The rise of the Ayatollah?" "What did you think of Liddy getting that free speech award from the Na-tional Association of Talk Show Hosts after he said that if the ATF comes af-ter you, they're wearing bulletproof vests so you should aim for the head or groin?" "That's pure Liddy. He's basically a romantic comedian." "When you were debating him, if you had listened to his advice retro-actively when he led the raid on Mill-brook, then later you would've been on stage debating yourself, because he would have been shot in the head and groin by somebody, if his advice had been followed." "He was a government agent enter-ing our bedroom at midnight. We had every right to shoot him. But I've never owned a weapon in my life. And I have no intention of owning a weapon, al-though I was a master sharpshooter at West Point on both the Garand, the Springfield rifle and the machine-gun. I was a Howitzer expert. I know how to operate these lethal gadgets, but I have never had and never will have a gun around." "But when you escaped from pri-son, you said, `Arm yourselves and shoot to live. To shoot a genocidal robot policeman in the defense of life is a sacred act.'" "Yeah! I also said `I'm armed and dangerous.' I got that directly from Angela Davis. I thought it was just funny to say that." "I thought it was the party line from the Weather Underground." "Well, yeah, I had a lot of arguments with Bernardine Doerhn." "They had their own rhetoric. She even praised Charlie Manson." "The Weather Underground was amusing. They were brilliant, brilliant, Jewish, Chicago kids. They had class and dash and flash and smash. Ber-nardine was praising Manson for stick-ing a fork in a victim's stomach. She was just being naughty." "She was obviously violating a taboo. What are the taboos that are waiting to be violated today?" "There is one taboo, the oldest taboo and the most powerful--I've been writing about it and thinking about it for 30 years. The concept of death is something that people do not want to face. The doctors and the priests and the politicians have made it into something terrible, terrible, terrible. You're a victim! If you accept the no-tion of death, you've signed up to be the ultimate victim." "Is that why you've announced pub-licly that you have inoperable prostate cancer? Friends knew it but--" "I actually have been planning my terminal graduation party for like 20 years. Of course, I'm a follower of Soc-rates, who was one of the greatest counterculture comic philosophers in history. He took hemlock." "The Hemlock Society was named after that." "I've been a member of the Hem-lock Society for many years. They talk about self-deliverance. That's the big-gest decision you can make. You couldn't choose how and when and with whom you were born." "Although there are people who say you can." "All right, well, go for it. But for those of us who don't have that option--" "Ram Dass even once said that a fetus that gets aborted knew it didn't want to be born so it chose parents who wouldn't carry it to term." "Richard's so politically correct. Isn't that fabulous?" "Are you planning to do what Al-dous Huxley did, which was to make the journey on acid?" "That's an option, yeah." "Do you believe in any kind of after-life?" "Well, I have left an enormous ar-chive covering 60 years of writing, around 300 audio-videos. It's being stored away. And I belong to two cry-onics groups, so I have the option of freezing my brain." "By afterlife, I didn't mean the pro-ducts of your consciousness so much as your consciousness itself." "My consciousness is a product of my brain. How can I know about my mind unless I express thought?" "Obviously, there are people who believe in the standard Heaven and Hell and Purgatory. I'm assuming that you don't believe in that kind of afterlife." "They're useful metaphors. I must be in purgatory now, huh? Occasion-ally, I have a pop of Heaven. That's not a bad metaphor. Of course, we realize that Hell is totally self-induced." "On Earth, you mean." "Well, wherever you are. What do you think about that? Do you believe in life after death and all that? What's your theory?" "That you are eaten by worms and just disappear, or you're cremated and your ashes--" "Wait, now, Paul, you have your choice of being eaten by worms or barbecued. Or you can be frozen. You don't have to be eaten by worms. You don't have to be microwaved. I'm go-ing to leave some drops of my blood, which has my DNA, in a lot of places. I'll leave my brain with them. Why not try all these things? Not that I care, Paul, believe me. I have no desperate desire to come back to planet Earth. I think that I have lived one of the most incredibly funny, interesting lives. I'm fascinated to see what's gonna hap-pen in the next steps. But I have no desire to come back. Most non-scien-tists don't realize that in scientific experiments you learn more from your mistakes. So I hope that I will leave a track record of making blunders about the most important thing in life. How to preserve your DNA. I hope someone will learn from my mistakes." "Are there regrets that you have? Things that you would've done differ-ently, knowing what you know now?" "I'd play the whole game differently, sure. About a third of the things I've done have been absolutely stupid, vul-gar, gross. About a third have been just banal. But a third have been bril-liant. Like baseball, one out of three, you lead the league. M.V.P. Most Valu-able Philosopher." "When I first met you in 1965 you were talking about baseball--and games in general--as a metaphor. How would you describe your game in life? It's been a conscious game. You didn't just fall into a pinball machine and get knocked around. Although that hap-pened too." "Well, I identified with Socrates at a very young age. The aim in human life is to find out about yourself and know who you are. The purpose in life is to discover yourself." "With these big media mergers going on now, giants, Time-Warner-Turner here, Disney-ABC there, how do you think the individual can fight that best?" "Why fight it? Like Southern Pacific merges with Pennsylvania Railroad, so what?" "But you said before they're trying to control, so aren't they trying to con-trol the information?" "You can't control information if it's packaged in light. In photons and elec-trons. You simply can't control digital messages. Zoom, I can go to my web site and put some stuff up there. Im-mediately my messages are accessed by people around the world. Not just now but later. The nice thing about cyber-communication is that counter-culture philosophers who learn about technology can work together, can be faster than committees, politicians and the like. So I have great confidence. You have to learn to play their game. That's why I went to West Point and that's why I went to the Jesuit school, and learned enough so I could play that mind-fuck game. I understood. And I moved on." "Do you mean you knew before you went to West Point, before you went to Jesuit school, that you wanted to learn their tools?" "I didn't want to go either. My parents insisted on that." "So you went with that attitude." "Yeah. They took me around to about ten Catholic universities and colleges in New England. None of them would accept me because of my high school track record. I was the editor of the newspaper in high school and I made it a scandal sheet expos-ing the principal. I had a great uncle who was a big shot in the Catholic Church. He had pull in the Vatican, and he pulled some strings so I got into a Jesuit school. I just watched, repelled, but fascinated." "I don't believe in reincarnation, but if I did, I would think I knew you in a previous life. But that's only a meta-phor, I don't believe in it. Do you be-lieve in that concept?" "In the time of Emerson, the 1830s, there was a counterculture very similar to ours. Self-reliance. Individuality. Emerson took drugs with David Thoreau. Margaret Fuller went to Italy and got the drugs. Later, William James started another counterculture at Harvard. Same thing. Nitrous oxide. Hashish. The Varieties of Religious Experience." "Well, have the medical people given you a prognosis on this life, of how many years you have left?" "I'm 75, and I've smoked and lived an active life but not the most healthy life. So my prognosis would be like two to five years. Jeez, I'll be 80 then." "Are there specific things you want to accomplish during this period?" "Our World Wide Web site is a big thing. We are putting books up there on the screen. You can actually play or perform my books. You read the first page and my notes. And you can re-vise my text. We call them living books. As many versions as there are people that want to perform `book' with me. True freedom of the press! The average person can't publish a book. This way they can." "Do you think it's destiny or chance that one becomes in a leadership posi-tion--a change agent, as you call it?" "Well, destiny implies that you were created that way. No, I think that the individual person has a lot to do with it. Thousands of decisions you make growing up in high school and college to get to a point where you have con-structed your reality. You can be a judge or--" "A defendant." "I think one of the good side-effects of the Simpson trial is that people un-derstand how totally evil lawyers are." "You mean defense lawyers and prosecutors?" "Yes." "A friend of mine was scheduled to be on jury duty and they asked him what he thought of prosecutors, and he said `Cops in suits.' Are you opti-mistic about the future, even though there's creeping fascism?" "The future is measured in terms of individual liberation. You have politi-cians. And the military people want to hurt other people. That's all about con-trol. They have to devise excuses for victimizing people. I do think that the new generations growing up now use electronic media. A 12-year-old kid now, in Tokyo or in Paris, or here, can move more stuff around on screen. She is exposed to more R.P.M., Reali-ties Per Minute! A thousand times more than her great grandfather. There's gonna be a big change. The greatest thing that's happening now is the World Wide Web. Signups zoom up like this. The telephone is the con-nection. The modem is the message! You can explore around. If you're a left-handed, dyslexic, Lithuanian les-bian, you can get in touch with people in Yugoslavia or China who are left-handed, dyslexic lesbians. It's great! It's gonna break down barriers, create new language. More and more graphic language. And neon grammatics. Any-thing that's in print will be in neon." "Well, that really brings us full cycle. We started talking about words, and now they've become neonized." "Consider, Paul, death with dignity, dying with elegance. It's wonderful to see it happening. I talk about orches-trating, managing and directing my death as a celebration of a wonderful life! That touched a lot of people. They say: `My father went through this whole thing. He wanted to die.' Amazing." "So the response has been that people are glad to know that they aren't the only ones who are thinking about death." "Yeah. People are thinking about dying with class, but were afraid to talk about it." "What do you want your epitaph to be?" "What do you think? You write it." "Here lies Timothy Leary. A pioneer of inner space. And an Irish leprechaun to the end." "Irish leprechaun! You're being racist! Can't I be a Jewish Lepre-chaun? What is this Irish Leprechaun shit?" "OK. Here lies Timothy Leary, a pioneer of inner space, and a Jewish leprechaun."
A collection of Paul Krassner's satire, The Winner of the Slow Bicycle Race, has just been published by Seven Stories Press. His comedy album, We Have Ways of Making You Laugh, will be released in August by Mercury Records. Krassner has published The Realist since 1958. But when People magazine called him "the father of the underground press," he immediately demanded a blood test. Only 13 more issues of The Realist will be published. They will not be sold in bookstores or on newsstands, so if you wish to receive the final 13 issues, send $25 to: The Realist, Dept. SH, Box 1230, Venice, CA 90294. Also available: The (Almost) Unpublished Lenny Bruce, an anthology of the controversial comedian's articles, columns, stories, bits and pieces, for $10.
Tim Leary and G. Gordon Liddy
square off during a press conference
in Los Angeles, 1992.