Newsgroups: bit.listserv.history
Date:         Thu, 9 Apr 1992 20:43:00 EDT
From:         "Daniel A. Foss" <DFOSS@CCVM.SUNYSB.EDU>
Subject:      Re: Historical Accuracy

[To the reader: The following are effluvia of this writer's spiritual torment,
not merely not half-baked this time but there ain't no microwave to begin with,
so should be regarded DELETEworthy by any organism with sense.]
   ****
   The "correct" place to take LSD turned out to be not "in your head" but in a
clique, peer group, affinity group, buncha kids hangin out, or other molecular
unit of the subculture where people generally speaking *did* know *how* to take
LSD, this having been a social skill.
   As with all my efforts at curring cheap popularity via herd conformity I
neglected this rudimentary fact hence became an object of ridicule for incompe-
tent drugtaking: Contenting myself with rudimentary "head trips," I used LSD as
a crude facilitator of otherwise factory-defective verbal processing much as I
use the entirely legal substance I used before and after for the same purpose:
Which included also making up jokes for comedy routines, reading books faster
than 5-10 pages an hour, and annoying people with conversation where the alter-
native was involuntary hermithood. All these could be explained by reference to
the adulterant mixed with LSD for the benefit of those to thick to learn how to
use it right, said adulterant having been not dissimilar to the legal
substance.
   To avoid embarassment I curtailed the use of LSD - as for analogous reasons
I have curtailed the use of computers - to rare occasions upon which I went to
Spectacle movies. These were: Cleopatra, Patton, Nicholas and Alexandra. The
only relevant effect of the LSD itself was the highlighting of details of
artificiality, bad acting, wooden screenwriting, lousy set design or costumes,
cracked makeup, incongruities, anachronisms, editing lapses, and misfired
special effects.
   Normal People had the Spectacle effect heightened for them, so just chalk up
yet another millstone of enless Failure.
   In what was in those days called "the Society of Spectacle" (Debord and the
Situationists) or "the terroristic society of coerced consumption" (H.
Lefebvre) be in worse shape; it was a bunch of mere rumors of media spectacles.
The Storming of the Winter Palace never happened; the back doors had been left
open; people seeped then tricked then poured in when it had been ascertained
safe. Cleopatra was not "good looking" by standards of what is in sociogibberi-
sh called the "somatic norm image" of today; my initial reaction upon looking
at the portrait medallion in Peter Green's new Alexander to Antony was, "gradu-
ate student." (My apologies for having months ago called Cleo a "genetic
defective"; this was a carryover of slander spread by the ultimate winners: She
was the smartest of her dynasty and spoke seven languages including Egyptian.)
Patton fought on a peripheral front.
   McLuhan, another figure of the sixties, said as usual the obvious when lett-
ing on that the content of television was the movie and of the movie the novel.
   A chain of accptable-to-wildly-profitable fictions led back to some "event"
which may not have occurred, may have occurred muchly otherwise, may have not
occurred within the causal matrix represented, or may have occurred in altoget-
er different context.
   A decontextualized event otherwise represented however accurately has been
misrepresented altogether.
   And an event is decontextualized when isolated from its causal branch points
in political, social, economic, and all other histories: "evenementelle" plus
"structurelle" plus "la vie quotidienne."
   ****
   If you haven't guessed let me tell you that I'm right now trying to grind
out, like hamburger from my mother's ancient - she used it in the 1940s - crank
operated meatgrinder: just what happened here last Thurday and on Tuesday. For
the first last only time Stony Brook was the scene of a campaign rally for a
major party's candidate for the presidential nomination. Specifically, Jerry
Brown. There was a crowd of 3,000 filling the concrete amphitheater steps. It
snowed. Brown's first appearance in Suffix County, that was Thursday.
   What did I hear?
   Cannot rightly recall.
   My failing memory is not much crutched by a copy of the Stony Brook States-
man, the remedial-English students' irremediable newspaper.
   The text of the speech is not printed; quotations are scattered promiscuous-
ly, their order randomized. Buried in the middle is this one which came near
the beginning: "'Two hundred and seventy miles of river in Arkansas is full of
chicken fecal matter because of the poultry influence on the Clinton administ-
ration...The Tyson poultry company is one of the major players' in Clinton's
administration."
   And a little later Clinton was "the poultry candidate."
   The leading contender for the Democratic nomination had just been called
both "chicken****" *and* "chicken[=poultry]," which among little kiddies is an
invitation to fisticuffs. Or is that what I heard?
   [Two undergraduates were walking home. One said, "Gonna be sure to watch the
news tonight, man; gonna have a cassette loaded in that VCR betcher ***." These
days no longer bizarre: You weren't there unless you documented the event; any
more than if you lost the slides you really went on vacation.]
   Tuesday, such voters as condescended to vote indicated by the numbers and by
the exit polls that Clinton was not much respected; despised to the point in
fact that he won the closest thing to losing. Brown on the other hand, of the
two candidates campaigning, finished *third*.
   ****
   This morning, Professor John H. Gagnon of the Department of Sociology, the
World's Leading Authority on three different things and Siver Medalist for a
fourth, said solemnly, "The country is hallucinated."
   ****
   Having never managed a socially acceptable hallucination even with LSD,
wherefrom I learned at most that I had wow & flutter in my cheapo audio
turntable, was in a country which if hallucinated tout entier perforce coerced
me right along with it into its hallucinated state.
   ****
   What did the present say about the past?
   ****
   What did the past say about the present?
   ****
   Tired. Will think about it after two days unthinking about it.

Daniel A. Foss
dfoss@ccvm.sunysb.edu
DFOSS@SBCCVM.BITNET
Comments: Gated by NETNEWS@AUVM.AMERICAN.EDU