Facsimile Magazine, Published by Haoyan of America. Volume Four, Number Eleven, 2010. ISSN 1937-2116.
Facsimile November 2010
Facsimile Magazine, Published by Haoyan of America. Volume Four, Number Eleven, 2010. ISSN 1937-2116.
In my life, I've done everything. There are only three things I haven't been - a ballet dancer, a jockey and a politician. Given that the first two jobs are out of the question, I'll throw myself into politics.
- Bud Spencer
by Mr. X, 1971
This account was written in 1969 for publication in Marihuana Reconsidered (1971). Carl Sagan (Mr. X) was in his mid-thirties at that time. He continued to use cannabis for the rest of his life.
It all began about ten years ago. I had reached a considerably more relaxed period in my life - a time when I had come to feel that there was more to living than science, a time of awakening of my social consciousness and amiability, a time when I was open to new experiences. I had become friendly with a group of people who occasionally smoked cannabis, irregularly, but with evident pleasure. Initially I was unwilling to partake, but the apparent euphoria that cannabis produced and the fact that there was no physiological addiction to the plant eventually persuaded me to try. My initial experiences were entirely disappointing; there was no effect at all, and I began to entertain a variety of hypotheses about cannabis being a placebo which worked by expectation and hyperventilation rather than by chemistry. After about five or six unsuccessful attempts, however, it happened. I was lying on my back in a friend's living room idly examining the pattern of shadows on the ceiling cast by a potted plant (not cannabis!). I suddenly realized that I was examining an intricately detailed miniature Volkswagen, distinctly outlined by the shadows. I was very skeptical at this perception, and tried to find inconsistencies between Volkswagens and what I viewed on the ceiling. But it was all there, down to hubcaps, license plate, chrome, and even the small handle used for opening the trunk. When I closed my eyes, I was stunned to find that there was a movie going on the inside of my eyelids. Flash... a simple country scene with red farmhouse, a blue sky, white clouds, yellow path meandering over green hills to the horizon. . . Flash... same scene, orange house, brown sky, red clouds, yellow path, violet fields... Flash... Flash... Flash. The flashes came about once a heartbeat. Each flash brought the same simple scene into view, but each time with a different set of colors... exquisitely deep hues, and astonishingly harmonious in their juxtaposition. Since then I have smoked occasionally and enjoyed it thoroughly. It amplifies torpid sensibilities and produces what to me are even more interesting effects, as I will explain shortly.
I can remember another early visual experience with cannabis, in which I viewed a candle flame and discovered in the heart of the flame, standing with magnificent indifference, the black-hatted and -cloaked Spanish gentleman who appears on the label of the Sandeman sherry bottle. Looking at fires when high, by the way, especially through one of those prism kaleidoscopes which image their surroundings, is an extraordinarily moving and beautiful experience.
I want to explain that at no time did I think these things 'really' were out there. I knew there was no Volkswagen on the ceiling and there was no Sandeman salamander man in the flame. I don't feel any contradiction in these experiences. There's a part of me making, creating the perceptions which in everyday life would be bizarre; there's another part of me which is a kind of observer. About half of the pleasure comes from the observer-part appreciating the work of the creator-part. I smile, or sometimes even laugh out loud at the pictures on the insides of my eyelids. In this sense, I suppose cannabis is psychotomimetic, but I find none of the panic or terror that accompanies some psychoses. Possibly this is because I know it's my own trip, and that I can come down rapidly any time I want to.
While my early perceptions were all visual, and curiously lacking in images of human beings, both of these items have changed over the intervening years. I find that today a single joint is enough to get me high. I test whether I'm high by closing my eyes and looking for the flashes. They come long before there are any alterations in my visual or other perceptions. I would guess this is a signal-to-noise problem, the visual noise level being very low with my eyes closed. Another interesting information-theoretical aspects is the prevalence - at least in my flashed images - of cartoons: just the outlines of figures, caricatures, not photographs. I think this is simply a matter of information compression; it would be impossible to grasp the total content of an image with the information content of an ordinary photograph, say 108 bits, in the fraction of a second which a flash occupies. And the flash experience is designed, if I may use that word, for instant appreciation. The artist and viewer are one. This is not to say that the images are not marvelously detailed and complex. I recently had an image in which two people were talking, and the words they were saying would form and disappear in yellow above their heads, at about a sentence per heartbeat. In this way it was possible to follow the conversation. At the same time an occasional word would appear in red letters among the yellows above their heads, perfectly in context with the conversation; but if one remembered these red words, they would enunciate a quite different set of statements, penetratingly critical of the conversation. The entire image set which I've outlined here, with I would say at least 100 yellow words and something like 10 red words, occurred in something under a minute.
The cannabis experience has greatly improved my appreciation for art, a subject which I had never much appreciated before. The understanding of the intent of the artist which I can achieve when high sometimes carries over to when I'm down. This is one of many human frontiers which cannabis has helped me traverse. There also have been some art-related insights - I don't know whether they are true or false, but they were fun to formulate. For example, I have spent some time high looking at the work of the Belgian surrealist Yves Tanguey. Some years later, I emerged from a long swim in the Caribbean and sank exhausted onto a beach formed from the erosion of a nearby coral reef. In idly examining the arcuate pastel-colored coral fragments which made up the beach, I saw before me a vast Tanguey painting. Perhaps Tanguey visited such a beach in his childhood.
A very similar improvement in my appreciation of music has occurred with cannabis. For the first time I have been able to hear the separate parts of a three-part harmony and the richness of the counterpoint. I have since discovered that professional musicians can quite easily keep many separate parts going simultaneously in their heads, but this was the first time for me. Again, the learning experience when high has at least to some extent carried over when I'm down. The enjoyment of food is amplified; tastes and aromas emerge that for some reason we ordinarily seem to be too busy to notice. I am able to give my full attention to the sensation. A potato will have a texture, a body, and taste like that of other potatoes, but much more so. Cannabis also enhances the enjoyment of sex - on the one hand it gives an exquisite sensitivity, but on the other hand it postpones orgasm: in part by distracting me with the profusion of image passing before my eyes. The actual duration of orgasm seems to lengthen greatly, but this may be the usual experience of time expansion which comes with cannabis smoking.
I do not consider myself a religious person in the usual sense, but there is a religious aspect to some highs. The heightened sensitivity in all areas gives me a feeling of communion with my surroundings, both animate and inanimate. Sometimes a kind of existential perception of the absurd comes over me and I see with awful certainty the hypocrisies and posturing of myself and my fellow men. And at other times, there is a different sense of the absurd, a playful and whimsical awareness. Both of these senses of the absurd can be communicated, and some of the most rewarding highs I've had have been in sharing talk and perceptions and humor. Cannabis brings us an awareness that we spend a lifetime being trained to overlook and forget and put out of our minds. A sense of what the world is really like can be maddening; cannabis has brought me some feelings for what it is like to be crazy, and how we use that word 'crazy' to avoid thinking about things that are too painful for us. In the Soviet Union political dissidents are routinely placed in insane asylums. The same kind of thing, a little more subtle perhaps, occurs here: 'did you hear what Lenny Bruce said yesterday? He must be crazy.' When high on cannabis I discovered that there's somebody inside in those people we call mad.
When I'm high I can penetrate into the past, recall childhood memories, friends, relatives, playthings, streets, smells, sounds, and tastes from a vanished era. I can reconstruct the actual occurrences in childhood events only half understood at the time. Many but not all my cannabis trips have somewhere in them a symbolism significant to me which I won't attempt to describe here, a kind of mandala embossed on the high. Free-associating to this mandala, both visually and as plays on words, has produced a very rich array of insights.
There is a myth about such highs: the user has an illusion of great insight, but it does not survive scrutiny in the morning. I am convinced that this is an error, and that the devastating insights achieved when high are real insights; the main problem is putting these insights in a form acceptable to the quite different self that we are when we're down the next day. Some of the hardest work I've ever done has been to put such insights down on tape or in writing. The problem is that ten even more interesting ideas or images have to be lost in the effort of recording one. It is easy to understand why someone might think it's a waste of effort going to all that trouble to set the thought down, a kind of intrusion of the Protestant Ethic. But since I live almost all my life down I've made the effort - successfully, I think. Incidentally, I find that reasonably good insights can be remembered the next day, but only if some effort has been made to set them down another way. If I write the insight down or tell it to someone, then I can remember it with no assistance the following morning; but if I merely say to myself that I must make an effort to remember, I never do.
I find that most of the insights I achieve when high are into social issues, an area of creative scholarship very different from the one I am generally known for. I can remember one occasion, taking a shower with my wife while high, in which I had an idea on the origins and invalidities of racism in terms of gaussian distribution curves. It was a point obvious in a way, but rarely talked about. I drew the curves in soap on the shower wall, and went to write the idea down. One idea led to another, and at the end of about an hour of extremely hard work I found I had written eleven short essays on a wide range of social, political, philosophical, and human biological topics. Because of problems of space, I can't go into the details of these essays, but from all external signs, such as public reactions and expert commentary, they seem to contain valid insights. I have used them in university commencement addresses, public lectures, and in my books.
But let me try to at least give the flavor of such an insight and its accompaniments. One night, high on cannabis, I was delving into my childhood, a little self-analysis, and making what seemed to me to be very good progress. I then paused and thought how extraordinary it was that Sigmund Freud, with no assistance from drugs, had been able to achieve his own remarkable self-analysis. But then it hit me like a thunderclap that this was wrong, that Freud had spent the decade before his self-analysis as an experimenter with and a proselytizer for cocaine; and it seemed to me very apparent that the genuine psychological insights that Freud brought to the world were at least in part derived from his drug experience. I have no idea whether this is in fact true, or whether the historians of Freud would agree with this interpretation, or even if such an idea has been published in the past, but it is an interesting hypothesis and one which passes first scrutiny in the world of the downs.
I can remember the night that I suddenly realized what it was like to be crazy, or nights when my feelings and perceptions were of a religious nature. I had a very accurate sense that these feelings and perceptions, written down casually, would not stand the usual critical scrutiny that is my stock in trade as a scientist. If I find in the morning a message from myself the night before informing me that there is a world around us which we barely sense, or that we can become one with the universe, or even that certain politicians are desperately frightened men, I may tend to disbelieve; but when I'm high I know about this disbelief. And so I have a tape in which I exhort myself to take such remarks seriously. I say 'Listen closely, you sonofabitch of the morning! This stuff is real!' I try to show that my mind is working clearly; I recall the name of a high school acquaintance I have not thought of in thirty years; I describe the color, typography, and format of a book in another room and these memories do pass critical scrutiny in the morning. I am convinced that there are genuine and valid levels of perception available with cannabis (and probably with other drugs) which are, through the defects of our society and our educational system, unavailable to us without such drugs. Such a remark applies not only to self-awareness and to intellectual pursuits, but also to perceptions of real people, a vastly enhanced sensitivity to facial expression, intonations, and choice of words which sometimes yields a rapport so close it's as if two people are reading each other's minds.
Cannabis enables nonmusicians to know a little about what it is like to be a musician, and nonartists to grasp the joys of art. But I am neither an artist nor a musician. What about my own scientific work? While I find a curious disinclination to think of my professional concerns when high - the attractive intellectual adventures always seem to be in every other area - I have made a conscious effort to think of a few particularly difficult current problems in my field when high. It works, at least to a degree. I find I can bring to bear, for example, a range of relevant experimental facts which appear to be mutually inconsistent. So far, so good. At least the recall works. Then in trying to conceive of a way of reconciling the disparate facts, I was able to come up with a very bizarre possibility, one that I'm sure I would never have thought of down. I've written a paper which mentions this idea in passing. I think it's very unlikely to be true, but it has consequences which are experimentally testable, which is the hallmark of an acceptable theory.
I have mentioned that in the cannabis experience there is a part of your mind that remains a dispassionate observer, who is able to take you down in a hurry if need be. I have on a few occasions been forced to drive in heavy traffic when high. I've negotiated it with no difficult at all, though I did have some thoughts about the marvelous cherry-red color of traffic lights. I find that after the drive I'm not high at all. There are no flashes on the insides of my eyelids. If you're high and your child is calling, you can respond about as capably as you usually do. I don't advocate driving when high on cannabis, but I can tell you from personal experience that it certainly can be done. My high is always reflective, peaceable, intellectually exciting, and sociable, unlike most alcohol highs, and there is never a hangover. Through the years I find that slightly smaller amounts of cannabis suffice to produce the same degree of high, and in one movie theater recently I found I could get high just by inhaling the cannabis smoke which permeated the theater.
There is a very nice self-titering aspect to cannabis. Each puff is a very small dose; the time lag between inhaling a puff and sensing its effect is small; and there is no desire for more after the high is there. I think the ratio, R, of the time to sense the dose taken to the time required to take an excessive dose is an important quantity. R is very large for LSD (which I've never taken) and reasonably short for cannabis. Small values of R should be one measure of the safety of psychedelic drugs. When cannabis is legalized, I hope to see this ratio as one of he parameters printed on the pack. I hope that time isn't too distant; the illegality of cannabis is outrageous, an impediment to full utilization of a drug which helps produce the serenity and insight, sensitivity and fellowship so desperately needed in this increasingly mad and dangerous world.
by Debbie "Blondie" Harry, from High Times, October 1978
WELL, UH, HIGH TIMES called me and said they were dedicating this issue to sex or some such and that I should write some such. Since sex is one of the main activities people get high for, and since I have been asked "how does it feel to be a sex symbol?" about a thousand million times in the last six months, it all seems very natural, and after all nature is gonna win no matter what all you suckers do.
Sex sells more magazines, books, movies, records, etc., than anything else. Only violence runs a close second, with flying saucers and drugs tied for third. 1 wish I had invented sex.
"So tell us how it feels to be a sex symbol, Debbie."
Well Johnny... uh, why don't you go luck yourself with a double water-spurting pulsating, rubber, inoterized, body-temperature dildothen and only then will you know the truth, the answer you have sought.
The real truth is that I learned about sex at the zoo. As a cute but clumsy four year old, I was taken to the Central Park zoo by my mom. We stood peacefully watching the bears while they sat and scratched themselves, when out of the blue came superjcrk in his weather-beat-in raincoat (a la Columbo) flashing his worn-out privates. My mom was pissed off. I couldn't have cared less, except he seemed to have three of 'em and I couldn't get much of an explanation from my mom.
Years later I discovered that the male of the species is equipped with nuts and that these in fact were what I had mistaken for two extra wang.
My only sex-related problem is the unexpected biological urge at the most inappropriate time, e.g., lines at the supermarket or crowded buses and elevators. And if! can be completely open with all of you perverts, the supermarket is the place for a turn-on. 1 can't say exactly what it is that turns me on: the bright lights, the Muzak, the smells of the deli department floating around the aisles or the bloodied uniforms of stiff whiteduck material. 1 don't know, I don't know. And it doesn't cost twenty-five cents to get in!
Pinball is sex. The flashing lights, the tensions, the faade, the score, the climax and the anticlimax, and after all, as the pros say. -All you need is one good ball."
Game shows on TV are sex-big orgasms as we see what's in the box! Everyone knows rock 'n' roll is sex.
Just sex is not really sex because it's private and you're not supposed to think about it. Better you should go beat one of your friends to death with a meat ax. That would be much less perverse.
I can only think of one market where sex has not been totally exploited: furniture. We use furniture most in connection with active and passive sex.
I got a couch
Shaped like a penis
I just hope
It don't come between us.
Well, when Wayne County saw this couch of mine, he was lit to be filled with "Crocodile Tears." (The Mumps.) I couldn't blame him, after all those years of searching the 42nd Street and Village sex shops for batterypowered cock rings and padded toilet seats, the poor thing was exhausted. 1 am surprised that there isn't more furniture like those tables in Clockwork Orange or even more bidets like in Europe.
I really did have a couch shaped like a penis, only it made one of my chairs pregnant. and I threw them both the luck out.
So that's my report. Don't believe everything you read, however, especially things related to rock 'n' roll, since no one in the business can read or write, especially rock 'n' roll writers and/or musicians. And remember, boys, if you're tired of shaving, get laid more, so your hormones come out of your cock instead of your face.
Love and X,
- Debbie "Blondie" Harry
by Salvador Dali (excerpts)
"WHEN, IN THE COURSE OF HUMAN CULTURE IT BECOMES NECESSARY FOR A PEOPLE TO DESTROY THE INTELLECTUAL BONDS THAT UNITE THEM WITH THE LOGICAL SYSTEMS OF THE PAST, IN ORDER TO CREATE FOR THEMSELVES AN ORIGINAL MYTHOLOGY [...]"
"The committee responsible for the Amusement Area of the World's Fair has forbidden me to erect on the exterior of 'The Dream of Venus' the image of a woman "with the head of a fish. These are their exact words: 'A woman with the head of a fish is impossible.' This decision on the part of the committee seems to me an extremely grave one [...] because we are concerned here "with the negation of a right that is of an order purely poetic, and imaginative, attacking no moral or political consideration. I have always believed that the first man who had the idea of terminating a woman's body with the tail of a fish must have been a pretty fair poet, but I am equally certain that the second man who repeated the idea was nothing but a bureaucrat. In any case the inventor of the first siren's tail would have had my difficulties with the committee of the Amusement Area. Had there been similar committees in Immortal Greece, fantasy would have been banned and, what is worse, the Greeks would never have created their sensational and truculently Surrealist mythology, in which, if it is true that there exists no woman with the head of a fish (as far as I know) there figures indisputably a Minotaur bearing the terribly realistic head of a bull."
"Any authentically original idea, presenting itself without 'known antecedents', is systematically rejected, toned down, mauled, chewed, rechewed, spewed forth, destroyed, yes, and even "worse — reduced to the most monstrous of mediocrities. The excuse offered is always the vulgarity of the vast majority of the public. I insist that this is absolutely false. The public is infinitely superior to the rubbish that is fed to it daily. The masses have always known where to find true poetry. The misunderstandin..g has come about entirely through those 'middlemen of culture' who, with their lofty airs and superior quackings, come between the creator and the public."
"ARTISTS AND POETS OF AMERICA! IF YOU WISH TO RECOVER THE SACRED SOURCE OF YOUR OWN MYTHOLOGY AND YOUR OWN INSPIRATION, THE TIME HAS COME TO REUNITE YOURSELVES WITHIN THE HISTORIC BOWELS OF YOUR PHILADELPHIA, TO RING ONCE MORE THE SYMBOLIC BELL OF YOUR IMAGINATIVE INDEPENDENCE, AND, HOLDING ALOFT IN ONE HAND FRANKLIN'S LIGHTNING ROD, AND IN THE OTHER LAU-TREAMONT'S UMBRELLA, TO DEFY THE STORM OF OBSCURANTISM THAT IS THREATENING YOUR COUNTRY! LOOSE THE BLINDING LIGHTNING OF YOUR ANGER AND THE AVENGING THUNDER OF YOUR PARANOIAC INSPIRATION!"
"Only the violence and duration of your hardened dream can resist the hideous mechanical civilization that is your enemy, that is also the enemy of the 'pleasure-principle' of all men. It is man's right to love women with the ecstatic heads of fish. It is man's right to decide that lukewarm telephones are disgusting, and to demand telephones that are as cold, green and aphrodisiac as the augur-troubled sleep of the canhandes. Telephones as barbarous as bottles will free themselves of the lukewarm ornamentation of Louis XV spoons and will slowly cover with glacial shame the hybrid decors of our suavely degraded decadence [...]"
ONE THING IS CERTAIN[...] YOU WHO ARE LIKE THE VERY STALK OF THE AIR, THE HALF CUT FLOWER OF HEAVEN! YOU, MAD AS THE MOON, NEW YORK! [...] YOU MAY WELL BE PROUD. BE PROUD. I GO AND I ARRIVE. I LOVE YOU WITH ALL MY HEART."
1. By dint of declaration the so-called Cinema Verité is devoid of verité. It reaches a merely superficial truth, the truth of accountants.
2. One well-known representative of Cinema Verité declared publicly that truth can be easily found by taking a camera and trying to be honest. He resembles the night watchman at the Supreme Court who resents the amount of written law and legal procedures. "For me," he says, "there should be only one single law: the bad guys should go to jail."
Unfortunately, he is part right, for most of the many, much of the time.
3. Cinema Verité confounds fact and truth, and thus plows only stones. And yet, facts sometimes have a strange and bizarre power that makes their inherent truth seem unbelievable.
4. Fact creates norms, and truth illumination.
5. There are deeper strata of truth in cinema, and there is such a thing as poetic, ecstatic truth. It is mysterious and elusive, and can be reached only through fabrication and imagination and stylization.
6. Filmmakers of Cinema Verité resemble tourists who take pictures amid ancient ruins of facts.
7. Tourism is sin, and travel on foot virtue.
8. Each year at springtime scores of people on snowmobiles crash through the melting ice on the lakes of Minnesota and drown. Pressure is mounting on the new governor to pass a protective law. He, the former wrestler and bodyguard, has the only sage answer to this: "You can´t legislate stupidity."
9. The gauntlet is hereby thrown down.
10. The moon is dull. Mother Nature doesn´t call, doesn´t speak to you, although a glacier eventually farts. And don´t you listen to the Song of Life.
11. We ought to be grateful that the Universe out there knows no smile.
12. Life in the oceans must be sheer hell. A vast, merciless hell of permanent and immediate danger. So much of a hell that during evolution some species - including man - crawled, fled onto some small continents of solid land, where the Lessons of Darkness continue.
Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, Minnesota April 30, 1999
Werner Herzog
by Anthony Cardinale, The Buffalo News, 1994
Jimmy McMillan was back in Buffalo Sunday, campaigning for governor as a write-in candidate who travels by bus or on foot and stays in city missions.
McMillan, 50, of Brooklyn was thrown out of the Democratic State Convention in Buffalo June 2, for interrupting Gov. Cuomo's speech. McMillan had arrived in Buffalo a few days earlier after campaigning on foot all the way from Brooklyn.
"I am overqualified to be governor," the retired letter carrier said during an exclusive interview in the Burger King at the Metro Transportation Center.
"I'm ready for this job," McMillan said. "In 1993, on Oct. 25, I climbed to the top of the Brooklyn Bridge and stopped the traffic for 12 hours. I only ask for a chance to be heard, and I will not be ignored."
At the time, he was running for mayor of New York City.
"I was taken to Kings County Hospital, they kept me n the psychiatric ward," he said. "They kept me for two week, and they had to let me go. But Jimmy McMillian is for real."
McMillian's french fries were growing cold, and he had taken just oen bite out of his hamburger.
Asked about Cuomo's education, law degree and 12 years experience as governor, McMillian said, "With all his college education he should know better. Those who came up through the middle class and believed that Mario was the man, he has destroyed them."
If elected governor, McMillan said he will declare a state of emergency, then cut taxes, balance the budget and bring businesses back to New York State. This will create jobs, he said, and the economy will grow as more people spend money.
"I'll have the authority to issue a state of emergency because of economic hardship," he insisted. "If I have to take the State of New York to court as governor, I will."
Born and raised in New Smyrna Beach, Fla., McMillan left Chisbolum High School while in the 12th grade to join the Army in 1966. He was a helicopter door gunner with the 227th Aviation in Vietnam.
McMillan, who is single, said he has a 21-year-old daughter who is disabled because of his exposure to Agent Orange while in Vietnam and a 15-year-old son who has learning disabilities.
After retiring in 1987 from the U.S. Postal Service, he studied to be a private investigator.
"I've investigated the state for 6 1/2 years, and I know what the people need," he said. "I've seen it with my own eyes."
McMillian's platform also calls for restoring the death penalty.
"I'll show you how much of a deterrence it is," he said, "See, I'm a veteran that knows. How can you rehabilitate a man that kills a man here in the street? Let him out in three years? I spent three years in Vietnam and killed maybe a thousand. As a gunner, that tore me apart. I haven't been rehabilitated one day. So what kind of rehabilitation is there for (a street killer)?"
McMillian was asked what he will do in January, after Cuomo or State Sen. George Pataki is sworn in as governor.
"If Jimmy McMillan is not elected governor, he can say that he tried," he replied.
Our policy is; "Clean up your backyard, before you clean up someone else." Which means, until the problems the people in every City, Town, and County are 100% resolved. Problems such as:
Until these crisis that are effecting the every day lives of the people are under control, we will not involved ourselves in politics as usual.
NYS is a War Zone and 5 years later our soldiers are still coming home in body bags. If the questionnaires you send us are not directed to issues listed above, please don't send to us.
This Administration/Government stands for change. We believe, if you are to be different and to bring changes that will benefit the 180 different ethnic groups that reside in the State changed must first start with self. POVERTY, and the total destruction of a State caused by the issues (Crisis) listed above.
There is an estimated 20 Million people in the State of New York and nothing has been done to crate jobs other than relying on the Federal government for recourses when there are enough recourses in the State of New York for the State to be independent enough to carry its own weight. Our plan will crate more than 10 Million Jobs we are talking about bringing back Mama and Papa Stores, they vacated the State after being driven out by High Rent. We're going to bring them back.
How did we/Why are we having so many problems in the State of New York?
We Voted into Office the wrong people, and there is no other clear way to put it. The Democratic and the Republican Party has drifted far away from the needs of the people, they are more concerned about Party POWER. One having more power over the other, to gain control, and we the people re caught in the middle.
Conclusion
We at the Rent Is Too Damn High Party are Democrats, who are just plain Fed-Up we are taking a giant step in trying to reform a Government that has failed to provide quality leadership for the people in the State of New York for so many years. In return they have drained the people of all of their recourses by:
The high cost of living the people in New York State was preventable. Leadership has a responsibility to make sure the people can provied a roof over their head and Money in their pocket. But that is not what going on at all they are looking to become Elected Officials for there own personal gain and other reasons other than for the people. Politics As Usual (we don't think so)
With just the stroke of a ball point pin the Governor can change the direction of a State forever by creating jobs, Restoring Family Values, Reducing Rent, Cutting Property Taxes, making College Tuition FREE for 4 years for all New Yorkers (who meet the residential requirements), caring for our seniors by making Medication and Health Care FREE, Reforming our Prisons & Judicial System, Total Price Reduction, Price Control (price control by government is something we the people never wanted but we have no other choice. After the attack on the World Trade Center, Greed and Opportunity took over and we must do this to bring a Government to the State of New York it never had. After we have took control of all that has been said and have past laws to prevent what has happen from ever happening again with the help of the voters we will set up a price control). The Rent Is Too Damn High Governor has one goal, crushing the existing crisis that has put the people in total hardship.
If you are paying attention to what is written there is no need for us to continue
If you have paid attention to what is written you would understand without questions
Thank You,
The Rent Is Too Damn High Party, Chairman
from Horizon Magazine, Winter 1966
Protesting the demolition of venerable old buildings is becoming one of the more popular outdoor sports. Marching up and down with hortatory placards is the way Americans usually play the game, but they might well take note of the more decorative (if equally ineffectual) mode of complaint recently devised in Amsterdam -- dolls. The thickly populated facade shown on these pages belonged to an eighteenth-century warehouse on Amsterdam's Waterloo Square, which used to he the center of a large Jewish community before the Nazis killed most of its inhabitants. One survivor was Pieter de Jong, a ragman who lived in the warehouse. Upon learning that his dwelling was to be razed to make room for a new town hall, he thought up his protest speciality. Word soon got around, and others who did not wish to see the old quarter altered sent an army of dolls to Mr. dc Jong. An American pop artist who calls himself Victor and lives on a barge in a nearby canal sent along four of his works, which account for such English slogans among the dolls as "Royalty is the best policy" and the more relevant "Jesus Saves."
The demolition squad arrived in spite of it all, and the dolls had to be evacuated. Progress, or whatever it is called, will not he impeded. But Protest, for a brief time, held the fort in a most original way.
by Samuel Sillen, from Masses & Mainstream, April 1948
WITH sickening hypocrisy the American press has for weeks been bemoaning the "death of democratic Czechoslovakia:" But the loud lamentations of Hearst and Luce and the whole war camp scarcely disguise their real feelings. Theirs is the fury of frustration. For a door has been slammed in their face. This is 1948, not 1938, and the treacherous intrigues of Munich will not work again. The official protests of Washington and London merely emphasize for the people of Czechoslovakia, though no further emphasis seems necessary, the arrogance with which Anglo-American imperialism meddles in the internal affairs of a sovereign member of the United Nations.
Those in America who truly want to understand the significance of the democratic victory in Czechoslovakia will look around the world today and examine the "democrats" who are being financed and armed by our government. They include the monarchist-fascists in Greece; General de Gaulle, who aims to lead all Western Europe in a military crusade against the Soviet Union and the new democracies of Eastern Europe, provided, of course, that he be made the generalissimo of such a "Christian crusade"; the feudal Arab rulers and chieftains who realize how potent the smell of oil is to their moneyed friends in the West; General Franco, who has made a graveyard of his country; Chiang Kai-shek, who is facing defection even from his close associates in the Kuomintang bureaucracy as the Chinese Communists mobilize tens of millions in their triumphant fight for freedom after age-old darkness and misery. These are the friends, the beneficiaries of American aid throughout the world. These are the Truman-Vandenberg "democrats."
"The new fascist international is taking shape," writes Alvarez Del Vayo, former foreign minister in the Spanish Republic. 'The Marshall Plan may be free from overt 'political conditions,' but even in advance of its adoption it has hastened the emergence of Europe's fascist and near-fascist leaders." But the policy-makers in Washington, not content with loans, subsidies, gifts, bribes and every conceivable form of pressure, are now forced to go further. Their pretenses of humanitarianism have worn thin. Economic aid is "not enough" and "too late," the American people are now told. The call is raised for open full-scale armed intervention on the part of the United States, intervention in Greece, intervention in China, intervention in Italy and France should the people in democratic elections vote resoundingly for the parties of the Left. Now the Wedemeyers speak not of the cost in dollars but "the cost in blood."
Only the most naive, surely, can any longer believe that it is possible to separate this aggressive militarism from the stepped-up tempo of repression at home. The bipartisan program for world supremacy and for defeating the advance of democracy and socialism inexorably stimulates and demands a full-scale program for destroying the people's living standards and liberties at home. Of the rapidly accumulating sectors of attack, we may here note two recent and vivid examples.
The attack of the Un-American Committee on Edward U. Condon, nuclear physicist and head of the Federal Bureau of Standards, has helped further to illuminate the real character of this Committee and its role. Many people who retained illusions that only Communists were the targets of Rankin and Thomas have learned better from the Condon episode. The most conservative scientific bodies in the country have protested the palpable smear of this man. They begin to recognize that all scientific inquiry is at stake. And yet many voices are still heard protesting merely that the Un-American Committee has "stumbled," that it is "failing to differentiate." This is, for liberals, suicidal deception. It is a rationalization for failure to fight for the outright dissolution of the Committee.
But it is impossible to divide the struggle for freedom in America today into "differentiated" compartments. The fascist attacks of the Committee on Eugene Dennis, Gerhart Eisler, Leon Josephson, the executive board of the joint Anti-Fascist Refugee Committee, can no more be separated from the attack on Condon than the earlier attack on Harlow Shapley can be separated from the persecution of the progressive film writers and directors of Hollywood. This is one fight. It is the fight of all true democrats for all true democrats. The Communist leaders are being persecuted for the same reason that the scientists and writers are being persecuted: that is, for their concern to prevent a fascist blackout in America, for the leadership they are offering to the progressive forces pf the country.
THAT is the meaning of the sadistic, illegal deportation proceedings against John Williamson, Claudia Jones, Alexander Bittelman, Gerhart Eisler, Ferdinand Smith, Charles Doyle, Irving Potash and other anti-fascist fighters. Here the police state in the making has shown its features most nakedly. Trade union leaders, leaders of the Negro and Jewish people, Communist officials, have been summarily arrested, thrown into a cell at Ellis Island, and denied bail. The heroic hunger strike of Williamson, Eisler, Smith and Doyle dramatized for the whole world what was happening in an America whose ruling class and press were simultaneously shedding tears over "the death of democracy in Czechoslovakia." Vigorous mass demonstrations of protest helped win the elementary right of bail from a hostile government. Here again Communists were included among the first victims. But may anyone suppose that Attorney General Tom Clark, the would-be Himmler who has supervised these infamous proceedings, is concerned only about Communists? Every trade unionist, every Negro, every Jew, every progressive intellectual is threatened by Tom Clark's and J. Edgar Hoover's crusade on behalf of their political masters to stamp out the voice of opposition to the war program.
The deep concern of the American people is increasingly demonstrated in the political actions of the masses. It is this concern for peace, for civil liberties, for abundance that is powering the third-party movement headed by Henry A. Wallace. Those who counted on the apathy or fear or confusion of the common people were mistaken. The great victory of Leo Isacson in New York has pinned back the ears of the politicians in both the Democratic and Republican parties. The amassing of a half million signatures for Wallace in California has dramatized the broad base of the third-party movement. People no longer ask themselves how many votes Wallace will get; they are asking whether he will win.
And this movement, swelling in its proportions, brings us back to democracy in Czechoslovakia. For it is an integral part of the people's movement throughout the world. The plain people here are threatened by the American monopoly capitalists no less than the plain people in other parts of the world. It is one world, and the resistance to imperialism is indivisible. The triumph of Czechoslovakia's new democracy is a triumph for the forces of peace in America. The growing strength of the third-party movement here invigorates all those who, whether in Greece, Palestine or China, are fighting for independence.
And in this country too, as everywhere else in the world, the Communists will play their part as an indispensable sector of the general democratic front. The attempt to imprison, deport, outlaw Communists is central to the strategy of the warmakers and fascists. That strategy must be defeated if the peace forces are to win.
by Michael Moriarty
I wonder what Charles Darwin might think if he were alive today, as the virtual Empire of Progressive Liberalism climbs up the back of his The Origin of Species, carrying the operator's manuals of Marxism: Das Kapital and The Communist Manifesto. We are now aware of the thousand-year plan of social engineer Sir Francis Galton, who envisioned a new and improved humanity created by Eugenics: the scientific usurpation of human evolution by Man, leaving our Father Almighty, that Divine Intelligence of Creation, and our Mother Earth bereft of any say in the New World Order.
We are mammals engaged in an institutionalized thinning of our own herd by abortion and tacit approval of ethnic cleansings in Africa, where the governing architecture of godless Socialism prevails.
Galton analyzed The Origin of Species. All the bloodletting throughout human history confirmed Darwin's doctrine of the survival of the fittest, and therefore Galton concluded that scientists were obliged to use death deliberately as the major cure for Mankind's ills, and the cadavers, the specimens from all that death, would serve as microscopes through which to envision the perfect man and woman, and all in the name of progress.
Can the human race be taught to bow before a God by the name of Science? As one of the pagan religions of human sacrifice, Science is indeed the unparalleled God of them all.
The Bible condemns all religions of human sacrifice except that of Christ, in which God came down to sacrifice Himself in order to end all human sacrifice, and to teach us the eternal meaning of Humanity as a force reflecting (but not usurping) the Divine. We are urged to follow the laws of nature and "be fruitful and multiply."
Never has Evil so infected human consciousness as now, when Progressive Liberals behave like Nazis and Planned Parenthood is neo-speak for Eugenics. With "moral ambivalence," these progressives will continue to fog the minds of our children.
"Don't you see the moral ambivalence in 9/11?"
Their certainty of "moral ambivalence" is the measure of "progress" toward our acceptance of death. "RU486 or against it?" The rewards it is bringing ' "Crime, poverty and hunger lowered exponentially by abortion!," scream the headlines in progressive newspapers and magazines ' versus the seeming insensitivity of the United Nations towards Rwanda.
Sir Winston Churchill called Eugenics "the perverse science." The Clintons called the faith within the Koresh compound "perverse religion," and provoked the incineration of 80 men, women and children.
Which is the greater molestation of a child? Sexual assault or death by abortion or, as in the case of Waco, incineration? You tell me.
Even slaves and Vietnam War protesters had a chance to escape to Canada. Where's the escape route for gestating infants?
"Do unto gestating infants what you would not want done unto your own gestating infancy."
That is the New and Improved Golden Rule under Progressive Liberal Protestants. The silence around the subject of abortion in the United Church of Canada and the Church of England is deafening.
We ARE animals. There's no denying that now.
Aside from Darwin's undeniable proof, there's a depth of homicidal animality in the surgically robed physicians of abortion that makes tribal warfare look like a domestic dispute. Over 1.5 million abortions a year are performed in America alone! That is not including those unborn children poisoned by the RU486 abortion pill.
There is death going on now, all over the world, prompted by Man: a humanicide that leaves all plagues, wars, ethnic cleansings and genocides, tsunamis and forces majeures in the minor league of massacres.
How can the human race, led by the highest intellects, with IQs in the 180s, be as ignorant as lemmings, to simply let our Rhodes Scholars and Nobel Prizewinners help us run off the cliff and into death?
We are Divine Animals!
There is, as Galton repeatedly pointed out, Hereditary Genius. There is also Divine Genius, as epitomized by Sir Winston Churchill.
Recently, Rudolph Giuliani likened himself to Churchill. And yet the former Mayor of New York favours abortion on demand.
I ponder what Sir Winston might say about a pro-abortionist imitator. Likely: "How dare a would-be Mussolini like Giuliani even pretend to know my name, let alone proselytize a perverse science, and assume my identity!"
