Varn Vlog
Abandon all hope ye who subscribe here. Varn Vlog is the pod of C. Derick Varn. We combine the conversation on philosophy, political economy, art, history, culture, anthropology, and geopolitics from a left-wing and culturally informed perspective. We approach the world from a historical lens with an eye for hard truths and structural analysis.
Varn Vlog
The Politics of Paranoia: Tom Forcade and the politics of the 70s
Have you ever wondered how drugs and publishing might intersect in a world of counterculture? Journey with us and guest Sean Howe as we explore the shadowy life of Thomas Forcade, a paradoxical figure of the 60s and 70s counterculture. We shed light on the radical politics of the era and delve into the tension between the counterculture 'heads' and the politicos 'fists.' Together, we unpack how the cocaine trade started to overtake marijuana in 1978, changing the game for everyone involved.
As we navigate the labyrinth of Forcade's story, we touch on the paranoia of the time, fueled by the FBI's involvement and the political shifts that marked the late 70s. Marvel Comics' influence on the reconciliation of art and commerce is brought to the forefront, hinting at similarities with today's climate. Moreover, we delve into the intriguing comparison between the drug culture of the psychedelic period and the opioid crisis that followed, offering a fresh perspective on how these historical events shaped the path for future generations.
Join us and Sean Howe for a captivating conversation that weaves together history, culture, and politics, offering a unique understanding of a largely unknown figure and his influence on the world as we know it today.
Crew:
Host: C. Derick Varn
Intro and Outro Music by Bitter Lake.
Intro Video Design: Jason Myles
Art Design: Corn and C. Derick Varn
Links and Social Media:
twitter: @varnvlog
blue sky: @varnvlog.bsky.social
You can find the additional streams on Youtube
Current Patreon at the Sponsor Tier: Jordan Sheldon, Mark J. Matthews, Lindsay Kimbrough, RedWolf
Hello and welcome to Varnblog. I'm here with Sean Howe on. We are talking about his book Agents of Chaos, which is the story of Thomas Foucault Frashad how do I say his name?
Speaker 2:That's Frashad. Even people who knew him don't always know.
Speaker 1:Okay, and Agents of Chaos is the subtitle tells you a lot Thomas Frashad, high Times in the Paranoid End of the 1970s, and I think this book is a document of 10 years of US culture. That seems really important in a lot of ways. I always think of the 70s in two phases In my mind. The 70s goes from like 68 to like 1983. And there's 68 to 78. And then there's that weird transition period and, like you know, it's basically the first part, the end of the current administration, the first part of the Reagan administration.
Speaker 1:And I researched this separately for the fact that I've been writing a book on Christopher Lash. And to understand Christopher Lash required understanding the new left of the of this time period. And I realized when I first encountered your work that I didn't know about this guy. But I knew about this guy, like it was one of these things where, like, oh, I know High Times and I've heard about different things that Thomas Frashad did, and yet he didn't register to me at all and he incorporate, like he seems to embody a lot of the paradoxes of this time period. He's incredibly entrepreneurial but he's a Marxist, you know he's. He seems he is constantly calling other people sellouts and yet he's monetizing everything. He is hyper paranoid, yet While we can't say that he was an agent, he does smell legitimately of someone you might think of being one, and so I find his situation as portrayed in your book like really illuminating, and we see the beginnings of things that would lead to the counterculture of the 90s and even today.
Speaker 1:I mean, one of the things that I found interesting right right now is today is a time where you meet entrepreneurial Marxists. The only other time where I can really think where that was super common is actually the late 1960s, early 1970s, like it's it's. There's parallels, though, but the world that Foucault also lives in seems totally different from ours, and as a person who was born pretty much right after he died, just to date myself, it does seem like ominous in some ways. What, what, what's about to happen after he's gone? So the preview a whole lot of your book all at once, but just so people can get a better sense of him. You know who? Why is it so hard to? I haven't even tried to, but to encapsulate Thomas Foushott, he's, he's a very difficult man to get a grasp on, even though the people we you know, we associate with him, particularly like the Yippies. You know, abby Hoffman, jerry Rubin are much clearer figures in the popular imagination, even if they're kind of forgotten now, than Foushott is like. Why do you think that is?
Speaker 2:Well. So I think one of the things that interested me about him was that he existed in so many different subcultures and yet I had never heard of him. I think you know there was a so. So Tom Foushott sort of came onto the scene in like 1969 is when he started really rubbing shoulders with a lot of you know what in the parlance of the times were called movement heavies people like Johnson, claire and Abby Hoffman and Jerry Rubin and almost immediately people were suspicious of him. You know he was someone who didn't want to be photographed. He didn't use his real name, he was very kind of contentious with other people. You know he was. You know, in a sense, like everything that you might expect a narc might be.
Speaker 2:And there was a period after that where he actually was trying to get his name into papers when he was part of, you know, the Zippy movement, which was, you know, a pushback to the Yippies kind of a, you know, a purer than thou enterprise.
Speaker 2:He was, he was, he was actually going for publicity, but High Times is what he's best known for retroactively and yet he never allowed his name to appear in the magazine while he was alive.
Speaker 2:So he he kind of appeared with, with no known background at the end of the 60s, briefly had his name in newspapers and on television, and then he kind of disappeared from the spotlight again. And so some of some of his you know, I guess lack of infamy is by design, you know, whereas you know, hoffman and Rubin were so celebrated for figuring out how to turn the you know media to their advantage, for sod abandoned that strategy, you know, for, I think I think, reasons of self preservation, wanting to not have too high a profile with law enforcement, and and so it's kind of, you know, his legend has kind of simmered a little bit in the ensuing decades, but he's, he's like a little bit of. I remember speaking to one of his friends when I was at the early stages of researching the book, and at the end of our conversation this guy said to me good luck with your ghost story, and that's kind of the elusive nature of Tom Forsad. He covered his tracks pretty well.
Speaker 1:I imagine doing some of the research for this was pretty complicated, because we're even talking about a milieu that was both deliberately underground I mean, I think we know about the alternative to press of the late 70s. We we know about the sectarian militant press of the late 60s the underground press is known about, but it's also kind of it isn't known, because unless you go visit the archives that, as you document, fashad actually created, it's very hard to find these things. They were ephemeral, they were deliberately hard to trace back to people. It was well, a lot of these people thought that they were basically running Iskra out of you know, out of small New York apartments, and that side of this is very interesting to me. But it also indicates you know, the kind of person that Forsad was running with and he seems to have a lot of the same traits.
Speaker 1:But you're right, the key one is he hides himself. He's involved in more illicit activities in Hockman and Reuben, at least that we know of. He tries to outratical position them but also is very frustrated about people's frustrations with his petty bourgeois affectations, and that seems to be a fascinating paradox. And unlike Reuben and Hoffman who kind of disappear but are able to pivot their media fame, basically by the mid-delay 60s, into their just personal fame. Forsad doesn't try to do that, even though it seems like he could have. I mean, do you have any you know, what are the various theories that his friends may have had against? If we have so little, we are constructing an image of a person who was very paranoid and also maybe had reason to be. But what do you think were the reasons why he was not able to do that in the same way? Yet clearly he was incredibly motivated culturally by the time he got to them in 1970s.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think so. I think he really admired Abby Hoffman in particular. I think he maybe always had a little bit of a fraught dynamic with Jerry Reuben. He really admired Johnson, clare, the White Panthers, and so he in a sense kind of modeled his trajectory after them. I think in the same way that the MC5 were sort of like the house band for the White Panthers.
Speaker 2:I think Forsad was occasionally looking for a band that could sort of be his soundtrack, first with David Peel in the Lower East Side, and then I think that's possibly what he thought he could maybe get out of the Sex Pistols very naively at the end of the 70s when he was racing around and trying to get them to cooperate with being in a documentary. I think he loved how agitated both of those groups made people. So I think he was kind of almost riding on the coattails of some of those other activists. Activists slash celebrities. And when he kind of turned on the yippies, which was kind of a fallout over the way that credit and money for Steel, this Book did or did not come his way, he basically used the yippies strategies against the yippies. The zippies were, as you said, kind of out radicalizing the yippies.
Speaker 2:I think that yippie-zippy split is, I think, very relevant today in terms of the way the left kind of is fractured. And I think what happened in terms of his pursuit of fame was he was indicted on firebombing charges stemming from an arrest at the 1972 Republican National Convention in Miami, and I think it scared him the idea that he might actually end up behind bars, and it was at that point that he never really sought publicity again. And meanwhile the same thing that was happening in the background was the underground press. Newspapers around the country were sort of faltering and flailing in the wake of the end of the Vietnam War. There was just a much less of a coherent set of goals for the left and there was also like a dearth of record company ads all of a sudden. So high times kind of came out of this need to find a next step. And since high times was happening at the same time that Forsad's drug enterprise was really growing, it made sense for him to keep his name out of out of everything.
Speaker 1:I think one of the things I find interesting about both Forsad's group and the Yippies that is different than a lot of the other groups we talk about from this time period, is that there is a way in which in the popular imagination in the 90s forward, amongst like Gen Xers and older millennials, that for a while hippies and political radicals were merged because of the counterculture associations with both, and you even saw this in critiques of both. I mean Joan Didion, for example, had articles about both things and her early writings on the time back when also she was more of an express conservative, and so there was a kind of Reagan attempt to meld them. But the Yippies are where they actually are melded and the Forsad's group is another one where, like these things do really become one thing. The only thing on the broader left that you can think of that was kind of like that, where politics and cultural movements were kind of merged. That way they either tend to be right wing, frankly, or they're like the situation is in France after May 68, which is kind of a parallel, but way more European and way less tied into popular culture, way more tied into art house culture and art culture, and that element of this feels weirdly modern and it feels very. It does feel familiar for those people who remember, like the associations of the punk movement of the 90s, not of the actual 70s punk movement. I always find it interesting that people assume that 70s punk was highly political and it frankly wasn't. There were politically motivated bands, particularly in Britain but also in the United States. But if you look at the CBGB's roster and try to figure out politics from that, you're going to have a hard time. But it does seem to be a tie in here. I thought that you brought up the soundtrack.
Speaker 1:You also mentioned in your book how they really hated Rolling Stone, which we think of today as like well, that's the countercultural institution that got made streamed in the 80s and 90s. But from the standpoint of these people they thought that oh well, no, these people are engaging in the arts, but they're only engaging in the kind of recreational side of this. There's no politics to it. What I find interesting in this and if you know the way Marxist in the talk they would be, what you'd hear later on is like this is the birth of lifestyleism. But this would not have been a critique back then.
Speaker 1:This would have been an attempt to merge politics and culture into a more total worldview, and I think you also document that that attempt was also responding to the fact that just pure radical politics, after the Vietnam War solved and after, ironically, it's Nixon who solves it just sucks the air out of all those movements almost immediately. Plus, you have the way that you think about the Black Panthers and the key figures, that either they're either dead, imprisoned or they become famous Like it's a very strange time where it seems like okay, you sell out or something very bad has you. And Fashad's interesting because he does seem to have the inclination to sell out, but not on the terms of the general culture, even the recuperation of the counterculture, and he doesn't ever seem to fully renounce the radical politics. He just seems to think that it should be moved from Marxism to drugs. I guess why do you think that happened and what do you think it says about the culture of the time?
Speaker 2:Yeah. So I think you're right to kind of pin that merging of politics and culture on the yippies, and I think in some ways it seems like a great idea, like use popular culture as this vehicle to politicize kids, and that's certainly the White Panthers were also very much all about that. They wrote manifestos about exactly that and wanted to use the White Panthers like fan club to radicalize teenagers. And so, yeah, I think the terms that Fashad uses and I don't think he coined them but I think they're really useful are the heads and the fists as kind of the two, the counterculture people and the politicos, and certainly I think a lot of the SDS, those various factions were, I think, very resistant to the countercultural lifestyle and certainly the communists in the United States were very suspicious and sometimes downright derisive of that. But that whole merging, I think for people like us who grew up in later decades and kind of received the Rolling Stone kind of narrative of the 60s I mean Rolling Stone but also the CNN version, whatever there's these movies which are side effects like. There's these movies which are soundtracked to, like the young bloods get together and you see protest marches. It's all kind of one continuum of stop the Vietnam War and listen to Hendricks, and I think the fact that those two movements were not always one thing and in fact they were seldom merged very perfectly, it's something that's lost on a lot of people now, but Forsad certainly was a subscriber to that merging of philosophies and Rolling Stone magazine even as early as 1968, that Jan Wenner penned an article about the Festival of Life plans for bands coming to play Chicago in 1968.
Speaker 2:And he was aghast and he basically railed against. He said, like these radical politics, people are trying to exploit rock and roll, which is such a funny inverse of what we think of as like a sellout. He was basically like keep this precious rock and roll away from something so petty as politics. Something that I think probably was a sign of his worldview to come. But back to your question of like why. I mean Forsad really was kind of in a sense he was like the last radical superstar standing. In a way he was. I think probably the most successful transition that people made in the early 70s was probably people who got into organizing local politics or people who got into electoral politics, people whose arcs are not as splashy, but the people who remained at the fringes of culture, they often kind of fell into either jail time or in some cases that was a result of kind of a violent revolutionary mentality, or they were drug casualties or they just kind of disappeared. And so I think that was a very interesting question, because they just kind of disappeared.
Speaker 1:I think we also forget the age casualties too.
Speaker 2:Oh sure, I was just thinking of the 70s, but in like 1975, there was nobody that was like waving the flag for the same on a level that was in the national consciousness. I don't think the SLA is really like a substitute for what had been existing only a few years later.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I was thinking about Max Eastman's book Revolution in the Air, which is kind of his reflections on this, and it's always had this interesting question to me and in some ways your book. One of the reasons I read it was it also through the life of this one person tries to answer. The same question is where did all the left go exactly? We are talking about a movement that, if you added them all up, it was unlike in the in like 1948, where there's 50,000 people in the Communist Party and that's all about the ballpark, but it's one thing or two things. You got the Communist Party and the Socialist Party and they're very real things and while they're not huge in comparison to the population they're not really they are big enough to be legitimately scary.
Speaker 1:And I think sometimes we actually have to like remind ourselves now that, like the Red Scare was a ridiculous overstatement but people were legitimately afraid of it before even McCarthy picked it up.
Speaker 1:It had been happening at a state to state level by the time you get to like the late 60s. I think, if Eastman is to be believed and if you believe the numbers reported between what's been declassified with Cointel Pro and these organizations on numbers, you almost get a million people in the far left but spread out over like 85 groups Like it's. And yet by the middle of the 70s I mean before we even get to Reagan by the Carter administration they already seem to be just gone, just completely gone. And how can a political movement that was, you know, I like to remind people bombing stuff they weren't bombing people, admittedly, I mean, but bombing property stuff like constantly for like four or five years, was seen as the apotheosis of the SDS and that movement, that it was believable even to some people in the State Department that there could be an actual viable revolutionary group in the United States, to just kind of like completely disappear?
Speaker 1:I mean, and yeah, I know it wasn't actually truly completely disappear. I know that, like some of these weird sectarian groups like they came back in the 90s, like you know it was, but most of those people just went away and for sure it seems to be one of the pass out. I mean, there's the other obvious path, like the Gene Kwan path which goes from radical malice to normal Democrats and mayor of Oakland, like you know, that was a thing, and she's not the only one to do it Are the quote neoconservative path, which is to go from radical Marxist to Skip Jackson Democrat to part of commentary magazine into the Reagan administration. Usually those are seen as Trotsky's. I tend to be a little bit careful with that because I also think some of that Sanctis and also people like David Horowitz were actually coming out of malice movements. But that doesn't explain what happened to the majority of the people. And I think actually Fashad does sort of give you a hint, like it was a cultural shift but people did see drug culture and political culture as somehow loosely wedded or a kind of cultural radicalism that maybe could revive political radicalism.
Speaker 1:I'm not quite sure. Like, the more I read this book, the less clear I was on what these people were actually thinking they were going to do politically but other than legalized weed. But I was like, okay, but once you get that like, what do you achieve? And I also like to remind people that this is like in 1976, I don't think anyone sees the drug war coming, like very few people see the drug war coming, not to the extent that it was going to hit, and it hits earlier than I think people realize.
Speaker 1:One of the things I was reminded of listening to an interview with you but also reading your book the interview was on the Long 70s show is that really the drug war starts like around the time Fashad dies in 1978. And it's the loosening of policies of under the Cardinal Administration get really tight actually right before the end, you know. And then it you know Reagan, you know empirically like really makes it state policy. That and being linked to the right wing is actually somewhat of it wasn't obvious actually in to me in 1970, like that's where it would go. So that's an interesting thing to notice that your book really kind of points out that like no one sees the drug war coming.
Speaker 1:It seems like this is a political one. That's easy and inevitable and that's just ultimately very wrong. And in a weird way it actually rhymes with the end of Fordist economic policy and the reason why I say that is that also, and we always think of like Reagan as a great neoliberalizer, but all that stuff starts actually in the Carter administration and reversals made in the Carter administration. So it seems like there is very definitely something changing in the cultural response between the. You know, would you put the end of this kind of like new left, like post-68 radicalism at its first stage around like 1972, 1973, somewhere in there?
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, I think so. I mean, I think that's about exactly right. I think the presidential, the national conventions of 72, I think, were kind of the last, yeah, the last time you saw like major protests for a long time, you know, or they were maybe even more demonstrations than protests. And you know, I think the other thing, the other thing that we haven't really, you know, mentioned is, of course, like you know, the economy shrunk and so, you know, people in their 20s were suddenly, you know, they were not, they didn't have as much time on their hands because they all had to be working more.
Speaker 1:So that was also happening like around 73, I think, and- that's always been interesting to me, though, because Marxists historically predict that the economy shrinking is going to be good for them, and it's almost never true that it is Like. What did they like note that? Like they always think that, like the coming economic crisis is going to be where they finally get their moment up, and just like that's never what actually happens.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean, I guess you could, I mean certainly, certainly, you know, I think the 2008 crash probably began a lot of-.
Speaker 1:Oh yeah, I think it revived Marxism, but it didn't revive Marxism's political chances, just revived it as a cultural category kind of Well, yeah, no, I guess.
Speaker 2:I just yeah. I think maybe it activated the left a little bit, not so much Absolutely, I would agree with that.
Speaker 2:But yeah, I would say that, like 72, 73, you know, and then you know the end of the Vietnam War, or at least you know for all intents and purposes the end. And then I think, yeah, 1978, I started to really you know I mean I'm sure part of it was kind of a confirmation bias you know that that's where Forsad's story ended and so. But I really started to see that as kind of like some real nails in the coffin of that 60s dream. And you know, even in just like the month that Forsad died, you know was the, you know the Jones Town Massacre and the assassination of Harvey Milk and Newt Gingrich came to Congress also with the same month, even internationally, like the.
Speaker 1:Irradiate. Revolution happens and, like you, start seeing cracks in national liberation movements being run by communists, they start going in other directions. I mean there's it's really like there are years where in retrospect, stuff looks like a whole lot is changing. You know, the 78 seems to be a big one and it's that period between, like the 1970s, that period between like 78 and 83 seems to be like this massive shift culturally.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I think about, you know, all the nostalgia for the 50s it gets like given to Gen Xers and older millennials because of the shift that happens in the 80s and, in some ways, the 50s for them. Actually, interestingly, and I don't know what you think about this for most of the American political spectrum the 50s is actually the paradigmatic model, whether they realize it or not. For the right it's culturally, and for the left it's like the last time we had a functional quasi-rep where it fell state at all. So you know, and it happened under very specific conditions, and a lot of things that people think come out of the New Deal actually come out of policies from the 50s into the 60s. It's just the 50s versions were also a lot more racist and you know explicitly, in a lot of cases it's, I think, that kind of generational thing is interesting to think about.
Speaker 1:When we think about, like a person like Fashad, who in some way, like I said, he seems very familiar to me in some ways and then completely far in others it's just a very but then I think about what? Would someone like him have been in the 50s? And I can't like, I guess a beat, I don't know, I don't have a like a clear, you know.
Speaker 2:Yeah, up until you know and I'm giving away like a little bit of a you know a reveal from the book here, but you know, up until 1967, you know he was basically like a you know a Ayn Rand reading like Gearhead, he was really into hot rods and he was into, you know, james Bond movies and you know he was like, you know it was like something out of American graffiti and it wasn't, I think, until the, you know the summer of love presented itself as this commercial opportunity for him that I think he started getting very quickly involved in the counterculture. And I think you know, I mean you know it's funny, having spent so many years working on this, on this book, I mean I still there's still so many questions that I have about him but I think that those values of the counterculture, I think that he actually did embrace them, even though maybe his entrance to the counterculture and left his politics, you know, may have been kind of mercenary.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it would be the first time that's happened. The person who enters mercenary becomes way more of a true believer than the people who started off as true believers in the beginning and then went through it. I mean, I think that's happened, arguably a lot, but it's.
Speaker 2:I think he you know, he what's the word I'm looking for he sort of encapsulated, like you know, this dichotomy between, you know, his revolutionary politics and capitalism and he had grown up wanting to be like Howard Hughes and I think he never really let go of that. So you've got this like magazine magnet magnate, who you know kind of is always haunted by the fact that the magazine is doing so. Well, you know, he's very conflicted by the realizing of his dream to be a captive of industry.
Speaker 1:Well, he kind of was, and one of the things that your book really pointed out to me is even in this like ephemera period of the early underground press, before it was even the alternative press, the amount of investment that record companies, for example, were putting in it and like 1971, money was shocking to me. I was like, oh so that there was literally $100,000 in ad revenue you know, $100,000 in ad revenue from Columbia records going to the underground presses until they made a decision to change it and like I guess it was 1971, 1972, somewhere in there. That's wild to me. That just seems crazy. I can't imagine that today. I can't like advertising as big as it is. It's hard to imagine some of those companies even advertising on Facebook, much less like basically giving the equivalent of zines, massive injections of money by large national corporations buying ads and stuff that would publish Marxist, revolutionary stuff. That's crazy to me.
Speaker 2:I was gonna say you did. I mean you did see that in the 90, like you know, in the sort of like post-Nirvana 90s, you did see, you know major labels, you know putting ads in zines all the time, but there was not that political aspect, which I think is probably why I think it was the FBI told you know, like Columbia records, to cut it out.
Speaker 1:I was actually gonna. It rhymes with the 90s and yet it doesn't like this. I was in the zine world in the 1990s. That's how I got into this alternative publication whether we are in today and that was a teenager.
Speaker 1:But there was very much a gulf between like pop culture zines and then like the anarchist zine world, even though theoretically they overlap.
Speaker 1:Theoretically they even talked about some of the same bands but they didn't really overlap because your ability to pull like ads and stuff were dramatically different, unless you were doing some cultural politics kind of stuff, which a lot of that stuff ended up being. What was interesting for me to look at from from the standpoint of for shot, is I didn't realize that a lot of the infrastructure that we relied on not so much fact sheet five, which is what I relied on, but the, the literal alternative press like which, which was a thing like you know it alternative press magazine was still was still running Tom tomorrow cartoons actually I mean you can still find it today to but like in the in the 1990s, and it was even some of the same people literally cooking up this stuff. We had no idea that it had this prior, but like very political other than a vaguely culturally like it felt culturally left wing, but that it came out of a radical may use, not something I had any idea of as a teenager. Like at all, it wasn't talked about really.
Speaker 2:That's another thing that happened in the maybe the mid to late 70s is you know the well it was in, I think, 73 that the underground press syndicate changes name to the alternative press syndicate. But by the end of the 70s those alt weeklies were really, you know, getting into like kind of service journalism. You know there's there's a great book by David Armstrong called trumpet to arms which is kind of about the, the, the transition from the underground press to, you know, the alternative press. You know the alternative alternative weeklies. You know that later were largely just sort of like swallowed by, you know corporations and now are often run by you know private right wing investors, if they exist at all.
Speaker 1:The major cities still seem to have them. But it was interesting I was thinking about this as I was reading your book again and this whole thing when I was in the zine world in the 1990s. That very much felt like the, the adjunct to us. It was a slightly more but like the NPR version of zines, but it was still in the same world. Today, yes, you can find.
Speaker 1:If you're in a major city, you can find an alternative weekly and you can get like it's probably the only place where you can get actual local news, because the local papers don't really carry local news anymore. Ironically, most of us written by the AP. That's how they remain free. You wouldn't. I don't think hardly anybody really associates in alternative culture. It's more just like you know how you keep your neighborhood marketable and a lot of the places in the country that used to have them like where I'm from originally in the southeast, they just gone away and to to think of that, I mean there does seem to be.
Speaker 1:I would love I'm definitely a trigger that book you mentioned because I would love to like think about what it means, about the mainstream vacation, then derasination of the alt weeklies, like what.
Speaker 1:What is it about One of the things that you talked about in the, in the, in the ups. I mean the other thing people have to realize like anyone well, not anyone, but almost anyone can throw together a podcast with 300 bucks and and enough money for a description and a hosting fee, and if you don't like crap, you don't even need that. The amount of work it took even in the 90s to do this and this is with computers Compared to what it takes to do a podcast now or like what ups was doing, which was building kind of a gray market media empire, it's wild to think about the amount of actual effort and man hours that would have had to go into that like and how long that infrastructure lasted. I mean, that's the other thing, and there was so much of it. I mean one of the things your book you know, I knew about high times and that's why I realized, oh, I know this Thomas Bushack guy, but I didn't know him is this I knew him as good man, I believe.
Speaker 2:Gary Goodson.
Speaker 1:Goodson, yeah, you know that's one thing, but like there's tons of stuff in that culture and it's also interesting for me to think about. Like there's a whole lot of like marijuana culture that just everybody knows now but in 1975. No, you didn't like. Probably if, particularly if you weren't in a city like you yeah, you, you knew about it from mythology, about Woodstock, whatever, but like strains of stuff, what the stuff is supposed to look like, where you find it, how you test it, how you make sure it's good, I don't think most people would have known that at all and so that's covered by high times. But there's all kinds of mags, magazine you talk about. You cover in there that I was like. There's a magazine for drug dealing that's incredibly audacious and dangerous, like it was.
Speaker 1:It was crazy to think about.
Speaker 2:I had a slick glossy magazine as well.
Speaker 1:Yeah, dealer magazine, yeah but having worked in I'm a teacher, but I've also worked in publishing off and on for like 20 years and like, thinking about trying to pay for running up glossy today, it just seems wild that anyone could have done that from an underground press perspective, like they just, you know, we'd be lucky to get newsprint, and it's just kind of crazy to think about. And that's what and that's also I mean. To me that like makes it clear how much money was in this, because printing was also not particularly cheap in this time period.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, and and, and you know, the first issue of high times was funded, you know, by, you know, according to several accounts, by a big shipment of Santa Marta gold, colombian marijuana, and those, those businesses, the, the drug dealing business and the publishing business were kind of intertwined for a while and I think it was eventually high times started paying for itself. But the same, yeah, the same underground networks, the same distribution networks that you know that we were just talking about that, that kind of survived well past the underground paper era. You know, those were also the, you know the, the head shop networks that foresaw it exploited to get high times around. And in fact it was the, that underground distribution network, that attracted Abby Hoffman and that was the reason he wanted, foresawed, to be involved in steal this book is because he wanted to go outside of normal publishing distribution models and first on was the guy who knew how to do that.
Speaker 1:That's one of the things that I learned from you about still this book is like you know, you can get still this book now as published by I don't know who's publishing it today, but it was. You know you could get it in Barnabas Nobles when I was a kid Ironically even with like all the info in the back about where to write to get stuff, which is really funny because you know it was like 1996. There's no way that any of those addresses are still any good, but but you can get that book then. But it was kind of amazing when I was reading, like you said, something like 30 publishers turned it down and that's part of why Hoffman got like. Hoffman did try to get it released by mainstream presses, making presses currently to try to build an alternative distribution network for it.
Speaker 1:That's that's fascinating to me. And yeah, the the whole, the head shop infrastructure and the fact that that was it became convenient to use that as a way to distribute radical political material, is kind of interesting. But it's interesting in a way that normally when you learn about drugs intersecting with the far left, it's like this party has to fund itself illegally, like the FARC are even like the Crips who, while they weren't from the Black Panthers, were clearly trying to emulate them and form like community defense leagues and they get sucked into the drug world and they get sucked into organized crime and they stay there. And I think, because this particularly was only dealing with weed, this kind of goes in a different, although still illicit direction. I mean, it's just, it's not, you know, it's not like for shot accidentally built like a street gang network or a mafia network. By the way, and that's another C change of you know of 1978, is that's really, you know, that's really when cocaine starts to overtake and narcotics and radical political beliefs is a very quick way to get federal prison.
Speaker 2:And that's the marijuana business. And you know that's. That is the point at which you know a lot of you know, kind of you know, almost like the weekend warrior version of the of the drug trade. Like you know, just guys like you know getting in their prop plane and listening to Jimmy Buffett and bringing in a load, like you know that's when some of those guys start to realize that, oh, you throw in some coke and everything gets very profitable very quickly.
Speaker 1:And you have, you know, you have you know, of course, like the violence in Miami is, is is starting at that time to Well, I was actually thinking about this was like it's interesting that a lot of infrastructure later on is like oh, this is a way to get yourself involved in creating a cartel, like you know it's, which is, which just isn't on the same, it's not on either end of that distribution stream, is not as likely at at the point that we're talking about. So one of the the things about the war on drugs I think it's always interesting, it's really obvious when you think about it, when you think about like prohibition it should have been very obvious, it's going to happen. But like a lot of things that were illicit and kind of illegal and shady become just straight out like no, we're we're like running out of criminal stuff and we're dealing with trafficking on a level that's really really disturbing and we're going to have to do stuff. That's that you wouldn't have to have done. And it also an interesting looks like in a feedback loop with the drug war, because now you have more actual deaths related to it. You have real evidence of of social malfeasance and you know it just spirals from there and also the drugs you're talking about. It very different, I mean. It's interesting to me One of the things your book pointed out to me why for shot didn't have some of the worst face that could have happened to him.
Speaker 1:I mean, he has a pretty bad fate. That just spoil for those of you who don't know. But is that marijuana is just not that bad of a drug. Why? So you know you're not dealing with the stuff you see, with the cocaine and heroin addicts later, even though this is the time period where that stuff is beginning to trickle in. You know, and a very real sense, and I always, I always think about that when we, when we think about like the difference in drug culture, of the psychedelic period in the counterculture, and then later on is I'm like well, there's not that much cocaine, there's not that much, there's not that much true narcotics, yet it's mostly hallucinogens and weed, and that's actually a kind of very different world than I don't know. The opioid crisis, for example.
Speaker 2:Sure.
Speaker 1:Right, so that's I was. I was thinking about a lot about why for shot doesn't seem to have some of the worst outcomes that we hear about from this time period, because he just doesn't seem to get into narcotics hardly at all.
Speaker 2:Right, right, I mean, I think, yeah, I think, you know, I think actually you know quite coily ludes which are, you know, considered such kind of like a punchline of a drug. But I think, given his, you know, bipolar condition, I think quite ludes were were pretty deadly for for him. But that's that's kind of the extent to which he really dabbled in downers.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I was actually going to ask about that because, for those of you who know, no, he, he, he kills himself in 1978 after his his best friend dies, correct? Yeah, that seems to be part of what prompts it, but it's. You know this, this guy is so enigmatic that we can't truly know what's going through his head. I mean, the one thing I'll say about, about reading your, your, book is I feel like I get to know the 70s a lot better from it. I don't feel like I know Thomas Pashai, like like it's just, and I don't know that that the one thing that your book seems to portray is like nobody else does either, like including the people who knew him really well. Like it's just, it's very hard to get a read of this guy, but, um, that does seem kind of important.
Speaker 1:I was going to ask you did his politics like? He always considered himself a radical, and that's very clear, but did his politics shift substantively or were they always kind of just like vague country and radicalism in the first place? Like do you think he was actually like a doctrinaire Marxist? Like what do you make about that?
Speaker 2:I don't think he was probably ever a doctrinaire Marxist. I think he probably was, you know, contrarian, libertarian, as he was, you know, growing up and into college. It probably didn't, you know, probably wouldn't have even called himself a libertarian, Probably would have been too contrarian to identify as a libertarian. And I think, yeah, I think he never, like I said, he never really let go of his, his capital. Is he never fully let go of his belief in capitalism? I guess, you know, I mean, whether it was like, you know, just like the tools of the master that he was going to use, but I think he was, you know, I don't know what you would call a other than just a radical leftist. I think, as you said, like contrarian and kind of moving along. You know different, different identities within that. For a while I think he might have referred to himself as like a anarcho-syndicalist. For a while, you know, I'm not sure.
Speaker 1:I mean, that's one thing I can that felt familiar to me, if you remember, like the radical left of the 90s not today where, like somebody could be a oh, Andrew, andy and libertarian one move, one moment, and then they could be like an anarcho-syndical wholists or an anarcho-communist next, and then they could go back to being like a chomsky anarchist, but they only vote for Democrats. It was like you know that kind of variability, the variability I think still exists today. But now it's like are you a social Democrat one week, or Stalinist the next, or whatever, like those? That's where the cluster of that behavior is moved.
Speaker 1:That behavior seems the same and I find that kind of fascinating as a way to build yourself as a media character. But the thing about him seeming to be a true believer in some vague, nebulous notion of radicalism is that you're right, he never really is willing to sell out enough to establish himself. In a way. We're gonna remember him, partly because he's involved in so many things that are just outright illegal. But it also seems to be pretty sincerely a lifestyle and political choice that he makes. Like it is not just that he couldn't cut it as a Jerry Rubin or an Abby Hoffman figure, and so that's a very interesting thing. And the one thing that I think is so fascinating is to like compare him to the white Panthers, which he's really inspired by. But the white Panthers are they're an explicitly a Marxist-Leninist association inspired by the black Panthers. Like they have very real political commitments, that there's a pretty wide spectrum of what those commitments actually mean, that that's during the black Panthers do. But you really couldn't be off the socialist spectrum and be in the black Panthers and be comfortable Like that just wasn't really possible. You could probably definitely be in any of the facade milieus and be fairly comfortable, even if you didn't have socialist politics or anarchist politics or anything like that. As long as you had, like radical cultural affiliations, you can probably still pull it off. So that's an interesting pivot and I do think it explains his survivability in a way, when that radical politics, like we said, just kind of disappears in six years but it almost dissolves as fast as it came up.
Speaker 1:And I always do like to remind people that like hey, most baby boomers were not in either the counterculture or the radical political scene, that's just the people that we write the most about. It was actually a pretty conservative time and to like it really was a very brief period that seemed to come out of nowhere and then go away almost as fast it was. It's a very strange thing to think about like, like that although in our conversation I was thinking about like maybe why 2007 is different than 1972. And that's 1972 didn't involve higher levels in unemployment, like you, the kind of economy sucked but there was work. It's just you weren't getting paid anything for it and actually more people had to work. So you know, christopher Lash actually makes this observation Riley, as a kind of mild critique of feminism but like, oh look, the family wage is going away. And now all the women.
Speaker 1:I find it liberating to go and work. How interesting that capitalists are okay with that, like so you know, I think that would change the prospect, because people don't have the time, and that's an interesting thing I want to get into, though I guess we've been hitting at it, but how paranoid this time was, I think the, the pair I mean it's in the title of your book, but we've hit a lot of the chaos and the rapid fire change and you know effectively like I think you break up your book and like basically like four time periods in a course of 10 years and they seem like radically different time periods and we're talking about like three to four years of each one, at most, like so. But the other thing is, the paranoia just gets amped up, amped up and amped up, and I find it interesting because that is something that's different from today, although you still see people calling. I mean, I guess we are in the heyday of conspiracy theories, so maybe-.
Speaker 2:I think we're all paranoid now.
Speaker 1:Yeah, let me rephrase that yeah, we're all so paranoid that it's no longer weird. Yeah, like it's just like this is what we life is like that. Like we know everyone's spying on us. We don't have any pretension of privacy. Like it's. The question is, who are we more comfortable with, corporations or the government? Are we gonna win one other one? Are they even different? We don't know. You know, but in this time period it seems like the paranoia is scarier because it's not normalized, but it's rampant. Like how do you think that contributed to Frischat Particularly? You mentioned he was bipolar. So like this got to have an effect on him. So how do you think that played out for him?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean, I think, as you said, he's involved in all these illegal activities, so he's kind of a magnet for law enforcement. I mean, this is not even getting into the idea of whether or not he's affiliated with law enforcement in any way. And there's also the. I think people talk about Coen's Health Pro today and I think they they talk about the scariness or maybe even the outrageousness of this big government program, but I don't think that they talk as much about the psychological effects that that maybe have had on a generation of activists.
Speaker 1:Between that and the church report. I mean in the church commission and all this stuff.
Speaker 2:And stories about other like surveillance just coming out every year. There seems like there was the army is like doing surveillance or the CIA is doing surveillance.
Speaker 1:No, we just assume it. I mean post 9-11, just like assumed that everybody's doing surveillance all the time and we don't care anymore, cause they like it's just it's an interesting apathy, but it is. I was thinking about this, about, like, how did we get to QAnon? And I'm like, well, some of this stuff has roots interestingly in this time period, I mean, and what's different is okay. Yeah, I've read my Richard Hatch stetter. I know that, like Americans have always been kind of weirdly paranoid and believed in everything from like the Illuminati to whatever. Like that's not new. It's new for that on the left wing of American politics.
Speaker 1:So, that is what's different about the 1970s. This is no longer just a right wing thing, it's a kind of everybody thing and more the left than the right, although left to say kind of overstate that they'll kind of pretend like, oh well, the government never comes after rightist. So I was like dude, do you know how many informants were in the American Nazi party? Like it was a lot. But it's interesting. And the other thing that your book points out, and this is many years ago.
Speaker 1:I worked for Zero Books and I published a book about this called Heavy Radicals, which was about the RCP, one of the more malice things that come out of the SDS, you know, kind of a split from a split of the Communist Party. But one of the things you learn in that book is how these groups were operating and when. It makes it very hard to like separate this is the other irony of Cointel Pro is it makes it very hard to separate what was Cointel Pro and what was weird fractiousness on the part of the left anyway, because what Cointel Pro did was just encourage the fractiousness. Often what you saw, with a few exceptions and the few exceptions are deadly and that's true, but like is they would just exacerbate already existing fractions within these movements, and they did it masterfully most of the time, and we know this because so much of this has been declassified now, but it's like it's kind of crazy to watch. The exceptions are the Panthers, and then one incident with the RCP, where usually what happens when people die, though, is the feds let it, like, leak something to the local cops and the local cops do something crazy. That's usually what happens, but when you read what they were doing, they were just getting very good at finding what the fracture point was and pushing it, but so many of these people, so many of these groups, really were calling with feds that's the other thing they really were. There were infirmits and whatnot everywhere, and in the drug end of this, I think sort of famously in the Panthers.
Speaker 1:That was a real weak point for them, because if you think about where the informants were able to get in and where they could really do damage like, say, hampton it's coming in through their connections in the drug trade.
Speaker 1:That's where they really get informants in, and that's where they're really able to go in and also cover up what cause. You can make it look like drug violence. There's a whole lot of stuff that happens under that aegis. So you gotta imagine that Fashad knows this and either he's directly involved, which your book does not rule out as a possibility there are some real fishy stuff. Or, although I think most of what you indicate is like the only thing that we have evidence for, like people, one or two persons removed from him right, like we don't actually have any, interestingly, anything coming out in the declassified documents on him directly, but that just indicates how close he would have been to it and how much he would have had to throw up to like not get drag netted in. It is kind of amazing to me he only got arrested and charged like as little as he did.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, I mean, there's that story about you know. One of the people who works for him at the Underground Press Indicate talks about you know being pulled over by a cop and Forsad gets out, goes to the, walks over to the cop, car, comes back and they're free to go. You know it's like, or when he throws the pie in the face of the obscenity panel, commissioner, and they just like walk right out. Nobody stops them.
Speaker 1:So you know it didn't take long. That does feel crazy.
Speaker 2:Yeah, to me.
Speaker 2:And so it didn't take very long, you know, for people to you know just outright accuse him, you know publicly, of being an agent of some kind. And you know, I think you know it's. You know it's kind of like in some ways it's kind of funny to watch people like just going back and forth accusing each other, but it's also obviously like that has just horrible, horrible effects for any kind of movement. So you know, you've got. I was talking recently to someone and saying that you know, that meme of like the two Spider-Man's pointing at each other feels like that could have almost been, like, you know, maybe I could have saved the time doing the research and that could have just been like what the pages of the book were. You know, like that's kind of like the picture is worth a thousand words.
Speaker 1:I did get from reading the other books I've read on Co-Ontel Pro that there are points where it's like, well, people are accusing people of being feds who are also clearly feds.
Speaker 2:Right.
Speaker 1:And sometimes they're sincere like people just don't know who's in the organization and who's doing what. It's not like it was coordinated. The other thing I got from reading about this time period on the fed end of things is like well, the feds were also not very. They weren't as organized as you'd expect them to be either. Like it was, some things were a lot more fraud by the see that your pants and you would expect spies to be Right, but maybe you just got the wrong notion of spies.
Speaker 2:Yeah, they just needed like yeah, these activists in many cases just needed like a little nudge and they would do the rest of the work themselves and make each other paranoid. And we also, I mean, haven't talked about it. I don't think I really get into this too much in the book either, but there was also just sort of like the for lack of a better term the identity politics of 69, 70, that had already kind of like split a lot of these groups into factions before that, and so there was a lot of hostility between just like just groups kept splitting in half. I mean even the some of the underground papers. It would be like three quarters of the staff would have an exodus from the publisher of the paper because they thought they weren't being paid enough and they would start their own paper, and so it was just kind of like. I think it was really easy to see all these differences that could be exploited.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's, I mean, what's interesting. There is I think about that in the podcast world today too, it's very easy to and more formalized web magazines like Current Affairs, which had a similar crisis, where, like you, have a unionization movement within the left wing paper, then it causes counterpapers and then counter counterpapers. I've definitely seen that our counter websites today is what it would actually more likely be unless you have significant funding. But what is fascinating to me is I sort of thought that was a leftover of the sellout of SAS 90s and realizing that, no, that really, like I knew about the sectarian factiousness, I didn't think that it also overlapped with, like job factiousness or gonna just start my own, take my ball and start my own magazine factiousness, and in this time period those things overlap and intertwine and makes it very difficult sometimes to figure out. Like why are they actually splitting again? Is this Coentel Pro? Is this legitimate ideological identity differences? Is this actually about work conditions? Is this about somebody sleeping with someone's girlfriend? Like? I just don't know.
Speaker 2:Yeah, there's, like the New York rat, one of the kind of most important of the underground papers in which the women kicked out all the men, and that happened in a number of places where the chauvinist pigs got the boot.
Speaker 1:I think that's fascinating to think about. And we see, I was thinking about the Panthers, because the Panthers we always think about the high point of Panthers, like basically 67 to after 60, and 69, with a really coalesce because they're coming out of SNCC and Stokely, carmichael and all that's going on. And then there's almost an immediate split between, like the Marxist, black nationalist and then like the non-racial Marxist nationalism which like Hampton, and then that leads to like the black liberation army and then all kinds of splits in the Panthers. But the Panthers actually weirdly survived for a long time, like I was surprised to learn that it didn't dissolve until the late 80s, like it was, I mean, that's after. You know all that happened with them, which is a lot. It's, it's, it's a, but they're kind of the odd people out Because most of these groups do not seem to last long. I mean that's the thing about it.
Speaker 1:This seems to be a very unstable time period.
Speaker 2:And Snick of. I mean, you know we're we're largely just talking about kind of like the white radicals and you know, and that's sort of like I guess, because it's, you know, post 66, the racial split had already had already taken place. And so you know I talk in the book a little bit about, you know, the Black Panthers. You know big man from the Black Panthers trying to drum up interest in the United Front Against Fascism conference at an underground newspaper conference, and you know people are are kind of, you know, yelling at him about the chauvinism of the Black Panthers. So he's getting like shouted down by all these white radicals. So so yeah, it's all of, which is to say, like the you know 69, when, when I start the book, a lot of, a lot of, a lot of these splits had already started.
Speaker 1:Oh yeah, I mean you already think about, like what's happened to the FDS by 69, ironically there's just there's, because you know you have all these groups entering it trying to take it over, like it. That makes it more and more fractious. I mean, the group that I was mentioning, the RCP, which was this like split of a split from, and they're still around as a very tiny sectarian Marxist group, but they are. They are still around, although their leader is very old and in France and when he dies I suspect they won't last too much longer than that.
Speaker 2:I was actually surprised to learn recent I mean, you know, the SDS. There was some version of the SDS that continued in the early 70s, you know and I. It's actually hard to find that information about them but there was a, you know, kind of like a post post well, not post weather underground, but post post split version of the SDS that was around in like 72.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I mean the SDS is one of the things until the DSA blew up is one of the things is always interesting because people kept trying to bring it back to you. I mean I remember in the OTSSERS the new SDS which also didn't last very long and that was right after 2008.
Speaker 1:But it was it's it like it kind of breeds eternal, because if you adjust for the size of the population of the country, that's the largest left wing movement since the, since the Communist Party and the in the 40s are the socialist party in the 1910s, like because you know the social party in 1910s, you know they get like what? 15% of the vote, which is crazy.
Speaker 2:I didn't realize that.
Speaker 1:Yeah, they were huge. Their actual membership was probably only like 30,000. But but again, adjust for population size between 1910 and now. And then also, I guess you could say Bernie Sanders is, is gets a maybe, I don't know. I don't actually think his apportions of the electorate actually truly met Deb's size, but I don't. That's a real hard comparison to make because he was within a party and does with outside of one. But the SDS, if you, if you skip popular front period post war, post war war two, but before Red Scare Communist Party, the SDS is massively huger than anything. I mean the technically speaking, the DSA is bigger now, but if you adjust for population size of the country it becomes a lot less impressive.
Speaker 2:So that also you're talking about. You know something that's limited to people, the SDS, limited to people in their late teens and 20s.
Speaker 1:Right, yeah, as opposed to the DSA which can be 85 in and like it's.
Speaker 1:You know you ever you you occasionally meet DSA or two have been in there since it started in the early 80s.
Speaker 1:But one of the things that I mean for for, for Shaw was just such an interesting way to approach this for me, because he does touch on so many of these things the fact that radical politics does weirdly start to dovetail with radical cultural shifts where previously had not and usually doesn't that you you actually see in Fashad's own actions, you see this ability of this kind of countercultural movement to set up institutions and counter institutions that were lasting and I really usually only associate with the right because usually they have outside funding to set up like para institutions but for shot and code they were doing it off of drug money and word of mouth, like that's how they were succeeding and it's it really. You do kind of see a huge shift and, yeah, I, and I think you know your observation that like the reason why the paranoia now doesn't feel all that all that profound the way it does it, because it's not confusing. We've lived under it the entire.
Speaker 2:We've internalized it Like have always been this way.
Speaker 1:So there's. It is sometimes hard for me to put myself back into the head of, like someone in the post war consensus between like 1950 and 1960, 65, where you like generally just trust the government and I'm just like you know it's. I mean, I will say that that's historically also a weird time period because, you know, prior to the world wars that also wasn't true. Like no one trusts the government in the nineties is true either. But like there is this weird period where there, you know, there's a lot of consensus in the United States and it's it's hard for us to like put our heads back there. I think the nineties kind of superficially looks like it, but not really. The only reason it's superficial looks like it is the economy is not terrible, so it's. So it's an interesting thing to think about.
Speaker 1:I always like to pivot a little bit. We'd have to get a bit about Fashad. One of the things that I was interested in is you wrote a book about the history of Marvel comics which doesn't seem like it would relate at all, and yet I kind of think it does. What do you, what did you learn If you were to compare and contrast the development of Marvel comments with, with with Tom Fashad's shenanigans. What do you think we can learn about the shifts in American culture in the 1970s?
Speaker 2:Well, yeah, I mean, I guess, if you're, I mean you know, marvel's greatest transformations were not in the 1970s. It was a pretty static time for for Marvel, but yeah their big transformation is really early, early mid-80s right.
Speaker 2:Well, I mean depending, you know, economically probably the mid-80s, culturally the 60s. You know, I think there are themes, there are sort of common themes in each of them that I neither of which I realized when I was starting to write them. The thing that I that you know, as I worked on the Marvel book, I mean what it really became a lot about was just like the conflict between, you know, the popular culture, conflict between art and commerce, and you know you could say art and capitalism if you want. And with the for SAD book, it was like it was like revolution versus capitalism. You know, in both cases there was just like this, this tension that existed and you couldn't have had. You know, these things couldn't have existed in a vacuum.
Speaker 2:And you know the Marvel comic story is very much about. You know the story that I tell is very much about the business of Marvel comics and how that was always, always created a lot of tension with the artistic ambitions of the people who worked for it. And you know, obviously, high Times, you know, is this weird hybrid of revolutionary ideals. And you know not just that the magazine is a corporate enterprise, but that it, you know it also really commodified marijuana. You know, not that it was the first thing to commodify marijuana, but it really, you know it sort of often treated drugs as like a lifestyle, a kutramat. So so I think that's that's kind of the, the, the major similarity that I mean, besides the fact that they're both books about publishing, I think you know they're both about people struggling to reconcile belief systems with, you know, the, the capitalist, capitalist confinements.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I think that's interesting. I mean, when you look at Marvel, like it's not as transparently paradoxical as when you look at radical revolutionaries who claim anarchist or Marxist sympathies running businesses Like it's just, it's a very strange thing. I mean, you know, as a person who's been in this world long enough to be adjacent to people who've literally made hundreds of thousands of dollars off of selling socialism to people, it is not lost on me, like the irony of all this. One of the things that I think I think that both your books illustrate, you know, is like using the master's tools to undo what the master's does is not impossible.
Speaker 1:I'm not going to say I don't want to, I don't want to like go off full bell hooks on us here, but but really hard Like, and with someone like for shot, it's hard. You know. I don't want to overly speculate on what caused his. We have already mentioned he's bipolar and that I did that deliberately so that people don't think maybe, oh, you know, his suicide was a result of his politics or his drug use, because there's a thousand things that kind of cost it, including the death of his friend.
Speaker 2:I think, I think it was a combination of factors, in fact.
Speaker 1:Yeah, but I do think we it is sort of interesting that, like I can very much like. I think one of the contrast here is like Marvel comics survives, normal and high time survive. And I think my last question is what? What do we make of like? You know this beyond the scope of your book, but what do we make of like what happened to a normal actor? For shot dies because he pretty much leaves everything normal, um, but but for shot doesn't seem like he could have.
Speaker 2:Like I can't imagine a character like him staying the way he was into the 1980s, like something would have had to give one way or the other Like it's hard, yeah, I mean it's hard to know because, yeah, like I said, I mean in a sense he outlasted, at least you know, in in the way he was operating, he sort of outlasted everyone else and so, um, if anyone could have, could have made the 80s, you know, continue to be weird, I think it might have been him. Um, I mean, and certainly I think it wouldn't, you know, it maybe wouldn't be surprising if he had, you know, kind of gone into you know um more of it like a technology, especially, like you know, personal computer, internet technology. Um, I mean, he, he definitely has like a Stewart brand kind of brain.
Speaker 2:Um, but um, uh, yeah, in in terms of like um, I think you, you asked about normal Um and I think you know there, I mean, their legacy is really like it was. You know, I think it was ex normal um people who were sort of the architects of um, uh, you know, sort of like, uh, colorado legalization um, you know, back in the what was it around 2010? Um, and, and so I think it was. You know, there was like kind of a um, you know, uh, a long gestating um, um success on on normal's behalf. Really, I mean, those people had left normal by that time, but you know that was. You know that was really like the legalization lobby, Um, and so everyone who was, uh, later part of successful legalization lobby, lobbying um, you know, came out of that world Um, and of course, that world wouldn't have, you know that normal probably wouldn't have stuck around had it not been for um funding from high times, um, uh, so so you know, I think, um, you know, obviously I don't want to, I don't want to give too much credit and say that you know, high times is the reason that we have legal weed, um, I don't think that's true, but um, but I I do think that it, it, you know, um, is, is has, has some responsibility for that Um, just as I think it also you probably bears some responsibility for um, the uh, almost like depoliticized, uh, you know, use of marijuana.
Speaker 2:You know that's I mean, that's another thing we didn't even really get into, but, um, you know, there was a time where marijuana was just seen as a tool for revolution. Um, and I think you know, the events of the last 10 years have have shown that that's not, that's not true. You know, people are, people are getting high and they're not um, and they're they're, they're not changing their votes because of it.
Speaker 1:Absolutely. Um, yeah, and that's, that's a, that's a good thing to think about. I mean, if anything, if I ever think about people who get high, change your votes. I usually thought about libertarian, but even those have gone away. So you know, it's, it's just, it doesn't seem to be, doesn't seem to be a thing. In the same way, and if anything, maybe that that early sectarian suspicion of, uh, cultural radicalism maybe seems to have been not as ill-founded as maybe it seemed in 1976.
Speaker 2:Um, but, and now we've got we've got people questioning oh, they're just going to say, and now we've got people sort of like putting forth the notion that, um, the counterculture was a Psyop.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I think about. That's interesting because that's that's one of these things where you know who, or shoot theory, which I generally think is bullshit, is actually kind of true, where you got parapolitics, people which who are usually right-wing um, you know there are always, but usually and you got a small faction, but not an insignificant faction of the far left, like parroting the same talking points about how maybe the counterculture was always there to de-radicalize the work class all the time and, and you know, maybe it was planned, and my. My response to this you know without, which is not to say it's impossible, but my response to this is generally, like, you believe in the competence of government more than me, um, if you think they were able to pull that off, um, but you know I get how they can build the case when you learn about, like, uh, the Co-Intel Pro and the, and then the, uh, the LSD things that got weirdly, ted Kazinski, uh, at San Francisco yeah yeah, okay, alternate Co-Intel Pro.
Speaker 2:But yeah, when you learn about that, you're like oh.
Speaker 1:I don't know, that's weird Um.
Speaker 2:It is.
Speaker 1:Um, but yeah, thank you so much. Uh, I have recently listened to an interview of yours, so I'm going to put that in the show notes, in addition to where people can find your book. Um, uh, because, uh, I happen to know from listening to the interview that you don't have anything else to plug. You are taking a break in recovering from, from a book that was, uh, apparently a lot more work than you were expecting.
Speaker 2:It's true, yours in the making, yeah.
Speaker 1:As a person who said I was going to write a book in six months that I've now, like, written two chapters of and, uh, done literally four and a half years of research on. Uh, I, I feel you, uh, yeah, it goes like.
Speaker 2:Thank you so much.
Speaker 1:Thank you.
