Browse Topics
Counterculture
Your Own Damn Life
Michael Meade On The Story We’re Born With
The big story isn’t history. That’s just another substitute for the life of the human soul, which is the real story. In the long run it’s the poets, not the newspapers, who have the news. The news is a superficial exchange of information that can never tell the whole story. The poets tell us we’re in this great, ongoing dance that includes opportunities to fight and love and fall down and get back up. Hopefully we have the occasional chance to do our particular dance in the middle of all that.
November 2011
Authority
Taking violin lessons, requesting conscientious-objector status, protesting at the state capitol
November 2011
Against The Grain
Peter Coyote On Buddhism, Capitalism, And The Enduring Legacy Of The Sixties
Politicians are not leaders; they are followers. They think that, because they can plunder the public treasury, they are leading. In fact they are terrified of the people. The people are a problem for them to manage, and when they can no longer manage them, they must follow them, or oppress them.
June 2011
Vital Signs
Dr. Andrew Weil Diagnoses Western Medicine
The Western scientific paradigm is materialistic, meaning that scientists do not believe in anything that cannot be perceived or measured. Look how restrictive that belief is. It’s the reason for the limited acceptance of mind-body medicine. The nonphysical causation of physical events is not allowed for in the reigning scientific paradigm. If you talk about nonphysical causes of changes in physical systems, materialists either ignore you or make fun of you or, if you keep at it, get angry with you.
January 2011
Slab City
Slab City is a squatters’ community located on a desolate swath of Southern California desert, just a few miles from the town of Niland. Drifters, dropouts, artists, outlaws, and other cultural dissidents have been coming here for more than four decades. They set up camps on the crumbling concrete foundations of a former military base and live in trailers, vans, and buses.
February 2010
excerpted from
Beyond Vietnam
A Time To Break Silence
A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.
June 2009In The Jester’s Court
Paul Krassner On The Virtues Of Irreverence, Indecency, And Illegal Drugs
There seems to be a mass awakening in process, comparable to the evolutionary jump in consciousness that took place during the sixties. It gives me a sense of hope, as well as a sense of continuity, that countercultural values have “infiltrated” the mainstream: the peace movement, organic food, protecting the rain forests, environmental sustainability, growing hemp, recycling waste, racial equality, feminism, animal rights, renewable energy. The seeds that were planted then continue to blossom, and the counterculture that began in the sixties continues to be celebrated at such annual events as the Rainbow Gathering, Burning Man, Earthdance, the Oregon Country Fair, and the Starwood Festival.
February 2009
Buy One, Get One Free
A Journal Of My Presidential Campaign
I am the first pro-Sudoku candidate for president in American history. Sudoku, as you may know, is a Japanese number puzzle found in most newspapers (except the New York Times). It consists of a square of eighty-one boxes in which the player must inscribe numbers so that each row contains 1 through 9.
December 2008
