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Authors: Jim Keith
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nervously.
Another Quarterite, a painter named Loy Ann Camp who was among my closest friends, had a textbook from her days in nursing school that said paranoia was related to fear of latent homosexuality. Since my reason for joining the Marines earlier had been to prove to myself that I was a man in every sense, I didn’t find that information comforting either.
From additional sources I gathered that paranoids were quite undesirable cranks who took to sitting in corners stroking their chins and observing those around them with sidelong glances. Senator Joseph McCarthy was said to have been a paranoid as was Robert Welch, founder of the John Birch Society. In fact, all the really famous paranoids seemed to be anti-Communist — a consideration that did not sit well with my own rational capitalist philosophy of those days. Paranoids, in addition to all the other problems they were causing, were giving my politics a bad name with outlandish notions like Welch’s charge that grandfatherly old Ike was “a conscious agent of the Communist conspiracy” and his grandiose ambition to impeach Earl Warren from the Supreme Court.
Intellectual respectability required mental health, and it was becoming evident to me by then that mental health consisted of trusting everyone about everything as much as possible — and, for good measure, poking fun at anyone who didn’t. Especially to be trusted were the mass media, whose owners and personnel were not to be regarded as minions of the Establishment because, as they themselves used to attest with confidence, there was no Establishment in the United States of America. Only foreigners and paranoids believed that there were.
Intellectualizing and joking about paranoia was a favorite pastime of post-Beatnik, pre-Hippie Bohemian America — for reasons that were undoubtedly the result of coincidence, at least among individuals who did not want their sanity called into question.
A habitue of the Bourbon House, Chris Lanham, once entertained us with the diabolical theory that the psychological classification of paranoia had been developed by conspirators for the purpose of discrediting anyone bent on exposing them. When his friend, Jack Burnside, suggested sharing this hilariously evil notion with a wandering conspiracy buff we called Crazy David — because he thought people like the Rockefellers and DuPonts controlled the government — we told Jack the joke had gone far enough. Crazy David might actually believe him. And, as everybody knew, paranoids who received reinforcement for their delusions could become very dangerous.
In retrospect, I realized that Crazy David’s views about who rules America did not seem especially insane. By 1972, my own analysis resembled it in many essential respects.
Then came Watergate.
Again my attention was absorbed by a public event that did not seem related to the John Kennedy assassination. That a reactionary warmonger like Nixon might be unceremoniously ejected from the White House for crimes that even Conservatives would find shocking seemed almost too good to be true. Eagerly, I followed the scandal, becoming more and more aware at the same time that conspiracies were a fact of political reality, even in America.
During the summer of 1973 I was in New York City, visiting my old friend Greg Hill, who in years past had accompanied me to New Orleans and lived as my roommate there for a few months. At a folk concert in Washington Square I was approached by a Yippie who wanted to sell me the latest issue of
The Yipster Times
for a quarter. A glance at the headline and cover photos convinced me it was worth the price.
What I found there has since been published in an excellent book by A.J. Weberman and Michael Canfield called
Coup d’Etat In America.
Convincing photographic evidence tends to establish that Watergate burglars E. Howard Hunt and Frank Sturgis were in the immediate vicinity of Dealy Plaza in
Another Quarterite, a painter named Loy Ann Camp who was among my closest friends, had a textbook from her days in nursing school that said paranoia was related to fear of latent homosexuality. Since my reason for joining the Marines earlier had been to prove to myself that I was a man in every sense, I didn’t find that information comforting either.
From additional sources I gathered that paranoids were quite undesirable cranks who took to sitting in corners stroking their chins and observing those around them with sidelong glances. Senator Joseph McCarthy was said to have been a paranoid as was Robert Welch, founder of the John Birch Society. In fact, all the really famous paranoids seemed to be anti-Communist — a consideration that did not sit well with my own rational capitalist philosophy of those days. Paranoids, in addition to all the other problems they were causing, were giving my politics a bad name with outlandish notions like Welch’s charge that grandfatherly old Ike was “a conscious agent of the Communist conspiracy” and his grandiose ambition to impeach Earl Warren from the Supreme Court.
Intellectual respectability required mental health, and it was becoming evident to me by then that mental health consisted of trusting everyone about everything as much as possible — and, for good measure, poking fun at anyone who didn’t. Especially to be trusted were the mass media, whose owners and personnel were not to be regarded as minions of the Establishment because, as they themselves used to attest with confidence, there was no Establishment in the United States of America. Only foreigners and paranoids believed that there were.
Intellectualizing and joking about paranoia was a favorite pastime of post-Beatnik, pre-Hippie Bohemian America — for reasons that were undoubtedly the result of coincidence, at least among individuals who did not want their sanity called into question.
A habitue of the Bourbon House, Chris Lanham, once entertained us with the diabolical theory that the psychological classification of paranoia had been developed by conspirators for the purpose of discrediting anyone bent on exposing them. When his friend, Jack Burnside, suggested sharing this hilariously evil notion with a wandering conspiracy buff we called Crazy David — because he thought people like the Rockefellers and DuPonts controlled the government — we told Jack the joke had gone far enough. Crazy David might actually believe him. And, as everybody knew, paranoids who received reinforcement for their delusions could become very dangerous.
In retrospect, I realized that Crazy David’s views about who rules America did not seem especially insane. By 1972, my own analysis resembled it in many essential respects.
Then came Watergate.
Again my attention was absorbed by a public event that did not seem related to the John Kennedy assassination. That a reactionary warmonger like Nixon might be unceremoniously ejected from the White House for crimes that even Conservatives would find shocking seemed almost too good to be true. Eagerly, I followed the scandal, becoming more and more aware at the same time that conspiracies were a fact of political reality, even in America.
During the summer of 1973 I was in New York City, visiting my old friend Greg Hill, who in years past had accompanied me to New Orleans and lived as my roommate there for a few months. At a folk concert in Washington Square I was approached by a Yippie who wanted to sell me the latest issue of
The Yipster Times
for a quarter. A glance at the headline and cover photos convinced me it was worth the price.
What I found there has since been published in an excellent book by A.J. Weberman and Michael Canfield called
Coup d’Etat In America.
Convincing photographic evidence tends to establish that Watergate burglars E. Howard Hunt and Frank Sturgis were in the immediate vicinity of Dealy Plaza in
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