Timely Commentary on American Foreign Policy

In a rather interesting – and for me, certainly atypical – book I’m reading, I came across a few lines that I think quite accurately sum up the opinions of many Canadians when it comes to America’s foreign policy today:

Look around you. Above all, look down here at these anguished United States of ours. And what do you see? If you see with any clarity, you will record a madhouse.

Our government in Washington is sending metal and steel, and atomic energy, and destructive power all over the globe to protect our national security. To other people the fact is that our government in Washington is a supremely materialistic and atheistic society seeking, as every empire has in the past, control, power, control. Aging, almost senile, and probably impotent, men in our capitals both east and west are sending young men out to kill for old men’s chess games: power and control.

You remember what happened to Rome, don’t you? The Roman Empire, like the American Empire, spreading its rule of steel and concrete across the Mediterranean…”

So…who said it? Michael Moore? Jon Stewart? Howard Hampton?

No. It was Timothy Leary, in a transcript of “The Speech That Never Was,” a talk the godfather of LSD was supposed to give at the University of Toronto’s Convocation Hall as part of Perception ’67. That’s right, 1967. The book, incidentally, is The Art of Ecstasy, by William Marshall and Gilbert Taylor and published in the same year.

It’s a bit of an eye-opener. In fact, with the similarities between Leary’s day and ours, one could easily be tempted to consult his works further, to give us an idea of what we may expect to come. That temptation fades quickly, in no small part because of some of Leary’s other thoughts on the pathway to enlightenment:

:And of course the other third of the people that live here with us at the spiritual center are young people ranging from newborn babies up through the teens. And I want to point out that all the children who live in this house who are over the age of seven or eight take LSD and use marijuana regularly.”