When I was growing up everything was clear. There were two sides. You were either hip or square. You were either a head or you were straight. Maybe your brother went to Viet Nam looking like Superman in a chest-forward up-angle movie shot, solid in his dress uniform. Or maybe your brother played bass w/ his Kustom amp in a band that jammed out in the garage and hung around the reservoir Friday nights with girls smoking pot and Marlboros, drinking Miller nips, dropping windowpane acid in the rain, disappearing for a week in his van.
Either way you had a choice to make.
On TV every night it was either the Vietnam War or the Watergate Hearings. Except for Sundays when it was Wild Kingdom, Disney and Sullivan; and maybe dinner on a TV tray. Me and my friend, now an Oscar-nominated film director, made plans to go to Phnom Penh cuz it had a cool name. My buddy's old man was rich as Croesus. In the swinging 60s he had been a shrink to the stars, like a character in a Peter Sellers movie, he even built an orgone box to Wilhelm Reich's specs for parties. I asked but it wasn't around anymore. (I stole his copy of the first Velvet Underground album---w/ the original Andy Warhol banana half-peeled on the cover--but a copy of the Velvets' third album was inside.) Eventually the old man became one of the world's biggest commodities barons. He had the first minicomputer I ever saw in his house, connected via a rotary phone and kludgey modem to what must have been DARPA net. My buddy and I used to watch university academics and nerds in the Defense Department play a text-and-numbers-based war game.
My girlfriend at the time--now a prominent criminal rights attorney--lived w/ her family of five in a minuscule shack deep in what was still the woods of Croton, one of the bungalows left over from the days when Croton was an old-time lefty boho summer colony on the Hudson--John Reed had lived there writing 10 Days that Shook the World. There was acutally a neighborhood known as Red Hill where now there are commuter condos. In the 1970s Croton had become known for its weird population mix of poor hippies and working class families.
My girlfriend's old man was a maniac. A boozer capable of hair-trigger personality changes. He was an English professor at a community college who made off w/ my William Tyndall text on the Beats. He kept a big bag of pot in the freezer and he let us play his copy of Ornette Coleman's Free Jazz. When he was drunk he was given to smart, loud, boorish pontification. Her attraction to me was obviously Freudian. My attraction to her was her porcelain face and small berry lips. Plus, she was the first girl I knew who liked Marvel Comics.
In those days my favorite Marvel character was Doctor Strange, Master of the Mystic Arts. Stephen Strange was a prominent, wealthy neurosurgeon whose psyche was shattered when he lost the use of his hands as the result of a car accident. Despondent and down on his luck he turned to magic, learning his craft at the feet of the Ancient One and ultimately becoming Sorcerer Supreme of the multi verse conquering villains and demons on a cosmic, inter-dimensional scale.
In the Marvel Universe Dr. Strange was always on hand to represent for the boho counter-culture. Not the anti-WTO, anarchistic, post-punk counter culture of today, but the consciousness-raising, social-reordering counter-culture of the Baby Boomers who came of age in the 1960s. My girlfriend's father's counter-culture.
Dr. Strange wasn't just a freaky older guy with a creepy mustache and cape who lived in Greenwich Village with an Asian houseboy and an interdimensional Laura Petrie character named Clea. No, Dr. Strange was a kind of moral center for the Marvel Universe--a kind of outre spiritual ballast in a superhero universe heavily weighted toward tales of the military industrial complex: battles between the agents of SHIELD and the agents of international terrorist societies like AIM and Hydra; and characters like Captain America (his powers the result of a military experiment) and Iron Man (the alter ego of military industrialist Tony Stark).
Dr. Strange was serene, unruffled, dignified. He had thrown off the trappings of success in favor of cosmic consciousness. His sanctum was filled with weird art, wafting smoke and doorways into other worlds.
He was a minor character. His books never sold that well. But he was indispensable. If someone like Galactus wanted to eat the planet, the Fantastic Four could handle that with military precision. But if something went wrong with the soul of the Marvel Universe, only Dr. Strange could set things right.
During the glory days Dr. Strange stories were trippy, cosmic, and spiritual. The stories were about consciousness and perception and all the things that LSD wrought on American culture, including the advanced study of brain chemistry.
These days things are different. The military industrial complex runs all three branches of government. Psychedelic drugs have been criminalized and the social disorder that was wrought by their mass use has become a facile joke. (Remember Austin Powers' famous line: "As long as people are having sex with many anonymous partners while at the same time experimenting with mind-expanding substances in a consequence-free environment I'll be sound as a pound!") Meanwhile the use of newer, legal psychoactive drugs that effect neurotransmitters in the brain have become so widespread that people's pets are on SSRIs. And guess what, we're living in an age of cultural conformity on par with that of the 1950s, when Eisenhower warned about the military industrial complex in the first place.
For years professional liberals---politicians, academics, writers, consultants, talking heads, think tankers--have been running from the legacy of the 1960s---not just the Marxist eonomics of wealth redistribution that inspired the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. but also the cultural awakening that was part of a culture war self-consciously and willfully launched by intellectuals in the Eastern academic elite like Timothy Leary at Harvard who really discussed with Huxley plans to reorder the American mind through the mass use of psychedelics. 
As in any revolution there were excesses, death, and tragic loss. And in the great American commercial tradition a whole New Age industry sprung up to sell consciousness-related tchochkis to aging Boomers who once turned on, tuned in and dropped out. But looking back it seems to me that the 1960s represented a kind of second Great Awakening in American history, an attempt to bridge American secularism with something more, to breed a new, futuristic spiritualism that resolved science and transcendence.
It is a legacy which the nation has turned tail and run from both legislatively--in continual assaults from the right on LBJ's Great Society programs--and culturally. Human consciousness, as it turns out, is a messy, often dark affair. But you can't just open the doors to perception then close your eyes to the ladies and the tigers that you find. Yet that seems to be what we've done -- run from the hardest lessons the 1960s counter-culture tried to teach us about ourselves, our world, and our relationships with one another-- choosing instead a culture of sublimation and repression.
Now, for the the second time in 4 years we have a Presidential race that is a Baby Boomer bake off, and again---whether by political design or social accident--it is shaping up as a replay of the culture wars that dominated the Boomers' adolescence. A weird handful of rag tag lefties keep looking for their Dr. Strange in the form of Ralph Nader or Howard Dean---someone from the counter-culture who can magically set things right w/ the soul of America--while the Democratic establishment keeps nominating candidates who can "run to the center." But there's no comic book magic that can make our real-world universe right, that's going to take a courageous rejection of the conformity, sublimation, and repression that are the sad cultural hallmarks of these dark days.
As both a friend of the late Dr. Timothy Leary (http://www.howardhallis.com/artgallery/timleary/story.html) and a huge Dr. Strange fan (http://www.howardhallis.com/drstrange), I believe both of them would not look for a Nader or a Dean, but for the best shot at defeating the greater of the two evils. That would be Kerry without a doubt. Still, if the current administration holds the Infinity Gauntlet of rigged electronic voting machines and rumored Bin Laden captures in their arsenal, the all seeing Orb of Agamotto suggests that even darker days may be ahead.
Posted by: Howard Hallis | April 14, 2004 at 09:18 PM