CRYPTONECROLOGY: Peggy Mellon Hitchcock, R.I.P.

From Benjamin M. Adams' 5-6-24 HIGH TIMES article entitled "Psychedelic Pioneer Peggy Mellon Hitchcock Dies at 90":

Margaret “Peggy” Mellon Hitchcock, an ultra-wealthy heiress who grew up in the Andrew Mellon estate and its fortunes, funded LSD-fueled adventures for Dr. Timothy Leary and Dr. Richard “Ram Dass” Alpert, passed away on April 9 and an elaborate obituary was written by Penelope Green for the New York Times on May 3.

“Pretty Peggy Hitchcock was an international jet-setter, renowned as the colorful patroness of the livelier arts and confidante of jazz musicians, racecar drivers, writers, movie stars. Stylish, and with a wry sense of humor, Peggy was considered the most innovative and artistic of the Andrew Mellon family,” Leary wrote in his 1983 autobiography, Flashbacks. The debut 1974 issue of High Times and April 1978 issue contained excerpts from Leary’s writings.

Both psychedelic gurus were kicked out of Harvard: Leary was kicked out of Harvard for allegedly missing teaching responsibilities (but more likely for advocating for LSD), and Alpert was kicked out of Harvard for giving psilocybin to an undergraduate student. In Leary and Alpert’s experiments, including the Harvard Psilocybin Project, graduate students from Harvard and other schools in Boston were given psilocybin and asked to write a report about their trips. In another experiment, they offered psilocybin to prison inmates in the hope it would diminish recidivism. Both LSD and psilocybin were legal at the time, however.

They both benefited from Hitchcock’s money and ability to host psychedelic activities, where they continued for about five years. Hitchcock was remembered for being nurturing, but also being a force of nature in the fields she chose to entertain [...].

Hitchcock married Walter Bowart, a counterculture journalist, who was a founder of The East Village Other counterculture newspaper. In 1966, Bowart testified before the Senate Committee on Juvenile Delinquency and urged the committee members to try LSD for themselves. High Times reprinted several East Village Other articles, such as a reprint of Leary’s 1968 article, “Deal for Real.”

Hitchcock bankrolled a publishing house for her husband called Omen Press, which published books on metaphysics and spirituality. They divorced in 1980.

Without Hitchcock’s involvement, it’s unlikely Leary and Ram Dass would’ve become the household names they are today.

To read Adams' entire article, click HERE. 

A historical footnote: It's interesting to note that my late friend and colleague, Walter Bowart, once told me that he originally wrote his groundbreaking 1978 nonfiction book, Operation Mind Control, with the intention of publishing it through the above mentioned Omen Press before deciding to allow a mainstream New York publisher (Dell Books) to release it instead. Walter thanks Peggy Mellon Hitchcock for her "patience and support" in the Author's Note to the first edition of the book. 

By the way, if you'd like to hear Walter discussing the updated and revised edition of Operation Mind Control, check out Ned Potter's 1994 interview with him directly below:

Walter Bowart with Ned Potter - Operation Mind Control

Censorship Corner: Salman Rushdie on 60 MINUTES

Salman Rushdie on Censorship in America Today (4-14-24):

From Salman Rushdie's 5-11-12 NEW YORKER essay entitled "On Censorship":

The creative act requires not only freedom but also this assumption of freedom. If the creative artist worries if he will still be free tomorrow, then he will not be free today. If he is afraid of the consequences of his choice of subject or of his manner of treatment of it, then his choices will not be determined by his talent, but by fear. If we are not confident of our freedom, then we are not free.

And, even worse than that, when censorship intrudes on art, it becomes the subject; the art becomes “censored art,” and that is how the world sees and understands it. The censor labels the work immoral, or blasphemous, or pornographic, or controversial, and those words are forever hung like albatrosses around the necks of those cursed mariners, the censored works. The attack on the work does more than define the work; in a sense, for the general public, it becomes the work. For every reader of “Lady Chatterley’s Lover” or “Tropic of Capricorn,” every viewer of “Last Tango in Paris” or “A Clockwork Orange,” there will be ten, a hundred, a thousand people who “know” those works as excessively filthy, or excessively violent, or both.

The assumption of guilt replaces the assumption of innocence. Why did that Indian Muslim artist have to paint that Hindu goddess in the nude? Couldn’t he have respected her modesty? Why did that Russian writer have his hero fall in love with a nymphet? Couldn’t he have chosen a legally acceptable age? Why did that British playwright depict a sexual assault in a Sikh temple, a gurdwara? Couldn’t the same assault have been removed from holy ground? Why are artists so troublesome? Can’t they just offer us beauty, morality, and a damn good story? Why do artists think, if they behave in this way, that we should be on their side? “And the people all said sit down, sit down you’re rocking the boat / And the devil will drag you under, with a soul so heavy you’ll never float / Sit down, sit down, sit down, sit down, sit down / You’re rocking the boat.”

At its most effective, the censor’s lie actually succeeds in replacing the artist’s truth. That which is censored is thought to have deserved censorship.

To read Rushdie's entire article, click HERE.

Jen Silverman: "Righteousness Over Complexity"

From Jen Silverman's 4-28-24 NEW YORK TIMES article entitled "Art Isn’t Supposed to Make You Comfortable":

As someone who was born in the States but partially raised in a series of other countries, I’ve always found the sheer uncompromising force of American morality to be mesmerizing and terrifying. Despite our plurality of influences and beliefs, our national character seems inescapably informed by an Old Testament relationship to the notions of good and evil. This powerful construct infuses everything from our advertising campaigns to our political ones — and has now filtered into, and shifted, the function of our artistic works [...].

When I work with younger writers, I am frequently amazed by how quickly peer feedback sessions turn into a process of identifying which characters did or said insensitive things. Sometimes the writers rush to defend the character, but often they apologize shamefacedly for their own blind spot, and the discussion swerves into how to fix the morals of the piece. The suggestion that the values of a character can be neither the values of the writer, nor the entire point of the piece, seems more and more surprising — and apt to trigger discomfort.

While I typically share the progressive political views of my students, I’m troubled by their concern for righteousness over complexity. They do not want to be seen representing any values they do not personally hold. The result is that, in a moment in which our world has never felt so fast-changing and bewildering, our stories are getting simpler, less nuanced and less able to engage with the realities through which we’re living.

To read Silverman's entire article, click HERE. 

 

"A sanitized culture always on its good behavior & bleached of provocation is no culture at all. It’s a garden party where no one talks of anything but the weather, and these days even the weather is controversial. In America, culture defines politics rather than the other way around, and it remains to be seen whether the culture wrests back from our times the courage of disquieting provocations…."

--Steve Erickson, AMERICAN STUTTER, 2021

OPERATION MINDFUCK on Austrian Radio!

On Friday morning I appeared on Tarek Al-Ubaidi's popular Austrian podcast, CROPfm, and over the course of three-plus hours discussed OPERATION MINDFUCK, CHAMELEO, my NEXUS MAGAZINE article "Invisible Predators," and my EVERGREEN REVIEW article "The Silent Civil War." Most of Al-Ubaidi's shows are in German; however, he also does an occasional English interview from time to time. This is one of those occasions. Click HERE to listen to the entire episode (the interview begins about six minutes into the show).