A WikiLeekZ Editorial: Which Timothy Leary?
February 11, 2017
WikiLeekZ is Our Name...Satire is Our Game
“Turn On, Tune in
Drop Out” or “Question Authority”, which slogan by Timothy Leary will we follow
in these times?
We, along with our nation, has lived through 3 weeks of the Trump
presidency. Doesn’t it seem as if it’s been more like 6 months or 6 years…perhaps the
worse 6 months/years of your civic life? Every day, sometimes multiple times a day,
the President tweets or says something that is patently false. Perhaps he has said this exact same thing a
number of times; and this statement has been made to be shown wrong or
inaccurate by multiple credible sources.
And, he keeps saying the same thing over and over again. Can you remember one time that a lie by Trump
has ever been walked back by him? Has he ever once apologized for lying or misleading, often
about important tenets of our democracy?
This leads me to his continuing statements about the
dishonest election reporting and how pervasive voter fraud in the 2016
election caused him to lose the popular vote and recently, he has specifically
named the state of New Hampshire as having had busloads of 1000’s of people
coming in from Massachusetts to vote
Democratic. This is a serious accusation and should be addressed to its correct
conclusion.
Trump has said that he would have a massive investigation
into national voter fraud causing him to lose the popular vote by millions of
votes. Okay, where is the commission? Whom has he delegated to discover the
huge fraud? When will the results be known?
We know, don’t we, that this will be another blustering,
loud-mouthed bunch of crap just like when with great fanfare, he told the
nation that Melania Trump would have a press conference in 2 weeks to tell the
world the truth about her early work experience in the US. That was during the
campaign and we’re still waiting. Not that we really care about that part of
her life…it’s just emblematic of what he says and does. Constantly.
On July 30, 2016, I wrote my Cri de Coeur and addressed this
problem more than 5 months ago…
“One of the most difficult things for
me to understand was his ability to consistently lie about almost everything
and not even seem to care. When he would be questioned about a false statement
he made, he’d double and triple down on it and shout louder while belittling
the questioner. He said so many false things, made so many false statements
that for the average citizen, it was impossible to have a normal life and still
find the time it takes to fact-check his statements. It was an unending,
cascading waterfall of braggadocio, lies and bullying”.
Nothing has
changed except that now he’s President and his words really, really matter…
economically, environmentally, health-wise, militarily, internationally and
many more ‘ally’s’. What to do?
I recently
wrote to a friend, a retired Political Science professor, and said that we are all living in a political science
class; PoliSci 2017. We had all better study, question, argue, write, talk,
shout, gather, demonstrate and vote. To preserve our democracy, we all have to
pass this test on our living and still vital democracy. For, I fear that if we
simply “turn on, tune in, drop out”, our 230+ year experiment on this continent
may be in peril.
There was another slogan in the 60’s that is more appropriate
now…”Question Authority”! Timothy Leary, where are you now?
Prague, Wensecslas Square, August 1969 Zeny
