/32/ - Psychopolitics

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Timeline of the Degeneration of the “Golden Generation”
1940's Aldous Huxley introduced to hallucinogens by Aleister Crowley
1945 Death of Franklin Roosevelt - abandonment of post-war anti-colonial perspective
Atomic Bombs dropped on Hiroshima & Nagasaki
1946 Mass production of television sets begins
Benjamin Spock - Common Sense Book of Child Care
1947 Levittown opens, beginning “suburbanization” of America
Howdy Doody premiers - First daily children's TV show (runs till 1960,
to be followed by Captain Kangaroo, Romper Room, etc.)
1948 HUAC anti-communist hearings (to be followed by McCarthy hearings)
Kinsey Report - “Sexual Behavior of the Human Male” (Rockefeller Foundation)
Cybernetics published - Norbert Wiener
1949 Soviet Union detonates its first nuclear bomb
1950 Congress for Cultural Freedom founded (at Berlin Conference)
1950-53 Korean War
1951 Catcher in the Rye published (existential teenage angst)
Film - The Day the Earth Stood Still
1953 Hydrogen bomb detonated at Bikini
Thorozine (first tranquilizer) introduced
Second Kinsey Report - “Sexual Behavior of the Human Female”
Playboy magazine publishes first issue
1954 Rock Around the Clock - first rock & roll hit
Doors of Perception published - Aldous Huxley
Lord of the Rings published (launches "fantasy" genre)
Scientology founded (spawns EST and other “personal improvement” cults)
1955 First Government mandated national air raid drill
6 Gallery poetry reading (San Francisco) launches Beat Movement
- Kerouac, Ginsberg, McClure, Snyder, etc.
Howl published - Alan Ginsberg
Ginsberg takes peyote; Huxley takes LSD; Anais Nin takes LSD
RCA signs Elvis Presley
Disneyland opens
Micky Mouse Club on TV five days a week.
(Mousecateer clubs recruit millions of boomer children)
Catch 22 published
Film - Rebel Without a Cause
Eros & Civilization published - Herbert Marcuse
MK-ULTRA project launched (CIA & Rand Corp)Mid-50's New Math spreads through public schools
1956 On the Road published (written 1951) - Jack Kerouac
Founding of Pugwash Conference
1957 American Bandstand on TV (Rock & Roll 5 days a week in your living room)
(1957-58) recession
1958 Alan Watts (The Way of Zen) takes LSD with Huxley
1959 Lady Chatterly's Lover declared not obscene by U.S. Supreme Court (to be
followed by Henry Miller's books, thus legalizing pornography)
Ken Kesey's first LSD trip at Menlo Park Vet. Hospital - Gregory Bateson
Ginsberg given LSD by Bateson
SF Mime troupe founded
Naked Lunch published - William Burroughs
Dobie Gillis on TV (First Beat inspired TV show; also Route 66, etc.)
1959 - 1964 Folk Music - Kingston Trio, New Christy Minstrels, Joan Baez, Jim Kweskin, Peter
Paul & Mary, Phil Ochs, etc.

1960 May - 160 million Americans participate in 7th National Air Raid Alert
First oral contraceptives introduced
First LSD trip by Timothy Leary
Growing up Absurd published - Paul Goodman
Summerhill, A radical approach to child rearing published - A.S. Neill
Leary publishes Tibetan Book of the Dead (Grateful Dead name)
1961 Berlin Wall erected
Leary starts Harvard LSD experiments
World Wildlife Fund founded (Julian Huxley, et al)
1962 Cuban Missile Crisis
Esalen Institute founded - (spawns T-Groups, consciousness raising, etc.)
Port Huron statement of SDS - (birth of anti-labor New Left)
Silent Spring published - Rachel Carson
Bob Dylan's first album
1963 Kennedy Assassination
Film - Dr. Strangelove
Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique launches feminist movement
1964 Triple Revolution published (Robert Hutchins' Fund for the Republic)
One Dimensional Man published - Marcuse
Merry Pranksters founded
Beatles on Ed Sullivan (75 million watch; they take name from Beats)
First Baby Boomers enter college
Shindig premiers on prime-time TV (followed by Hullabaloo)1965 Acid tests start in California - (LSD still legal)
Rappaport Report released (London Tavistock Institute)
Ralph Nader's Unsafe at Any Speed - (beginning of ‘consumer’ movement)
Hare Krishna founded
1966 Trips Festival (Jan 21-23, 1966, San Francisco)
“Eve of Destruction” released (fastest song in history to #1 on pop charts)
Mamas & Papas - California Dreaming
Masters and Johnson's Human Sexuality published
Anton LaVey founds Church of Satan
“Black Power” movement launched
(Black Panther Party - Oakland, CA; Stokley Carmichael)
(1966-67) Massive escalation of Vietnam War (more than 200,000 flee to Canada)
(1967-1971) Series of Monetary shocks
1967 March on Pentagon (first big anti-war demonstration)
Human Be-In - San Francisco (Leary, Ginsberg, Watts, Snyder, McClure)
Summer of Love - Haight-Ashbury, Fillmore concerts, Diggers (“Do your own
thing,” “Today is the first day of the rest of your life”), Zap Comics
Monterey Pop Festival (first big rock concert)
Rolling Stone magazine founded
Hair opens in NYC (“Age of Aquarius,” “Masturbation can be fun”)
Yippies founded (Hoffman, Rubin, Krassner)
Trout Fishing in America published
Films - The Graduate, Battle of Algiers
R.D. Laing's Politics of Experience published (Tavistock Institute)
Music -Get Together, Sgt. Peppers, All You Need is Love, Sounds of Silence,
If you're going to SF, Good Vibrations, Turn Turn Turn
First Superbowl (initiates Roman-style mass spectator sports cult)

1966-69 Spread of Counterculture ideas on campuses, etc. -
Books - Hesse (Siddhartha), Stranger in a Strange Land, Wilhelm Reich, etc.
Occultism - Transcendental Meditation, Gurdjeff (Ouspensky), Theosophy,
Buddhism, I-Ching
French Existentialism - Sartre, Camus, Genet, Artaud, Cocteau, etc.
Organic Food cult starts - Macrobiotics, etc.
1968 Film I am Curious, Yellow declared not obscene by Supreme Court,
effectively legalizing pornographic movies
Ehrlich's The Population Bomb published
Leary's Politics of Ecstasy published
Beatle's “Yellow Submarine”
Massive university campus demonstrations (Columbia, etc.)
Chicago Democratic Convention
Assassinations of Martin Luther King & Bobby Kennedy1969 Woodstock
Earth Day (founding of mass-based environmentalist movement)
1970 Sexual Politics published - Kate Millet
Film - Jesus Christ Superstar
1971 Alvin Toffler's Future Shock published (followed by The Third Wave)
Our Bodies, Our Selves published
EST founded (followed by Lifespring in 1974) - leading to today's ‘personal
improvement’ cults (Tony Robbins, Peter Lowe, etc.)
Aug 15 - Collapse of the Bretton Woods monetary system
1972 Limits to Growth published (Club of Rome)
NSSM-200 issued by Henry Kissinger (population reduction)
The Way to an Ecology of Mind” published- Bateson
World Without Boarders published - Lester Brown
The Female Eunuch published - Germaine Greer
Last Apollo Mission to Moon (ending Kennedy's space commitment)
Joy of Sex published
Unification Church (Moonies) established in USA
1973 Roe vs. Wade
1974 Bucharest UN Conference on World Population (J.D. Rockefeller)
High Times magazine founded (drug legalization)
First “oil shock”
1975 Cable TV begins
Microsoft founded
Rocky Horror Picture Show premiers in London
1976 Apple Computer founded
Jimmy Carter elected (energy conservation; drug decriminalization)
1977 Film - Star Wars
1979 Three Mile Island (the beginning of the end for the American nuclear industry)
Film - The China Syndrome
1981 MTV airs first broadcast (rock videos 24 hours a day)
1985 Stewart Brand founds “The Well” (Whole Earth ‘Lectronic Link), the first internet-
based “community.” Brand, a former “Merry Prankster,” had published the Whole
Earth Catalog in 1968
1980's and
beyond “Globalization” of the world economy
Expansion of the Internet; propaganda for “new information economy”
Spread of “end times” pseudo-Christian churches
Emergence of “family values” as the dominant culture among aging Boomers
Robert Ingraham - April, 1997