Drug ingestion wasn't permitted in the office, but many tripping acidheads sat on the old sofas and stared at blank walls. "What are you seeing, Angel?" I asked out of curiosity. "The seventh bardo," he responded. "I'm almost there." Angel was very handsome and surfer-muscular. Even when he passed into complete oblivion, Angel looked like a Greek statue of idealized masculinity. Or maybe he looked like a decadent model for a 1936 Nazi Olympics poster.

"What about the other six bardos?" I asked.

"They are only in your head."

Angel held the Berkeley record on acid tripping. He never came down. "I take acid first thing in the morning, every morning, until I see God's white light," he said.

Angel's father was a career Trotskyist from a working-class background, a friendly, open sort of guy who was involved in the VDC. But he never mentioned his acidic son, except in mumbled words and painful expressions. In Berkeley, the generational war could be waged on unique turf.

For some reason, Angel liked me. He once showed up at the VDC table when I was in an intense debate with an ROTC officer over the winnability and morality of the Vietnam War. Angel entered our discussion by looking deeply into the officer's unsuspecting eyes. The old soldier withered under the intense enemy assault and quickly fled. "I hypnotized him," he said. "I took over his mind. He'll join the VDC now. He's one of us."

I became concerned when Angel doubled his already unmeasurable acid dose. I was worried that he might come flying out the window. One Berkeley acidhead had already passed on to another realm, thinking he was a bird or a plane.

"A lot of pioneers get killed, man, but it's worth it."

One day Angel announced that he was going to levitate himself outside of Robbie's greasy cafeteria. An extensive debate broke out over his claim. Some thought the proposed levitation might take place; many argued that we should at least maintain an open mind.

A crowd showed up at the appointed time in front of Robbie's on Telegraph Avenue near the Berkeley campus. There was a tone of nervous expectation. Maybe Angel might float over Telegraph Avenue? He never showed up. He forgot. Angel never remembered anything. It wasn't that there were so many Angels. It was that the rest of us never realized that they needed to be helped, not turned into heroes.

Can 1960s-style energy be cultivated again? I suspect the idolatrous worship of the world market global economy, with its utter lack of democracy or compassion or humanistic culture, may chew itself up and produce its opposite, a rebellion on behalf of human nature and self-determination. It's already started. Young people are again taking frightening chances in police-infested and sadistic streets.

The great thing about the movement against corporate globalism is that it's a global movement. That's why the left suddenly has a presence again in America. Progressive politics took a terrible wrong turn when it starting thinking globally but acting locally. In a media culture, that was pretty much quitting.

But the movement also worries me some. For one thing, just as I celebrated the dissolution of boundaries as an acidhead in the '70s, I celebrated the coming dissolution of boundaries, including the waning power of nation-states as wrought by information technology, as a cyber-counterculturalist in the early '90s.

There are lots of hellish devils in the details of globalization, in the specific rules conjured up by the International Monetary Fund and the World Trade Organization and so forth. But there's also a lot to be said for a global culture. And just to play devil's advocate, a lot of globalism's advocates sincerely think they're making a better and hipper world, filled with happy middle-class tech stock owners, listening to multiculti pop music while watching "Ally McBeal" and drinking Frappuccinos.

I used to argue with Abbie that he was too much of a media global-village freak. But I learned from him that Marshall McLuhan was right. Abbie drew from this insight and tried to work out a practical political strategy of influencing and transforming the village. His basic approach was to develop entertaining tactics that were irresistible to the media -- tactics that made for good visuals, headlines and quotes. And so we threw money at stock exchange brokers in New York, and I ran for sheriff of Alameda County in California and challenged my opponent to a duel, and on and on. All of these stunts were fun for those who engaged in them, and for most who viewed them through the media lens. And they all satirized the political/economic system. We received much greater attention than any comparable bunch of extreme radicals.

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