January 1, 2005


Exile Presidential New Year's Address


Dear Friends and Colleagues,

This is the time of year when we're most sensitive to considerations of mood.

So I'd like to suggest that underlying the various current scandals and emergencies is indeed a crisis of human mood. People don't feel good enough often enough to care enough about their futures to be willing to go through the lifestyle changes necessary now to have those futures at all. So they tolerate the Bush Junta's thefts of elections these past four years and they tolerate its murder of nearly 3000 innocents on 9/11/01. If they felt better, they'd begin to care more and if they started caring more they'd want a better life (thus a better government) than they have now.

Those who control us understand this. They know that once a citizenry becomes quite elated and confident, it becomes a danger to the state.

So in the tightly controlled corporate-media feed one rarely finds an example of a very good mood. The fish gobbling the feed never get to know about the yogins who've gradually become capable of feeling elated almost all the time.

The media do feed us lots of pretty good moods though. Market researchers have signaled that people in pretty good moods will buy lots of superfluous consumer goods in order to chase the very good mood--but that once the very good mood is attained, consumption will drop sharply. Thus very good moods must be concealed: "You Got to Hide Your Love Away." Thus the Bush Junta encourages alcohol users because the hangover enforces a net mood loss but jails marijuana users because there's no hangover and thus a net mood gain.

Attempts to control mood have been going on for so many centuries now that it has become less a willed thing within the sociologies than an instinctive thing within the anthropologies. For example, northern India was the birthplace of quite a refined sexual yoga in both Hindu and Buddhist circles about a millenium ago (cf. William Garrison's SEXUAL YOGA) but today that same region is riddled with crude mood-inhibiting sexual taboos. Efforts there to pre-empt supreme sexual experiences probably were conscious for only a century or two, then became what we call instinctive.

It is in this spirit that I wish all of you a Hippie New Year--a year full of elation and confidence. Are you wondering why the dreaded US secret police behaved so viciously towards hippies in the late 60s and early 70s while simultaneously being so easy-going with leftists? It's mainly because the average mood among hippies was significantly higher than among leftists. Also the hippies were into transformation and the leftists only into revolution, hippies into a new culture and leftists only into a more compassionate distribution of benefits within the old culture. So the hippies had to go--but the left could be used as one way to sustain the illusion that the US was a democracy.

To an appalling degree the leftists played along with the outrageous wipe-out of hippies by the dreaded US secret police. It was as if Noam Chomsky and Howard Zinn thought hippies were subhuman (and thus had no human rights) because the males among them didn't patronize a barber every two or three weeks. More generally, though, the leftists regarded hippies as the competition--and indeed a competitor who'd become ten-to-fifty times more popular than they among young people. And so the right and the left could agree that hippies had to go. And so hippies went.

Now three decades later it's time to bring hippies back as the cutting edge of a strategy for improving average mood in order to gain great influence in election results. It seems that only this way is there any chance of moving fast enough to save the rapidly collapsing home-planet life-support systems. We can provide the general citizenry with mood-enhancing yogas which don't require obedience to a guru or buying into a religion. Hopefully we also can find a mood-enhancing sequel to LSD and introduce others to it till the police either lace it with something creating a debilitating hangover or else jail us for using it.

More soon. It has been difficult for me to finish this because I am enervated by absorbing thoroughly the magnitude of the various tsunami horrors in combination with the magnitude of the legal difficulties being encountered by lawyers able to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that Kerry won. Hippie New Year! No Jive in 2005! Come Alive in 2005! May You Thrive in 2005!

Yours for transfer of prime human attention from objects to states of mind,

Keith Lampe, Ro-Non-So-Te, Ponderosa Pine
Transition President