Old hippies, earth day, and Iraq

(Update: Sheila Lennon finds lots more links about The Farm.)

This month's Vanity Fair -- which is full of Earth Day-related stories -- has a feature on The Farm. With a slide show and some lovely photos of Stephen and Ina May Gaskin, it's called Sex, Drugs and Soybeans, by Jim Windolf.

The Farm's website is worth a look, too, with blogs by several members and a link to The Hippie Museum. The latter will blow your mind with the Flash mandala opening.

Speaking of drugs, did you hear the one about the psychotherapist from Vancouver who isn't allowed to enter the United States because he participated in a controlled study of LSD -- nearly forty years ago. Apparently Homeland Security Googled him and found a paper he wrote about it.

Another child of the '60s went to Iraq recently, after scrimping to save up enough money to go on her own, and blog about it. Jane Stillwater opposed the war, but wanted to see for herself. Her first blog postings were positive about the American role there and the motivation of the troops. But now she's back, and has come to only one conclusion:

...the bottom line is this -- the same shroud of sadness that hangs over Virginia Tech these days also hangs over Iraq.
And right now I am feeling like Lady Macbeth.
There's got to be a better way to solve human conflict than to blow everybody up.
Sure, America has to pull its troops out of Iraq. It has to -- but not for the deeply moral reasons that I would feel so proud of my country for honoring. Nope, we gotta pull out for a more practical reason. We can't afford it!

The San Francisco Chronicle tells her story: Berkeley Blogger back from Iraq, Eyes wide open:

...by the end of her trip this week, she felt that the U.S. must withdraw all of its troops. Not only is life in Baghdad unsafe for everybody, "It's like the people of Iraq don't seem to like the occupation at all," said Stillwater, allowing that most of the Iraqis she came into contact with were journalists or connected to the Iraqi parliament.
" 'Ta hell with Iraq," she wrote in her most recent blog post. "Let God-slash-Allah sort it all out. It's high time for Americans to start watching out for America instead.
"We can't afford to let a whole generation of fresh-faced boys be forced to turn into gangsta wannabes in some foreign country just to benefit the Bush/Cheney de-Americanization fund. We need our troops at home. Here. Now."

And then there's this, in The Guardian: Fascist America, in 10 easy steps, from Naomi Wolf, who lays down the progression:

...you can see that there is essentially a blueprint for turning an open society into a dictatorship. That blueprint has been used again and again in more and less bloody, more and less terrifying ways. But it is always effective.

Like Number 2:

2. Create a gulag
Once you have got everyone scared, the next step is to create a prison system outside the rule of law (as Bush put it, he wanted the American detention centre at Guantánamo Bay to be situated in legal "outer space") - where torture takes place.

And last, there's a lot more from this month's Vanity Fair related to Earth Day. A couple of them:

James Wolcott writes 'Rush to Judgment', in which he claims that Rush Limbaugh, nearly single-handedly, created the anti-global warming backlash:

It was Limbaugh who inscribed the term "environmentalist wackos" into the political lexicon and hung the "loser" tag on them. He caricatured the fight for wildlife preservation—a broad-visioned tradition that spans from Henry David Thoreau to John Muir to Rachel Carson to Edward Abbey to David Brower—into something weedily hippie-dip.

And, by Robert F. Kennedy Jr, Texas Chainsaw Management, on the EPA and its manipulation by the current administration:

The verdict of history sometimes takes centuries. The verdict on George W. Bush as the nation's environmental steward has already been written in stone. No president has mounted a more sustained and deliberate assault on the nation's environment. No president has acted with more solicitude toward polluting industries. Assaulting the environment across a broad front, the Bush administration has promoted and implemented more than 400 measures that eviscerate 30 years of environmental policy.

And the long, strange trip continues.