When the Elite Loved LSD -- John Cloud -- Our Minister of Truth from TIME Magazine

Link for this Post: When the Elite Loved LSD  -- John Cloud -- TIME.

John Cloud is at it again. Having heaped his oddly reasoned form of  ridicule on Timothy Leary  in his last TIME magazine op/ed, he is now doing the same for LSD.

Not coincidently this short but rambling piece uses the same Robert Greenfield  bio Timothy Leary: A Biography as a "source"which he used for his earlier scantly documented article about Leary.

After reading this short article after the last short piece about Timothy Leary, I asked myself (and Google) who is John Cloud?

It turns out that his main claim to fame (aside being a TIME staff writer) is that he wrote the Time Magazine cover story puffing Ann Coulter. Cloud became the subject of scrutiny in an article on Media Matters about the Coulter story. In fact, Cloud has gained somewhat of a reputation as this post  John Cloud: Today's Most Dissed Person in the Blogosphere.

These two article leave me wondering. Is this a preemptive strike by the Newt Gingrich crowd against the possibility that somehow the Sixties counterculture might reemerge?  Despite the unhappy fact that LSD has been illegal for 40 years now and therefore impossible for most people to get, they fear that somehow, someway that what they perceive as a threat against their fundamental values and way of life might return.

This kind of "historical revisionism" was described in the fictional dystopia 1984.  Wikipedia describes it this way:

In George Orwell's 1984, the government of the main character's country, nominally led by the enigmatic Big Brother, is constantly revising history to be in harmony with the current political situation. For instance, if the country is at war with another, then the official position is that they have always been at war with that country. If the situation changes, the civilians are brainwashed accordingly. In this novel, historical revisionism is one of the main policies of the propaganda arm ("Ministry of Truth") . . .

Its not 1984 but 2007 and our "Minster of Truth" writes for Time Magazine.

Notes on illustrations:

Life Magazine Cover May 13, 1957 at top -- The Discovery of Mushrooms That Cause Strange Visions Secret of "Divine Mushrooms" by Gordon Wasson

Time Magazine Cover, Apr. 25, 2005, Ann Coulter: Ms. Right by John Cloud