Great Escape
Over the Acid Rainbow
It’s boom time for psychedelics. Can a new cultural revolution rewire our destructive politics?
I.
Not long after the last presidential election, a meme started circulating among advocates of psychedelics. Someone had given Donald Trump a thick, white beard. Eyes atwinkle above his Santa Claus whiskers, the reality TV star turned president appears uncharacteristically thoughtful and kind, maybe even evoking a bit of William James’ model saint—that “herbivorous animal whose beard you may, if you ever care to, pull with impunity.”
The punchline is a Fox News chyron: “BREAKING: ‘LSD SAVED MY LIFE.’”
The meme put a 2016 twist on a 1966 joke: Give a square enough acid, and three hours later, he’s barefoot in the grass, weeping over a daffodil. A few hours after that, he’s jumping around like George Bailey at the end of It’s a Wonderful Life, renouncing his former life driven by the quest for money and power, and embracing a new one centered around love, kindness and the eternal now. The religious ecstasy occasioned by the psychedelic experience, goes the cliché, is so powerful it dissolves and redeems any ego placed in its cosmic grace, even one as oversized and diseased as Donald Trump.
