WEIRD SCENES INSIDE THE CANYON - DAVID McGOWAN

The final in a trilogy of CIA books that I got into recently. This one plus POISONER-IN-CHIEF and CHAOS. All very focused on the 60’s and made possible (each to their own extent, some of these books are more fact-based than others) by recent declassifications since the 60’s is now so long ago. The War on Terror will be a fertile ground to write horrifying books along these lines, exposes of the evil/shady shit the CIA gets up to. Just this morning I read an article in the Guardian about how one of the founders of the YT terrorist organization The Base was(is?) involved with military intelligence. And, of course, the current most interesting conspiracy, Epstien and his role with various intelligence agencies. It’s always hard to tell where any of this fits on the truth/fiction spectrum, and, to finish my digression and get back to this book, WSITC falls heavily on the entertaining fiction side. I read this book, like the Manson book, before falling asleep at night, which is the ideal context to encounter these ideas. McGowan has a conversational, snarky style that is slightly annoying but read really quickly. If you don’t like the current conspiracy, wait 2 paragraphs and he’s on to another, each so juicy and dense, they warrant their own book. Or rather, it would take a book length explanation to convince me that most of this stuff is “true”. The broad outline is that the Hippy/folk-rock/flower-child counterculture was a PsyOps program, run by the CIA, to nuder the anti-war movement/radical left. In its specifics, it’s dense. Jim Morrison’s dad was the commanding officer at the Gulf of Tonkin incident (I looked this up and it’s true), ipso facto, CIA plant. I’m very amenable to this idea, only a cop could write poetry as bad as Morrisons. But on the other hand, I’m very pro-Frank Zappa, and this book comes down hard on him. His father worked at Edgewood as a chemicals weapons guy and he was, apparently, personally right-wing. Also a CIA plant. Same with Captain Beefheart (conducting cult research). Same with the Police and Sting. Same with Jack Nicholson It is weird that McGowan seems so surprised that so many Baby Boomers would have parents who had been in the military. Or that rich and famous people would have found ways to avoid the Draft and/or consequences for misbehavior (a lot is made of the fact that so many of these young musicians and actors aren’t drafted and are never arrested for their public drug use). Or that it seems nefarious when people living wild lives die bizarrely and suddenly. I’m not going to say I was “convinced” by as much of this book as I was by the other 2 in this little series. Additionally, I don’t like this type of music, era of music too much. I like Zappa, as I said, Beefheart, some of Gram Parsons and that’s about it for me. I don’t have too much of a taste for CSNY or the Byrds or the Eagles or The Mamas and the Papas and I think I would have enjoyed this book much more if I was more into those bands. But I like this sort of paranoid freak-out, it’s a dope genre. Finally, I’m very pleased I learned, from this book, a new word: spychologist. 70 PsyOps