High Across The Prairie

Steve Otto's latest novel takes an honest look at 1970's Kansas. Memoirs Of A Drugged-up, Sex-crazed Yippie ---Tales from the 70's Counterculture: Drugs, Sex, Politics and Rock and Roll.

By Steve Otto
Authorhouse Press/2005

Reviewed by Tim Pouncey

Kansas in the late 1970's was so different from today; the Sunflower State might as well have been located in Holland.Remember what it was like to share drugs with close friends and complete strangers? Remember when casual sex was so casual you didn't even know your partners name? Remember when the political climate of Kansas came down squarely on the side of tolerance? Remember when your personal philosophy of life was defined by rock lyrics and not a mission statement? You don't?
Well, Steve Otto does. In his latest semi-fictional novel, Memoirs Of A Drugged-Up, Sex Crazed Yippie (Authorhouse Press/2005), Otto excavates 1970's counterculture like an archeologist loving dusting off a Mastodon tusk. In a brisk 349 pages, Otto gives us a lucid look at a Kansas few people remember --- or can't remember due to a plentiful supply of "controlled substances" that were constantly and cheaply available. Characters romp through Wichita, Lawrence and even Sedalia Missouri when a cheap thrill was worth what you paid for it and pleasure was just the flipside of danger.But to dismiss this book as just another nostalgic stoner reminiscing about the last days of the counter-culture would be a major mistake. Although there is a certain "back-in-the-day" wistfulness about the time before political correctness was a mantra, Otto tempers his dreamy history lesson with brutal honesty.The narrator of the story --- a composite of just about every old druggie you ever met --- may graphically describe the bliss of mainlining MDA, he also reminds us that brief moment of pleasure most often occurred in a squalid apartment at broken kitchen table next to sink full of dirty dishes.Like all good storytellers, Otto takes the reader places they've never been before. Like William Burroughs and Charles Bukowsky, Otto sometimes takes you to places you've never really wanted to visit. Yet, Otto makes it worth the trip by including generous portions of political discourse, Cyrenaic philosophy, post-adolescent lust and near-suicidal thrill seeking to keep the narrative moving along like a junkie careening through a police roadblock.Otto's work is always provocative and this book will undoubtedly draw the wrath of both solid conservatives and neo-feminists. Otto's characters never mask their contempt for the right-wing agenda and Otto's narrator never hides his obsession with female anatomy. However, criticizing Memoirs because it baits conservatives and objectifies women is missing the point. Filtering 1970's Kansas counterculture through the sensibilities of a naive middle-class, catholic school educated, twenty-something is no easy trick but Otto mostly pulls it off. He has a good ear for times-past and tries --- often successfully --- to make his prose read like it would have been written by someone experiencing these situations 30 years ago. Trying to be simultaneously innovative, entertaining and honest is a juggling act on a unicycle, but Otto is generally at his best when everything's up-in-the-air and he's peddling frantically. When the narrator's budding Marxist politics and his discussions with Iranian nationalists clash with his dawning awareness that Kansas politics has taken a sharp turn to the right, Otto makes it work.Is Otto's look into the rear-view mirror a true reflection on the 70's, or do the objects simply appear bigger than they were? Ultimately, it doesn't matter. Memoirs resonates with characters buckling under the weight of the America Dream with redemption harder to find than next snort of Cocaine.

"This reveiw can also be seen in F5. There are Other articles by Pouncey" -Hellbender.

PBS portrayed the Symbionese Liberation Army

The Symbionese Liberation Army (SLA) was a major news media event, during the mid-1970s. PBS’ “American Experience”, 8 p.m., May 23, 2005, gave us a fresh look at the organization and its short history.
As it pointed out, in the beginning of the show, many young people, including myself, distrusted authorities. When the SLA called the government “Fascist insects” many of us could identify with that analysis. Much as the Weather Underground, which formed out of the “new left” Students for a Democratic Society, there was a serious belief among young people that our country was sliding into pure fascism. Richard Nixon was our president and even before the Watergate Scandal, we could see our president showing outright contempt for all civil liberties. He was also fighting a vicious war in Indo-China.
The program had plenty of interviews by many of those who were involved or new those involved in the movement.
I remember those days because many of us sympathized with the guerrillas. They scared a system that seemed dedicated to intimidate and disrespect its young people. Of course the SLA probably had no chance of succeeding, even if they hadn’t made several serious errors as the show pointed out. Building an army and taking over the government was not an easy task then, it’s probably impossible today.
However, history does repeat itself. We have a Republican controlled congress and presidency that show at least as much contempt for civil liberties as Nixon did. Our young people are fighting needles war and dying for a pack of lies, in the Middle East, just as in Vietnam in the 1970s.
So we’re not likely to have another guerrilla movement take on the system, but many young and old people, locked out of the system by right-wing ideologs, is causing a slow simmer which is leading to a boil. Our anger is building. We won’t pick up guns, but we will find someway to react to the modern “Fascist insects” of our present government.
And the SLA emblem, the seven headed cobra, looked pretty cool.

They just can’t leave pot alone

In a throw back to the days of Nixon, the US has refocused on harassing people who use marijuana. By now most US adults know that marijuana is less harmful than alcohol and yet most of the drug arrests are for that drug. According The Wichita Eagle, May 4, 2005, reported a rise in drug arrests from 1.1 million in 1990 to 1.5 million presently.
This should not be too surprising. Since the Reagan years and the Republican revolution, marijuana, along with any cultural tradition that grew out of the 1960s and 1970s liberalism is under attack. Marijuana may take away a person’s loyalties to the government. That’s especially true if a person uses the drug and realizes how much our government lies about it. Such enforcement is sure to please the Christian fundamentalists who would rather rope us into their church, rather than let us smoke pot. They are sure to bring up the bogus “gateway drug” argument.
“Take away pot and you take away all other drugs,” they argue. The problem is, it doesn’t work. Some crack addicts have never used marijuana. The high that comes from narcotics and cocaine are completely different from that of pot. It’s like arguing that drinking orange juice will lead to alcoholism, since many people mix vodka with orange juice. The argument just doesn’t make sense.
Arresting pot smokers is a terrible waste of resources anyway. The main purpose of pot prohibition seems to be to force clients into state ordered rehab. There’s money to be made and it’s another opportunity for Christian fundamentalists to use the system to rope in new members.
Remember: a brain on Christian fundamentalist religion or the influence of the present day Republican imperialists is no better than a brain saturated with drugs. All three impede the cognitive ability to use the brain.We should also know better than to trust a man who spent the Vietnam War stateside, getting drunk at frat parties, smoking pot and snorting coke, yet portrayed himself as a patriot over a man who actually went to Vietnam and had something to say about it. See: Bush sucks weed.