Robert Anton Wilson left his mortal coil nineteen years ago today. After a life of pushing his mental limits to the edge in order to enter the palace of wisdom, Wilson captured one fact better than most. That everything is moving, all the time. It never stops. The more we look, the more there is. It’s not a matter of whether there is more out there, but a matter of can we make sense of everything happening. He often said, like the title of his book, “it’s” happening “right where you are sitting now.” Clearly, “it” is happening where you are sitting, but it is also happening around you, in ways we can only approximate with maladroit models that flitter away in the winds of change.
Wilson was a paradoxical writer and as I show in my book Chapel Perilous: The Life & Thought Crimes of Robert Anton Wilson his life was also quite paradoxical. To invoke another legendary poet, Wilson contained multitudes, which means that he was both non-participant as well as engaged political activist in his lifetime. He was committed to living as a philosopher, meaning he sought to provoke new thought through playing with the reader’s epistemological footing for making sense of the world. In that regard, Wilson wanted to remind everyone that we always have choices, in every situation, no matter how dire the circumstance.
Wilson wrote many lofty articles and communiques about living the anarchist way, but when it came time to hit the streets, he did so. In the early 1960s, he took part in a Civil Disobedience demonstration of a racist barbershop owner, who refused to follow the law to desegregate his shop. Wilson, despite his fears of getting arrested and damaging his young family, chose to protest the shop and ended up getting arrested. However, none of the bad things he was afraid of happened. What did end up happening was the Barbershop owner, instead of just desegregating his shop, closed down and moved deeper into the South. Years later, while living in Chicago, when Wilson finally had some good money coming in while working for Playboy magazine, he and his wife Arlen became seriously engaged in political demonstrations. In the 1970s, he went full Libertarian, shifted political activism gears entirely and began demonstrating for the release of Tim Leary from prison and getting off the planet. Yet by the ‘90s leading up in the 2000’s, Wilson’s view that the United States was run by an Oligarchy became increasingly clear. In 2001, more than a decade before two political scientists “proved” it so, RAW spoke about America’s drift into Oligarchy and how dangerous it is to live in such a state.
Wilson’s second to last book, TSOG: The Thing that Ate the Constitution written and published as a response to America’s War on Terror, stressed above all else the necessity for Americans to understand the US Constitution. Around this time, his medical marijuana dispenser, the Wo/Mans Alliance for Medical Marijuana had their farms raided by Federal authorities. This was during the struggle to get Marijuana recognized as a medicine and WAMM was part of the vanguard of the movement. So, while federal law strictly prohibited the growth of Marijuana, California was more civilized and allowed some use for Medical. As such, WAMM was allowed to exist, but when the DEA kicked through the doors of the farm sticking guns in the faces of cancer patients and old women, Wilson stepped up. He knew the egregious dangers of masked federal agents arriving on scene, guns up, and believed people needed to push back immediately against such actions. Constitutionally, the whole battle between the Feds and WAMM was covered by the 10th Amendment, which states that powers not given to the federal government are reserved to the states or the people.
In response to the raid, on September 12, 2002, the 70-year-old wheelchair bound, Wilson sat on the front lines of WAMM’s sit-in protest on the steps of Santa Cruz City Hall and was one of the first to publicly receive his medical marijuana in defiant protest to the Federal government’s laws.
My point is this. As much as Wilson liked to think about the very long game of universal existence and the fluctuating nature of reality, he nearly always remained grounded in the knowledge that the way to make change was to be the change. He knew the struggle America now faces is living up to the real American dream of equality for all.
I will not make the mistake of playing the game of “what would RAW think or do these days.” He’s dead. He ain’t thinking anything. However, I know what I’m thinking and what ICE is doing right now is a disgusting abomination and should be resisted with all the might we Americans can muster.
Five days after that WAMM protest on the steps of Santa Cruz City Hall, but 215 years before, Benjamin Franklin exited Independence Hall in Philadelphia where he attended the Constitutional Convention. Walking down the steps, Franklin was asked about this new vision for a country, “What have we got? A republic or monarchy.” Franklin’s famous reply, now revered in the annals of American History, was “A republic, if you can keep it.” Wilson knew how flawed the American system was and he knew how dirty the “deep state” functioned, yet he persevered. He did what heroes are supposed to do, and he met the challenge head on. The challenge today is to retain your humanity in the face of fascism. To do so, we must all be as engaged and active as we possibly can, otherwise Humpty Dumpty falls again.
Stay Strong Everyone!!!
Viva Renee Nicole Good
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