Sometime in the 1980s I read in one of Robert Anton Wilson's books about Timothy Leary running for president in 1968, a year so violent and hallucinogenic it could be a graphic novel adapted into a summer blockbuster.  President Johnson had aged a few decades since starting the Vietnam War and he lacked, I think, the energy to run again that year.  Eugene McCarthy acted as a vote-sucker on Vice-President Humphrey, who may have otherwise been able to defeat Richard Nixon.  The Democratic Convention in Chicago, replete with aggressive cops, a hardass mayor, and the surrealism of literary giants like Allen Ginsberg, William S. Burroughs, and Jean Genet, reporting on the chaos of an event not dominated by the anointing of dead Robert Kennedy.
     Leary got the Beatles to write a campaign song; we still hear it in TV advertisements divorced from the original context: "Come Together."
     It's a good, freaky song.  It would take hippies to believe such sounds could overcome mainstream America to the extent that a controversial drug philosopher like Leary had even a remote chance of becoming president.  How would President Leary have run America?  I assume he would have decriminalized all illegal drugs and attempted to halt the U.S. war machine's activities in Southeast Asia.  He would've been opposed at most if not all levels by Congress.  The truth is, people don't want to come together, to feel the pleasures of shared agreement.  Contention oxygenates the blood of the nation.  The circle of life is peaceful, makes sense, then it sucks again. 
     I met a stuck-in-the-wrong-time hippy who went by the name Hippy; I guess because as a holdover from the late 1960s and early 1970s, he was so rare a bird by 1991 he had to name himself by a label, like someone now calling himself Grunge.  I met Hippy, a grubby wanderer-type in his mid-forties, in the company of Mark, an amiable fellow I spent a few weeks hanging out with that
Spring.  Hippy took out a medallion at the end of a thong, a dirty metal peace sign, explaining how he believed in non-violence, "because I'm a hippy."
     Mark responded, "I believe in non-violence because I'm a human being."
     "That's cool, that's cool."  Hippy seemed unaware of Mark's mockery of everything he said.  He asked about a female friend of ours he'd met at the previous night's party.  He took her natural friendliness and spacy demeanor as demonstrating an interest in himself.
     "Hey man, you know her number?"
     Mark told him seven false digits and we left Hippy as he wrote on his palm.
     Now, Leary's idea of coming together could jibe with the interconnectedness of social media; yet, where are today's war protests? 
     Where is Hippy?  He's about sixty-five now if he's alive.  American culture is more open now than it was in 1991 or 1968, but not in a good way.  Transparency makes the teenager's calls registered at the NSA seem as if they're as important as most hippy activity wasn't in the time of J. Edgar Hoover. 
     Maybe that's what Timothy Leary wanted to destroy: governments with their toys.

                                                                           Vic Neptune