Kerry Thornley - The Dreadlock Recollections

I thought it both bizarre and impossible, but I did not want to say as much to them. "Yeah, that sounds like a pretty clever way to resist the government."

"Sweeney then developed delusions: he believed that the CIA had implanted a radio receiver in his teeth, so he pried out some dental work; he believed electrodes had been implanted in his brain, so he tried to find a surgeon to remove them. He also had auditory hallucinations, believing he was picking up messages from outer space," writes E. Fuller Torrey in his article, "The Sweeney-Lowenstein Madness," appearing in the October 1980 issue of Psychology Today .

Like Congressman Lowenstein's assassin, Timothy Leary has been claiming somewhat more respectably that he receives messages from interstellar aliens, which he calls "Starseed signals." That Sweeney could not settle on one theory to account for what he experienced does not prove it was delusory, only that he was more obviously confused perhaps than Leary about the sources of his oppression.

"Kerry, what do you think of various organizations in the intelligence community joining forces for recruiting purposes, by implanting listening devices on individuals and observing their behavior until who they should work for is decided on the basis of what kind of people they are?"

Again, I expressed agreement to what seemed both irrelevant and unlikely.

"Remember Adolph Eichmann's plea at his trial in Israel that he was only following orders? I think that should be a legitimate defense. Don't you?"

"Like Paul Krassner said in The Realist : Where were all the defenders of Caryl Chessman at the Eichmann trial?"

Chessman was a confessed rapist in California whose execution was postponed for many years because he also happened to be quite intellectually gifted.

"Liberals are so hypocritical," I added. Actually, I believed in civil disobedience rather than blindly following orders, but again I saw no reason to say as much at this point to this particular individual.

Agreeing with him as much as I could seemed by far the more prudent policy.

I could agree in good conscience with Brother-in-law, though, that the Nuremberg War Crimes Trials had been a farce. That was an opinion I had acquired from reading the story of Senator Taft in John F. Kennedy's Profiles in Courage . "That was something that amounted in practice to ex post facto law , and our Constitution is supposed to protect against things like that. I think it was Goering who, according to something someone told me, stood up during those proceedings and said something like, 'Why don't you call off this farce? You won and we lost. Why do you pretend you now need a legal excuse to kill us?'"

Because of similar Constitutional technicalities, such as States' Rights, I often found myself uncomfortably in agreement with Southern racists, although I found it handy enough to stress in my discussions with Brother-in-law that such agreement existed.

I was determined to oppose Communism; nevertheless, I found vociferous nationalism and enthusiastic militarism to be nothing less than frightening, not because I feared war, I didn't, but because I feared anything that I could identify as systematic mindlessness.

I told Brother-in-law about a visit to Rockefeller Center's Radio City Music Hall that I made when pulling temporary additional duty in the Marines, on liberty in New York, stationed in Washington, D.C. for a Technique of Instruction Competition. "The Rockettes, in Israeli Army uniforms, with plastic submachine guns over their shoulders, marched out on the stage and the crowd went wild. I felt like I was at a Nazi rally. I think people who are persecuted sometimes acquire the characteristics of their oppressors."

Although he expressed agreement at my horror, I was sure it was for the wrong reasons. For when I spoke of what Hitler said of the power of brass bands to stir up the people, he was equally supportive. Besides that, I had listened many times as he spoke cheerfully of Goebbels' wife suggesting lampshades be manufactured from the skins of murdered Jews: "They tried it for a while; it worked."

"Speaking of Hermann Goering, Kerry, you know he also protected Jews from the Gestapo." With characteristic inconsistency, Brother-in-law spoke as if he deemed that a point in Goering's favor. There was just no figuring this guy.

His attitudes about freedom seemed equally ambivalent. "You know, Kemil Ataturk was a strongman who took over the government of Turkey and directed it firmly out of poverty and backwardness into the industrial age. Something like that couldn't have happened there under a democratic regime."

"Yes. I studied him in college. Whenever he felt overworked, he used to take a vacation and plunge himself into a sex orgy. Now that man was all right. I can identify with someone like that."

Strong character was something that appealed to us both in others. "You know, I hated Batista's government in Cuba," I told him. "When Castro was fighting Batista I admired Fidel enormously. Then he got into power and executed so many of Batista's henchmen in the carnival atmosphere of those war crimes trials. That disappointed me. But remember that one guy, that general who told them all to go to hell? 'Of course I burned homes and killed women and children,' he said. 'I was a soldier. That was my job ' And when they marched him up to be shot, he swore at them all the way, calling them names right up until the moment he was killed. Now I have to admire a man like that, no matter whose side he is on."

"Yes, me too," Brother-in-law answered.

One of my theories to explain the popularity of John Kennedy was my notion that the American people had never matured politically to the point of outgrowing their need for royalty. "That's what's wrong with them," I said to Brother-in-law, "the Kennedys remind them of a royal family. They've never outgrown their need for a king. At heart they are still a bunch of Englishmen."

I was also intolerant of anything political that was in any way whatsoever tainted with religious faith. Eisenhower's "Pray for Peace" program had infuriated me. So again I was able to agree with Brother-in-law's conclusions, for reasons different than his, when said he thought Israel ought to be abolished.

"So do I. If the British were not Christians influenced by the prophecy in the Bible, that land would have gone back to its Arab residents at the end of the war. I don't think property rights, once usurped, ought to extend beyond one generation. What if a foreign power gave the United States, the freest, noblest and most industrially advanced nation in the world, back the Indians?"

At such times I did not think about what I said about giving the Southwestern US back to Mexico, therefore the inconsistency did not occur to me, but then there was no religious issue involved in that dispute.

Not only did Gary seemed pleased with my response to his proposal to abolish Israel, he acted like he would probably being doing something about it, such as joining a movement for that purpose, in the near future.

Late in the summer of 1963 I returned, by way of a side trip to Mexico City, to New Orleans from California, where I had been staying with my parents since early May of that year. Unbeknownst to me, Lee Harvey Oswald was in New Orleans at the time of my arrival, and would soon depart for Mexico City, where I had just spent one or two weeks.

Yesterday Slim had made the usual suggestion about visiting Brother-in-law and we sped through what was then remote, rural Louisiana country in the car Slim had arranged to borrow from Gary.

In those days besides the brewery across the field, only an immense steel bridge that arched over the river and over which cars moved in slow, eerie silent procession signaled civilization's designs.