#On tyranny manual#
#On tyranny free#

Not surprisingly, the growing loss of public confidence in our political leadership, the declining standard of living for most working Americans, and a deepening crisis in public education has brought us the election of a President with little of the traditional, and often hypocritical “respect” for democratic institutions like the Judiciary, Congress and the Press. Together they directed an alarming shift in income from the middle class to the wealthiest 1 percent of Americans. Meanwhile, the equal opportunity corporate sponsors of both the Republican and Democratic Parties presided over decades of increased militarization, endless war, globalization and the transfer of American jobs overseas.

#On tyranny free#

This was the State’s tyrannical answer to the Free Speech Movement, to Martin Luther King’s multiracial Poor People’s Campaign, to the flower bearing hippies and yippies and zippies, and to the growing effectiveness of the anti-Vietnam War movement.Īnd, of course, the auto industry had its own powerfully effective response to John Muir and his small army of idiot mechanics: they began to make cars that ordinary people couldn’t even understand, let alone successfully fix. Sadly, the sometimes naïve but heartfelt efforts of the 1960s (we did, remember, attempt to levitate the Pentagon in 1967) were overcome by a determined Cointelpro program, the elimination of the Black Panthers, and the violent overreaction to the protests at Kent State and Jackson State.

He empowered a generation to change points and plugs, jack up their bugs to change the oil, and if necessary drop an engine. An engineer, he had dropped out, let his hair grow long, and transformed himself into a car mechanic in Taos, New Mexico. John Muir, I imagine, used “idiots” with affection. Those, at least, not too stoned on marijuana, and/or residing in another, more vivid acid/magic mushroom-induced reality to make it on time to community meeting at the commune or to the demonstration.

#On tyranny manual#

His “How to Keep Your Volkswagen Alive: A Manual of Step-by-Step Procedures for the Compleat Idiot” was embraced by a generation of compleat idiots who relied on their dog-eared copies and Craftsman wrenches to keep their VW bugs alive as they attempted to remake America. In 1969, John Muir wrote a book that democratized car repair for those lucky enough to own a VW. On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century