How Our Generation Got Lost

"There’s the known. And there’s the unknown. And what separates the two is the door, and that’s what I wanna be."*
Jim Morrison of The Doors

After their Celtic Pagan wedding in June 1970 in which she and Jim Morrison wed in the summer of 1970,
Patricia explained, [It] "is a blending of souls on a karmic and cosmic plane that has an effect on future incarnations of the two involved: death does not part, and the vow taken is "forever in the Goddess’s sight."

They stood inside a circle during which a little of their blood was drawn and it was mixed with wine and then drunk by them.
However, they never filed for a legal marriage license.

A few months before, Patricia had told Jim she really loved him. And he told her he loved her.

Except for the false and superstitious Paganism, this ethical emphasis upon monogamy and permanence sounds so positive, so loving...

But it wasn't.

Like so many actions and events in the 1960's to the present, talk is cheap, actions speak much louder than words.

--

Kennealy wrote that she became pregnant from Morrison after he pulled out her diaphragm.

Jim was most cordial as they drank at the hotel bar, but whenever Patricia tried to direct the conversation toward her pregnancy, he skated away.

Again he dodged Patricia, telling her twice on the phone that he would see her but never did, spending time with another friend instead.

In August 1970, Patricia talked with him during a break in his trial, "I know it’s not exactly the best time and place to ask you to deal with this, with the trial and all but the fact remains, it happened and now—"

Jim smiled awkwardly and said, "We’ll manage."

"Listen, I’m not exactly thrilled by the idea either, you know. But you happen to be the only man I ever considered good enough to father a child of mine, and now it’s come to pass and I don’t know what to do. I do think you owe me a bit more than your checkbook."

Jim glanced at her, then away. "If you have that baby, it’ll ruin our friendship. A baby isn’t going to change my life at all, but it would alter yours tremendously, forever."

"I could take it to court."

"And I would deny the charges..."

"I can't believe you said that." By now, tears were streaming down her face.

"Well, what did you expect me to say?"

"I don't know, goddamn you! I suppose it makes no difference that it's our baby, yours and mine not yours and Pamela's."

[Jim was sleeping with both at the same time, plus carrying on one-night-stands with groupies and brief affairs with other girls he met. One night he ripped rings off from the hands of a girl he had taken back to his motel room.
When Pamela, suddenly, showed up at his door demanding to know who he was with, he told Pamela, "Look, these are for you."
And he handed the other girl's ring to Pamela.]

"I--no, no difference. I won't support a kid. Any kid. I can't afford it and I don't want the responsibility."

"The only way you can't afford it is emotionally," she shot back at him.

"Well now, wouldn't it be better to have a kid with somebody who wanted to be its father?
It's really up to you. If you have the kid, it'll be your kid. If you want the abortion, I'll pay for it and I'll come to New York to be with you when you have it. I promise I'll come."

[He also had at least 20 other paternity suits against him. But he said] "You know, this subject has never come up with me before."

Patricia exploded. "Don't give me that bullshit! I know it has. I've been told..."

"No, no it's not true, none of it--it's never happened before."
--

The first week of November Patricia Kennely entered a hospital in New York and Jim's child was aborted in the 20th week of fetal development.

Contrary to his promises, "Jim was not present and he did not call."

"Well, I just got into town about and hour ago
Took a look around , see which way the winds blow
Where the little girls in their Hollywood bungalows

Are you a lucky lady in the City of the Night?"

"L.A. Woman" by J.M./Doors

At a concert in Florida, he had yelled, "...ain't nobody gonna love my ass?...you're all a bunch of fuckin' idiots! you're all a bunch of slaves...I'm talkin' about love...I wanna change the world..."

One of his defenders at his obscenity trial in Florida said, "...I mean for all the obscenity, he was really telling the audience,
"Fuck" meant love...and to love each other."

Jim told reporters, "This trial and its outcome won't change my style, because I maintain that I did not do anything wrong."

"And then he fought so bitterly with Pamela that she left him--flew off to Paris to be reunited with her rich French count."

Days past "spent in bars and the nights were passed in the Strip hotel, where he told a buddy, ...look at this!"

"Jim was hanging from the balcony railing outside his room in the Hyatt House Hotel, ten stories above the Sunset Strip. He had been drinking and snorting coke."

He worried about LA cops who "...are almost fanatical about in believing in the rightness of their cause. They have a whole philosophy behind their tyranny."

Excerpts from No One Here Gets Out Alive, by Jerry Hopkins and Danny Sugerman

Jim "devoured Friedrich Nietzsche," who wrote of Dionysian excess, the uber-man, and going "beyond good and evil." Morrison would often speak of Nietzsche and include his ideas in his writings and poems.

A young Frenchman, Gilles Yepremian, came across Morrison being evicted from a Parisian hotel...

“He was totally drunk. Nobody recognized him...Jim saw some policemen and he rolled down the window and shouted, ‘Fuck the pigs!’, so the driver kicked us out."

"It was no secret that Paris was awash with heroin, nowhere more so than in the rock clubs."

“A lot of drugs, yes, a very free time for sex, a lot of jealousy and tension. The night club scene was heavy – gangsters and very bad cops. There were a lot of fistfights inside, which wound up on the stairs and in the street. There was a gunfight outside the club. I used to carry a bayonet for protection. Crazy but necessary."
L.A. Woman and the Last Days of Jim Morrison
By Max Bell

Jim's father was a "Naval Captain—later Admiral—who participated in the Gulf of Tonkin incident in August 1964, an event which marked the beginning of large-scale US military involvement in Vietnam.

As Captain/Admiral George Steven Morrison rose in the ranks of the Navy, Jim rejected him and his mother. "In 1964, at the age of 21, he spent his last Christmas with his family...
Jim’s original bio for Elektra records indicated he had no family and his parents were dead."

Then Jim "heard that Janis Joplin was dead of an overdose. First Jimi [Hendrix] Then Janis."

Jim's repeated comment to friends was, "You're drinking with Number Three."

Soon he was dead of a heroin/alcohol overdose, and probably, cocaine abuse.

Isn't there so much in that brief vignette
from the biography which captures our generation's contradictions?

It's hypocrisies, empty political and spiritual rhetoric,
abuse of others, demeaning cruelty,
heavy drug/alcohol addiction
and refusal to accept our infants, the ones we had chosen to create,
while all at the same time,
claiming
we were rejecting the Establishment, and seeking to help everyone find peace and love and justice?

Early on in Jim's meteoric rise into rock, I was a devoted fan of The Doors' first album. I listened to it over and over. I loved the songs, especially ones like "Light My Fire," "Backdoor Man, "Break on Through (To the Other Side)."

That is until one decisive night; I actually sat down, while very alert and rational, and read the lyrics, and figured out what each of his songs meant.

They were ALL songs of abuse, adultery, drugs, immorality, and even killing and incest.

Allegedly, "The End," is a song about his own hatred for his military father. But why does Jim, in the lyrics, emphasize obscene incest for his own mother?

The latter one, a very powerful rock anthem, was so gross and obscene that it got him and the Doors thrown out of the famous Hollywood nightclub, the Whiskey a Go-Go. The owner strongly objected to Jim's screaming the last line.

One night, he kept repeating those lines over and over, like an immoral mantra. At one concert, even though he saw his mother and younger brother in the audience,
he screamed the incestuous obscenity, and refused to see them,
having his team repeatedly lie to his mother that he would see her later in the evening.

But like with his lies to Patricia in the pregnancy case, and to other friends, he never did.


How tragic was our generation,

Daniel Wilcox

*The inspiration for The Door's name was from Aldous Huxley's book on mescaline, The Doors of Perception.

Syria, the Romans, General Douglas Macarthur, and a Peacemaker

Politicians are stridently arguing for various responses to Syria’s use of chemical weapons which slaughtered 1,500 people. What a tragedy! But where were all of these voices for the last several years when over 100,000 Syrians got slaughtered by guns and bombs?

There are at least 3 ways to respond to the horrific killing:

#1 The Way of Half Measures: This nearly always fails. Look at any historical war effort, especially American foreign policy of the last 50 years. Consider Afghanistan where many, many thousands of innocent Afghans have been slaughtered by Islamic militants, several thousand American servicemen and women have died for nothing, Afghan women are oppressed, Christians killed or banned--- because the Muslim leaders we support are corrupt and/or advocate a form of Sharia Law and they (and we) let Afghan farmers still flood the world market with heroin! Furthermore, many Afghans we are trying to help actually oppose “our ways” and instead empower the Taliban even now!

And all of this horror continues after we Americans have been there for over 11 years trying to bring change and have spent billions of dollars in the process! We even executed Ben Laden (and Saddam Hussein in Iraq). But notice Islamic fundamentalism has gotten worse not better. Islamic schools and mullahs continue to inspire millions of followers.

Half measures almost never work when it comes to changing people and eliminating evil governments and evil societies.

#2 The Way of the Juggernaut (or the Roman Way): This where you roll in like a steam-roller and stay in the enemy country for hundreds of years. The British only stayed in Islamic lands for one hundred years. It didn’t work. The Russians were harsher but only stayed 25 years. It didn’t work.

But try the Roman way of the juggernaut. It works. Of course it is ruthless and cruel and millions of innocent suffer, but it often works if you stay for many years. Consider that after the slaughter of the Jewish zealots by the Roman legions, no Jewish military attack happened for 900 years!

But at what a cost:-( to millions of people.

Or consider the Islamic juggernaut. It conquered more land than the Roman Empire and lasted in various forms for about 1,000 years! From 700 C.E. to 1917 C.E.—the end of WW1. With a few exceptions such as the violent Crusaders, all Christians were overwhelmed and subjugated in Muslim held countries for centuries.

This is the way, too, of America and General Douglas Macarthur at the end of WW2. It’s the approach to conquering another country which says as he did to the Japanese, “You’ll do it our way!” There is little in the way of half measures. The enemy society isn’t allowed to continue promulgating its evils like we have done in Afghanistan. No. People are forced to change to the ways of the conqueror. Of course half a million civilians were killed, but the juggernaut always does that—kill many. But it does bring change.

So should the United States invade the Middle East again, only this time take the Roman way, the Roman road? That means spending billions, locking down the country, eliminating Islam, telling the Syrians, “You’ll do it our way.”

However the Middle East isn’t Japan, not by any stretch of the imagination an ordered somewhat homogenous society like Japan. I lived in the Middle East for the most part of a year. All the people I knew who believed in God, hated each other and wanted to kill each other. On the Jewish kibbutz farm where I worked, everyone was an Atheist, but they, too, were willing to kill their enemies in the name of no god.

Places in the Middle East like Syria are volatile cauldrons of intense religious intolerance that have been only held in check by secular dictators, for decades through murder and intimidation. But at least if you didn’t cross the Assad family (or Saddam, Kaddafi) and his political/ethnic minority, you were somewhat protected. That is why, as bad as Assad is, most Christians have not opposed him. Notice now with the rise of Islamic rebels, how Christians are suffering and being driven out and killed by these Muslim jihadists.

In the case of Syria, if we Americans want to go the route of the juggernaut, we will need to think of hundreds of years of controlling and killing people in Syria. It might even take 1,000 years to get rid of the Sharia-Law-form-of-Islam consciousness out of the populace!

And at what cost in humans lives and Life.

OR

#3 The Way of the Cross: Jesus’ way isn’t popular, not even with most Christians who would rather kill their political enemies than love them.

But if you have doubts about #1 or #2, please check out this 3rd way.

This is the way of Jesus-followers such as Elie Chacour and Martin Luther King Jr.

One way to get started is to read the true story of Elie Chacour’s Palestinian family—how they followed Jesus in the midst of war and suffering. Read Blood Brothers.

http://www.amazon.com/Blood-Brothers-Dramatic-Palestinian-Christian/dp/0801015731/ref=sr_1_fkmr0_2?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1378260503&sr=1-2-fkmr0&keywords=blood+brothers+by+elie+chacour

And how it has made all the difference for thousands of Palestinian Christians, Jews, and Muslims ever since.

In the Light,

Daniel Wilcox