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Thursday, May 15, 2008 12:00 AM

California's marriage ruling -- what it means and what it doesn't mean

One can easily anticipate the myths and falsehoods soon to be spouted about this landmark ruling.

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  • Friday, May 16, 2008 11:25 PM

    It's funny Salon being San Francisco based

    I see from the 'about' page that the central office is in San Francisco. I had looked at that page before, but somehow my eye had jumped straight to the New York office. Don't blame me for that : any assumptions I may have made about the USA are strictly derived from its own mass media.

    Anyway, it's funny, because, as I hinted earlier, I think the truly distinctive thing about post-1967, or more accurately post-1973, American Jewish Zionism is that it's "psychedelic" : it's the result of the fact that a rather large proportion of US Jews who turned on to acid in the 1960s and early 1970s experienced a sort of disillusion - not unknown to the rest of us, or to other Jews in other contexts - which led them to seek for less known, and in some cases more Jewish, ways of developing their psychedelic experience. Again, in some cases, this led them to the Lubavitcher movement, which underwent a surge of rapid growth in those years. In other cases, it led them to the specifically religious-zionist doctrines of Rav Avraham Yitzchak Hakohen Kook, zt""l, which had been regarded by Orthodox Jews until that time with some horror, as being the product of an unholy alliance of pragmatism between religious and political forces. In both cases, what was attractive was the kabbalah, which was front and center.

    Now, as I have explained, I am a Crowleyan, I may even say, a Crowleyan adept, though I am not on good terms with the Ordo Templi Orientis, or 'Caliphate OTO' as it is known by those who wish to deny its sole claim to the name OTO and to distinguish it ironically from other OTOs. In fact, I am not a member of anything. Honestly. I'm a sort of one-man mission into a difficult, troubled space that started in San Francisco back in 1967 or so, and now badly needs unwinding.

    Now, about that job I was looking for...

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