July 2010

Legendary: What forces, experiences, ideas, or people contributed to the forming of the man, the intellect you have become?

Legendary: I was raised in a mountain town high in the Colorado Rockies. My father fed his family with a rifle, and protected the property of the New York aristocracy. Their mountain homes were jewel boxes where privileged children would summer and blond girlfriends would languish.

Legendary: What was school like?

Legendary: My mother's side of the family were educators from back east, so they and my teachers did their best to stomp me into a square box. I tried to fit, but it was impossible.

Legendary: Your family was in the tourist business for a long time, is that right?

Legendary: Yes, we had a string of horses - 30 head; we took people on rides, cooked for them in the mountains, rented cabins, sold gas, had an arcade. The world came to my little town, it gave me perspective.

Legendary: What is the basis of your philosophy?

Legendary:  I don't have a philosophy really, I base everything on observation. I watch people's belief systems.

Legendary: Give us an example.

Legendary: I lived in the panhandle of Nebraska and watched corporate Republicans develop a complete belief system and spoon feed it to rural America. Needless to say, they bought it hook, line and sinker.

I was travelling then and went to northern New Mexico a lot. I watched the left wing abdicate their political power to the right wing, politics being uncool, cool being the only priority. I felt this attitude had also been engineered by the corporate right; they were, after all, the primary beneficiaries.

Then I had the pleasure of knowing people who were avid conspiracy theorists. They, too, had abdicated their political power, focusing their skepticism on the ridiculous. Again, the corporate right benefited.

I realized that all you had to do was to tailor a belief system to a demographic and you could engineer a society to act against its own best interests.

Legendary: I think you come across crazy! Lately your writing has become disjointed, lacking continuity.

Legendary: Your incessant criticism doesn't contribute much.

Legendary: That's better than being disjointed.

Legendary: Thanks a lot.