← Autodidact Archive · Original Dissent · toddbrendanfahey
Thread ID: 6701 | Posts: 1 | Started: 2003-05-16
2003-05-16 06:30 | User Profile
Todd Brendan Fahey: Gonzo Reality-Smasher
by Alex Burns Editor-in-Chief, Disinfo.com May 16, 2003
Considered to be a conspiracy writer par excellence, Todd Brendan Fahey is also one of the most illuminating renegade minds in contemporary America.
Often compared to famed gonzo journalist Hunter S. Thompson (whom he has interviewed several times), Fahey is best known for Wisdom's Maw: The Acid Novel (1996), a 'factionalization' of the sobering links between the CIA's MK-ULTRA program, LSD and other entheogens research, and the 1960s Counter-cultural Revolution. Although these dark vistas had been previously charted by books such as Martin A. Lee and Bruce Shlain's Acid Dreams: The Complete Social History of LSD: The CIA, the Sixties, and Beyond (1986) and Jay Steven's Storming Heaven: LSD and the American Dream (1998), Fahey managed to capture the enigmatic nonlinear experiences that many neuronauts have experienced as altered states of consciousness.
Wisdom's Maw was considered so subversive in its exploration of mind-control and rumoured assassination programs, that despite being hawked around New York City for five years by two book agents, the original manuscript was rejected by over two hundred publishers!
Out of the ashes of this Ordeal, Fahey founded Far Gone Books, which has continued to publish truly alternative poetry and social commentary. Drawing upon three years in the maelstrom of far-Right politics in Arizona during the mid-1980s, Fahey's most recent book Hell Bottled Up! Chronicles Of A Late Propaganda Minister (2000) offers some disturbing revelations about John McCain, a Republican candidate for the 2000 US Presidential Campaign. Thus, Fahey's work serves as an invaluable and necessary corrective to the slick 'Madison Avenue' designed media campaigns to sell political candidates.
Having interviewed key revolutionary figures such as Laura Huxley, Timothy Leary, Ken Kesey, John Perry Barlow, R.U. Sirius and others, Fahey's life has increasingly become larger-than-life in his pursuit of Truth. Fahey escaped from Los Angeles to Utah's Salt Lake City during the early 1990s after perceptions he was being tailed by intelligence agents.
He is rumoured to be living perhaps on the Mongolian steppes, an obscure island in the Indonesian archipelago, or a Peruvian mountain village. But you can still reach him via cyberspace at fargone@fargonebooks.com.