Pot Stories for the Soul by Paul Krassner

Author:Paul Krassner
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781593764852
Publisher: Soft Skull Press
Published: 2018-05-15T16:00:00+00:00

Not a word of the above was true, of course. But while I was selling the Mirror on the street, I started to notice that the magazine’s primarily hippie readership didn’t understand that it was satire. Maybe I should have called it something less serious sounding than the Chicago Mirror. Maybe I should have called it the Chicago Goofy Wacky Magazine. I don’t know. But the one event I remember that truly convinced me to give up on the Mirror and publish Bijou Funnies (one of the first underground comic books) instead, occurred while I was selling the issue of the Mirror with the dog poop article on Wells Street.

A young hippie boy enthusiastically approached me and said, “Hey, man! Thanks for that tip about the dog shit! It really works, man! And it’s free!” The kid went on about how he and his friends had read the article and tried smoking dog shit. He claimed it was better than pot. He was serious. He wasn’t kidding. Now that I think about it, dog shit might actually have enough nitrogen content to get a person high. Or maybe, like the banana-peel smoking craze, it was just the power of suggestion that got this kid stoned on dog poop. I took full responsibility, though. I tried to tell him it wasn’t true. I tried to explain that it was humor. He wouldn’t accept it. He had been in Dog Poop Nirvana. I could not convince him that it was meant to be satire.

That’s the problem with satire, though. There’s always going to be somebody out there who doesn’t understand it. How many folks were duped into eating their children after reading Swift’s A Modest Proposal? How many kids have adopted Beavis and Butthead as role models? How many seas must the white duck sail before he can sleep in the sand?

There was a time when people realized that if they jumped out of a tenth-floor window, they would ultimately fall to their deaths. Today, though, they’ll metaphorically jump out of that same tenth-story window and then, on the way down, lobby for softer concrete.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.