Orgonon

[dxc4@po.CWRU.Edu (David Condon)]

Apologies if somebody has posted about this before, but Orgonon, Wilhelm 
Reich's home and laboratory in Rangely, Maine (not really a ranch) has
been for a number of years, the Wilhelm Reich Museum. It's open during
the summer, I think only three or four days a week. It's only about an
hour away from Farmington, where I grew up, but I didn't make it up there
until my early college days (when I used to hang out with some people who
were real Reich freaks). I went back there again last summer. You can
buy nifty T-shirts, as well as fantastically expensive books if you're
so inclined. It is a _fascinating_ place -- it gives you a really eerie
sense of what Reich was like. Which is to say, in my view, a unique mix
of inspiring vision and madness, of vivacity and kindness, of mixed-up
"science" and real insight into the human condition. An Austrian Jewish
refugee from Nazism, and also, someone who would have been eccentric in 
_any_ setting, adrift in a small, conservative rural community.

As interest in Reich's "orgone therapy" grew, he was the subject of
investigations by, I think, the Food and Drug Administration, and
finally a federal judge handed down an injunction that he was not to
sell the so-called "orgone accumulators." Reich, or someone on his
staff, disobeyed the order, and federal agents came and confiscated most
of his stuff, as well as all the copies of his books, which were burned.
Just another case where the first amendment didn't apply. Reich was then
sent to prison in Lewisburg, Pa., where he died of heart failure several
months later. Despite the evident fallacy of most of his "scientific"
work, there is no question in my mind that he was unjustly persecuted
by a government that found his theories -- including a life-affirming view
of sexuality that was unique for his time -- profoundly disturbing and even,
from their point of view, "dangerous," and that this persecution
led to his untimely death. 

"Love, work and knowledge are the wellsprings of our life. They should
also govern it."

				Wilhelm Reich
-- 
Love went over the wall,	 /      
Was it pushed or did it fall?	/	"Let's just say Bob 
	John Wesley Harding    /	Gates is a happy man."
			      /   U.S. Sec. of Defence Richard Cheney