Harper’s Magazine periodically created forums in which they asked a number of wise people to sort out the issues of the day. In what strikes me even now as something close to magic, a pair of Harper’s staffers named Jack Hitt and Paul Tough had the prescience of mind to convene a forum on freedom of expression and forbidden information on the Internet.
Almost randomly, they asked a number of prolific WELL beings to discuss where we should draw the line in what can be known, and who should draw that line and how. At one point, with my usual idiotic flair, I had said that I could imagine a future in which it would not only be all right but in fact a moral obligation to hack into the White House computer system. Harper’s printed this quote with my name attached to it on the flyleaf of their December 1989 issue.
Shortly after that, I picked up my phone in Pinedale one day and someone said, “Hello, this is the White House.” And I said, “Oh God, I’ve been waiting for this call.” And the guy said, “Why do you say that?” And I said, “Because of that forum that was in Harper’s.” And he said, “It’s kind of about that.” And I said, “How could it be kind of about that?”
He said, “That was how we found out that there was somebody who was basically a member of the Grateful Dead and also a recently retired Republican county chairman. We wouldn’t have thought that was possible. So we hoped you might be the person to arrange something we want to have happen.”
By this time, I was looking at the phone like it was an object I’d never seen before. It was one of the moments in my life when reality had looped back up on me. I said, “What would you like me to help engineer?” And he said, “We’ve been trying to figure out how to address global warming, and we think one way to do so would be to get people to plant a lot of trees. We also think that if the president,” who was then George H. W. Bush, “and Jerry Garcia could be seen planting a tree together, a lot of people would plant trees.”
I said, “I don’t know. But I could certainly run it by him.”
So I called up Jerry and after I had told him about this, he said, “You mean the president of the United States?” And then he did the Garcia cackle. Ha-ha-ha. Jerry thought it was really funny, but he didn’t exactly say no. Instead, he said, “Let me think about it for a couple of hours.”
So he did and when he got back to me, he said, “I’ve been thinking about that picture of Sammy Davis, Jr., hugging Nixon onstage during the 1972 Republican Convention. And how it didn’t do either one of them any good.”
Jerry was definitely right about that, but I said, “Wait. This could be an opportunity. Because this guy seems willing to do any goddamn thing for us. He could also bring a whole bunch of people to the table that we don’t usually get a shot at that I would really like to take a shot at.” Jerry said, “But we don’t know anything about this.” I said, “I kind of do.” And then he said, “Then we better have a meeting with them.”
The Dead were going to do a gig at RFK Stadium in Washington, D.C., on July 12, 1990, and so I helped arrange a big powwow in the Georgetown Four Seasons Hotel. As it turned out, we got everybody we wanted to be there: the head of the Environmental Protection Agency, the assistant secretary of agriculture, and the guy in charge of the U.S. Forest Service. I saw this as an opportunity to get whatever we could from them. I didn’t have any specific goals in my mind, but I figured we could all put our heads together and come up with something positive.
And then Garcia came in there looking like God with a hangover. He was using at that point, and all of his hair was flung to one side of his head. He was also in an ugly mood and not about to plant a tree with anybody. All these heavy guys in suits took their fair share of abuse from him. He said, “We know how much you know about what we do, but we can’t imagine we all know enough about one another for us to do much good together.”
So the photo op with Garcia and President Bush never happened. But I had a few other things I thought I would ask for during the meeting. One that stuck was that prior to this point in time, there had been no market for recycled paper. Everybody was throwing tons of paper into recycling bins, but it wasn’t actually getting recycled because there wasn’t a big enough demand for it to make building a recycling infrastructure worth the trouble.
I brought this to their attention, and although nothing happened until President Bill Clinton finally got around to issuing an executive order about it in 1993, the Government Printing Office began using only recycled paper. Which was a fuck of a lot of paper. So in the final analysis, a few good things came of this meeting. Not the least of which is my own indelibly inscribed memory of Jerry Garcia interacting in a none-too-positive manner with all the Lords of the Public Domain.