A year ago, the student debt crisis was a quiet one. Default-triggered cascades of compounding interest and collection fees were matters of lonely shame and anxiety. Journalists writing on the issue networked through friends and family to find subjects willing to go on record. Then the debt-confession signs started popping up at OWS protests, and stories of debilitating student debt were everywhere. Numbers that had been a source of private depression became symbols of generational defiance. “I have $80,000 in student loan debt,” declared a typical sign. “How can I ever hope to repay that now?” Others demonstrated the vertiginous arithmetic of the classic default spiral: “Borrowed $26,000. Paid back to date $32,000. Still owe $45,000.”

There’s no shortage of statistics capable of illustrating America’s economic elephantiasis. Taxes, health care, wages — take your pick. But it’s the student debt numbers that most shock college graduates over 50. If you went to school in the 1960s or ’70s, it doesn’t seem possible that the class of 2012 is graduating with an average debt load of more than $25,000. The macro milestones tend to get more press — America’s $1 trillion in aggregate student debt now surpasses that owed on its credit cards — but it’s the 25 large that makes boomers whistle and start talking about the days when a semester at Berkeley cost the same as a trip to the laundromat.

Now Berkeley costs as much as Princeton, and the days of paying for any state university with a part-time job aren’t coming back. But neither is the time when exploding education costs went unchallenged and the loan industry got away with murder. Post-Occupy, there is a new militancy around student debt that signals a break with the decades leading up to the present mess. “There are groups popping up all over the place who are slowly coming together under one movement,” says Kyle McCarthy, an organizer with Occupy Student Debt and the creator of “Default,” a documentary airing on 140 PBS affiliates. “Our generation has no disposable income anymore. Some of us aren’t getting married, having kids, buying a house. People finally understand this is a huge freaking problem that isn’t going away.”

Indeed, the crisis grows with every graduating class. Amid an anemic recovery, America’s recent graduates continue to default in record numbers; according to some estimates as many as one in three. Tuition and fees at public and private schools are galloping ahead of inflation, while state funding per student has dropped by nearly a quarter since 2000. The number of students taking on toxic debt in the scandal-plagued private loan sector, where interest rates can tickle 30 percent, has more than tripled during the same period. Activist sites continue to be flooded with stories of student debt hell — of educated 20- and 30-somethings forced to choose between health care, day care and servicing the interest on ballooning student debts the laws ensure they will take to their graves.

It is a sign of the times that sites like StudentLoanJustice.org aren’t the only ones crowd-sourcing student debt misery. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, launched last year over Republican opposition as part of the Dodd-Frank Act, is collecting stories from distraught borrowers as part of an investigation into corruption and abuse in the growing private student loan market. “For the first time, a government agency is empowered to supervise this industry and prevent a whole generation from losing trust in institutions promoting higher education,” says the bureau’s student loan ombudsman, Rohit Chopra. “The financial interests of these companies are often at odds with those they are claiming to serve.” The CFPB may be a little late to save those bonds of trust, but it plans to release its report this summer, possibly as part of congressional hearings.

The CFPB effort is a welcome but small development. It does not address the myriad larger issues that constitute the student debt crisis, a partial list of which includes federal loan debt and defaults, predatory collection practices, rising tuitions, disinvestment in public education and a lack of basic consumer protections around student loans such as bankruptcy. Another recent development that better reflects the scope of the problem is the Student Loan Forgiveness Act, which the House freshman Rep. Hansen Clarke, D-Mich., introduced in March. The bill would establish an income-based repayment plan that caps student loan payments at 10 percent of income over 10 years following graduation. After a decade, the remaining balance is forgiven up to $45,000.

“After 10 years of repayment, you should be able to save and make other investments in your life, but now increasingly what you get is a nightmare,” says Clarke. “It undermines American competitiveness when those best suited to start a business or buy a home can’t because of student debt. Freeing up $500 a month for millions of people over decades is real stimulus. The student debt bubble won’t burst the way the housing bubble burst, because the Treasury backs most of the loans, but crushing personal debt is a slow-burning social crisis that’s robbing people of their American dreams.”

The stimulus logic behind Clarke’s bill is supported by recent data showing student debt’s drag effect on the housing market. But it’s human-scale suffering that’s driving the increasingly pissed-off conversation outside Washington. When Clarke travels to Michigan to discuss his bill, he hears stories that could be multiplied thousands of times over in every state: of young people putting everything on hold and taking jobs they hate just to service the loan interest, of older Americans who went back to school to learn new skills now fearful that default will mean chunks of interest subtracted from their Social Security checks. An online petition in favor of Clarke’s bill is rapidly nearing its goal of 725,000 signatures.

Though Clarke’s bill is a nonstarter in the current Congress, it has the potential to serve as a rallying point for a growing movement. Among Clarke’s brain trust is a former assistant Brooklyn district attorney named Robert Applebaum. In 2009, Applebaum founded ForgiveStudentLoanDebt.com in disgust over the Wall Street bailouts that bypassed everyone else. The following summer he launched a petition to forgive all student debt. Intended as a conversation starter more than a policy proposal, the petition garnered more than 700,000 signatures and became the most popular campaign in the young history of SignOn.org.

“So many indebted graduates entering a decimated job market has triggered a rapid shift in the conversation,” says Applebaum, who now organizes full time around the issue. “What we’re seeing are the spoils of what happens when education is treated not as a public good, but as a commodity, as just another way to turn a profit.”

With the class of 2012 preparing a graduation walk that for many means walking the financial plank, it’s worth asking: How did we get here?

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The student loan era begins with the Higher Education Act of 1965. The educational cornerstone of LBJ’s Great Society, the bill fueled the postwar democratization of higher education by funding need-based grants and zero-interest student loans. The act was no civilian expansion of the GI Bill, but began to shift the burden of paying for education from the government to students. Richard Nixon sped up this shift in 1972 when he created the Student Loan Marketing Association, a government-sponsored entity best known by its maternal nickname, Sallie Mae. The outfit was tasked with encouraging banks and schools to issue more student loans, which for a fee Sallie Mae would purchase and service, backed by the U.S. Treasury.

As long as tuitions stayed in line with inflation, Sallie Mae grew without controversy alongside college enrollment. Well into the 1970s, the typical student could cover the costs of college with part-time work, government grants, and zero- or low-interest federal loans. In the event of economic calamity, those loans could be discharged in bankruptcy.

Like so much else in the U.S. economy, this changed in the 1980s. The tuition-federal loan cycle is not well understood, but it’s likely schools began charging more simply because they could: A college degree was becoming the new high school diploma, and the Treasury, not the schools, was on the hook for the loans. States, meanwhile, began reversing the postwar trend of investing in community colleges and state university systems. In Reagan’s budgets, yearly increases in need-based Pell Grants, which targeted low- and middle-income students, came to a grinding halt. Where the maximum Pell grant covered 69 percent of the cost of a four-year college in 1981, it covered just 45 percent a decade later. The number is now 34 percent.

“By the time Reagan left office, the balance between need-based grants and interest-bearing loans had shifted dramatically,” says Stephen Burd of the think tank Education Sector. “And the student loan industry began to see its profits soar.”

No one understood the profit potential of this shift better than an ambitious Sallie Mae executive named Albert Lord. Within a decade of joining the company as comptroller in 1981, Lord rose to CEO with a plan to take Sallie Mae private and shift the company’s center of gravity from Washington to Wall Street. The desire was mutual. Sallie Mae’s assets multiplied eightfold during the Reagan years. Investors were salivating over the chance to get a piece of Sallie Mae’s expanding $15 billion portfolio of government-backed loans.

With enrollment numbers and tuitions ticking up, Bill Clinton’s election briefly threatened the plans of those planning to take the federal loan gravy train private. In 1993, Clinton instituted the Direct Loan program in the Department of Education. The intent of allowing the Department of Education to issue loans was to cut out middlemen like Sallie Mae and save money. But the industry’s friends in the newly Republican Congress successfully undermined the program. In 1996, Sallie Mae went private and began trading as the SLM Corp. All of the trends of the 1980s accelerated, and by the early aughts Lord sat on a personal fortune of $230 million. Sallie Mae’s 2003 annual investors report boasted of “strong fee income growth, largely from debt management operations.” With his profits Lord began building a private 18-hole golf course on his Maryland estate. Shortly after breaking ground, he bitched to the Baltimore Sun about having to deal with zoning officials. “I hate rules,” said Lord.

Not all rules. When he uttered these words, Sallie Mae had just spearhead the lending industry’s lobby effort behind the 2005 Bankruptcy Act, which stripped private student loans of bankruptcy protection. (Such protections around federal loans had long been chipped away.) Leading the effort in Congress was Lord’s golfing buddy and current majority leader, John Boehner. It was around this time that Sallie Mae hired Boehner’s daughter as an executive at one of its largest collection companies. Sallie Mae remains the largest donor in the history of Boehner’s PAC, followed by the unctuous for-profit education industry, where private student loans are most common, most toxic and least likely to result in a college degree.

The removal of bankruptcy rights from private student loans startled education economists at the time and remains a central grievance of student debt activists. “There was and is no public policy rationale for holding private student loans to the same standards as federal income taxes or child support,” says Mark Kantrowitz, author of three books on student finance and publisher of FinAid.org. “These loans are comparable to credit cards.”

The Bankruptcy Act proved the high-water mark of student lending-and-collection industry influence. The following spring, “60 Minutes” aired an investigation that featured student borrowers in default spiral, as well as victims of sleazy lending and brutal collection tactics. For many viewers it was their first glimpse into the realities of modern student debt, where borrowers down on their luck can quickly find themselves drowning in runaway debt totals many times their initial loan. Following the segment, members of the newly elected Democratic Congress called for investigations and assembled a student loan reform agenda. They were assisted by New York state attorney general Eliot Spitzer, who unearthed multiple instances of Sallie Mae and other major lenders colluding with financial aid departments against the interests of students. The Senate Education Committee and the New America Foundation conducted their own investigations, uncovering high-level conflicts of interest and revolving-door hiring between Sallie Mae and senior management at the Department of Education.

The revelations did not shock Alan Collinge. The Tacoma native had spent the previous two years researching the industry and collecting borrower stories for his website, StudentLoanJustice.org, some of which were featured in the “60 Minutes” segment. Among them was Collinge’s personal story of watching a $38,000 debt incurred studying aerospace engineering grow into more than $100,000. In the summer of 2006, Collinge launched a one-man crusade. He gave up his apartment, purchased a run-down Winnebago, and conducted a speaking-tour of the home districts of every member of the House and Senate education committees. He ended the tour in Washington, where he met with Sen. Hillary Clinton.

When the financial crisis of 2007 and 2008 resulted in a wave of new defaults, Collinge began organizing pissed-off borrowers who were just beginning to understand the depth of their hole. He collected the stories for his website and continued to agitate on Capitol Hill. By 2010, Collinge was a well-known gadfly among education economists and members of Congress. But it was a lonely vindication he felt when during nationally televised TARP hearings, the chair of the oversight panel, Elizabeth Warren, described the student loan industry as having won powers “that would make a mobster envious.”

He worried that not even Warren understood that the comparison was unfair to the mob, which actually wants fast repayment and makes plain the consequences of default.

“At least loan sharks look you in the eye and are upfront about the terms of the loan,” says Collinge. “The student lending industry, including the Department of Education, is structurally predatory and makes more money from defaulted loans. In the mob analogy, the lenders make more money breaking fingers.”

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Obama entered office with a moderate reform agenda and delivered. Fifteen years after Clinton established the Direct Loan program, Obama finally removed the right of private lenders like Sallie Mae to originate federal loans (though they continue to profit by collecting and servicing them). He created a Grad Plus program guaranteeing access to unlimited low-interest federal loans for graduate study. Most recently, he ordered the Department of Education to speed up the introduction of a new income-based repayment plan for federal loans. Less generous than Clarke’s bill, the administration’s plan caps payments at 10 percent of income (down from 15) over 20 years (down from 25) after which the balance is forgiven.

But like Clarke’s bill, Obama’s income-based repayment plan treats the symptoms, not the disease. It does nothing about the soaring costs of education, budget cuts, or widespread corruption and abuse in the private loan industry. Nor does it help the huge number of borrowers already in default with their federal loans.

“Obama’s IBR can help people entering school next year, but it’s limited to federal loans and does nothing for those who’ve already paid more than they borrowed and shouldn’t have to face another 20 years of payments,” says Collinge. “It also forces defaulted borrowers, who may have been defaulted improperly to begin with, to sign a fresh loan document that legitimizes a massively inflated amount.”

Perhaps the biggest problem with Obama’s program is that it ignores the baseline uncertainty of life in America. If you want to remain in the program, you have to stay current with payments for ten years. There’s little room for the unexpected.

As with health care, the U.S. is the higher ed outlier of the industrialized world. This November, British students staged massive protests against a new law that would have raised the maximum annual tuition charged by universities to $14,000 — or less than half of what California residents pay to attend UC-Berkeley. Closer to home, annual tuition at elite Canadian universities tops out at $6,000. But even this is too much for some regional Canadian governments. Newfoundland has maintained a tuition freeze since the 1990s, and last year it eliminated interest on all student loans. Experts say the first step in resolving America’s student debt crisis is a similar recommitment to quality public education. “You can’t fix the U.S. student debt problem without addressing disinvestment in public education, which leads you to federal and state lawmakers,” says Education Sector’s Steve Burd.

Making American higher education universally affordable again should be easy (unlike health care). There already exists a vast public infrastructure of state universities and colleges, as well as a widespread belief in government’s obligation to educate its citizens. But nearly a half-century after the signing of the Higher Education Act, the costs of attending college make a sick joke of LBJ’s signing ceremony claim, in which he described higher education as the path “to deeper personal fulfillment, greater personal productivity, and increased personal reward.” For today’s graduates, it’s just as often a path to a lifetime of debt bondage. Whether this will be the case for generations to come is still an open question. The answer depends on the Unemployed Superhero wielding his economic ball-and-chain not as an stage prop, but as a battle flail.

That a Brooklyn book festival would promote small presses and their authors isn’t surprising. But the sponsor of OnePage has raised a few eyebrows. As the festival’s press release noted, “The project is made possible with a grant from Amazon.com.”

Yes, much of the literary world is in full-throated revolt against Amazon’s dominance — bookstores fear Amazon will push them out of business, authors worry about deep discounting, and the Department of Justice is considering the major publishers’ challenge over the price of e-books. But amid the public and private rancor, the massive e-retailer is very quietly trying to make friends in the book world. Its strategy is simple and employs a weapon Amazon has in overwhelming supply: Money.

The Brooklyn Book Festival is just one of many recent beneficiaries of Amazon’s largess. According to a list on Amazon’s site, prestigious groups such as the PEN American Center, journals like the Los Angeles Review of Books, One Story, Poets & Writers and Kenyon Review, mentorship programs such as 826 Seattle and Girls Write Now, and associations including the Lambda Literary Foundation, Voice of Witness and Words Without Borders have all received grants.

While the dollar figures are not always announced, according to interviews and press reports, many recipients said they have received between $20,000 and $25,000. With the more than 40 current grants listed on Amazon’s site, this suggests the company distributes approximately $1 million annually to small presses and other literary-minded nonprofits. (Publishing sources confirmed that number, but Amazon would not.)

At a time when independent publishing is struggling to survive, in part due to the influence of Amazon, recipients say that these grants offer crucial — if ironic — life support. Sometimes the grants pad out thin margins of survival, and make it possible for worthy programs to maintain their tiny staffs. And there’s no question the grants support legitimately important work: Literature in translation, international poetry, smart criticism, youth literacy efforts.

If few Amazon customers know anything about the company’s growing charity presence in the world of literary nonprofits, this is by design. Since launching its grant program in 2009, Amazon has kept its efforts low-key. Indeed, Salon’s repeated requests to discuss the grant program with Amazon — or to interview Jon Fine, Amazon’s director of author and publisher relations and the man who distributes the money — were all declined.

That silence cuts both ways. A gift from Amazon is considered the devil’s kiss in many corners of the publishing world, and many grantees are in no rush to blow a ram’s horn announcing their acceptance of money, either. (Many grant recipients interviewed for this story didn’t want to say anything negative or positive about Amazon, concerned either with offending Amazon on one hand, or betraying the anti-Amazon indie ethos on the other.)

Because both sides understand the delicate nature of the dance, the only stipulations attached to Amazon’s grants are a brief acknowledgment tucked away on a back page, and a short press release sent to supporters and members of the project. Those receiving these news releases generally consist of fellow authors, editors and members of America’s indie-publishing ecosystem. In other words, some of the only people left in the world who not only never learned to love Amazon, but actively hate its grinning yellow guts.

So what’s the point of contributions that get little publicity? Does Amazon genuinely want to be a white knight, unconcerned about the credit? Or do the grants represent a kind of blood money? Is the real goal of the grant program to keep friends close and enemies closer, by showering influential, articulate and potentially critical voices in the publishing community with sacks of no-strings cash?

“It’s the bully on the playground handing you a lollipop,” says Shirin Yim Bridges, publisher of Goosebottom Books in San Francisco, which has not received a grant from Amazon. “I mean, what do you do?”

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The pillars of Amazon hatred — recently recapped by the Authors Guild’s Scott Turow on Salon — are arranged like this. Critics allege that the Seattle-based company, led by Jeff Bezos, its ex-Wall Street CEO, engages in predatory pricing. They claim that Amazon bullies small publishers into signing price and promotional contracts that threaten their already slim margins, and doesn’t hesitate to unplug the “Buy” buttons of those who resist. While the company claims a foundational book-loving ethos, some suggest it wages total war against other institutions that sell books and embody book culture.

Amazon is picking up its literary largess during an especially charged season in the company’s relationships with the rest of the book world. For the first time, the “Big Six” publishers — HarperCollins, Random House, Hachette, Simon & Schuster, Penguin and Macmillan — have refused to sign Amazon’s latest annual contract. The main sticking point is exorbitant increases in “co-op promotional fees” for e-books that the publishers see as an illegal gouge by another name. One person familiar with the details of the proposed 2012 contracts that Amazon has submitted to major New York publishers described them as “stupifyingly draconian.” In some cases, he said, Amazon has raised promotional fees by 30 times their 2011 cost. In saying no, the big publishers are following in the footsteps of the Independent Publishing Group, a major indie distributor representing dozens of small presses that refused Amazon’s increases earlier this winter and soon saw the “Buy” buttons on more than 4,000 of their titles promptly delinked.

This standoff comes as the Department of Justice considers the antitrust implications of the Big Six and Apple’s refusal to let Amazon set the price of Kindle titles at $9.99. Then there is Amazon’s bold, long-term gambit to take on publishing houses altogether with them with its in-house Amazon Publishing project.

That adds extra movement to the philanthropic knuckleball of the company’s recent patronage of small publishers. Is the program simply a calculated corporate response to past accusations of stinginess? Is it part of a long-term strategy to divide and conquer the last bastions of Amazon’s critics, while winning over some of the very people Amazon may find useful as it develops its print-on-demand and e-book business?

It depends whom you ask. Of more than a dozen grantees Salon interviewed, some completely disassociated Amazon’s charity from its business practices. Others were more conflicted, but saw nothing to gain by dwelling on the source of the funds or turning their cash-strapped offices into an Ethics 101 seminar. Others saw Amazon’s grant giving as something to be feared: An evolutionary skill developed by a natural and intelligent predator growing ever stronger off the blood of its prey.

“The grants are a blatant attempt to buy goodwill from an industry that they’ve ravaged,” said one veteran indie publisher who asked not to be identified because he’s involved in an Amazon-funded project. “They are a rapacious, horrible company from top to bottom. But they have all this excess capital, so $25,000 here and there is nothing to them. And it’s working. People say, ‘Oh, look, they’re funding a translation prize, what could be wrong with that?’ Yet everything about them is still evil.”

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But the devil’s checks never bounce. The above Amazon hater still took the money. The truth is, there probably aren’t any underfunded indie lit institutions that haven’t, or many that wouldn’t, given the chance. Nor are there many people willing to argue they shouldn’t.

“They’re funding excellent things focused on emerging writers that create new work,” says Jeffrey Lependorf, president of the Council of Literary Magazines and Presses, an Amazon grantee. “Amazon operates a dangerously large part of the marketplace, and many of us are trepidatious about the power they wield. But they’re not pulling a fast one here. They’re a giant corporation doing what large corporations do, which is sponsorship [with the goal] of gaining the imprimatur of that to which the money is given.”

The tension is plain enough: The same people most familiar with and bitter about the bully’s methods are often the same people most in need of lollipops. Amazon’s grantees tend to be small and broke. They do not receive the kind of government support they would get in many European countries. A sponsored project can keep the lights on, put out the next title or series, and provide financial cushions to educated professionals who have mastered the art of flirting with, and occasionally bedding, the poverty line.

This is especially true of literary translators. Along with its own translated feature series, AmazonCrossing, the company funds several original translation projects, including the PEN Translation Fund and Open Letter’s Best New Translation Award, to the tune of $20,000 annually. The result has been some new friends for the Yellow Giant. “Translators love Amazon,” says Chad Post of Open Letter, an Amazon grantee and publisher of translated fiction at the University of Rochester. “They’re working for maybe $500 a book, books no one wants to touch. Then Amazon comes along and suddenly they’re benefiting from an industry that doesn’t help them, ever. Five thousand dollars is enormous to them. I can understand people are concerned with Amazon’s power in the marketplace, but I have a hard time chastising them when they directly benefit people who struggle their whole lives to do what they think is important.”

Many of Amazon’s grants have a broad trickle-down effect that puts hundreds of dollars in a lot of pockets. Amazon’s $25,000 grant to the Brooklyn Book Festival, for example, is spread out among numerous writers with small presses and associations, including Coffee House Press, Hanging Loose Press, Coach House Books, PM Press, McPherson and Co., Archipelago Books and Poets Wear Prada. Grants targeting writing programs reach the next generation of writers whom Amazon might one day sign up to Amazon Publishing. Recipients include the Association of Writers & Writing Programs, Girls Write Now, Asian American Writers Workshop, New York Writers Coalition and the Alliance for Young Artists & Writers. Smart new journals have also received money, such as the recently launched Los Angeles Review of Books, an online book review site. As newspapers have cut back on books coverage, paid outlets for critics have dwindled over the last decade.

“We are thrilled with the grant from Amazon.com, which is going to allow us to pay more writers and editors,” says Los Angeles Review of Books editor Tom Lutz. “These days, if you find money for writers, you take it. It is a drop in the bucket, given all the out-of-work journalists and incredibly shrinking book advances, but it is real money. Yes, Amazon is a controversial company, but this is not a controversial program — no one, as far as I have heard, has said, ‘No, thank you.’”

Nor has anyone yet heard from a Big Six publisher eager to fund a translation award of their own.

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The man who controls Amazon’s purse strings, and is tasked with outreach to the literary community, is a 40-something lawyer named Jon Fine. Fine’s previous positions, listed in biographies and his LinkedIn page, show he’s comfortable with a range of people across the political spectrum, from liberal tastemakers to boardroom insiders. He was a media counsel for King World when they syndicated “Inside Edition” (coinciding with part of Bill O’Reilly’s tenure as anchor) and several reality shows. He moved to NBC as senior media counsel in November 1996, where he worked with late-night shows including “Saturday Night Live” and several news divisions. Before joining Amazon in 2006 as an associate general counsel for media and copyright issues, he spent five years as the vice president and associate general counsel for Random House, where he led the legal affairs division for Alfred A. Knopf and Random House of Canada.

In November 2008, Fine became Amazon’s first director of author and publisher relations and was put in charge of a “community fund” worth, by many estimates, $1 million annually. He has since become a fixture at book fairs and publishing events around the country, where he leads seminars, joins panels and generally hams it up with friends in the business, often seeking tips on grant candidates. (Again, Fine did not return multiple written and phone requests for an interview.)

Most everyone agrees that Fine is a laid-back, likable fellow, especially by Fortune 500 standards. Although he doesn’t pretend to be anything but a company man, he cuts checks with just enough sly and endearing self-awareness. “My job is to make an 800-pound gorilla seem like only a 200-pound gorilla,” he’s known to say. Combined with his background in publishing, the result is an effective go-between for repping Amazon to indie artists, publishers and writing program directors. “He’s a book lover and genuinely cares about books,” says the CLMP’s Lependorf. “Fine has a great eye for great indie causes that don’t get funded otherwise.”

Fine may be a book lover, but he still works for a CEO who famously said, “I get grumpy when I’m forced to read a physical book.” And he himself is no stranger to what some call Amazon’s darker side. Among his specialties is antitrust law, and he is said to remain part of the company’s notoriously demanding legal brain trust. “Jon Fine embodies the two faces of Amazon,” says one of his grantees who asked not to be identified. “I like him a lot and think his heart is in the right place, but he comes from the legal side.”

Even while working a room in indie-press savior mode, Fine can bare his fangs. Dennis Johnson of Melville House Books, who has become something of a legend as a fearless and relentless on-record Amazon critic, remembers Fine approaching him at the 2011 Associated Writing Programs conference. In fall 2010, Johnson had withdrawn Melville House from the Open Letter Translation Award, rather than be associated with an Amazon-funded project. “The first morning of the conference, everybody kept telling me that some guy from Amazon was looking for me,” says Johnson. “Eventually, Jon Fine walks up to me and says, ‘I just wanted to thank you for giving us a world of publicity.’ In other words, ‘We won.’” Johnson says the company has also sent reps to intimidate him into accepting contracts. “These young guys in suits come up and stick their fingers in my chest with a message that amounts to ‘Get with the program or [perish].’ This is the class of Amazon,” he says.

After Johnson pulled Melville House from the Open Letter award, he heard from translators and small publishers around the country. Some were livid. How could he deprive his translators of an all-too-rare chance to make some coin? Others expressed a whispered respect, but said they were in no position to follow suit. As if in confession, some admitted to have recently taken money from Amazon. “One of the reasons they’re finding people so eager to accept their money is they have created a desolate landscape where that money is more necessary than it used to be,” says Johnson. “People are more willing to co-opt their ethics as a result. Not everyone is proud of it. I think a lot of the giving is not known for that reason.”

Johnson’s long crusade against Amazon has for the most part been a lonely one. “I admire Dennis’ rebel spirit,” said one small publisher who declined to go on the record. “It’s very brave. You can’t really speak out publicly against them. They’ll hear. It’s amazing. You say something in a short blog interview, and they know.”

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The fact overshadowing every Amazon debate is the company’s position as the world’s largest seller of books. It is so large that those now teamed up against Amazon in the fight over agency pricing — the right for publishers to set their own prices — is a new alliance of former enemies. In 1994, an association of independent bookstores sued the major publishing companies for discount rates they said favored the chains. The publishers in turn saw chains like Borders and Barnes & Noble as the enemy for putting a squeeze on their margins. “Discussion of terms goes back before Amazon,” says Jim Milliot, a longtime observer of the industry at Publishers Weekly. “What makes this [standoff] with Amazon stark is that they take the ‘Buy’ buttons off the website. To a lot of people, that seems unfair, and it catches a lot of attention. At least the chains always sold the books.”

Publishers large and small are on the same side as Barnes & Noble and Apple in challenging Amazon’s attempt to gain a death grip on the exploding e-book market. Amazon’s success, say its critics, will lower price expectations for physical books to the point where they become untenable for the Big Six’s business model.

The current standoff between the Big Six and Amazon is a game of chicken that will end in some sort of compromise. Amazon is the biggest customer for publishers, and it is entirely possible that Amazon will succeed in making them increasingly irrelevant with Amazon Publishing — signing authors and distributing their books directly to Amazon’s massive customer base. The company has already proven with Kindle singles and other digital exclusives that they can profit by creating content and selling it directly to readers on an Amazon-created device — and without any of the legacy infrastructure costs hobbling big publishers and bookstores.

In the future, publishers large and small may be forced to live in an Amazon world in which the company produces most books and sets whatever prices it wants. Everyone else, meanwhile, will fight for crumbs from one of Amazon’s $25,000 grants. These grants may continue to buy bits of gratitude and goodwill expressed in tight smiles, but it is unlikely to result in genuine affection for its corporate soul.

“The grants give Amazon something to point to, but people don’t see Amazon’s business practices any differently,” says Chad Post. “It’s the same as with any corporation. Money is money. I take money from Citibank, and I fucking hate Citibank.”

OWS is the latest in a long American tradition of encampments and sit-downs. These actions often act as harbingers of larger movements and historic shifts in public opinion. Jacob Coxey’s army of homeless migrants may not have succeeded in occupying Washington in 1894, but his effort marks the beginning of a period of militant labor agitation and public anger over growing wealth inequality. OWS could one day appear to future generations as a similar bookend. Already the literal “occupation” part of OWS is coming to an end, and giving way to something bigger than any city park or bullet-point list of financial industry reforms. The dispersed tent-towns of New York and Oakland, Calif., expanded and sharpened the focus on this country’s ever more disgusting disparity between the rich and the rest, and out of them have grown calls to occupy the food system and occupy the rooftops.

The following gallery is an overview of the American occupation protest tradition.

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Kossut had no idea, but in the spring of last year, he was looking for something, anything, that might improve his mental state. In 2008, he was diagnosed with cancer of the tonsils and put on a biweekly chemo and radiation regimen. He quickly lost his appetite, dropped weight and sank into a deep depression. When a friend sent him a news brief about the experimental NYU study, he applied.

Shortly before Kossut’s arrival on the morning of his session, two clinic employees entered a high-security storage room, which just happens to face a painting of a white rabbit. From a massive steel combination safe they removed a bottle containing one gram of synthesized psilocybin, the psychoactive agent animating the 200-member fungus family commonly known as “magic mushrooms.” The duo carefully measured the small container against the previous day’s weight, as if securing a store of weapons-grade plutonium. They then pill-pressed an amount of powder containing 20 milligrams of the molecule, first identified in 1958 by the Swiss chemist Albert Hoffman, most famous for his other psychedelic synthesis, LSD-25.

They delivered the pill to a converted exam room gutted of its dental chair and refitted for comfort with holistic panache: plush pillow-strewn sofa, Persian carpet, Buddha statuettes, books on spirituality and mysticism, a high-performance sound system. Only the ceiling lighting track betrays the former identity of New York City’s federally sanctioned psilocybin room.

Receiving the pill is Dr. Stephen Ross, a 40-year-old assistant professor of psychiatry at NYU Medical School and the cancer study’s principal investigator. Ross has a precise scientific manner softened by an upbringing in Southern California, where his mother (also a doctor) took him to hospice centers as a child, sparking an interest in end-of-life issues. Now director of the addiction division at Bellevue, Ross is among the youngest of a new generation of psychedelic researchers. With his cancer study still two years away from publishing results, he is already looking ahead to testing psychedelic treatments for drug addiction and alcoholism.

For now, Ross is fully focused on treating existential anxiety in people like Kossut, who lies on the couch, ready for his initiation into the psychedelic mysteries. In the research jargon, Kossut is “psychedelic naive.” After swallowing the pill Ross presents — in the cap of a ceremonial ceramic mushroom — all he can do is close his eyes, lose himself in the preselected tabla drum and sitar music, and try to remember the advice to not fight it, to move ever deeper into the light, to let go …

“It was absolutely incredible,” remembers Kossut. “The first rush was a little scary as I realized it wasn’t the placebo. That passed and next I was crossing boundaries of time and space and reality. I felt this weightlessness, this sense of being close to an unspeakable beauty that was unlike anything in my experience. For the first time since my diagnosis, I was not afraid of anything. The wall of depression that was building up day by day, the fear that I was going to die soon, that my daughter is only 8 — all those things disappeared. I wanted to stay there. I wanted it to last longer.”

It did. More than one year after his psilocybin session, Kossut reports greatly improved states of emotional and psychological well-being. “I walked out of the session happy, unafraid of death,” he says. “I don’t know why, but a transformation took place after being in that peaceful place. I relaxed. I started enjoying food again and was able to gain weight. The session taught me to be fully in the present. I’m optimistic. Mentally and physically, just better.”

This glowing report — based on a single dose of a naturally occurring, non-addictive, low-toxicity substance — sounds impossible. Surely one pill can’t succeed where months of traditional psychotherapy and antidepressants usually fail. According to science, that’s not how drugs work. It’s foreign to the model. But high success rates in ongoing concurrent studies at NYU and Johns Hopkins strongly suggest that Kossut’s psilocybin-assisted psychological rebound is no fluke. So do the findings of a pilot project conducted by Dr. Charles Grob at UCLA. Between 2004 and 2008, Grob administered psilocybin to 12 cancer patients suffering fear, anxiety and depression. His data, published last year in the Archives of General Psychiatry, showed long-term diminished anxiety and improved mood in every subject. The NYU and Johns Hopkins studies build on Grob’s pilot program with more subjects and higher doses. Midway through the research, their results are just as strong, signaling larger, multi-site trials to come.

“What appears to be going on with the psilocybin studies is a model system for creating ‘quantum change,’” says Dr. Roland Griffiths, the behavioral biologist who oversees the Johns Hopkins study. “We’ve shown we can safely produce replicable effects.”

This is the subdued, clinical language of a psychedelic science renaissance quietly entering its third decade. If its practitioners and advocates avoid the utopian claims and liberationist rhetoric that defined the LSD gospel of the 1960s, this is no accident. A new generation of psychedelic researchers understands that public and official support depends on exorcising the ghost of Timothy Leary, whose democratic acid crusade grew out of and ultimately helped destroy the first wave of psychedelic science in the 1950s and ’60s. Their goal is not to promote the legalization of these drugs or tout their value for everyone, but to revive the once-great and now largely forgotten promise of psychedelic science. And that just might, among other things, change the way we confront and think about death.

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Dosing anxious cancer patients with psychedelics may sound counterintuitive, to put it mildly. The hallmarks of the psychedelic experience — the loss of bearings in time and space, the breaking up and slipping away of the sense of self — can themselves produce acute anxiety and panic. Everyone has heard stories, most of them apocryphal, of psychedelic experiments gone wrong; of kids on acid jumping off of 12-story buildings, or showing up in emergency rooms a twitching, psychotic mess, requiring enough Thorazine to sedate a horse.

But the current studies are not self-experiments. They are carefully designed and professionally guided therapy sessions crafted to minimize anxiety and avoid so-called bad trips. Subjects are screened and prepared before ingesting the psilocybin in a plush environment overseen by two specially trained therapists. Even the dose employed is the result of trial and error: The Johns Hopkins team has identified the golden mean — between 20 and 30 milligrams, roughly equal to a good fistful of strong ‘shrooms — to maximize peak experience while minimizing transitory anxiety.

Which is not to say that subjects don’t sometimes get scared. Clark Martin, a retired psychologist who suffers recurrent kidney cancer, panicked during the onset of his first psilocybin session at Johns Hopkins. “Initially it was like falling off a sailboat,” he remembers. “You turn around, the boat is gone. Then the water’s gone. Then you’re gone. I wanted things to make sense again. My urge was to run outside.”

But his guides calmed him and the anxiety passed. Today what Martin remembers best is what came next.

“Everything became tranquil and calm, and I had the sense that I was floating on a giant bubble,” says Martin, who spent the next several hours in this peaceful place meditating on life, death, the nature of human relationships and consciousness. “I left the session animated and intellectually stimulated. Today I don’t have a sense of death like I used to. I see it as part of the flow of nature. There’s grieving and sadness, of course, but what’s being lost is this false sense of separateness we create. I don’t get too worked up about my illness anymore. My relationship with my daughter is better. I’m also more fully present and empathic when I spend time with my elderly father, who has dementia.”

What’s going on here? How does psilocybin induce states of consciousness capable of dramatically reorienting one’s mental frame? The beginnings of an answer may be found in the morning mists of recorded history. In the ancient world, disparate cultures from the Amazon to Siberia consumed psychedelic mushrooms and plants in sacred rituals they viewed as openings into spirit worlds where mysteries were revealed and ineffable wisdom communicated. Often these rituals were conducted by “medicine men” and focused on themes of disease, death and healing, as in the case of Amazonian cultures where doctors still engage in ritualized use of the “healing plant” Ayahuasca.

No one is claiming that psychedelics cure disease. But around the time Western science discovered psychedelics in the 1890s, psychology of religion scholars began to notice a recurring cross-cultural motif — the psychic salving power of what American psychiatrist Richard Maurice Bucke called “cosmic consciousness.” To research his landmark 1902 study “Varieties of Religious Experience,” the psychologist and philosopher William James surveyed a vast global record of spiritual literature. Again and again, he encountered reports of death anxiety evaporating upon the direct experience of mystical states of consciousness. The reports of Kristof Kossut and Clark Martin overlay neatly with James’ description of the afterglow provided by mystical consciousness, “of which the central [characteristic] is the loss of all the worry, the sense that all is ultimately well with one, the peace, the harmony, the willingness to be, even though our outer conditions should remain the same.” Throughout history and in every culture, James found, those who experience “the full flood of ecstatic liberation” tend to benefit afterward from “a new zest which adds itself like a gift to life … and a temper of peace.”

This insight led James to advocate for experimental mysticism, which helped him treat his own bouts with severe depression. In the 1870s, James began using nitrous oxide (a hallucinogen that shares characteristics with ketamine and PCP) as a shortcut to the experiences cataloged in “Varieties.” He found the practice salutary. Mind-blowingly so. But nitrous is just laughing gas compared to the classical hallucinogens that concerned James’ heir in the annals of chemical mystics.

In the middle of the otherwise staid 1950s, the writer Aldous Huxley emerged as a muscular advocate for psychedelics. His conversion followed his first mescaline trip, immortalized in the slim but influential 1954 work “The Doors of Perception.” Like James, Huxley’s  experiments built on a lifelong interest in mystical states. His cross-cultural examination of mystical testimony, “The Perennial Philosophy,” found the same aspects to the experience as recorded in today’s psilocybin studies: a sense of access to ineffable and intuitive knowledge; a sense of unity, transcendence and sacredness; overwhelming, ecstatic positivity felt as joy, love and peace.

Timothy Leary was the first scientist to test the power of psychedelics to trigger these states. In 1963, his last year at Harvard, Leary supervised an experiment in which psilocybin was administered to 10 seminary students attending the Good Friday sermon at Boston University’s St. Marsh Chapel. Of the 10, eight claimed to experience something like mystical consciousness. Forty years later, Roland Griffiths updated the Marsh Chapel experiment at Johns Hopkins by administering psilocybin to healthy individuals with an interest in spiritual states. As he reported in the journal Psychopharmacology, nearly 80 percent of subjects listed their psilocybin session as among the top-five most meaningful experiences of their lives, and described the experience in language straight out of the mystical literature. Follow-up monitoring by the subjects’ families and friends found sustained positive changes in personality, behavior and mood.

The fact that psychedelics act as shortcuts to mystical states provides only one-half of the logic underlying the psilocybin-cancer studies. The young field of palliative care provides the other half with its research into “good deaths.” The palliative-care literature finds that those with a sense of a transcendental force have less depression and anxiety. This can mean belief in a Judeo-Christian god, or a direct memory of the nameless, overwhelming sense of eternal, cosmic love occasioned by the ingestion of 20 or 30 milligrams of psilocybin.

“Psychedelics are a powerful mechanism for forging a connection to a transcendental force, and people with such a connection are protected against end-of-life distress,” says NYU’s Ross. “We all have cognitive illusions that protect us from the knowledge that we will die, and medicine is failing those who have to deal with this abruptly.”

Psilocybin metabolizes quickly, and follow-up doses are not needed to maintain long-term effects. This means that the psilocybin studies are not really drug studies in the traditional sense. They are more like experiential studies, in which the benefit is derived from the memory of something that isn’t easily explained away by reference to serotonin receptors. “Eternity, a state of awareness outside of time, often described as pulsating with love and life, no longer is an abstract concept,” explains Bill Richards, a therapist with the Johns Hopkins team who has been working with psilocybin since 1963. “Rather [it] is a memory of an experience, perhaps more vivid than the memory of visiting a foreign city on a vacation. Typically fear becomes replaced with curiosity and trust in deeper strata of consciousness.”

Among those who have benefited from a new trust in these deeper strata of consciousness is Janeen Delany, a Phoenix woman who flew to Baltimore for psilocybin therapy in 2008 after a leukemia diagnosis.

“I was struggling emotionally with my fear,” she remembers. “No matter how hard I tried to do the work myself, I couldn’t get to that place of acceptance.” More than two years later, Delaney describes her psilocybin experience as the turning point in coming to terms with her illness. “It changed my frame of mind,” she says. “This disease no longer defines me when I wake up in the morning. I understand myself as part of a greater whole made up of energy and frequencies. It’s impossible to put these insights into words, but they were real; are real. It felt like a thousand pounds lifted off my shoulders. I’m now the person I always wanted to be.”

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Using psychedelics to treat terminal anxiety was popularized in the West in Aldous Huxley’s 1962 utopian novel “Island,” in which the natives of the fictional paradise Pala ingest a psilocybin-like drug called moksha during stages-of-life rituals, including infirmity, sickness and death. Huxley himself would famously request and receive a large intravenous dose of LSD on his own deathbed the following year.

Shortly after Huxley’s passing, Eric Kast of the Chicago Medical School began a four-year study administering LSD to cancer patients in extreme pain. He discovered that along with reorienting the patient’s relationship to death, the psychedelic had an analgesic effect resulting from an “attenuation of anticipation.” Following their LSD treatments, Kast wrote, subjects developed “a peculiar disregard for the gravity of their situations and talked freely about their impending death with an affect considered inappropriate in our Western civilization but most beneficial to their psychic states.”

A former graduate student of Tim Leary’s named Walter Pahnke picked up Kast’s work in 1968 at Spring Grove Hospital in Baltimore. As part of a psychedelic dream team including Stanislav Grof and Bill Richards, Pahnke successfully administered LSD and psilocybin to more than 100 cancer patients between 1968 and 1977. The National Institute of Mental Health funded much of their work.

The cancer anxiety studies of the ‘60s and ‘70s were part of a global postwar flowering of psychedelic science. Researchers published hundreds of peer-reviewed papers, with LSD receiving the bulk of the attention. Psychedelic drugs were considered a revolutionary tool, frequently compared to the invention of the telescope or microscope. They were seen as keys to understanding and finding treatments for everything from alcoholism to autism to schizophrenia. This was not a fringe view, but that of respected researchers backed by the Food and Drug Administration and funded by institutions like the Rockefeller Foundation. There were research grants galore and conferences sponsored by the American Psychiatric Association. (We’d later learn that the CIA funded many psychedelic research projects. But that’s another article.)

The golden age of psychedelic studies proved brief. Even before recreational use exploded in the mid-1960s, the government had begun moving toward the view of the military and intelligence establishments that psychedelics were mere “psychotomimetics” (i.e., they mimicked psychosis) holding no scientific use (let alone spiritual or humanistic value). A series of laws throughout the decade steadily restricted and discouraged scientific access to psychedelics culminating in the 1970 Controlled Substances Act, which grouped psychedelics together with heroin as a Schedule 1 drug. According to the Drug Enforcement Agency, created in 1972, Schedule 1 drugs “have a high potential for abuse [and] have no currently accepted medical use in treatment in the United States.”

The closing of the psychedelic mind involved the weaving of a fine-spun stigma and the application of indistinct professional pressure. “A subtle microphysics of power guided scientists away from further work on these compounds,” says Nicolas Langlitz, an anthropologist at the New School who studies psychedelic science. “The allocation of funding, having to guard one’s reputation, approval of research projects, recruitment of test subjects — it all led to a near-total breakdown of academic hallucinogen research.” Before the end of the ’60s, two leading lights in the field would bemoan the fact that interested and capable scientists were “turning their backs on psychedelics for fear of identification with irresponsible researchers.”

Then as now, “irresponsible researchers” was synonymous with Timothy Leary, the ex-Harvard professor turned self-styled laughing leprechaun and high priest of an everybody-must-get-stoned psychedelic revolution. Among the new generation, resentment of Leary’s legacy remains palpable, as is the determination to avoid the mistakes, indeed the tragedy, of the 1960s.

“Leary so undermined credible scientific use of these compounds that it poisoned research for decades,” says Griffiths of Johns Hopkins. “The iconic scientist goes AWOL and promotes unrestricted recreational use. As a result, I don’t know of any other set of scientific questions that have been banned for decades because it was judged too dangerous to study. Maybe germ or chemical warfare. But I doubt those were actually stopped.”

Bill Richards, the avuncular Hopkins therapist who knew Leary and has overseen thousands of psychedelic sessions over 50 years, has learned to take the long view. “One of our sayings during the sessions is ‘Let go,’ which we needed to do,” he says. “The old fires needed to die down. Leary’s ashes needed to get launched into outer space. Now I’m hopeful. The research proceeds with integrity.”

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This quickening psychedelic revival was a long time coming. Activists and scientists began laying the groundwork during the second Reagan administration, when their efforts seemed most futile. In 1986, Rick Doblin founded the Multidisciplinary Association of Psychedelic Studies to advocate and educate the public. Not much happened until 1990, when Rick Strassman of the University of New Mexico Medical School broke ground with a study on the affects of DMT, the so-called nuclear bomb of the psychedelic family. Then, early in the first Clinton administration, the National Institute of Drug Abuse and the Food and Drug Administration quietly signaled a readiness to approve new psychedelic research. Encouraged by the signs, a group of scientists founded the Heffter Research Institute in 1993 to fund projects and hold them to the highest scientific standards.

The early naughts witnessed a further eroding of the psychedelic research taboo. The big foundations and government agencies maintained their distance, but groups like MAPS, Heffter and the Council on Spiritual Practices stepped in to underwrite medical school studies involving Schedule 1 drugs such as Ketamine, MDMA, marijuana and psilocybin. Mid-decade, Harvard’s John Halpren finally exorcised Tim Leary’s Cambridge ghost when he won approval for a small cancer anxiety study employing MDMA. The data from these and other studies is now beginning to appear in medical journals and on professional association conference agendas. This year, a chapter on psilocybin therapy for cancer patients will appear for the first time in a standard psycho-oncology textbook.

Much of this activity is centered at NYU, where a vibrant community of therapists and scientists has emerged around an ongoing speaker’s series called the Psychedelic Research Group. In 2008, Dr. Jeffrey Guss, a Manhattan therapist and co-investigator on the NYU study, taught “Psychedelics and Psychiatry,” the first course on psychedelic therapy offered at a modern medical school. Guss also directs the university’s 12-week psychedelic psychotherapy training program, the only program of its kind in the country. “We’re establishing a conversation across disciplines — oncology, psychiatry, palliative care — to reintroduce psychedelics into the medical discourse,” says Guss. “The field is emerging as a doable career, and I’ve started to mentor people who want to move exclusively in this direction.”

For political and scientific reasons, cancer anxiety is the research avenue with the most potential to scale up in the near future. Advocates like MAPS’ Doblin optimistically envision a scenario in which the therapy could be more widely available in a decade. Getting there will require larger trials and a full rescheduling review by the DEA and the Department of Health and Human Services. “Getting a drug rescheduled is very difficult,” says Bill Piper, national director of the Drug Policy Alliance. “But by its charter, the DEA is bound to follow the science.”

Establishing psilocybin-assisted therapy as an accepted option for end-of-life care could have some surprising consequences. Among them is a fundamental reorienting of our culture’s relationship to death. It could move discussion on what constitutes a “good death” and how to better provide them. Because Western medicine focuses narrowly on defeating disease with little consideration for how we die, the sick often spend their last weeks and days surrounded by machinery and hospital staff instead of a comfortable hospice setting surrounded by family.

“There is an increasing understanding that there is a paucity of approaches to psycho-spiritual well-being at end of life,” says Anthony Bossis, a palliative-care expert at NYU and co-investigator of the psilocybin study. “Medicine doesn’t talk about how we die. Palliative care brought psycho-spiritual stress into the conversation, and now psychedelic research is enlarging that conversation by exploring the ontological shifts, like that brought about by psilocybin, which can affect one’s outlook on life, death, disease.”

Adds Griffiths of Johns Hopkins: “So much money gets poured into those last few months of life where people are terrified and grasping at anything to prolong life. It’s heartbreaking to see, but our culture has such a disordered relationship to end-of-life issues. Change that, and people will change their utilization of the medical system. They’ll use it more in some ways, less in others. The result would be a huge net decrease in expensive interventional procedures in the final weeks.”

If and when psilocybin enters the larger healthcare debate, it will trigger the mother and possibly deciding battle of the 1960s culture wars. The prospect of Medicare dollars going to psychedelic therapy would send right-wing opportunists into a stomping rage. Sarah Palin would tweet about Hippie Death Panels. The GOP might revive its 1972 battle cry about liberals marching under a banner of “acid, amnesty and abortion.”

But here the history of the medical marijuana movement is instructive. Drug warriors could only deny the medicinal value of marijuana for so long; soon they were forced to beat a retreat before the combined forces of the medical literature, lobbying and advocacy, and the reality of millions of suffering Americans. If the science is solid, it usually wins, if only in fits and starts. This is especially true when the science is accompanied by the moving testimonies of people like Roy, a 52-year-old television news producer and Stage-4 lung-cancer patient who this summer underwent psilocybin treatment at NYU after three years of chemotherapy. Like Krystof Kossut and dozens of others, Roy had grown increasingly anxious and depressed before his revelatory psilocybin session. Today he describes that session as among the most precious and important experiences of his life. His journal is excerpted in a forthcoming chapter in Springer’s textbook, “Psychological Aspects of Cancer,” co-authored by Bossis and Guss of the NYU study and Charles Grob of UCLA.

“From here on love was the only consideration,” Roy writes of his psilocybin session.

Love seemed to emanate from a single point of light. The bliss was indescribable … I took a tour of my lungs. There were nodules but they seemed rather unimportant … I was being told (without words) to not worry about the cancer … it’s minor in the scheme of things, simply an imperfection of your humanity and that the real work to be done is before you. Again, love … [On the day after the session] I felt spectacular … both physically and mentally! It had been a very long time since I’d felt that good … a serene sense of balance … Undoubtedly, my life has changed in ways I may never fully comprehend. I now have an understanding, an awareness that goes beyond intellect, that my life, that every life, and all that is the universe, equals one thing: Love.

It’s true we don’t know much about psychedelic states of consciousness. Are they merely biochemical carnivals producing internal hallucinations, or are they — as people often describe them — “more real than real”? The psychedelic experience has always been just that — the ultimate subjective experience, ineffable and very difficult to account for when over. But those who doubt its power or “reality” might remember that we also have precious little understanding of the neurological basis of “normal” consciousness. And when it comes to bringing comfort to the ill, of giving the gift of “indescribable bliss,” a case can be made for the irrelevance of ultimate metaphysical and scientific questions. The first psychologist to advocate for experimental mysticism also advocated for that most American of thought systems, pragmatism.

Truth, concluded William James, is what works. 

Amazingly, just after the ADL report’s release, Sarah Palin responded to a question about a possible Palin-Beck ticket by refusing to rule out Beck as a running mate. She praised him effusively, describing him as “bold, clever, and very, very, very effective.”

Effective at what, exactly?

Earlier this week, Sam Stein of the Huffington Post detailed several instances in which Beck has welcomed onto his shows guests with ties to groups that traffic in white supremacy, neo-Confederate secession, and anti-Semitism. Stein’s reporting was a good start, but it would take a chalkboard the size of Idaho to fully map out Beck’s racially paranoid guest list.

But Beck insists his critics are imagining things, that he does not engage in racial fear-mongering, that a string of guests with ties to hate groups do not form a meaningful pattern, and that he’s not a racist. It occurred to me the other day that if you really want to know whether Beck and his guests are blowing racial dog-whistles, it’s best to ask a dog.

I decided to reach out to Don Black, the avowed white nationalist who runs the Web site Stormfront.org, the country’s leading “Discussion board for pro-White activists and anyone else interested in White survival.” But Black hung up on me. I next tried to get in touch with David Duke, the former gubernatorial candidate and current head of the European American Unity and Rights Organization. Duke, too, had little interest in talking to me, likely because of my past association with the Southern Poverty Law Center, which tracks the activities of white supremacist groups.

Unable to get through to the highest-profile spokesmen of the racist grass roots, I took a page from the other side and trawled their Web sites for insight. I scanned Davidduke.com and Stormfront.org to see what they had to say, if anything, about Beck. Admittedly, this method is not scientific, and certainly folks on the left don’t like it when righties cherry-pick an extreme comment from Daily Kos or the Huffington Post and pretend the whole site can be summed up by such extremism.

On the other hand, Stormfront.org isn’t a media organization but a self-described discussion board. And when it comes to Beck, the discussions are fairly positive. On both David Duke’s Web site and Stormfront, Beck’s July 28 claim that President Obama harbors a “deep-seated hatred of white people, or the white culture” was met with attention and appreciation.

Duke was heartened by the discussion it generated, and placed it in a larger context. “A lot of stuff is happening in the world of race relations and little of it points towards a post-racial society,” Duke noted. “Beck is steadily losing advertisers, but his viewers seem to be sticking with him … White desperation is manifesting itself in various forms.”

Beck’s charge that the president hates white people sparked a more expansive discussion at Stormfront.org. Some participants saw Beck as an important ally in the White Nationalist cause. Others were skeptical, viewing him as a clueless conservative version of Lenin’s “useful idiot.” But some of Stormfront’s most active members generally agreed that, whether he was fully conscious or not, Beck was nudging his audience toward an embrace of racial consciousness.

“Glen [sic] Beck can be useful,” said one frequent Stormfront contributor who posts under the name SS_marching. “When Glen beck said ‘Obama Has A Deep-Seated Hatred For White People’ he is able to reach a much wider audience than we can. They will [be] predisposed to the idea and the next time Obama pushes an anti-white policy they will see it as such.”

Stormfront member PowerCommander agreed. Beck, he wrote:

“seems to have ignited a flame under the asses of some folks with similar ideas by pushing the right buttons. It appears as if the current regime [is] directly blaming GB and fox news for throwing a wrench in their machine. Is Beck’s rambling getting America fired up and ready to fight? Has Beck told enough of the truth to start something bigger? Even an engine needs a starter to get fired off and go down the road.”

Thor357, a Stormfront sustaining member who has posted on the site more than 3,500 times, had this to say:

“Glenn Beck and Alex Jones [a controversial conservative media figure who believes 9/11 was an inside job] are the front line in the war of Ideals we grapple with, they are far from perfect and are somewhat compromised. But every person in the last 2 years that I have introduced to the WN [White Nationalist] Philosophy have come largely from Alex Jones, Glen Beck and the Scriptures for America founder Pastor Pete Peters … Baby steps are required for people like these, but the trio Beck, Jones, Peters are the baby food that feeds potential Nationalists… Glenn Beck is not far behind as his Mormon background indicates to me as most Mormons I have met are not friends of Jews like the Church was years ago. Most Mormons I know are arming themselves, with guns, bullets and food.”

Later in the same discussion thread, Thor357 added:

“I have talked to 6 people in two days because Glenn Beck woke them up, it’s amazing how angry they are. They are pissing fire over Obama, this is a good thing. Now I educate them. If out of 100 of the Glen Beckers I keep 20 then I have won 20 more to cover my back side. I never lost the 80 as they never were.”

Carolina Patriot, whose member picture features a kitten aiming an assassin’s rifle, was conflicted but admiring:

“Every now and again when an infomercial takes the place of hunting or fishing, I’ll turn over to Glenn Beck if he’s on and watch his show. Sometimes it is amusing, sometimes it is informed, and sometimes, I think he comes to SF [Stormfront] to steal show idea’s”

UstashaNY offered up an analogy to substance abuse, with Beck as the soft-stuff hook:

“Beck, Dobbs etc. are like gateway drugs. If it wakes up one person to learn something about whats really going on and that person does the research, looks deeper and deeper into WHO and WHAT is behind all of this, then its a win for the movement. NOBODY in the msm is reporting the stuff Beck does, let him keep talking. It will wake people up, believe me… He is more of a help to us then you may think. Until we have a REAL voice in the msm, guys like him and Dobbs are a stepping stone right into our laps. Its only a matter of time…”

Even those who don’t think Beck understands what he’s doing appreciate his instincts. According to WhiteManMarchesOn88:

“There is no doubt that Beck is not a WN [white nationalist], but I have to agree that he does raise a lot of really good questions that do promote White survival. I’m sure he would go a lot farther with a lot of his questions, but ZOG [Zionist Occupied Government] would more than likely kick him off television if he did.”

ZOG or no ZOG, Beck is clearly doing something right from the point of view of the average white nationalist.

“By no means do I think [Beck] is aware of the racial issue, and for the moment that is ok,” wrote Stormfront member QHelios. “He is stirring the pot, and I thank him for that.”