YMMV / The Season of the Witch

• Everyone Is Jesus in Purgatory: An in-universe example. Early in the book, Gloria and John visit her cousins in their vacation cottage on Lake Erie. This is back when Lake Erie was extremely polluted and parts of it had been declared dead. While meditating, John has a vision of Christ's resurrection and observes that "Lake Erie is Jesus." Why? Because Jesus died to teach us to love one another, and Lake Erie died to teach us to love the earth. (John doesn't mention that humanity might someday help the lake to resurrect itself, but the investigation, legal action and quality controls that restored it began about a year after Gloria and John's visit.)

• Harsher in Hindsight: It's like Herlihy had a crystal ball. Pretty damned frightening, fifty years down the road, to read Hank's description of what's wrong with the United States in 1969 and his prediction for what will eventually happen. Erudite Stoner and former psychiatrist Peter Friedman has just shared his The Future Will Be Better vision, a High Times Future world in which humanity is united through technology, altruism and Higher Understanding Through Drugs (and/or meditation). This is historian Hank Glyczwycz's response.
  A smart man with a big drive can get drawn into the system here. He can become a little king, have his own back yard and a fence around it. He can buy Coca-Cola, a television. His wife can go to the drugstore and come back smelling good. He can buy a car and drive fast on big highways. Superhighways. Everything super. He is a little king because he's got a little intelligence, a little ambition. But you know something about kings, even little ones? They can't see good. They can’t see millions of other people still desperate, still hungry. The fat grows up around their eyes. They don't see the millions of poor who don’t fit in the system. And the poor? What about them? They not even angry, my friends. They think it’s their own fault to be broke and out of work. They’re not angry. They feel guilty. They live in the greatest country of all, where every man can be king, but they look in the mirror and they see a piece of shit. They don’t know what the hell they doing wrong. If they get drafted in the Army, that’s good luck. Maybe in the war they find a way to fit the system. Otherwise, stay home, get drunk, die. This is why I hate America.

  This fine man, this Peter, with his beautiful ideas, he is Mr. Nixon's’s best ally. He works for the generals and the billionaires and the corporations. He takes the young people and he keeps them soft in the head with all his hashish and his dreams. They should be out organizing and plotting the takeover of the government, but he puts them to sleep instead with his talk of love. Very fine talk. The whole world holding hands. Beautiful. There should be such a world. And perhaps it comes. Who knows. It could happen — ten thousand years from now! In the meantime, some other things going to happen first. America will be obliterated. There is no other fate for such a cancer of rubbish and greed. Europe and Russia will go, too. And for hundreds of years this land will be cemetery land, with Asiatics and Africans and South Americans picking over the bones. Our bones.