Hey, we just hosted an event for a really good book called Burning Rainbow Farm: How a Stoner Utopia Went Up in Smoke by  a real cool guy named Dean Kuipers. It’s basically the story of two men, Tom Crosslin and Rollie Rohm, a gay couple, who more or less decided to go back to the land and assembled a loose collective of the like minded (meaning a wide range of those who didn’t fit in in "straight" society) and lived on a farm in Western Michigan. One of their tenants of personal freedom was the right to smoke hemp, and Tom and Rollie had several high profile hemp festivals which got the Man’s attention (in this case a tight assed Prosecuting Attorney named Scott Teter). All the weapons of the war on drugs – our longest lasting and least successful war – compared to the war on drugs the war against Iraq has been a rousing success – were turned on them including such heinous and unconstitutional methods as forfeiture, unlawful search and seizure, and even the removal of Rollie’s son Robert. Eventually an armed stand-off ensued and Tom and Rollie were killed by Federal and State sharpshooters under very questionable circumstances.

One of the things that really struck me about this case is how few people had heard of it. The shootings occurred right before 9/11 so they were wiped off the news, and even the countercultural magazine Spin and the liberal New Yorker pulled back from running Kuipers’s original article about it in the resulting atmosphere of fear and paranoia. Of course this is the paranoia that George W. Bush continues to mine so extensively as he strips further and further freedoms from the American public, now aided by a packed, acquiescent Supreme Court. Burning Rainbow Farm shows how such broad Governmental powers will inevitably be abused. The oft used argument that evesdropping, data collection, no knock raiding and the other methods of the Bush regime will be used only on "terrorists" ignores the elastic definition of that word – it’s basically come to refer to drug users, homosexuals, war protestors, liberals and anyone who doesn’t fit the narrow conservative Christian image of rectitude. We can’t afford to be blase about the deaths of Tom and Rollie, because the guns that killed them will soon enough be turned on the rest of us.

Kuipers has done a public service by bringing the facts about Rainbow Farm forward so cogently, to attempt to make the events there as well known as those at Ruby Ridge and Waco, but the best thing to me is that it’s also a very good book. I read a lot of "True Crime" (and if there’s a crime here it’s on the Government’s side) and like all good books the secret of excellence is CHARACTER, and in Tom Crosslin Kuipers has a great one, a tragic figure whose traits of idealism, pugnacity and stubborness made him the charismatic figure he was, but also led inevitably to his downfall. He unfolds the story elegantly and economically, and although the ending is depressing it is also very moving and as inevitable as in any good novel.

Anyway, there are a lot of good reasons to read this book and I urge you buy it immediately, hopefully from an independent bookseller.

UBU has spoken. So it is written. So it shall be.