Spirit of the O'Looneys


In 1861 a meeting was held on the 4th of July in Looney's Tavern, in what is now Addison, Alabama. With over 2,500 representatives of the local area on hand, they voted a resolution saying that if a state could secede from the Union, then by the same logic, a county could secede from a state. They formed "The Free State of Winston" and demanded to be left alone. They were led by "Ol Black Fox," William Bauck Looney.

That history is from, "3rd Down and Forever," by J. Brent Clark. "Bill" Looney was a paternal ancestor of Joe Don Looney, who, when ordered by Detroit Lions head coach to run in a play, said, "If you want a messenger boy call Western Union."

Looney was an All-American at Oklahoma and a first round draft pick by the New York Giants in 1963. But that was a time when young men were shaped and molded into team players. Nobody danced behind the goal posts with the football. It was not up to the man to praise himself. He was expected to wait for somebody else to do it. A man who expressed too much independence had to be pushed out of the pack as an example to the others.

In the introduction, Clark relates, "My decision to write this book was prompted by my Thanksgiving morning, 1988, perusal of a published interview of William S. Burroughs, in which Burroughs defended the individualist spirit in our society. It seemed to me Joe Don met most every criterion of the individualist."


When he was at Oklahoma, Joe Don committed the sin of questioning the image of head coach Bud Wilkinson as accurate. He saw him as an aspiring politician. In fact, Joe Don always ended up in trouble with authority, because he didn't much care for it from outside himself. He did things on his terms, and was the man who created the model of the free agent. He didn't survive the structure and politics of football, but he was undeniably a great athlete.

Looney was a strange combination of physical power and skill and yogic mysticism. Clark relates that Joe Don used to have a diner he liked to go to in the early morning hours, where he thought things over. And he couldn't do that one night because there were two booths of guys making noise. One was some students and the other truck drivers. So he stood up and told them he was trying to think and they would have to go somewhere else if they were going to make all that noise.

The students were bright enough to give him space to cool but the truck drivers challenged him. He threw one of them through the plate glass window. He was a wild man. And he was also a religious seeker. Baba Muktananda didn't have any problems with Joe Don. To the contrary, Joe Don became his protector.

Joe Don had been in Vietnam. That's where he learned to use drugs, along with the rest of the young men who went there. He watched the most powerful nation on earth drop a million tons of bombs and missiles on the Vietnamese during Operation Rolling Thunder. It was supposed to break their will. He saw that it did not. He began to see power from a different perspective.

There is a story in the book of Joe Don's dropping in on some family friends. He was broke and strange and not at all a success in the measure of this rich man. This friend couldn't turn him away, but he wasn't really comfortable either, because of Joe Don's bizarre lifestyle. They were in the hot tub, and Joe Don said, "Look at this." And he stood up and demonstrated amazing power in his abdominal muscles, pulling them in and making his waist very small. So unusual was the control over his body that the effect was startling. The other man was by comparison a slug, and knew it.

In their own peculiar way, Burroughs and Looney had the same kind of animating soul. It is distinctly American, and it will not be turned back to a time when conformity was the rule, and the threat of being forced out of the group was enough to ensure it. Both men are patron saints of the evolutionary spirit that drives individualism.

In a tribal setting, if you didn't fit in, then you were ostracized. This was the only punishment, and no other was needed. In a tribal unit the tribe itself is the individual Spirit, not a member of it. It is from Dante , who retains the personalities of the dead in heaven and in hell, that we have the distinctly Western pattern for individualism. It breaks the tribal mold, wherein there is one consciousness, and each person is just a piece of it, the same as in a family.

This came home to me when I had applied for, and been accepted to, an African village seminar with Maladoma Patrice Some . I had done weekend workshops with him and his wife, and was very impressed with his ritual work. He embodied the experiences of both tribal Shaman initiation, and of western higher education (PhD's from Brandeis, and from the Sorbonne in Paris).

That was also the time I was doing analysis with Dr. Joseph Henderson, who was in his early nineties. He is now one hundred.

I had a dream which told me not to go to the village, but to say on the individual path with Dr. Henderson. In the beginning of the dream Maladoma had on the white robes of a guru, and was talking about American men. I looked out the window and saw this line of garage doors open and these airstream motor homes were pulling into them.

Very phallic. I then found myself outside the group, looking at the silver motor homes parked in their garages.

They had Montana and Wyoming plates, and were actually self-contained homes and businesses in one. In other words, each was a complete identity, with both masculine and feminine aspects. The one I was looking at was connected to dairy products, and I realized I was being shown a unique container, a symbol of an American man that did not fit with Maladoma's assessment.

I suddenly knew that I was supposed to be on the bus with all the others, and that I was being a problem by not staying as one of the group. I could feel the "others" anxiety about my not being with the unit. I walked outside to find the bus, and there was a big old car with tailfins, like a sixty Dodge , and it had Montana plates. And this little old man in cowboy getup was walking bowlegged right across my path, to get in the car. It was Joseph of course. I realized that my path was the Western model, of individuation, and that I would continue analysis.

Posted: Mon - March 8, 2004 at 11:09 AM