“Yes, I do believe it is possible, and not only for novelists, to ‘plug in’ to an overmind, or Ur-mind, or unconscious, or what you will, and that this accounts for a great many improbabilities and ‘coincidences.’ “  —Doris Lessing, winner of the 2007 Nobel Prize in Literature

WASHINGTON (CNN) 11:45 a.m. EDT, June 26, 2007 — The Supreme Court ruled against a former high school student Monday in the “Bong Hits 4 Jesus” banner case—a split decision that limits students’ free speech rights. Joseph Frederick was 18 when he unveiled the 14-foot paper sign on a public sidewalk outside his Juneau, Alaska, high school in 2002. Principal Deborah Morse confiscated it and suspended Frederick. He sued, taking his case all the way to the nation’s highest court. The justices ruled that Frederick’s free speech rights were not violated by his suspension over what the majority’s written opinion called a “sophomoric” banner. (Watch the banner unfurl and launch a legal battle )

Here’s an example of how the collective unconscious works on us in mysterious ways…. I started writing Crash Gordon and the Mysteries of Kingsburg a few weeks after September 11th, 2001. We all know what went down that day and there’s no need to get into it here, except to say that I was living in Manhattan when it happened and I intuitively knew, right away, that there was more to the attacks on the World Trade Center than we were being told. Crash Gordon, in a way, has been my method of educating myself about the slithery history of false flag terrorist events and the manipulative lies our government tells us. “Bong Hits 4 Jesus” ended up as just one slender tentacle on that many-armed octopus.

The phrase occurs on page 48 of my book. I was writing that section during the winter of 2001-2002. I must have run across a news item about Joseph Frederick unfurling his banner during the Winter Olympics torch relay in Juneau, Alaska on January 24th, 2002—although I can’t remember doing so now. I do know that I liked the phrase, however I ran across it, and I decided to use it, for comic purposes, as a bit of graffiti painted on some pissed-off farmer’s barn. I had no way of knowing then that Frederick’s case would get all the way to the Supreme Court and result in a further Bush-sponsored curtailing of our constitutional rights. But believe it or not, that’s how it happened.

That in itself wouldn’t be of much note if I hadn’t written a scene in Crash Gordon, a few months later, that depicted Gordon defending a fellow student’s right to free speech in a series of editorials for his high school newspaper, The Viking Voice. Gordon ends up being harassed by his high school principal and an overzealous policeman for writing the editorials. But later, The Columbia Journalism Review singles out those same editorials for its Annual Scholastic Journalism Award.

So you can see where I’m going with this: Five years before it happened, the collective unconscious helped me key in on the exact phrase that would become the focus of an onerous Supreme Court decision regarding our rights to free speech. That particular issue happened to resonate with me, personally, because Crash Gordon’s fictional adventures in high school journalism were based on actual incidents from my brother Crash’s life. Crash really did write award-winning editorials on free speech in high school that got him sent to the principal’s office for an ugly police interrogation. And Crash grew up to become an independent journalist who got into still more trouble for publishing his anti-corporate screeds.

And now I’ve gone and written Crash Gordon and the Mysteries of Kingsburg—a book that five out of nine Supreme Court Justices might like to see banned and burned, if they could get away with it.

You can read the relevant excerpts here:

BONG HITS 4 JESUS — THE EXEGESIS