That aside Timothy Leary's Dead is a fun and powerful look back at Timothy Leary's life, what it meant, and how it affected our world. Fours stars. Highly recommended.
In any case, the movie got me to thinking. It seems a lot of my heroes have been dying lately. For a while that wasn't the case. I guess it started with Abbie Hoffman back in 1988. Richard Feynman also died in 1988, though I don't suppose I really began to feel like he mattered to me till later. But recently they've begun going faster and faster. Jerry Garcia died in 1995. This year Timothy Leary and Allen Ginsberg died. I'm starting to read the Times obituary pages with more of an eye to the possibility that someone who was important to me may be gone. That's new.
Until recently I pretty much divided famous people I respected into two categories. There were those who were already dead (King, Gandhi, Einstein, Feynman, many others) and those who were still alive (Hoffman, Chavez, Wilson, Leary, Mermin). But that doesn't work anymore. Now I have to have a third category for those who've left. It's surprisingly disturbing given that I'm not talking about anyone I've known personally.