"If you cut your arms and legs off, well, you're not
dead so, obviously, your arms and legs aren't you. They're just extensions of your ‘bio-mobile'.
And, so, what are you? What am I? And that's the search that started back in 1963, I guess. And, after
about a year and a half of searching for answers, I discovered, uh, there were others that were on the same quest that I was
on.
"I heard in Bob Dylan's music,
a mystery that was like he had glimpses of the same mystery, and I felt a resonance in the words that he used - that he was
writing that excited me because it felt like a gravitational pull, you know? He wrote about social hypocrisy and held
a mirror up with his words that we could all - I could see myself in those words in that mirror.
"Then, when I met Phil Sloan who wrote ‘Eve of Destruction',
there was another mirror. ‘Eve of Destruction' is nothing more than a mirror and it reflected reality more
accurately than any thought up to that time that I'd ever heard. And that's why I sang it because it reflected
reality FROM MY PERSPECTIVE - not from everybody's - because you're perspective IS your reality."
In classic McGuire fashion, Barry offers a very unique analogy to illustrate
his point about how one's perceived reality affects their religious, racial and political views.
"If you have a thousand people all holding hands in a big circle and you
put an elephant down in the middle of them and you ask each one to describe the elephant, well you're going to get a thousand
different descriptions of the elephant because every one of them sees the elephant from a different perspective.
"Even your left eye sees reality from a different perspective than your
right eye does. You hold your finger up in front of your face and close one eye and open the other and then close that
one and open the one that was closed - you go back and forth and your finger is going to move back and forth because your
eyes don't even see things the same way. But it gives you depth perception, doesn't it?
"So if you have a thousand people, all holding hands, looking at the elephant,
well you have a depth perception that one person wouldn't have. And don't you know that God is a pretty
big elephant?"
I couldn't resist
asking the obvious tongue-in-cheek question: "Does that make Him a Republican?"
Chuckling, he replies, "Well, from some respects He might be. From others,
he's a donkey. It depends on your perspective. And, the thing of it is, is that it's both the flip sides
of the same coin, you know? The front of the elephant is just the flip side of the back of the elephants.
And the Republicans and the Democrats are just flip sides of the same coin. There's only one coin and they're
battling away at each other and they're the same coin.
"There's only one government. There are only one people. There's only one race.
If you say that you're an Irishman - as soon as you call yourself an Irishman, you become a
