Kenneth Rexroth
Five More Columns from San Francisco Magazine
Depression and Revolt
As I write this, the news weeklies, the picture magazines and the butcher-paper weeklies of the liberals are full of summaries of the Sixties and prognostications of the Seventies. With the exception of sheets still lost in the McKinley Administration, everybody agrees that the prospects are uniformly gloomy.
The so-called anti-inflation measures of the Calvin Coolidge Junior Administration have not checked inflation but rather increased it, and they have pushed the American unemployment rate above that of any major industrial nation. The stock market slid steadily downward all autumn and around the world the experts on the various financial papers agree that the United States is entering a depression — they call it recession. So, for that matter, do conservative publications like Time and the New York Times. They, however, say bravely, “The Nixon administration cannot afford to allow the country to slide into a serious depression.” This optimism is based on the assumption that the Administration has on its economic general staff people intelligent enough to stop it. This is whistling in the dark. Since Goldwater’s capture of the presidential nomination, the Republican Party has been the party of the militantly mindless. The fiscal policies of the country are in the hands of people who believe not just that John Maynard Keynes was an agent of the Comintern, but that Adam Smith, Ricardo and John Stuart Mill were, in the words of an aging pin-up presidential spokeslady (name of Magnolia), all communistic liberals. To manipulate as stupefyingly vast and complex a structure as the American economy requires brains. There is no evidence that brains are tolerated inside the fence around the White House.
At the moment, the United States is engaged in an immensely profitable war and has an economy geared to permanent war. At the same time it is moving steadily, month by month, deeper into depression. At the same time the rate of inflation is becoming liquidationist. At the same time government bonds pay more than the most fly-by-night, get-rich-quick schemes paid five years ago for their bonds. The entire sector of the world economy dependent on the dollar is being pulled after it. Even the famous West German Miracle is teetering. The bright spots are Sweden, Australia, and of course Japan. Except for periods of catastrophe, the growth rate in Japan has been the highest in the capitalist world for almost 100 years. Yet even Japan was caught up in the world economic crisis that began in 1929 and was solved nowhere except by the introduction of an economy of permanent war.
The most ominous sign of the threat of the new economic crisis is that both objectively, with the ending of the Vietnam War, and in the muddled minds of the self-styled economists in the Administration, we should be several months into a deflationary period. Quite the opposite is the case — sufficient indication that forces of such profound contradiction are operating within the economy that they threaten to pull it to pieces. Macaulay, in his History of England, has a famous panegyric to the national debt: he points out that it is never paid, it is inflated away. Have you any idea what the national debt of the United States is at the beginning of 1970? Assuming that the debt is never paid, compare the interest on the present debt with the interest on the debt at the beginning of the Vietnam War. Deficit financing is all very well, but you cannot destroy bombers that cost many millions of dollars day after day — to, at best, blow up bamboo bridges that are repaired in the night — without subverting the foundations of economic life. Since the outbreak of World War II, the entire U.S. economy has been treated as an extractive industry, as a mine, not a crop.
Any economist who knows more than can be learned from pamphlets put out by the National Association of Manufacturers or mouthed at luncheons of small-town boosters clubs is kept outside the picket fence around the White House along with all the other pickets. For a decade Washington has been a city of pickets. It has also been a city of uncontrollable “crime in the streets.” These were years when prosperity, war, civil liberties legislation and the Welfare State should have fostered a high degree of social cohesion. Of course, the exact opposite was the case. The social turmoil that has accompanied an overall upcurve would have been inconceivable during the economic crisis of the Thirties. Now, historians and sociologists who have devoted years of objective scientific study to the etiology of revolt all agree that the greatest social turmoil, usually culminating in the breakdown of society or revolution, occurs shortly into what they call a J-curve, or fishhook. In other words, a long period of prosperity with ever-increasing participation in the affairs of state and social mobility is followed by a sharp downturn economically, and then with a social stasis and repression. The curve does not have to go very far — no more than the hook of the “J” or fishhook in relation to the shank — when the whole business blows up. This is true of every major outbreak and breakdown in history in every civilization. Men do not revolt out of hopeless poverty. They revolt when their so-called “rising expectations” are cut off and comparative prosperity is suddenly inhibited, and they still have enough physical health, strength, stamina to fight back. This is obvious is the steady rise in black militancy. There are more members of the Black Panthers still alive today than there were Negroes who revolted in all the history of the slave revolts from the first shipload to the Emancipation Proclamation, and this is due to the relatively mild frustration and disappointment of hopes following the first civil rights legislations and court decisions. What will happen when the whole affluent society has been a year or two on the downgrade?
The Administration of Calvin Coolidge Jr.
Faced with economic crisis, Herbert Hoover’s administration proposed measures that, had they become law, would probably have ameliorated the severity of the collapse and might even have enabled an eventual recovery. Within the context of the private enterprise system they were intelligently considered, but an antagonistic Congress refused to pass the emergency bills Hoover submitted. This at least is the orthodox Republican position, and there is something to be said for it. Hoover and old Andy Mellon got where they did because they knew what they were talking about.
The present situation is a different matter altogether. Now, as we look back on the first year of Calvin Coolidge Jr. [i.e. Richard Nixon], it is easy to see how his administration handles its problems. The method is that of soap and cigarette advertising. Sell the product on the basis of a minute quantity of a secret ingredient. “Our detergent contains the wonder-working miracle chemical paleoiridiumoxalate, protects your hands, improves your digestion, children cry for it.”
The United States claims it is withdrawing its armed forces from Vietnam. Actually, it is taking a limited number of men out of the field, consolidating its position, and attempting to fight on interior lines. Meanwhile, it is buffering itself with native expendables it hopes to keep fighting by stiffening and policing South Vietnamese troops with American “advisors.” And backing them up with American regiments — literally, with guns at their backs. This is one reason for talk about doing away with the draft. The present strategy would be more effective with a volunteer — i.e. mercenary — army. The trouble is, many volunteers are not forthcoming, so America must continued to rely on gadgetry. Gadgetry has not defeated the enemy in the past, but that is not its purpose. Its purpose is to make money. The loss of a giant bomber worth millions in an attempt to take out a bridge of bamboo sticks that can be rebuilt in a night is just what the doctor ordered. It’s all very well to talk about fighting on interior lines if you can establish a front, but the front is in Saigon, where a complete underground apparatus is functioning.
So too with the administration’s measures to cope with inflation and the oncoming economic crisis. The only anti-inflationary measure put through so far is to increase unemployment. All the other measures, including high interest rates, are, in the final analysis, inflationary. When respectable credit for bona fide enterprises costs as much as the extortionist loan sharks were charging desperate people only five years ago, this is not deflation but inflation and, furthermore, it is inflation before collapse. The economic processes now operating cannot be turned off. You can’t go back; all you can do is someday bail out. You don’t remember, but 1928-29 saw a boom bond market, but not, as I remember, with anything like the present fantastic interest rate.
So too with crime in the streets, which simply means the breakdown of urban civilization. The present administration measures add up to “get more cops and get them tough,” and turn the authority over to local police forces. In other words, if what you’ve been doing is wrong, you have to do it harder.
The most serious crisis we face is the general one of the human species itself, the breakdown of the environment. How does the administration propose to handle it? By setting up a small commission to advise the President on what measures he can submit to private enterprise and to encourage the business community to de-pollute itself. This is hiring the murderer to solve the crime. Modern capitalism is no longer productive in the sense that a farm is productive. It no longer operates by cycling its resources, whether of men or materials. As a whole, modern industry is one great extractive industry, a mine. You take the stuff out of the ground, process it, sell it, use it, break it, throw it on the rubbish heap. The gismo is the rubbish heap. If the tin cans went back to the smelter the system would blow up. The point in Vietnam is precisely the destruction, for trivial ends, of billions and billions of dollars’ worth of matériel. The system’s built-in falling rate of profit was once met by dumping manufactured surpluses onto the coffee-colored brethren, sometimes in exchange for extremely cheap raw materials or luxuries like ivory or diamonds. We’re still dumping surpluses on the same brethren but now it’s no longer cheap tin trays. It’s napalm, fragmentation bombs and blazing bombers. Don’t forget, they are commodities, too. They are also a form of technologically highly improved pollution or garbage.
To overcome the lethal destruction of the environment, it would be necessary to totally reorganize all methods of production and distribution “lock, stock and barrel” — a catch phrase which in this case is singularly fitting. Where will this reorganization come from? Not from the other side, certainly. From 1929 to 1939 I watched the world economic crisis affect Russia as deeply as it did Germany and the United States, and I watched it partially solved in the same way — by war production. The Five-Year Plans were just a nastier, more hysterical, WPA. When the facts finally came out, hunger and unemployment were at least as great in Russia as in Germany or America. The only difference now is that the Rhine is not as polluted as the Hudson or Japan’s Inland Sea or many Russian rivers. So Calvin Coolidge Jr. plans to save the human species with the aid of the San Bernardino Chamber of Commerce?
Dissolving Power
I hope everybody’s strapped in, because the acceleration is going to get terrific. Calvin Coolidge Jr. and the One-Man Greek Junta wanted a politics of confrontation, and now they’ve got it. Bang. Bang. Bang. They free the cops in Detroit. They sentence the Chicago defendants to bigger raps than they give second-degree murder in that murderous town. They throw not one, but a whole stack of books at their lawyers. The district attorney makes a public speech that they are all faggots. Three more oil slicks hit three different resort coasts. The Safeguard program will cost over $600 million more than estimated — already, on the trial run. The University of Santa Barbara blows. The Onassis of Chesapeake Bay demands that the press self-censor itself and stop printing news of those dope-crazed, sex-crazed, commie university children. And, with few exceptions, the press does.
There has ceased to be any communication whatsoever between the dead society and the living. They make totally imbecilic remarks, like Pat in the atomic power plant: “And, just think, isn’t it wonderful! It doesn’t cause any pollutions!” The press solemnly reports that since Operation Intercept the use of heroin in New York high schools has doubled. And Cal Jr. twists the arms of the Turks to stop the export of, believe it or not, marijuana! And the Daddies and Mommas cheer and nobody ever tells them that Turkey is one of the three principal exporters of illegal opium. What’s happening? When the Mafia took over Haight-Ashbury, for weeks grass became unobtainable, but young sinister strangers were peddling smack all along the street like newspapers. Who is taking over what, when the same thing happens on a national-international scale?
The most profitable counterrevolution in history occurred when the Syndicate discovered they could sell middle-class youth drugs as revolution. But dope wears out. You build up tolerance and have to kick it and start over. What is the power structure going to do when all the dope wears out and there is no drug that can narcotize youth so that they can face their parents without vomiting? It’s a 45/55 ratio now, what is going to happen when 55 percent of the youth of the land say, “I find this social order of institutional murder and lies utterly, totally unbearable and I refuse to stand it another minute.” What will happen then?
I am a neo-Flower Child. I believe nonviolence is incomparably more effective than violence. I believe the techniques of nonviolent social action have hardly been tried. I believe that quietly living a lifestyle of love and respect for all sentient creatures can completely subvert a power-crazy society. I don’t believe in Black Power, or Student Power, or Gay Power, or any other kind of Power. When push comes to shove, all power is Pig Power. I don’t believe in power at all. If they get you wanting power, they’ve got you in their bag, doing their thing.
But what is happening when the school that students put down as the country club of the university system (their parents have a median income of over $35,000), where you can’t buy a single radical newspaper, where a former leader of SDS asked me to explain very briefly the difference between socialism, communism and anarchism, blows up? Don’t blame it on Kunstler. Kunstler is still trying hard to be a pacifist, and he certainly is not going about uttering direct incitement to violence. Never, anywhere, is riot due to “outside agitators.” When students from homes in Palos Verdes burn down banks something has gone terribly wrong. It is not the youth from the slums who are saying this year, “I refuse to accept a life devoid of all meaning.” It is youth from split-level utopia.
Power comes out of the mouth of a gun. That’s right. But it is absurd as a slogan for the alternative society. You pull out your piece, they pull out their piece. You pull out your next piece, they pull out their next piece. The last piece pulled is theirs — it’s the cobalt bomb. The peaceable kingdom will not be won by fire and sword. They’ve told us that’s what they were doing for 6000 years. All wars are fought for freedom and peace. The plastic dolls at the top of the power structure are more vulnerable than you think. When you’ve seen one synthetic statesman you’ve seen them all. They are non-inflammable and impenetrable by bullets. But they can all be dissolved by very simple solvents.
It’s never worked? But it’s never been tried, except maybe by the Buddhist Emperor Asoka.
Meanwhile, the Black Panthers topple over like black bowling pins — like black sitting ducks.
What’s the solvent that dissolves the Enemy? That’s the solution. The problem is, how do you apply it?
Yet here we are trapped in the air-conditioned nightmare — and the air-conditioner has broken down at last.
Nixon in Drag
Ellsworth Huntington’s works on sunspots, climate, history, business cycles, and the rise and fall of civilizations are usually dismissed as pseudo-science. Nevertheless, there is something terribly convincing about them. America is capitalist. Russia is “revisionist socialist.” China is “real socialism.” The Iron Curtain countries are People’s Democracies. Cuba is a mixture of all three. Yugoslavia is real revisionist socialism. Sweden is the Middle Way. The nations of the former colonial world are Liberated. Right?
Theoretically, according to anybody’s sociology or economics but especially Marxism, economic conditions and social movements should differ vastly. They do not. Russia is in the depths of a serious economic depression. So is the United States. So is most of the rest of the world — Western Europe, Japan and Australia the least, Africa probably the most. According to the papers, the American depression is due to inflation, over-expansion of the stock market and the benighted economic policies of the J. Walter Thompson administration. In Russia it’s supposed to be caused by the relative impoverishment of the civilian economy by military expenditures the country cannot afford. In Africa it’s because those natives don’t know any better. That all these disparate social systems should converge in one worldwide deepening economic depression is certainly a remarkable coincidence. One would think that when the capitalist world went down, the socialist world, self-sufficient within its own autarchy, should go up. But this has never been true. Bolshevik policy has always followed the American stock market, if you want to interpret it that way, although the Bolsheviks must be given credit for foreseeing the end of their New Economic Policy — their Coolidge prosperity — in the summer of 1929. “The Republicans bring depressions; the Democrats bring wars.” It’s not so simple as that.
It’s as though some external factor was operating — sunspots or cosmic rays — or astrology. But even more ominous, there seems to be a subjective factor operating all over the world. Reaction, repression, dictatorship, the seizure of power by the militantly mindless — it’s the same the whole world over. Sacramento, Washington, the Vatican, Peking — on the thrones of power everywhere is just another costume. It’s the same Dick Nixon in drag. Brezhnev and Nixon even look alike. We are entering a period of counterrevolution triumphant. We are also entering a period where the population explosion and the destruction of the environment are catching up on us at a geometrically accelerating rate. Resources, said Adam Smith, grow by addition; population grows by multiplication. Four plus four is eight; but four times four is 16, and the higher the number the greater the difference. That’s back in those old square days. These are the days of breakdown by cube. To raise the standard of living of every man on earth to that enjoyed by American blacks with a median income, it would be necessary to have 27 planets to exploit at the rate we exploit this one, and those would wear out pretty soon. These problems may be capable of solution but they are not being solved now, and the proposed solutions on the part of the state are frauds, all of which would work backwards exactly like the current “control of inflation.”
Liberal political theorists who have said the state was turning before our eyes into a service state, and the Left that said the state was simply the coercive organ of the ruling class, have both been proven wrong. But the Left that said its state was to be a true service state, is wronger still.
Once a regulative order of the body politic, the state has become cancerous and now has metastasized throughout all the tissues of society, and even its former beneficent activities become malignant. So all political terminology becomes Newspeak and means the opposite. We are tapering off the war in Vietnam. Tricky Dick’s ecological revolution pollutes the Arctic Ocean and turns the national forests over to the lumbermen. But though he or Brezhnev or Montini actively enjoy behaving that way, they couldn’t help it even if they didn’t like it. At a rough estimate I would say that it is physically impossible for a contemporary politician to utter three sentences without lying five times. I should hate to ask any of our rulers if he had two eyes, one nose and one mouth. I fear the answer would be an embarrassment to all concerned. This is not just rhetoric of the Mr. Dooley-Will Rogers-Mark Twain variety; the joke has come true.
How does a body fight this? Not by massive confrontation, certainly, with the cohorts of Ronnie Bloodbath, Don Alioto’s Tac Squad or the U.S. Army. It’s old Macdonald’s Green Beret Farm, and just as you are ready to pull your ace out of the hole, they can top it; their ace is the Doomsday Machine. Do you realize how far along we are? If in 1935 Hitler had said, “When you go on the campus of Heidelberg University, be ready to shoot; if we are going to have a bloodbath, let’s have it now,” his government would have fallen. The time has come for all men of good will to disentangle themselves from a dying society. This doesn’t necessarily mean anything overt. It means reorganizing one’s own life and redefining the meaning of life so that all the cords which bind one to implication in an order of death are cut, one after the other. The first step should be a private denial of collective guilt, something like an act of prayer. Once you no longer believe in the Gospel according to J. Walter Thompson or the Politburo, you can begin to act. You have found the fulcrum of Archimedes’ lever. How is another story.
The Reign of Lies
They laughed when I sat down at the piano . . .” In this epoch of the dizzy acceleration of the breakdown of American world hegemony, of Western civilization — of the environment, of the capitalist system, of civilized interpersonal and family relationships, of ordinary morality — it is impossible for any sane prophet of doom not to be overtaken by facts. And the facts surpass all but the most outrageous paranoia.
If a really hip old-time political journalist were to tell what he really knows about the way the world is run, they’d ring the bell and call for the men in white to take him away in a straitjacket. The devil theory of history so long mocked by orthodox historians has come true at last and maybe — looking back from the daily newspapers to the Roman historians, Tacitus and Suetonius, who in my young days I thought were just romancing propagandists for the Senatorial party — maybe it’s always been true.
I was sitting one time in the Brasserie Lipp with France’s most liberal politician, discussing the international economic and military machinations responsible for his recent defeat. The woman with me said to the others around the table, “You have to take anything Kenneth says with a grain of salt. He believes the world is run by the CIA, the Pentagon, Chase and Citibank, the Communists, the Mafia, five American advertising agencies and the homosexuals.” Everybody laughed, but the ex-premier cocked an eyebrow, shrugged his shoulders and quietly said, “Mais oui.”
The major white-collar industry today is lying. Figure out the number of people who live by lying! Journalists, salesmen, advertising men, publicity men, movies, television and radio employees, writers and actors, novelists and playwrights, professors, schoolteachers, clergymen, all politicians without exception — left, right and center — all military and paramilitary officers — from cops to generals to admirals — employees of research institutes like Rand, doctors and “scientists” who write testimonials for cigarettes, DDT and leaded gasoline, conservationists who endorse the activities of the lumber and paper industries. So it goes, on and on and on. Sure, there are honest men among them, but they are few and far between. As such, the business of communicating with one another, not just the communications industry, has come to consist almost entirely of perverting facts and peddling fantasy. How many times a day does a clerk in a department store cosmetics counter say something that is manifestly false? As you go up the ladder the intensity of the lie increases geometrically until you get to the J. Walter Thompson shadow cabinet presided over by the Rice Krispies box into which they pour words, the programmed android who was hired by a classified ad.
Most sensible people know that the administration calls things by their opposite. “Invasion” cannot be called “withdrawal” without people catching on, but what is behind the PR, even the PR of the Left? The invasion has captured some cans of Spam and some Springfield rifles and consolidated the enemy deep in Cambodia. In other words, the North Vietnamese, the Viet Cong and the Pathet Lao, withdrawing from before the Americans, have not retreated but advanced. Was this a mistake on the part of the Pentagon and the White House? Obviously it was not. They planned it that way. More important than the military adventure is the constitutional one. The invasion was a deliberate act of defiance of those Congressmen — and the public opinion behind them — who were attacking the unconstitutional power of the President to make undeclared war. This is what is important: the deliberate planned defiance of the Constitution, amounting to a dry run for a military coup d’état. Greece, Iran, Santo Domingo, Guatemala, Indonesia and, of course, Cambodia were all defenses of freedom and democracy, dry runs over the body of the gooks. Now the boys are putting into effect the lessons they learned abroad on the home folks.
As for the domestic scene, is there really anybody so naïve as not to believe that the same technocrats of the lie write Spiro Agnew’s speeches as write Nixon’s speeches chiding him for being too rough? It’s the old technique of the bad cop and the good cop, with the American people getting the third degree. Only one trouble: Nixon is not as convincing as a good cop. It may be paranoid to believe that everything is going according to plan here at home, but isn’t it? Do you really believe that 150,000 hard-hats could be mobilized for a demonstration in 48 hours and that then hard-hat clubbings, hard-hat clubs, hard-hat demonstrations could spread all across the country during the following week all as a spontaneous eruption of the stalwart patriotic American working class? Do you believe this? It takes months of planning and preparation to organize such a movement in New York City alone. Furthermore, it takes a cadre of organizers. Who were the principal organizers of the New York demonstration? The labor unions most notoriously identified with the Mafia. Are you aware that in these hard-hat demonstrations the bully boys are being paid for their time by their unions and/or their employers — and this includes construction workers on government and state jobs? A queer kind of spontaneity.
At one blow the men behind Nixon (And who are they, these faceless men behind their faceless masks? Certainly more powerful and more anonymous figures than the pipsqueak Southern California millionaires who hired him long ago with a classified ad and coached him to libel and slander Helen Gahagan Douglas out of Congress.) have been able to call up an army of hoodlums of a size it took Hitler years to muster.
How are you at cutting barbed wire, getting through electric fences, dodging searchlights and strangling police dogs? Better practice.
A comprehensive biography of Kenneth Rexroth (1905-1982) can be found at The Poetry Foundation.
(Editor's Note: The pieces that Kenneth Rexroth wrote for the San Francisco Examiner & the San Francisco Bay Guardian can be found as a separate section on Ken Knabb's great website, The Bureau of Public Secrets. My thanks to Ken for permission to reprint this selection.)
Five More Columns from San Francisco Magazine
As I write this, the news weeklies, the picture magazines and the butcher-paper weeklies of the liberals are full of summaries of the Sixties and prognostications of the Seventies. With the exception of sheets still lost in the McKinley Administration, everybody agrees that the prospects are uniformly gloomy.
The so-called anti-inflation measures of the Calvin Coolidge Junior Administration have not checked inflation but rather increased it, and they have pushed the American unemployment rate above that of any major industrial nation. The stock market slid steadily downward all autumn and around the world the experts on the various financial papers agree that the United States is entering a depression — they call it recession. So, for that matter, do conservative publications like Time and the New York Times. They, however, say bravely, “The Nixon administration cannot afford to allow the country to slide into a serious depression.” This optimism is based on the assumption that the Administration has on its economic general staff people intelligent enough to stop it. This is whistling in the dark. Since Goldwater’s capture of the presidential nomination, the Republican Party has been the party of the militantly mindless. The fiscal policies of the country are in the hands of people who believe not just that John Maynard Keynes was an agent of the Comintern, but that Adam Smith, Ricardo and John Stuart Mill were, in the words of an aging pin-up presidential spokeslady (name of Magnolia), all communistic liberals. To manipulate as stupefyingly vast and complex a structure as the American economy requires brains. There is no evidence that brains are tolerated inside the fence around the White House.
At the moment, the United States is engaged in an immensely profitable war and has an economy geared to permanent war. At the same time it is moving steadily, month by month, deeper into depression. At the same time the rate of inflation is becoming liquidationist. At the same time government bonds pay more than the most fly-by-night, get-rich-quick schemes paid five years ago for their bonds. The entire sector of the world economy dependent on the dollar is being pulled after it. Even the famous West German Miracle is teetering. The bright spots are Sweden, Australia, and of course Japan. Except for periods of catastrophe, the growth rate in Japan has been the highest in the capitalist world for almost 100 years. Yet even Japan was caught up in the world economic crisis that began in 1929 and was solved nowhere except by the introduction of an economy of permanent war.
The most ominous sign of the threat of the new economic crisis is that both objectively, with the ending of the Vietnam War, and in the muddled minds of the self-styled economists in the Administration, we should be several months into a deflationary period. Quite the opposite is the case — sufficient indication that forces of such profound contradiction are operating within the economy that they threaten to pull it to pieces. Macaulay, in his History of England, has a famous panegyric to the national debt: he points out that it is never paid, it is inflated away. Have you any idea what the national debt of the United States is at the beginning of 1970? Assuming that the debt is never paid, compare the interest on the present debt with the interest on the debt at the beginning of the Vietnam War. Deficit financing is all very well, but you cannot destroy bombers that cost many millions of dollars day after day — to, at best, blow up bamboo bridges that are repaired in the night — without subverting the foundations of economic life. Since the outbreak of World War II, the entire U.S. economy has been treated as an extractive industry, as a mine, not a crop.
Any economist who knows more than can be learned from pamphlets put out by the National Association of Manufacturers or mouthed at luncheons of small-town boosters clubs is kept outside the picket fence around the White House along with all the other pickets. For a decade Washington has been a city of pickets. It has also been a city of uncontrollable “crime in the streets.” These were years when prosperity, war, civil liberties legislation and the Welfare State should have fostered a high degree of social cohesion. Of course, the exact opposite was the case. The social turmoil that has accompanied an overall upcurve would have been inconceivable during the economic crisis of the Thirties. Now, historians and sociologists who have devoted years of objective scientific study to the etiology of revolt all agree that the greatest social turmoil, usually culminating in the breakdown of society or revolution, occurs shortly into what they call a J-curve, or fishhook. In other words, a long period of prosperity with ever-increasing participation in the affairs of state and social mobility is followed by a sharp downturn economically, and then with a social stasis and repression. The curve does not have to go very far — no more than the hook of the “J” or fishhook in relation to the shank — when the whole business blows up. This is true of every major outbreak and breakdown in history in every civilization. Men do not revolt out of hopeless poverty. They revolt when their so-called “rising expectations” are cut off and comparative prosperity is suddenly inhibited, and they still have enough physical health, strength, stamina to fight back. This is obvious is the steady rise in black militancy. There are more members of the Black Panthers still alive today than there were Negroes who revolted in all the history of the slave revolts from the first shipload to the Emancipation Proclamation, and this is due to the relatively mild frustration and disappointment of hopes following the first civil rights legislations and court decisions. What will happen when the whole affluent society has been a year or two on the downgrade?
[February 1970]
Faced with economic crisis, Herbert Hoover’s administration proposed measures that, had they become law, would probably have ameliorated the severity of the collapse and might even have enabled an eventual recovery. Within the context of the private enterprise system they were intelligently considered, but an antagonistic Congress refused to pass the emergency bills Hoover submitted. This at least is the orthodox Republican position, and there is something to be said for it. Hoover and old Andy Mellon got where they did because they knew what they were talking about.
The present situation is a different matter altogether. Now, as we look back on the first year of Calvin Coolidge Jr. [i.e. Richard Nixon], it is easy to see how his administration handles its problems. The method is that of soap and cigarette advertising. Sell the product on the basis of a minute quantity of a secret ingredient. “Our detergent contains the wonder-working miracle chemical paleoiridiumoxalate, protects your hands, improves your digestion, children cry for it.”
The United States claims it is withdrawing its armed forces from Vietnam. Actually, it is taking a limited number of men out of the field, consolidating its position, and attempting to fight on interior lines. Meanwhile, it is buffering itself with native expendables it hopes to keep fighting by stiffening and policing South Vietnamese troops with American “advisors.” And backing them up with American regiments — literally, with guns at their backs. This is one reason for talk about doing away with the draft. The present strategy would be more effective with a volunteer — i.e. mercenary — army. The trouble is, many volunteers are not forthcoming, so America must continued to rely on gadgetry. Gadgetry has not defeated the enemy in the past, but that is not its purpose. Its purpose is to make money. The loss of a giant bomber worth millions in an attempt to take out a bridge of bamboo sticks that can be rebuilt in a night is just what the doctor ordered. It’s all very well to talk about fighting on interior lines if you can establish a front, but the front is in Saigon, where a complete underground apparatus is functioning.
So too with the administration’s measures to cope with inflation and the oncoming economic crisis. The only anti-inflationary measure put through so far is to increase unemployment. All the other measures, including high interest rates, are, in the final analysis, inflationary. When respectable credit for bona fide enterprises costs as much as the extortionist loan sharks were charging desperate people only five years ago, this is not deflation but inflation and, furthermore, it is inflation before collapse. The economic processes now operating cannot be turned off. You can’t go back; all you can do is someday bail out. You don’t remember, but 1928-29 saw a boom bond market, but not, as I remember, with anything like the present fantastic interest rate.
So too with crime in the streets, which simply means the breakdown of urban civilization. The present administration measures add up to “get more cops and get them tough,” and turn the authority over to local police forces. In other words, if what you’ve been doing is wrong, you have to do it harder.
The most serious crisis we face is the general one of the human species itself, the breakdown of the environment. How does the administration propose to handle it? By setting up a small commission to advise the President on what measures he can submit to private enterprise and to encourage the business community to de-pollute itself. This is hiring the murderer to solve the crime. Modern capitalism is no longer productive in the sense that a farm is productive. It no longer operates by cycling its resources, whether of men or materials. As a whole, modern industry is one great extractive industry, a mine. You take the stuff out of the ground, process it, sell it, use it, break it, throw it on the rubbish heap. The gismo is the rubbish heap. If the tin cans went back to the smelter the system would blow up. The point in Vietnam is precisely the destruction, for trivial ends, of billions and billions of dollars’ worth of matériel. The system’s built-in falling rate of profit was once met by dumping manufactured surpluses onto the coffee-colored brethren, sometimes in exchange for extremely cheap raw materials or luxuries like ivory or diamonds. We’re still dumping surpluses on the same brethren but now it’s no longer cheap tin trays. It’s napalm, fragmentation bombs and blazing bombers. Don’t forget, they are commodities, too. They are also a form of technologically highly improved pollution or garbage.
To overcome the lethal destruction of the environment, it would be necessary to totally reorganize all methods of production and distribution “lock, stock and barrel” — a catch phrase which in this case is singularly fitting. Where will this reorganization come from? Not from the other side, certainly. From 1929 to 1939 I watched the world economic crisis affect Russia as deeply as it did Germany and the United States, and I watched it partially solved in the same way — by war production. The Five-Year Plans were just a nastier, more hysterical, WPA. When the facts finally came out, hunger and unemployment were at least as great in Russia as in Germany or America. The only difference now is that the Rhine is not as polluted as the Hudson or Japan’s Inland Sea or many Russian rivers. So Calvin Coolidge Jr. plans to save the human species with the aid of the San Bernardino Chamber of Commerce?
[March 1970]
I hope everybody’s strapped in, because the acceleration is going to get terrific. Calvin Coolidge Jr. and the One-Man Greek Junta wanted a politics of confrontation, and now they’ve got it. Bang. Bang. Bang. They free the cops in Detroit. They sentence the Chicago defendants to bigger raps than they give second-degree murder in that murderous town. They throw not one, but a whole stack of books at their lawyers. The district attorney makes a public speech that they are all faggots. Three more oil slicks hit three different resort coasts. The Safeguard program will cost over $600 million more than estimated — already, on the trial run. The University of Santa Barbara blows. The Onassis of Chesapeake Bay demands that the press self-censor itself and stop printing news of those dope-crazed, sex-crazed, commie university children. And, with few exceptions, the press does.
There has ceased to be any communication whatsoever between the dead society and the living. They make totally imbecilic remarks, like Pat in the atomic power plant: “And, just think, isn’t it wonderful! It doesn’t cause any pollutions!” The press solemnly reports that since Operation Intercept the use of heroin in New York high schools has doubled. And Cal Jr. twists the arms of the Turks to stop the export of, believe it or not, marijuana! And the Daddies and Mommas cheer and nobody ever tells them that Turkey is one of the three principal exporters of illegal opium. What’s happening? When the Mafia took over Haight-Ashbury, for weeks grass became unobtainable, but young sinister strangers were peddling smack all along the street like newspapers. Who is taking over what, when the same thing happens on a national-international scale?
The most profitable counterrevolution in history occurred when the Syndicate discovered they could sell middle-class youth drugs as revolution. But dope wears out. You build up tolerance and have to kick it and start over. What is the power structure going to do when all the dope wears out and there is no drug that can narcotize youth so that they can face their parents without vomiting? It’s a 45/55 ratio now, what is going to happen when 55 percent of the youth of the land say, “I find this social order of institutional murder and lies utterly, totally unbearable and I refuse to stand it another minute.” What will happen then?
I am a neo-Flower Child. I believe nonviolence is incomparably more effective than violence. I believe the techniques of nonviolent social action have hardly been tried. I believe that quietly living a lifestyle of love and respect for all sentient creatures can completely subvert a power-crazy society. I don’t believe in Black Power, or Student Power, or Gay Power, or any other kind of Power. When push comes to shove, all power is Pig Power. I don’t believe in power at all. If they get you wanting power, they’ve got you in their bag, doing their thing.
But what is happening when the school that students put down as the country club of the university system (their parents have a median income of over $35,000), where you can’t buy a single radical newspaper, where a former leader of SDS asked me to explain very briefly the difference between socialism, communism and anarchism, blows up? Don’t blame it on Kunstler. Kunstler is still trying hard to be a pacifist, and he certainly is not going about uttering direct incitement to violence. Never, anywhere, is riot due to “outside agitators.” When students from homes in Palos Verdes burn down banks something has gone terribly wrong. It is not the youth from the slums who are saying this year, “I refuse to accept a life devoid of all meaning.” It is youth from split-level utopia.
Power comes out of the mouth of a gun. That’s right. But it is absurd as a slogan for the alternative society. You pull out your piece, they pull out their piece. You pull out your next piece, they pull out their next piece. The last piece pulled is theirs — it’s the cobalt bomb. The peaceable kingdom will not be won by fire and sword. They’ve told us that’s what they were doing for 6000 years. All wars are fought for freedom and peace. The plastic dolls at the top of the power structure are more vulnerable than you think. When you’ve seen one synthetic statesman you’ve seen them all. They are non-inflammable and impenetrable by bullets. But they can all be dissolved by very simple solvents.
It’s never worked? But it’s never been tried, except maybe by the Buddhist Emperor Asoka.
Meanwhile, the Black Panthers topple over like black bowling pins — like black sitting ducks.
What’s the solvent that dissolves the Enemy? That’s the solution. The problem is, how do you apply it?
Yet here we are trapped in the air-conditioned nightmare — and the air-conditioner has broken down at last.
[April 1970]
Ellsworth Huntington’s works on sunspots, climate, history, business cycles, and the rise and fall of civilizations are usually dismissed as pseudo-science. Nevertheless, there is something terribly convincing about them. America is capitalist. Russia is “revisionist socialist.” China is “real socialism.” The Iron Curtain countries are People’s Democracies. Cuba is a mixture of all three. Yugoslavia is real revisionist socialism. Sweden is the Middle Way. The nations of the former colonial world are Liberated. Right?
Theoretically, according to anybody’s sociology or economics but especially Marxism, economic conditions and social movements should differ vastly. They do not. Russia is in the depths of a serious economic depression. So is the United States. So is most of the rest of the world — Western Europe, Japan and Australia the least, Africa probably the most. According to the papers, the American depression is due to inflation, over-expansion of the stock market and the benighted economic policies of the J. Walter Thompson administration. In Russia it’s supposed to be caused by the relative impoverishment of the civilian economy by military expenditures the country cannot afford. In Africa it’s because those natives don’t know any better. That all these disparate social systems should converge in one worldwide deepening economic depression is certainly a remarkable coincidence. One would think that when the capitalist world went down, the socialist world, self-sufficient within its own autarchy, should go up. But this has never been true. Bolshevik policy has always followed the American stock market, if you want to interpret it that way, although the Bolsheviks must be given credit for foreseeing the end of their New Economic Policy — their Coolidge prosperity — in the summer of 1929. “The Republicans bring depressions; the Democrats bring wars.” It’s not so simple as that.
It’s as though some external factor was operating — sunspots or cosmic rays — or astrology. But even more ominous, there seems to be a subjective factor operating all over the world. Reaction, repression, dictatorship, the seizure of power by the militantly mindless — it’s the same the whole world over. Sacramento, Washington, the Vatican, Peking — on the thrones of power everywhere is just another costume. It’s the same Dick Nixon in drag. Brezhnev and Nixon even look alike. We are entering a period of counterrevolution triumphant. We are also entering a period where the population explosion and the destruction of the environment are catching up on us at a geometrically accelerating rate. Resources, said Adam Smith, grow by addition; population grows by multiplication. Four plus four is eight; but four times four is 16, and the higher the number the greater the difference. That’s back in those old square days. These are the days of breakdown by cube. To raise the standard of living of every man on earth to that enjoyed by American blacks with a median income, it would be necessary to have 27 planets to exploit at the rate we exploit this one, and those would wear out pretty soon. These problems may be capable of solution but they are not being solved now, and the proposed solutions on the part of the state are frauds, all of which would work backwards exactly like the current “control of inflation.”
Liberal political theorists who have said the state was turning before our eyes into a service state, and the Left that said the state was simply the coercive organ of the ruling class, have both been proven wrong. But the Left that said its state was to be a true service state, is wronger still.
Once a regulative order of the body politic, the state has become cancerous and now has metastasized throughout all the tissues of society, and even its former beneficent activities become malignant. So all political terminology becomes Newspeak and means the opposite. We are tapering off the war in Vietnam. Tricky Dick’s ecological revolution pollutes the Arctic Ocean and turns the national forests over to the lumbermen. But though he or Brezhnev or Montini actively enjoy behaving that way, they couldn’t help it even if they didn’t like it. At a rough estimate I would say that it is physically impossible for a contemporary politician to utter three sentences without lying five times. I should hate to ask any of our rulers if he had two eyes, one nose and one mouth. I fear the answer would be an embarrassment to all concerned. This is not just rhetoric of the Mr. Dooley-Will Rogers-Mark Twain variety; the joke has come true.
How does a body fight this? Not by massive confrontation, certainly, with the cohorts of Ronnie Bloodbath, Don Alioto’s Tac Squad or the U.S. Army. It’s old Macdonald’s Green Beret Farm, and just as you are ready to pull your ace out of the hole, they can top it; their ace is the Doomsday Machine. Do you realize how far along we are? If in 1935 Hitler had said, “When you go on the campus of Heidelberg University, be ready to shoot; if we are going to have a bloodbath, let’s have it now,” his government would have fallen. The time has come for all men of good will to disentangle themselves from a dying society. This doesn’t necessarily mean anything overt. It means reorganizing one’s own life and redefining the meaning of life so that all the cords which bind one to implication in an order of death are cut, one after the other. The first step should be a private denial of collective guilt, something like an act of prayer. Once you no longer believe in the Gospel according to J. Walter Thompson or the Politburo, you can begin to act. You have found the fulcrum of Archimedes’ lever. How is another story.
[June 1970]
They laughed when I sat down at the piano . . .” In this epoch of the dizzy acceleration of the breakdown of American world hegemony, of Western civilization — of the environment, of the capitalist system, of civilized interpersonal and family relationships, of ordinary morality — it is impossible for any sane prophet of doom not to be overtaken by facts. And the facts surpass all but the most outrageous paranoia.
If a really hip old-time political journalist were to tell what he really knows about the way the world is run, they’d ring the bell and call for the men in white to take him away in a straitjacket. The devil theory of history so long mocked by orthodox historians has come true at last and maybe — looking back from the daily newspapers to the Roman historians, Tacitus and Suetonius, who in my young days I thought were just romancing propagandists for the Senatorial party — maybe it’s always been true.
I was sitting one time in the Brasserie Lipp with France’s most liberal politician, discussing the international economic and military machinations responsible for his recent defeat. The woman with me said to the others around the table, “You have to take anything Kenneth says with a grain of salt. He believes the world is run by the CIA, the Pentagon, Chase and Citibank, the Communists, the Mafia, five American advertising agencies and the homosexuals.” Everybody laughed, but the ex-premier cocked an eyebrow, shrugged his shoulders and quietly said, “Mais oui.”
The major white-collar industry today is lying. Figure out the number of people who live by lying! Journalists, salesmen, advertising men, publicity men, movies, television and radio employees, writers and actors, novelists and playwrights, professors, schoolteachers, clergymen, all politicians without exception — left, right and center — all military and paramilitary officers — from cops to generals to admirals — employees of research institutes like Rand, doctors and “scientists” who write testimonials for cigarettes, DDT and leaded gasoline, conservationists who endorse the activities of the lumber and paper industries. So it goes, on and on and on. Sure, there are honest men among them, but they are few and far between. As such, the business of communicating with one another, not just the communications industry, has come to consist almost entirely of perverting facts and peddling fantasy. How many times a day does a clerk in a department store cosmetics counter say something that is manifestly false? As you go up the ladder the intensity of the lie increases geometrically until you get to the J. Walter Thompson shadow cabinet presided over by the Rice Krispies box into which they pour words, the programmed android who was hired by a classified ad.
Most sensible people know that the administration calls things by their opposite. “Invasion” cannot be called “withdrawal” without people catching on, but what is behind the PR, even the PR of the Left? The invasion has captured some cans of Spam and some Springfield rifles and consolidated the enemy deep in Cambodia. In other words, the North Vietnamese, the Viet Cong and the Pathet Lao, withdrawing from before the Americans, have not retreated but advanced. Was this a mistake on the part of the Pentagon and the White House? Obviously it was not. They planned it that way. More important than the military adventure is the constitutional one. The invasion was a deliberate act of defiance of those Congressmen — and the public opinion behind them — who were attacking the unconstitutional power of the President to make undeclared war. This is what is important: the deliberate planned defiance of the Constitution, amounting to a dry run for a military coup d’état. Greece, Iran, Santo Domingo, Guatemala, Indonesia and, of course, Cambodia were all defenses of freedom and democracy, dry runs over the body of the gooks. Now the boys are putting into effect the lessons they learned abroad on the home folks.
As for the domestic scene, is there really anybody so naïve as not to believe that the same technocrats of the lie write Spiro Agnew’s speeches as write Nixon’s speeches chiding him for being too rough? It’s the old technique of the bad cop and the good cop, with the American people getting the third degree. Only one trouble: Nixon is not as convincing as a good cop. It may be paranoid to believe that everything is going according to plan here at home, but isn’t it? Do you really believe that 150,000 hard-hats could be mobilized for a demonstration in 48 hours and that then hard-hat clubbings, hard-hat clubs, hard-hat demonstrations could spread all across the country during the following week all as a spontaneous eruption of the stalwart patriotic American working class? Do you believe this? It takes months of planning and preparation to organize such a movement in New York City alone. Furthermore, it takes a cadre of organizers. Who were the principal organizers of the New York demonstration? The labor unions most notoriously identified with the Mafia. Are you aware that in these hard-hat demonstrations the bully boys are being paid for their time by their unions and/or their employers — and this includes construction workers on government and state jobs? A queer kind of spontaneity.
At one blow the men behind Nixon (And who are they, these faceless men behind their faceless masks? Certainly more powerful and more anonymous figures than the pipsqueak Southern California millionaires who hired him long ago with a classified ad and coached him to libel and slander Helen Gahagan Douglas out of Congress.) have been able to call up an army of hoodlums of a size it took Hitler years to muster.
How are you at cutting barbed wire, getting through electric fences, dodging searchlights and strangling police dogs? Better practice.
[July 1970]
A comprehensive biography of Kenneth Rexroth (1905-1982) can be found at The Poetry Foundation.
(Editor's Note: The pieces that Kenneth Rexroth wrote for the San Francisco Examiner & the San Francisco Bay Guardian can be found as a separate section on Ken Knabb's great website, The Bureau of Public Secrets. My thanks to Ken for permission to reprint this selection.)
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