Kenneth Rexroth
Six Columns from the San Francisco Magazine
What Lies Ahead?
Autumn, rather than January, has always seemed to me the beginning of the new year and so it is, of course, for lots of other people — students and others who have long vacations, Congress — and for many industries and retail businesses. Falling leaves always induce in me a mood of “what lies ahead?” What does lie ahead and how can we determine the future rather than be driven into it?
It must be obvious to almost everybody except the Greek Colonels in the White House, the Cabinet and Congress that the American Empire is smashing up. The country is headed for chronic tumult, riot and revolt and after that, a repression that will make the Nazis seem amateurs and may well make them look positively benevolent.
We are no longer faced with the breakdown of an economic system in which the methods of production and distribution are in flagrant contradiction, but with the most violent antagonism between a highly developed technology, an economic system which operates on principles that ceased to make sense in 1848, and a social, cultural order which has been completely emptied of meaning and can no longer provide significant life satisfactions to anybody.
There’s no question but what if humanity is going to survive there is going to be a revolution incomparably more profound than anything envisaged by Karl Marx. That revolution can take one of two forms: total collapse into a new dark ages or total change in society’s ideas of the values and meaning of life. There is no question but what it’s coming. The problem is to avoid catastrophe. It’s not a question of reform versus revolution; it’s a question of keeping society alive and functioning through the changes that will come. Shortly before his death, Jack Kennedy and his advisers were admitting privately that they were completely bankrupt. They saw no way out of the impasses that confronted them in every avenue of policy. The present incumbent and his PR men are busy fighting the Philippine War and coping with the Panic of the 1850s. Just trust in Billy Graham. Everything is going to come out all right.
If we want to just keep our heads above water, what will we have to do? First, stop the war and get out in a matter of weeks. Mobilize every means of transportation in the world the way the Muslims do to ship pilgrims to Mecca for Dhu al-Hijja, and totally evacuate Southeast Asia.
Legalize marijuana, even if we have to turn it over to the cigarette companies. The present situation is more demoralizing than ever was Prohibition in the days of Al Capone.
Abolish poverty now with a guaranteed annual wage at the level of a decent life. It has been proven again and again that this would be far cheaper than the present methods of welfare and pensions.
We are not dealing with ideological reaction in America at the present. It takes intelligence to have ideology. We are dealing with an ignorant, brutal, greedy taxpayers’ revolt, the immense class of nouveau riche produced by the affluent society, by the tremendous wealth of energy and the resulting release of commodities produced by the new technology. Einstein was elated when he was offered $10,000 by an American university. The petty bureaucrat or technician who owes his affluence to Einstein amongst others says, “I worked hard for mine (which he didn’t) and I’ll be goddamned if I’ll let the government take it away and give it to a bunch of dope-crazy college punks and niggers.” We need to stop the war and stop spending money for war and yet raise taxes and use them for the improvement of the quality of life for society as a whole; for education, housing, health and all the rest. America is steadily dropping down the scale in world health and it is today the most expensive country in history to be sick in.
What can be done about black America? “You give them an inch and they want a yard.” That’s right. Today, juridically, black Americans are the equal of white in the quest for jobs, education, housing, but then they were 10 years after the Civil War, too. All the recent civil rights legislation and Supreme Court decisions only repeat rights granted over 100 years ago, and the second round has not accomplished much more than the first. People forget what it was like before the destruction of Reconstruction in the Eighties. Most of the social legislation that white southerners now enjoy was passed by the post-Civil War state governments by what the textbooks used to call “the Carpetbagger-dominated watermelon legislatures.”
It is extremely doubtful if White and Black America can ever live together with mutual liking and respect. On their little island, the English, Welsh and Scots can’t today. Englishmen talk of Welshmen the way Southern agrarians talk of Nigras, although both of them may be going to Oxford — and as for the English and Irish! Partition doesn’t seem to help, as witness present-day Northern Ireland. The only thing to do is to enforce absolute job equality and complete social mobility. I think the Muslims and secular militants are right. Sooner or later we are going to have to face the prospect of partition and set up an independent Black American state. However, if I were a Black Muslim I wouldn’t take South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana and Arkansas, any one or altogether, as a gift.
It’s extraordinary. Presidential commissions of learned and dedicated men are set up to study and make proposals for solutions to all those besetting evils that promise imminent catastrophe — the educational crisis, the racial crisis, the alienation of youth, the historically unparalleled crime wave, the exploitation of women, the breakdown of medical care. They have come to describe it pretty much as it all is, without mincing words, and they make sensible, practicable proposals — and nobody does anything or, rather, usually does the opposite.
With a second Coolidge in the White House, and a second McKinley speaking for him on the lecture platform, the polarization of society has reached such a point that the “swing vote” may revolt against their own demagogues. Maybe the November elections will start to topple the present mindless regime. What a big maybe! May Day! M’aidez!
Invisible Power
When Dick Gregory announced he was expatriating himself to Canada, and that the United States was already under the dictatorship of the military — and it would reveal its hand around the time of the fall elections — an enormous number of people must have agreed with him. There have been very few countries in all history whose constitution and accepted ways of life have so carefully protected them from the seizure of power by either the Army or the Church. Although the G.A.R. (the North’s veterans’ organization of the Civil War) dominated politics in America until the end of the last century, even the administration of President Grant was thoroughly civilian and secular.
Though the United States, whose citizens think of themselves as eminently peaceable, has in its short life been one of the most warlike nations in history, seizing vast territories from other nations, the Mexican War, the Civil War, the Spanish-American War did not perceptibly militarize the society. In fact, the Mexican and Spanish-American wars were provoked by purely civilian political forces — as of course was the Civil War. And their economic and social consequences were manifested primarily in the civilian economy.
Today the dominant power of the military-industrial complex has grown up largely outside the political structure of the Constitution. Finally we have reached the point Eisenhower warned against in the famous words of one of his last speeches. (These words, incidentally, are a direct quotation from Leon Trotsky, put in the President’s mouth by some cynical ex-radical speechwriter.) This all-consuming power structure has grown up outside the Constitution because the constitutional processes in the United States are no longer relevant. The United States is a country ruled like Russia, by apparats, organized power blocs struggling for the position and privilege of special interests. The juridical governmental structure, including the Supreme Court, reflects the shifts of power of the apparats only passively. This is doubly true of the military-industrial dictatorship. The Pentagon and the CIA are not the Army, Navy or Air Force. They are extralegal organizations of which the constitutionally created Army is a passive instrument. This is even true in a sense of the industrial half of the military-industrial complex. Most of these industries are new, undreamed of a generation ago, and independent of the old industrial financial empires of the “Robber Barons” in the 19th century, and to a large extent are located in hitherto nonindustrial areas.
The technological development of post-modern society, the cybernetic computerized revolution, has bypassed financially, technically and geographically the old capitalist world of iron, steel and coal and old-time J.P. Morgan-Rockefeller financial methods. This means, very conveniently, that much of this new dominant power is exerted invisibly. And of course it is also exerted by individuals unknown or unfamiliar to the general public, or connected only with the relatively small industries from which their vast empires have grown since 1941.
The list of visitors for luncheons and dinners, and even as house guests, at the California White House includes many of these people, subsidizers of radio stations and magazines and newspapers that give tongue to the thugs of the Lunatic Right, avowed Fascists who would make Hitler, take away the anti-Semitic program, look positively humane. Yet the public knows these people only as very minor small capitalists and manufacturers, if at all, and is completely unaware of immense empires that stretch from razor blades to textbooks and based solidly on war industry. There were no Rockefellers, Morgans, Vanderbilts, Strausses, Peabodies planning The American Century over the chicken à la king and other Silent American Cuisine at San Clemente.
One of the things they so obviously planned was to drive vigorously toward total polarization of American society — if possible before the November elections. Their demagogic Greek colonel started out immediately fighting an election between the hard hats and the students, the suburbanized working class and the blacks. The administration speech writers have done everything possible, too, to speak Pentagonese, to maximize social conflict. And in the universities and the ghettos and all the agencies of the once Welfare State, provocateurs have been as busy as stool pigeons in the old Communist Party. “If we’re going to have a bloodbath, let’s have it now and get it over with,” was very far from being a slip of the tongue or a piece of rhetoric. It was a perfectly clear, well considered statement of policy.
Women's Liberation
Since everybody else is writing about it, I might as well speak my piece too. Women’s Liberation is almost as fashionable as ecology. The clitoral orgasm ranks with offshore oil as a topic of polite conversation. Being the direct descendant of a long line of suffragettes, including a great grandmother who wore masculine clothes, it all strikes me as a little unreal, and for a time puzzled me by its emotional violence and vindictiveness. The reason of course is that I have always avoided women who aren’t liberated. So much of the action in the black movement, the gay movement, the women’s movement, the students’ movement, and every other little movement that has a meaning of its own, puzzled me until suddenly I realized one day that I had spent my life in the radical and revolutionary bohemia with traditions and social and even family continuity back to the 18th century, in which the freedom and integrity of the individual was completely taken for granted; sex, color, condition of servitude was ignored.
What we are seeing today is a series of revolutions of people and classes who have never been revolutionary and are not used to being revolting. When I read Kate Millet and Shulamith Firestone I am constantly being brought up short in amazement. What kind of men have they known? Or what kind of women, for that matter? The answer is The Great American Male who double-parks in front of his favorite whorehouse and The Great American Female whose motto is “No minkee, no sackee.” In this region I am sure I would be a stranger and afraid in a world I never made, ignorant and impotent. I don’t really give a damn if these people straighten out their interpersonal relations or not. I’m afraid of what will happen when and if they are liberated. Except, every year they get more fouled up and when they get fouled up they get nasty and when they get nasty they get deadly, and when they get deadly I don’t want to dance with them.
Miss Millet and Miss Firestone are so right, righter than they know. Women run America, from U.S. Steel to the Frances E. Willard Grammar School. The female administrative assistant does the work, makes the decisions, books the planes, and portions out to the bosses t.i.d. valium while the male president or school principal attends business luncheons and even business breakfasts where the principal activity is consuming too much low-grade alcohol. The women are anonymous, invisible and powerless, although if each one flipped one lever of the nearest business machine the entire economy would come crashing down.
America is the most expensive country in the world to get sick in and dying is practically prohibitive. The AMA, like the building trades, keeps the number of doctors in America down to the level necessary to ensure our rank in the 12th place in world public health, while women, entering medicine, are subjected to relentless, not discrimination, but persecution from pre-med to retirement. Since they usually go into GYN and OB they usually don’t retire. These two specialties have a life expectancy comparable to that of trapeze performers. On the other hand, a highly trained PhD public health nurse executive with three or four years more education than the doctors “over” her, makes about one-tenth her masters’ income. Go into a big architect’s office. What do you see? Women. They aren’t, as you think, draftswomen; they are architects. They do the work. The bosses take the clients to business lunches, make fetching sketches and consume low-grade alcohol. How many buildings have you ever seen in a magazine or anywhere else signed by a woman? There are but two mildly famous women architects in America, and they are famous only among architects. The public has never heard of them. In the big New York publishing houses the second echelon editorial work is done almost entirely by women. The bosses take authors and agents to business lunches and consume low-grade alcohol. Women have all the responsibility but they have none of the power. The only power they can exert is by the exploitation of their sex as a commodity, and, as America gradually turns gay from top to bottom, they are losing that.
The principal trouble with the propagandists for Women’s Liberation, especially the ones that get in the picture magazines, is their unbridled emotionalism, the result not of being women but of being systematically frustrated and exploited. Like all the other movements in the contemporary turmoil they show a singular concentration on the essentials — complete equality — socially, economically, domestically, and in opportunity. It’s pointless at this stage of the game to engage in violent battles over the question of “natural differences.” If every opportunity is guaranteed open, the biological variations will sort themselves out. I for one am not impressed by the Russian woman’s “freedom” to be a coal miner, although, à chacun son goût, or à chacune sa goûte.
Will juridical equality bring about a ceasefire in the bitter war of attrition waged in the bedroom? I doubt it. Today in America blacks have juridical equality and the laws so guaranteeing are simply restatements of identical laws passed after the Civil War. Much good it’s done. Well, some. Ten years ago an old Negro militant friend of mine said, “I never thought I’d live to see light at the end of the tunnel.” There’s a light there alright, but for 10 years it’s been turning redder and redder.
The brutal fact is that the real problems — ecological, economic, social, moral, ethical, religious, sexual, intersexual — cannot be solved within the context of this society or any society at present known. And every year the problems get more insoluble, more lethal, the whole kit and caboodle errs from the prime foundation, and before noble men and women can live together as perfect equals we’ll have to start all over. The chances are the beautiful lives will be led in a million years by the descendants of the squids, the octopuses, the cockroaches, and the shriveled descendants of homo sapiens will be a kind of lice in their pseudopodia.
Peace Might Break Out
Of course anything may happen at any minute, but as we move into 1971 it looks like we might have before us a year of comparative calm. A primary source of this soothing influence has been the West German government. Even a moderate Social Democracy ruling in one of the great powers can exert an immense pressure toward sanity and peace — as long as it is independent. The last British Labor government, alas, tied itself to Johnson’s kite and really fell with him. The virulent antagonisms of the central European nations seem to have quieted, at least temporarily, and the West Germans have played a kind of go or Chinese checkers with the East German regime. The East Germans are surrounded, and can do little else but agree to saner and more normal relations with the West. If this happens, the Ulbricht government may well fall, to be replaced by the extremely radical neo-communist technocrats who now operate East Germany behind Ulbricht’s back. This should release a wave of reform in all the Communist parties, possibly even the Russian, not unlike that of the unfortunately too early Dubcek regime in Czechoslovakia.
England may well be admitted to the European economic community this year, and when that happens all the other outsiders on the continent will soon have to be admitted too and at last there will come about a united Europe that can free itself from American economic imperialism and the shenanigans of the CIA.
There already exists an international of youth in Europe. Young people wander freely from country to country and more and more come to think of themselves as people of one world. Even the bastions of the Iron Curtain cannot keep them out. There are almost as many hippies coming and going in Tashkent as there are cruising the main stem of Katmandu. There is another international which has not received so much notoriety, that of the unskilled and semi-skilled workers — the Greeks, Italians, Turks, Yugoslavs, Spanish, Portuguese, Mexicans and South Americans, and even Negroes and some whites from the United States — who do the hard work in the booming economies of the northern sphere of nations. They, too, most of whom originally were peasants, members of a class traditionally virulently prejudiced nationalists, are becoming internationalists; they are also getting ideas from the youth international that infiltrate their ranks.
It begins to look as if terror for terror’s sake, revolution for the hell of it, is dying out in America. Most of the leaders are either in jail or out on good behavior and the more irresponsible clowns like Jerry Rubin are thoroughly discredited and are booed by college audiences. This does not mean that revolt in America is disarmed; it is not. It just means that the leaders of the present underground have learned some sense and have also learned to wait.
Domestic explosions in America are going to depend on the state of the American economy and on the degree of irresponsible violence from the Establishment. Of course if the present slide toward sever economic crisis continues and unemployment reaches 12 percent or more, consumer buying is reduced to a minimum, the stock market collapses and industry operates at less than 70 percent of capacity, everything will blow up. Those of us who are old enough remember the great hunger marches and agricultural and waterfront strikes of the early Thirties. Huge masses of people were thrown into social conflict. If this happens again they will not be led by stodgy, petty-bourgeois Communist bureaucrats but by people who will make Angela Davis and Kathleen Cleaver look like little Quakeresses.
This is the keystone. All over the world the events of the coming year will depend on the state of the American economy. If things get bad enough, even Germany, Japan and Russia will not be able to withstand the economic maelstrom of American collapse, and the dreams and promises of an independent and prosperous Europe will be gone.
Roosevelt did not solve the economic crisis that began in 1929 by social reform; he solved it just as did Germany, England and France — by preparation for war and finally by war itself. Nobody knows this better than the Chinese, and the realization that they may soon be on a very dangerous spot accounts for their recent gestures of, if not friendship, at least nonbelligerence toward other nations, even Russia. If they can protect themselves, make friends and influence people and create a series of buffers over against America, the solution of war will not be an option open to the United States. Peace might break out all over.
The Real Polarization in America
A while ago I was asked to be the speaker, as distinguished from the preacher, after the services dedicating the new clerestory windows at Grace Cathedral. These are dedicated to the secular achievements of man and portray a vivid assortment of people for a church. Amongst them Henry Ford and John L. Davis.
It was a kind of mass demonstration of the Establishment. Everybody who is anybody was there: the Roman archbishop and his suffragans, the leading rabbis, the Methodist bishop and the leading Protestant ministers, of course all the Episcopal hierarchy, the mayor, the highbrow pin-up who is the chairlady of the Board of Supervisors, a whole row of people in academic hoods — including the retired silent-screen actor who rules San Francisco State College.
It is unlikely that any of my colleagues — Paul Goodman, Allen Ginsberg or the Berrigan brothers — would be invited to speak to a similar bash at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York. There’s no question but what San Francisco is highly civilized.
What does it mean to live in a city, to be part of a community where the mayor quotes Matthew Arnold or Lawrence Ferlinghetti? Nothing less like the civic establishments in the rest of the United States could be imagined. The contrast with Richard Nixon and Spiro Agnew was total. Almost everybody there would have been at a loss to know how to make the President of the country or the mayor of Los Angeles feel at ease if they came to dinner. Does it mean anything? Does an administration that pushes Arthur Schlesinger in the swimming pool rule the country better than one that shares the grape juice and cottage cheese and ketchup with Billy Graham? On the record there doesn’t seem to be very much difference, but it’s less frightening to be ruled by the civilized than by the militantly mindless. Or is it? Was the Bay of Pigs or the Cuban Missile Crisis less frightening than the invasions of Cambodia and Laos? Waiters were nicer to you in French restaurants during the Kennedy era.
The Manhattanization of San Francisco, the undisputed rule of organized crime, the smoldering racial welfare, the destruction of the fabric of the City, the uncontrollable congestion and pollution — are any of these problems nearer solution because in the City Hall the politicians come and go talking of Michelangelo, or even Van Gogh, Rimbaud, and Artaud? Jimmy Rolfe kept Capone out of San Francisco and there was nothing under his silk hat but a little warm air. Things were easier then, of course, nobody would have understood Herb Caen’s daily wisecracks, or if they had they probably would have locked him up and forbidden the paper in the mails. Do the well-bred, the genteel, the sophisticated have any more control of society than the old boys in the back room divvying up the payoff from the whorehouses?
Certainly this is one of the great polarizations dominating American life — the cultivated versus the vulgar. It looks like the coming civil war will be fought between the hips and the squares. The principal issue in last Fall’s election was the four-letter word and the Greek Colonel ran against Charlie Manson. Maybe the mindless are just more scary masters. Maybe our fright is unjustified. Nero was one of the leading intellectuals of his time.
There is a polarization in contemporary society, all over the world but especially in America, which most of those people gathered to celebrate those windows in the cathedral didn’t seem to know anything about although most are supposedly in the business of knowing just such things. It was a celebration of the achievements of secular man, the accomplishments of a materialist and predatory civilization, though all over the world the young and many not so young have come to reject secular man and his material accomplishments.
In the country all around San Francisco are communes where the standard of living is below that of the Miwok Indians before the coming of the white man. A few days after I gave that speech we were visited by the leader of a commune — on 300-odd acres of undeveloped land with no proper shelter, no real sanitation facilities and the most primitive water supply — which at the height of the hitchhiking influx during the summer often numbers 150 people. Life is more primitive there than in the shantytown favelas of Rio de Janeiro, yet most of these people are upper middle class, college educated, some of them with respectable accomplishments in the world they’ve left. They have retreated from what they consider the rotten corpse of a civilization to a life which denies every value of that civilization it possibly can. The same thing happened in ancient times when the first monks fled to the Egyptian desert.
But it’s not just hippies in communes today, as it wasn’t just lice-covered monks living in caves in the desert in those days. People who live outwardly the most conformist and respectable lives find this civilization at its best offers them no meaning, no satisfaction in their lives. For them life has no spiritual significance in the White House, chez Mr. and Mrs. Nixon, but it has none in the ivied halls of learning or the jeweled fanes of the cathedral either.
Is Humpty Dumpty ever going to be put back together again? I doubt it. Everybody knows the prescription — A Great Spiritual Awakening. Who’s left to blow the bugle or ring the bell? Maybe we are already awake and that’s all there is. Certainly the world is not going to be saved by putting Henry Ford in cathedral windows and bowing before the material achievements of secular man.
Manson, My Lai, and the Devil
For weeks, the Manson and Calley trials ran side by side, sharing the headlines. Yet scarcely anyone — editorial writers, columnists, or the public — saw fit to draw the parallel. Read a blow-by-blow description of what happened in Bel Air. Remove the personal details and move it to My Lai. What’s the difference? Purely quantitative geography, skin color, economics and, of course, the number of victims.
But the country did not explode with self-righteous indignation over the sentence of the Manson defendants. Perhaps a majority of Americans are quite willing to assume moral responsibility for My Lai or Kent State, or the extermination of the Black Panthers, but one thing follows from another. Is the local Kiwanis Club willing to assume responsibility for the Manson massacres, too?
I think we have touched on the source of something about the Manson case that puzzles well-educated, enlightened liberals (the Panthers call them “liberal fascists”) and that is the deliberate, self-conscious Diabolism — the witchcraft. Manson was certainly a warlock out of horror comics, and his girls called themselves witches. I wonder how many straight people are aware of the tremendous eruption of witchcraft in contemporary society. If they are, are they aware that it is almost as common in Russia as in America or England?
Are they aware that this, in the most literal sense, is a systematic rejection of the values of modern civilization — not as amongst the flower children for other, non-Western values, but for the opposite of the contemporary value system? It’s one thing to meditate on Krishna, The Great Lover, or Shiva, Lord of the Dance, or Tara, the Bride of Buddha. It’s another to invoke devils. Carl Jung made the I Ching respectable, and T.S. Eliot, the Tarot pack, and the Buddhists and early Taoists are self-evidently more civilized than we are. But the educated “straight” person simply does not believe that his daughter is jumping around in a circle drawn with chicken blood, stark naked, invoking Asmodeus or Beelzebub. He doesn’t believe in God, much less the Devil. How can she believe in the hierarchy of the infernal regions, and not only that, but believe that those powers can be materialized with the aid of miscellaneous rubbish bought in a head shop and forced to do her bidding?
For years people have asked me, “What do you mean by the term you are so fond of, the Social Lie?” Here we see the consequences worked out in a simple deductive process. If this, then that; if that, then that; and so on to Asmodeus. If the establishment is founded on lies; if the statements of the President are true only by accident; if the hypocrisy of the churches is practically absolute; if education is fraudulent and designed only to produce bureaucrats; and so on, then the philosophy on which the social system is founded is false, and the scientific world view, which is a consequence of that philosophy, is a system of mutually supporting falsehoods. Therefore, Newton is false, and Einstein, Darwin, and even Euclid. Therefore, the counter-tradition, which has always been that denying the values of the dominant society, is true. It does no good to tell the alienated that astrology is demonstrably false and impossible. The demonstration proceeds from certain presuppositions that he rejects. It does no good to say that a belief in the Powers of Darkness is absurd. Certainly the twentieth century has provided better evidence for their existence than for the Powers of Light.
Is there a personal Devil? What does that mean? There are obviously people in the world whose motives are positively evil. Contrary to Socrates, when presented with full opportunity for rational choice, they do not choose the good, they choose the bad. The assumption is that a civilization exists to keep them powerless. Whether it does or not, as civilization decays and its values become inoperable, their power increases by the sheer accumulation of evil acts. At the time of the Moscow Trials, I pointed out that the Russians were not on Mars: they were human beings, on this planet, and a wholesale moral catastrophe would metastasize throughout the species and could not be isolated behind the barbed wire of a totalitarian state. So much more true was this of the German extermination of Jews, Gypsies, Communists and others. My Lai cannot be kept away in the jungle. Charles Manson is a product of American society, and the girls are even typical of an immense and ever growing class, as he himself noted. The old liberal notion that crime is a sickness is based on the Socratic Fallacy that man, given the chance, will choose the good. Any policeman can tell you that most criminals are in it for the fun.
Most professional criminals, real yeggs, stickup men, boosters and cannon guys, do not come from broken homes and poverty. But there is no comparison with their denial of the values of the society and the behavior of heads of states and great industries and business enterprises. The existence of karma is obvious; the deeds of men do accumulate. The evil deeds accumulate until they reach the tipover point, and what tips over is the society, which becomes an association of psychopaths. The diagnostic sign of the psychopathic personality is the remark made to the counselor or psychiatrist, “Everybody else does it, why shouldn’t I?” If you have never been a counselor or headshrinker you cannot believe how common this remark is, and amongst the most “deviant” individuals. Finally, the behavior of the sociopath becomes the norm of social order.
A bunch of wild-eyed kids full of drugs burst into a private home and indiscriminately kill perfectly innocent people. Where? Bel Air? My Lai?
Who turns the values of civilized society into their opposites? Who raises the Powers of Darkness?
What Lies Ahead?
Autumn, rather than January, has always seemed to me the beginning of the new year and so it is, of course, for lots of other people — students and others who have long vacations, Congress — and for many industries and retail businesses. Falling leaves always induce in me a mood of “what lies ahead?” What does lie ahead and how can we determine the future rather than be driven into it?
It must be obvious to almost everybody except the Greek Colonels in the White House, the Cabinet and Congress that the American Empire is smashing up. The country is headed for chronic tumult, riot and revolt and after that, a repression that will make the Nazis seem amateurs and may well make them look positively benevolent.
We are no longer faced with the breakdown of an economic system in which the methods of production and distribution are in flagrant contradiction, but with the most violent antagonism between a highly developed technology, an economic system which operates on principles that ceased to make sense in 1848, and a social, cultural order which has been completely emptied of meaning and can no longer provide significant life satisfactions to anybody.
There’s no question but what if humanity is going to survive there is going to be a revolution incomparably more profound than anything envisaged by Karl Marx. That revolution can take one of two forms: total collapse into a new dark ages or total change in society’s ideas of the values and meaning of life. There is no question but what it’s coming. The problem is to avoid catastrophe. It’s not a question of reform versus revolution; it’s a question of keeping society alive and functioning through the changes that will come. Shortly before his death, Jack Kennedy and his advisers were admitting privately that they were completely bankrupt. They saw no way out of the impasses that confronted them in every avenue of policy. The present incumbent and his PR men are busy fighting the Philippine War and coping with the Panic of the 1850s. Just trust in Billy Graham. Everything is going to come out all right.
If we want to just keep our heads above water, what will we have to do? First, stop the war and get out in a matter of weeks. Mobilize every means of transportation in the world the way the Muslims do to ship pilgrims to Mecca for Dhu al-Hijja, and totally evacuate Southeast Asia.
Legalize marijuana, even if we have to turn it over to the cigarette companies. The present situation is more demoralizing than ever was Prohibition in the days of Al Capone.
Abolish poverty now with a guaranteed annual wage at the level of a decent life. It has been proven again and again that this would be far cheaper than the present methods of welfare and pensions.
We are not dealing with ideological reaction in America at the present. It takes intelligence to have ideology. We are dealing with an ignorant, brutal, greedy taxpayers’ revolt, the immense class of nouveau riche produced by the affluent society, by the tremendous wealth of energy and the resulting release of commodities produced by the new technology. Einstein was elated when he was offered $10,000 by an American university. The petty bureaucrat or technician who owes his affluence to Einstein amongst others says, “I worked hard for mine (which he didn’t) and I’ll be goddamned if I’ll let the government take it away and give it to a bunch of dope-crazy college punks and niggers.” We need to stop the war and stop spending money for war and yet raise taxes and use them for the improvement of the quality of life for society as a whole; for education, housing, health and all the rest. America is steadily dropping down the scale in world health and it is today the most expensive country in history to be sick in.
What can be done about black America? “You give them an inch and they want a yard.” That’s right. Today, juridically, black Americans are the equal of white in the quest for jobs, education, housing, but then they were 10 years after the Civil War, too. All the recent civil rights legislation and Supreme Court decisions only repeat rights granted over 100 years ago, and the second round has not accomplished much more than the first. People forget what it was like before the destruction of Reconstruction in the Eighties. Most of the social legislation that white southerners now enjoy was passed by the post-Civil War state governments by what the textbooks used to call “the Carpetbagger-dominated watermelon legislatures.”
It is extremely doubtful if White and Black America can ever live together with mutual liking and respect. On their little island, the English, Welsh and Scots can’t today. Englishmen talk of Welshmen the way Southern agrarians talk of Nigras, although both of them may be going to Oxford — and as for the English and Irish! Partition doesn’t seem to help, as witness present-day Northern Ireland. The only thing to do is to enforce absolute job equality and complete social mobility. I think the Muslims and secular militants are right. Sooner or later we are going to have to face the prospect of partition and set up an independent Black American state. However, if I were a Black Muslim I wouldn’t take South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana and Arkansas, any one or altogether, as a gift.
It’s extraordinary. Presidential commissions of learned and dedicated men are set up to study and make proposals for solutions to all those besetting evils that promise imminent catastrophe — the educational crisis, the racial crisis, the alienation of youth, the historically unparalleled crime wave, the exploitation of women, the breakdown of medical care. They have come to describe it pretty much as it all is, without mincing words, and they make sensible, practicable proposals — and nobody does anything or, rather, usually does the opposite.
With a second Coolidge in the White House, and a second McKinley speaking for him on the lecture platform, the polarization of society has reached such a point that the “swing vote” may revolt against their own demagogues. Maybe the November elections will start to topple the present mindless regime. What a big maybe! May Day! M’aidez!
[October 1970]
When Dick Gregory announced he was expatriating himself to Canada, and that the United States was already under the dictatorship of the military — and it would reveal its hand around the time of the fall elections — an enormous number of people must have agreed with him. There have been very few countries in all history whose constitution and accepted ways of life have so carefully protected them from the seizure of power by either the Army or the Church. Although the G.A.R. (the North’s veterans’ organization of the Civil War) dominated politics in America until the end of the last century, even the administration of President Grant was thoroughly civilian and secular.
Though the United States, whose citizens think of themselves as eminently peaceable, has in its short life been one of the most warlike nations in history, seizing vast territories from other nations, the Mexican War, the Civil War, the Spanish-American War did not perceptibly militarize the society. In fact, the Mexican and Spanish-American wars were provoked by purely civilian political forces — as of course was the Civil War. And their economic and social consequences were manifested primarily in the civilian economy.
Today the dominant power of the military-industrial complex has grown up largely outside the political structure of the Constitution. Finally we have reached the point Eisenhower warned against in the famous words of one of his last speeches. (These words, incidentally, are a direct quotation from Leon Trotsky, put in the President’s mouth by some cynical ex-radical speechwriter.) This all-consuming power structure has grown up outside the Constitution because the constitutional processes in the United States are no longer relevant. The United States is a country ruled like Russia, by apparats, organized power blocs struggling for the position and privilege of special interests. The juridical governmental structure, including the Supreme Court, reflects the shifts of power of the apparats only passively. This is doubly true of the military-industrial dictatorship. The Pentagon and the CIA are not the Army, Navy or Air Force. They are extralegal organizations of which the constitutionally created Army is a passive instrument. This is even true in a sense of the industrial half of the military-industrial complex. Most of these industries are new, undreamed of a generation ago, and independent of the old industrial financial empires of the “Robber Barons” in the 19th century, and to a large extent are located in hitherto nonindustrial areas.
The technological development of post-modern society, the cybernetic computerized revolution, has bypassed financially, technically and geographically the old capitalist world of iron, steel and coal and old-time J.P. Morgan-Rockefeller financial methods. This means, very conveniently, that much of this new dominant power is exerted invisibly. And of course it is also exerted by individuals unknown or unfamiliar to the general public, or connected only with the relatively small industries from which their vast empires have grown since 1941.
The list of visitors for luncheons and dinners, and even as house guests, at the California White House includes many of these people, subsidizers of radio stations and magazines and newspapers that give tongue to the thugs of the Lunatic Right, avowed Fascists who would make Hitler, take away the anti-Semitic program, look positively humane. Yet the public knows these people only as very minor small capitalists and manufacturers, if at all, and is completely unaware of immense empires that stretch from razor blades to textbooks and based solidly on war industry. There were no Rockefellers, Morgans, Vanderbilts, Strausses, Peabodies planning The American Century over the chicken à la king and other Silent American Cuisine at San Clemente.
One of the things they so obviously planned was to drive vigorously toward total polarization of American society — if possible before the November elections. Their demagogic Greek colonel started out immediately fighting an election between the hard hats and the students, the suburbanized working class and the blacks. The administration speech writers have done everything possible, too, to speak Pentagonese, to maximize social conflict. And in the universities and the ghettos and all the agencies of the once Welfare State, provocateurs have been as busy as stool pigeons in the old Communist Party. “If we’re going to have a bloodbath, let’s have it now and get it over with,” was very far from being a slip of the tongue or a piece of rhetoric. It was a perfectly clear, well considered statement of policy.
[November 1970]
Since everybody else is writing about it, I might as well speak my piece too. Women’s Liberation is almost as fashionable as ecology. The clitoral orgasm ranks with offshore oil as a topic of polite conversation. Being the direct descendant of a long line of suffragettes, including a great grandmother who wore masculine clothes, it all strikes me as a little unreal, and for a time puzzled me by its emotional violence and vindictiveness. The reason of course is that I have always avoided women who aren’t liberated. So much of the action in the black movement, the gay movement, the women’s movement, the students’ movement, and every other little movement that has a meaning of its own, puzzled me until suddenly I realized one day that I had spent my life in the radical and revolutionary bohemia with traditions and social and even family continuity back to the 18th century, in which the freedom and integrity of the individual was completely taken for granted; sex, color, condition of servitude was ignored.
What we are seeing today is a series of revolutions of people and classes who have never been revolutionary and are not used to being revolting. When I read Kate Millet and Shulamith Firestone I am constantly being brought up short in amazement. What kind of men have they known? Or what kind of women, for that matter? The answer is The Great American Male who double-parks in front of his favorite whorehouse and The Great American Female whose motto is “No minkee, no sackee.” In this region I am sure I would be a stranger and afraid in a world I never made, ignorant and impotent. I don’t really give a damn if these people straighten out their interpersonal relations or not. I’m afraid of what will happen when and if they are liberated. Except, every year they get more fouled up and when they get fouled up they get nasty and when they get nasty they get deadly, and when they get deadly I don’t want to dance with them.
Miss Millet and Miss Firestone are so right, righter than they know. Women run America, from U.S. Steel to the Frances E. Willard Grammar School. The female administrative assistant does the work, makes the decisions, books the planes, and portions out to the bosses t.i.d. valium while the male president or school principal attends business luncheons and even business breakfasts where the principal activity is consuming too much low-grade alcohol. The women are anonymous, invisible and powerless, although if each one flipped one lever of the nearest business machine the entire economy would come crashing down.
America is the most expensive country in the world to get sick in and dying is practically prohibitive. The AMA, like the building trades, keeps the number of doctors in America down to the level necessary to ensure our rank in the 12th place in world public health, while women, entering medicine, are subjected to relentless, not discrimination, but persecution from pre-med to retirement. Since they usually go into GYN and OB they usually don’t retire. These two specialties have a life expectancy comparable to that of trapeze performers. On the other hand, a highly trained PhD public health nurse executive with three or four years more education than the doctors “over” her, makes about one-tenth her masters’ income. Go into a big architect’s office. What do you see? Women. They aren’t, as you think, draftswomen; they are architects. They do the work. The bosses take the clients to business lunches, make fetching sketches and consume low-grade alcohol. How many buildings have you ever seen in a magazine or anywhere else signed by a woman? There are but two mildly famous women architects in America, and they are famous only among architects. The public has never heard of them. In the big New York publishing houses the second echelon editorial work is done almost entirely by women. The bosses take authors and agents to business lunches and consume low-grade alcohol. Women have all the responsibility but they have none of the power. The only power they can exert is by the exploitation of their sex as a commodity, and, as America gradually turns gay from top to bottom, they are losing that.
The principal trouble with the propagandists for Women’s Liberation, especially the ones that get in the picture magazines, is their unbridled emotionalism, the result not of being women but of being systematically frustrated and exploited. Like all the other movements in the contemporary turmoil they show a singular concentration on the essentials — complete equality — socially, economically, domestically, and in opportunity. It’s pointless at this stage of the game to engage in violent battles over the question of “natural differences.” If every opportunity is guaranteed open, the biological variations will sort themselves out. I for one am not impressed by the Russian woman’s “freedom” to be a coal miner, although, à chacun son goût, or à chacune sa goûte.
Will juridical equality bring about a ceasefire in the bitter war of attrition waged in the bedroom? I doubt it. Today in America blacks have juridical equality and the laws so guaranteeing are simply restatements of identical laws passed after the Civil War. Much good it’s done. Well, some. Ten years ago an old Negro militant friend of mine said, “I never thought I’d live to see light at the end of the tunnel.” There’s a light there alright, but for 10 years it’s been turning redder and redder.
The brutal fact is that the real problems — ecological, economic, social, moral, ethical, religious, sexual, intersexual — cannot be solved within the context of this society or any society at present known. And every year the problems get more insoluble, more lethal, the whole kit and caboodle errs from the prime foundation, and before noble men and women can live together as perfect equals we’ll have to start all over. The chances are the beautiful lives will be led in a million years by the descendants of the squids, the octopuses, the cockroaches, and the shriveled descendants of homo sapiens will be a kind of lice in their pseudopodia.
[December 1970]
Of course anything may happen at any minute, but as we move into 1971 it looks like we might have before us a year of comparative calm. A primary source of this soothing influence has been the West German government. Even a moderate Social Democracy ruling in one of the great powers can exert an immense pressure toward sanity and peace — as long as it is independent. The last British Labor government, alas, tied itself to Johnson’s kite and really fell with him. The virulent antagonisms of the central European nations seem to have quieted, at least temporarily, and the West Germans have played a kind of go or Chinese checkers with the East German regime. The East Germans are surrounded, and can do little else but agree to saner and more normal relations with the West. If this happens, the Ulbricht government may well fall, to be replaced by the extremely radical neo-communist technocrats who now operate East Germany behind Ulbricht’s back. This should release a wave of reform in all the Communist parties, possibly even the Russian, not unlike that of the unfortunately too early Dubcek regime in Czechoslovakia.
England may well be admitted to the European economic community this year, and when that happens all the other outsiders on the continent will soon have to be admitted too and at last there will come about a united Europe that can free itself from American economic imperialism and the shenanigans of the CIA.
There already exists an international of youth in Europe. Young people wander freely from country to country and more and more come to think of themselves as people of one world. Even the bastions of the Iron Curtain cannot keep them out. There are almost as many hippies coming and going in Tashkent as there are cruising the main stem of Katmandu. There is another international which has not received so much notoriety, that of the unskilled and semi-skilled workers — the Greeks, Italians, Turks, Yugoslavs, Spanish, Portuguese, Mexicans and South Americans, and even Negroes and some whites from the United States — who do the hard work in the booming economies of the northern sphere of nations. They, too, most of whom originally were peasants, members of a class traditionally virulently prejudiced nationalists, are becoming internationalists; they are also getting ideas from the youth international that infiltrate their ranks.
It begins to look as if terror for terror’s sake, revolution for the hell of it, is dying out in America. Most of the leaders are either in jail or out on good behavior and the more irresponsible clowns like Jerry Rubin are thoroughly discredited and are booed by college audiences. This does not mean that revolt in America is disarmed; it is not. It just means that the leaders of the present underground have learned some sense and have also learned to wait.
Domestic explosions in America are going to depend on the state of the American economy and on the degree of irresponsible violence from the Establishment. Of course if the present slide toward sever economic crisis continues and unemployment reaches 12 percent or more, consumer buying is reduced to a minimum, the stock market collapses and industry operates at less than 70 percent of capacity, everything will blow up. Those of us who are old enough remember the great hunger marches and agricultural and waterfront strikes of the early Thirties. Huge masses of people were thrown into social conflict. If this happens again they will not be led by stodgy, petty-bourgeois Communist bureaucrats but by people who will make Angela Davis and Kathleen Cleaver look like little Quakeresses.
This is the keystone. All over the world the events of the coming year will depend on the state of the American economy. If things get bad enough, even Germany, Japan and Russia will not be able to withstand the economic maelstrom of American collapse, and the dreams and promises of an independent and prosperous Europe will be gone.
Roosevelt did not solve the economic crisis that began in 1929 by social reform; he solved it just as did Germany, England and France — by preparation for war and finally by war itself. Nobody knows this better than the Chinese, and the realization that they may soon be on a very dangerous spot accounts for their recent gestures of, if not friendship, at least nonbelligerence toward other nations, even Russia. If they can protect themselves, make friends and influence people and create a series of buffers over against America, the solution of war will not be an option open to the United States. Peace might break out all over.
[February 1971]
A while ago I was asked to be the speaker, as distinguished from the preacher, after the services dedicating the new clerestory windows at Grace Cathedral. These are dedicated to the secular achievements of man and portray a vivid assortment of people for a church. Amongst them Henry Ford and John L. Davis.
It was a kind of mass demonstration of the Establishment. Everybody who is anybody was there: the Roman archbishop and his suffragans, the leading rabbis, the Methodist bishop and the leading Protestant ministers, of course all the Episcopal hierarchy, the mayor, the highbrow pin-up who is the chairlady of the Board of Supervisors, a whole row of people in academic hoods — including the retired silent-screen actor who rules San Francisco State College.
It is unlikely that any of my colleagues — Paul Goodman, Allen Ginsberg or the Berrigan brothers — would be invited to speak to a similar bash at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York. There’s no question but what San Francisco is highly civilized.
What does it mean to live in a city, to be part of a community where the mayor quotes Matthew Arnold or Lawrence Ferlinghetti? Nothing less like the civic establishments in the rest of the United States could be imagined. The contrast with Richard Nixon and Spiro Agnew was total. Almost everybody there would have been at a loss to know how to make the President of the country or the mayor of Los Angeles feel at ease if they came to dinner. Does it mean anything? Does an administration that pushes Arthur Schlesinger in the swimming pool rule the country better than one that shares the grape juice and cottage cheese and ketchup with Billy Graham? On the record there doesn’t seem to be very much difference, but it’s less frightening to be ruled by the civilized than by the militantly mindless. Or is it? Was the Bay of Pigs or the Cuban Missile Crisis less frightening than the invasions of Cambodia and Laos? Waiters were nicer to you in French restaurants during the Kennedy era.
The Manhattanization of San Francisco, the undisputed rule of organized crime, the smoldering racial welfare, the destruction of the fabric of the City, the uncontrollable congestion and pollution — are any of these problems nearer solution because in the City Hall the politicians come and go talking of Michelangelo, or even Van Gogh, Rimbaud, and Artaud? Jimmy Rolfe kept Capone out of San Francisco and there was nothing under his silk hat but a little warm air. Things were easier then, of course, nobody would have understood Herb Caen’s daily wisecracks, or if they had they probably would have locked him up and forbidden the paper in the mails. Do the well-bred, the genteel, the sophisticated have any more control of society than the old boys in the back room divvying up the payoff from the whorehouses?
Certainly this is one of the great polarizations dominating American life — the cultivated versus the vulgar. It looks like the coming civil war will be fought between the hips and the squares. The principal issue in last Fall’s election was the four-letter word and the Greek Colonel ran against Charlie Manson. Maybe the mindless are just more scary masters. Maybe our fright is unjustified. Nero was one of the leading intellectuals of his time.
There is a polarization in contemporary society, all over the world but especially in America, which most of those people gathered to celebrate those windows in the cathedral didn’t seem to know anything about although most are supposedly in the business of knowing just such things. It was a celebration of the achievements of secular man, the accomplishments of a materialist and predatory civilization, though all over the world the young and many not so young have come to reject secular man and his material accomplishments.
In the country all around San Francisco are communes where the standard of living is below that of the Miwok Indians before the coming of the white man. A few days after I gave that speech we were visited by the leader of a commune — on 300-odd acres of undeveloped land with no proper shelter, no real sanitation facilities and the most primitive water supply — which at the height of the hitchhiking influx during the summer often numbers 150 people. Life is more primitive there than in the shantytown favelas of Rio de Janeiro, yet most of these people are upper middle class, college educated, some of them with respectable accomplishments in the world they’ve left. They have retreated from what they consider the rotten corpse of a civilization to a life which denies every value of that civilization it possibly can. The same thing happened in ancient times when the first monks fled to the Egyptian desert.
But it’s not just hippies in communes today, as it wasn’t just lice-covered monks living in caves in the desert in those days. People who live outwardly the most conformist and respectable lives find this civilization at its best offers them no meaning, no satisfaction in their lives. For them life has no spiritual significance in the White House, chez Mr. and Mrs. Nixon, but it has none in the ivied halls of learning or the jeweled fanes of the cathedral either.
Is Humpty Dumpty ever going to be put back together again? I doubt it. Everybody knows the prescription — A Great Spiritual Awakening. Who’s left to blow the bugle or ring the bell? Maybe we are already awake and that’s all there is. Certainly the world is not going to be saved by putting Henry Ford in cathedral windows and bowing before the material achievements of secular man.
[March 1971]
For weeks, the Manson and Calley trials ran side by side, sharing the headlines. Yet scarcely anyone — editorial writers, columnists, or the public — saw fit to draw the parallel. Read a blow-by-blow description of what happened in Bel Air. Remove the personal details and move it to My Lai. What’s the difference? Purely quantitative geography, skin color, economics and, of course, the number of victims.
But the country did not explode with self-righteous indignation over the sentence of the Manson defendants. Perhaps a majority of Americans are quite willing to assume moral responsibility for My Lai or Kent State, or the extermination of the Black Panthers, but one thing follows from another. Is the local Kiwanis Club willing to assume responsibility for the Manson massacres, too?
I think we have touched on the source of something about the Manson case that puzzles well-educated, enlightened liberals (the Panthers call them “liberal fascists”) and that is the deliberate, self-conscious Diabolism — the witchcraft. Manson was certainly a warlock out of horror comics, and his girls called themselves witches. I wonder how many straight people are aware of the tremendous eruption of witchcraft in contemporary society. If they are, are they aware that it is almost as common in Russia as in America or England?
Are they aware that this, in the most literal sense, is a systematic rejection of the values of modern civilization — not as amongst the flower children for other, non-Western values, but for the opposite of the contemporary value system? It’s one thing to meditate on Krishna, The Great Lover, or Shiva, Lord of the Dance, or Tara, the Bride of Buddha. It’s another to invoke devils. Carl Jung made the I Ching respectable, and T.S. Eliot, the Tarot pack, and the Buddhists and early Taoists are self-evidently more civilized than we are. But the educated “straight” person simply does not believe that his daughter is jumping around in a circle drawn with chicken blood, stark naked, invoking Asmodeus or Beelzebub. He doesn’t believe in God, much less the Devil. How can she believe in the hierarchy of the infernal regions, and not only that, but believe that those powers can be materialized with the aid of miscellaneous rubbish bought in a head shop and forced to do her bidding?
For years people have asked me, “What do you mean by the term you are so fond of, the Social Lie?” Here we see the consequences worked out in a simple deductive process. If this, then that; if that, then that; and so on to Asmodeus. If the establishment is founded on lies; if the statements of the President are true only by accident; if the hypocrisy of the churches is practically absolute; if education is fraudulent and designed only to produce bureaucrats; and so on, then the philosophy on which the social system is founded is false, and the scientific world view, which is a consequence of that philosophy, is a system of mutually supporting falsehoods. Therefore, Newton is false, and Einstein, Darwin, and even Euclid. Therefore, the counter-tradition, which has always been that denying the values of the dominant society, is true. It does no good to tell the alienated that astrology is demonstrably false and impossible. The demonstration proceeds from certain presuppositions that he rejects. It does no good to say that a belief in the Powers of Darkness is absurd. Certainly the twentieth century has provided better evidence for their existence than for the Powers of Light.
Is there a personal Devil? What does that mean? There are obviously people in the world whose motives are positively evil. Contrary to Socrates, when presented with full opportunity for rational choice, they do not choose the good, they choose the bad. The assumption is that a civilization exists to keep them powerless. Whether it does or not, as civilization decays and its values become inoperable, their power increases by the sheer accumulation of evil acts. At the time of the Moscow Trials, I pointed out that the Russians were not on Mars: they were human beings, on this planet, and a wholesale moral catastrophe would metastasize throughout the species and could not be isolated behind the barbed wire of a totalitarian state. So much more true was this of the German extermination of Jews, Gypsies, Communists and others. My Lai cannot be kept away in the jungle. Charles Manson is a product of American society, and the girls are even typical of an immense and ever growing class, as he himself noted. The old liberal notion that crime is a sickness is based on the Socratic Fallacy that man, given the chance, will choose the good. Any policeman can tell you that most criminals are in it for the fun.
Most professional criminals, real yeggs, stickup men, boosters and cannon guys, do not come from broken homes and poverty. But there is no comparison with their denial of the values of the society and the behavior of heads of states and great industries and business enterprises. The existence of karma is obvious; the deeds of men do accumulate. The evil deeds accumulate until they reach the tipover point, and what tips over is the society, which becomes an association of psychopaths. The diagnostic sign of the psychopathic personality is the remark made to the counselor or psychiatrist, “Everybody else does it, why shouldn’t I?” If you have never been a counselor or headshrinker you cannot believe how common this remark is, and amongst the most “deviant” individuals. Finally, the behavior of the sociopath becomes the norm of social order.
A bunch of wild-eyed kids full of drugs burst into a private home and indiscriminately kill perfectly innocent people. Where? Bel Air? My Lai?
Who turns the values of civilized society into their opposites? Who raises the Powers of Darkness?
[May 1971]
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