Kenneth Rexroth
Six Columns from the San Francisco Magazine
Nixon’s China Ploy
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.)
Nixon’s China Ploy
One day one of the boys in the super-colossal advertising agency which has the hot line to the White House — which is the hot line to the White House — was whiling away the summer afternoon with his feet on his desk, when suddenly he got up with a yell. “Sidney! Moe! Come here quick! I’ve got the gimmick of the century!” The rushed over. “What is it? What is it?” “Let’s send Big Tricky to Peking to exchange thoughts with Chairman Mao.” “Colossal!” “Terrific!” “Incredible!” “Formidable!” “Let’s give it some sex appeal,” said Sidney. “We’ll send Kissing Henry as an advance man to Handsome Chou En-lai.” “What will they talk about?” “What do you think? Their favorite sport.”
So began an Historic Epoch, the era of massive cooptation. Only a few weeks later, after everybody had done a lot of hard thinking night and day, Moe came up with a new idea. “I got a great new slogan. Down With The Gill!” “No, no, you can’t do that. Woodrow Wilson tried it and lost. Now too many of them vote.” “No, not jill, g-i-l-l.” “I don’t dig it — what have you got against fish?” “No, no, not gill, gill, the measure, a quarter of a pint. Think of it, think of the headlines! White House Attacks Inch! Abolishes Peck! Advocates Metric System!”
From then on it was all downhill. By Christmas grass was legalized. New Year’s Day Kate Millet was appointed to the Cabinet as Secretary of Women’s Affairs. The President’s message to Congress appeared first as a Playboy interview. The National Foundation for the Arts subsidized 2000 porny filmmakers and announced a national dirty limerick contest with a pressed Cadillac for first prize. On the eve of the election the White House was turned into an interracial tri-sexual commune with group sex in the Blue Room, broadcast in color via Telestar. LSD had been legalized the previous Christmas. On the Fourth of July a sugar cube a day was made compulsory and Spiro Agnew’s hair reached his shoulders and he burned up all his shoes on the White House lawn. One day, deep in the fifth term, somebody looked out the window. Outside the picket fence on Pennsylvania Avenue an aged man in a tattered bikini, his body completely coated with pancake makeup and his hair dyed bright blue, was tottering along at the head of a little band of four ladies in tennis shoes. They bore a long banner: FLUORIDATION IS CREEPING GENOCIDE. “Who is that?” asked the President. Kissing Henry peered through his binoculars. “It’s that old nut from California, the last of the demonstrators.” “Oh, him,” said the President, “what was his name? “Ronald Reagan,” said Kissing Henry.
Do you think it’s a joke? It’s the oldest ploy in the world. “If you can’t lick ’em, join ’em” was not invented by the Emperor Constantine. But what happened when Constantine embraced Christianity? He embraced it like a grizzly bear, and once it was embraced it ceased to be the religion of Jesus and became the religion of Constantine.
There are only two alternatives: The dominant culture can take over the forms of the counter-culture, empty them, and fill them with its own content, or it can insist on preserving its own forms — every last one, every jot and tittle. To do this it must embark on the most rigid and absolute totalitarianism because if it gives anywhere the wall is breached, and the fortress society falls. At the present juncture in America this would mean a generation of random guerrilla civil war and then it would be discovered that the content of the counter-culture had imperceptibly seeped in and filled all the forms of the dominant one.
All the pundits have been supposing the results of the President’s new China Policy. Let’s suppose. Let’s suppose the advertising men who run this government and the agitprop commissions in Peking and Moscow (the policy doesn’t make any sense unless it’s three-cornered) all get together and sell the slogan, “Share the World!” Where is freedom now?
At the present we are living in a society ridden by conflict and tension everywhere. Internationally, nationally, interpersonally, everything is at cross-purposes — but of course this imparts a very considerable dynamism to life. Solzhenitsyn, Tito, nor the New Economics or the Neo-Marxists would ever have been permitted to exist were it not for pressures from the outside. So we too on our side of the Iron Curtain have, not just Jerry Rubin, or LeRoi Jones, but Robert Oppenheimer and Eugene McCarthy, not to mention Allen Ginsberg. Of course there is always the possibility that we will all blow up in the next five minutes. If only the threats of war, race hatred, poverty, mass starvation, exhaustion of the environment, could all be done away with and the tensions generated by these evils could pass over into a new, purely creative dynamism. As it is, looking down the years ahead, the greatest threat to the human race, next to extinction, is totalitarianization of all life by mutual consent. We like to ignore the evidence that this is in fact the dominant tendency of our time. Hitler and Stalin year after year were “elected” by almost unanimous plebiscites.
It should be obvious that there is very little difference between the set of values advocated by Hugh Hefner and by Jerry Rubin, and both cannot be easily assimilated by despotism, but they are almost certain to be. The same is true of the program of the Black Panthers and the Black Muslims. Would life be any better for either black or white if they were realized tomorrow? So what kind of program do you advocate, Rexroth? It’s simple. Figure out those positive, creative elements of the relations of man to man and people to people that cannot be digested by the sausage grinder and stick to those and interpret all morals, ethics and politics in those terms. It’s really so simple. Who does it? Who ever did it?
My Philosophy of Life?
“What is your philosophy of life?” This is a question the young ask the old and laymen ask the specialist, the putative thinker. As you pass the midpoint of life you are supposed to acquire wisdom, and wisdom is supposed to entail a more or less systematic reordering of values. It is assumed you have learned from experience. I wonder. It seems to me that for the wise, life is a long unlearning. Systematic philosophy, like creative mathematics, is a sport for the young when it is meaningful, or a remote specialty by which academicians make their living — when it is meaningless. How do we know we know? Is there anybody else out there? Is there anything out there? Think of the thousands of people who make a good living figuring out new, complicated answers to these questions — which are not questions and which have no answers. The final, unquestionable question is “Why is it there at all?” Why does existence exist, being be? This is the final, totally unfathomable mystery. Religious philosophers have said that it is because of the overflowing love of God and they equate the three words — love, God, and creativity. But this is a “circular definition” and like most answers only restates the question.
Once you’ve had enough of it you learn that experience has very few pointers and those point around in circles. Experience is its own content. There are only questions linked to each other, marching along like the elephants in the circus parade, their tails in each other’s trunks. The answer is just another elephant. Last night I sat out in the moonless winter dark, looking out past the stars with a four-inch telescope. There are quite a few extra-galactic nebulae you can see with so small an instrument if you know where to look, and the nearest, the Andromeda nebula, you can see with the naked eye. There are more universes visible in the largest telescope than there are stars visible in this one. They stretch out and out for billions of light years to the limits of the speed of light. I came indoors and Carol said that her dress Stewart tartan skirt was wearing out. Think of that piece of cloth, woven in a certain pattern, cut in another pattern, the fibers plucked from sheep and picked from cotton plants. It came into existence at a certain moment and endured for a certain number of years and soon it will cease to exist. It embodied its own little tradition, and Queen Victoria loved to wear it when she frolicked sedately at her Scottish castle with her Scottish lover and the neighbors called her “Mrs. Brown.” Did the Young Pretender wear it as his lovers hid him and smuggled him back to Europe after the failure of ’45? A piece of cloth from which reality is known to stretch out for six billion light years in every direction, whirling along through the night with giraffes and sowbugs and people and wheelbarrows. The elephants march by, tails in trunks.
“Who am I? What can I do? What can I hope?” Life takes care of those questions by presenting its own questions. It is itself a question. Today, when it appears that my own life may be coterminous with life itself on this planet, I wonder sometimes if the pure solipsist may not be right, and it may not be just a dream going on in my own head, and being itself will turn out to be something else entirely when I awake, or as the Indian philosophers have said, “For a world epoch Shiva dances. For a world epoch Shiva sleeps. You think this is a time of Shiva’s dancing. It is not. He is asleep. You are Shiva but you dream.”
Yet what comes through the illimitable web of questions is the direct experience of transcendence, unqualified, unpredictable. We know The Other in a different way than we know the details of experience. If we probe deep enough we discover that this knowledge is the basis of all knowledge, the answer to the “epistemological dilemma.” The experience of persons transcends and originates the experience of things, and the experience of Reality, of being as such, breaks in upon us as an experience of the same kind, and we recognize it as the final source of all the rest. This is what is meant when people call Buddhism “pure religious empiricism.” Buddhism says the religious experience is ultimate and unanalyzable. It cannot be described or named but from it flows the love of all sentient creatures and the reverence for all being. This experience and this knowledge, if it can be called knowledge, is available to all men. All that is needed is a turning into The Right Way of life. It is itself the Way.
Is this a philosophy of life? If it is, it’s pretty simple. Nietzsche said that no philosophy was any good unless its fundamentals could be written on a postcard. Everything else is play. What we call philosophies are really works of art. The Summa Theologica of St. Thomas Aquinas is just another Gothic cathedral. The fancy dynamic engineering which theorists like Ruskin thought they saw in the Gothic cathedral have been proven to be illusory.
A philosophy of being and knowing and hoping is simple. The great mystery of life is the behavior of man, what used to be called the Problem of Evil. How could the things which have happened and are happening in our own lifetimes happen? How can an economic and social system in which man is wolf to man endure an hour? Why does anybody consent ever to go to war? Why doesn’t everybody rise up and take an axe to the television set after it’s been in the house for 24 hours? Why do people hate each other because of the color of their skins? How could millions of people have consented to Hitler and Stalin exterminating millions of other people? How can Americans consent to their society of unbridled violence and lies? How can people go right on committing suicide by befouling the earth? These are the mysteries. Of course there are all sorts of books written to explain human conduct, but they do not explain it. Socrates said that if a man really understands the alternatives he will always choose good rather than evil. There isn’t the slightest evidence for this, either in history or in one’s own experience. At the end of his life, H.G. Wells believed that about 10,000 years ago the world had passed through a poisonous interstellar cloud which had deranged the human race. Perhaps he was right.
American Violence
One of the most interesting aspects of the Wallace shooting has been the reaction of the country’s liberal writers and what Westbrook Pegler used to call “the butcher paper weeklies” — “This isn’t the real America.” It’s a reaction of guilt in the face of international criticism, because everybody else outside the country thinks it is the real America. Left, right and center, the rest of the world is scared to death of the United States. It does no good to say “In a population of more than 200 million you’re bound to have a lot of dangerous nuts at large and in a democracy it’s impossible to control them sufficiently.” “You cannot attribute to an entire people a national personality, a folk-soul, with attendant syndromes. There cannot be such a thing as a sick national character.”
Take a compass and enclose any other area of two hundred million people on the globe — do you find the kind of violence you find in the United States? You find a different kind of violence in Latin America. You find state-directed, organized violence in China as you once found it in Germany and Russia. All you have to do is compare these kinds of violence to see the differences that distinguish, precisely, national character. What is the real America is determined by the facts and the facts point more and more to uprootedness, alienation, lovelostness, frustration of every wholesome life aim, with the resulting violence.
We are so busy with the rush of commonplace events in our own lives that even those of us who think of ourselves as social critics seldom stop to really know in our guts how profoundly the reality of life is changing. The average American moves about 14 times in his life, but 42 million change their home addresses at least once each year and this rate steadily increases. It is almost twice that of Great Britain and France and three times that of Japan. Americans are becoming a homeless people. This is very different from bygone nomadism. Even the Mongols swept across Asia and eastern Europe in remarkably stable communities. The aristocracy of Europe still claims to be descended from the tightly knit communities of the Goths — their directory is called the Almanac de Gotha. Our American nomads whirl in the winds of change, as lonely as the monads of Leibnitz, which, as he said, “have no windows.” God told Leibnitz’s monads what to do. The American monad has television. When they gave him the third degree to find out if he was a Communist, the man who shot at Roosevelt and killed Mayor Cermak of Chicago, said, “I belong to nobody and I suffer,” a phrase that is gradually replacing “E pluribus unum.”
It is interesting that, at that time, now so long ago in what seems a far mellower and kinder age, even though it was in the depths of the most severe world economic crisis, the wise guys all believed that it was part of a plot, that the assassin was a tool of the Chicago Mafia who wanted to get rid of both Cermak and Roosevelt. People, most especially the wise guys, cannot bear to face the fact that history is meaningless and that even its most crucial events are purposeless accidents. There must be a reason; there must be a plot. It all fits together — that way lies paranoia. Significantly, “paranoia” has become a catch phrase among youth more common than “neuroses” amongst their cocktail-drinking, couch-lying elders. Rightly so. As Western civilization declines and falls we’ve seen an historical pattern in mental disturbance. The old-time hysterical lesions so common in the practice of the young Freud rarely show up in the analyst's office today. The anxiety neuroses and the death wish of the later Freud have followed them. Today we seem to be in the midst of a worldwide pandemic, not of neuroses at all, but sub-psychoses spilling over into outright madness.
During the Tet offensive a news photograph of a South Vietnamese police officer blowing out the brains of a defenseless prisoner circulated all over the world and Robert Kennedy asked in the Senate, “What is happening to America?” It was not long before he received a terrible answer. My Lai was not an action that came down on orders from the White House or the inner recesses of the Pentagon. It was just the way the cookie crumbled. Was Adlai Stevenson poisoned on orders of a secret committee of faceless men? The same ones who ordered the shootings of all the rest — Malcolm X, and George Wallace; Martin Luther King and the Kennedy brothers? Is it all connected? Even the murder of Yablonsky? Dow Wilson? Is America really ruled by a vast, secret organization, like something in an old Pabst movie? What was the reason for the rash of suicides of high government officials that followed the death of Roosevelt? Did the same people kill the anarchist Carlo Tresca, who was exposing the hookup between great wealth, the Mafia, and the New York Communist Party in his newspaper, and Huey Long, of whom both the president and every Democratic machine lived in mortal terror? Has it been going on for over forty years? History must have a meaning. All the violence must have a connection. “I belong to nobody and I suffer” — but if there is somebody there operating it I won’t suffer so much; it must all be a plot.
It’s all connected all right, but not through a committee of masked men at the top, but at the bottom, by the quality of American life. Even the efforts to change the society now are defeated by the universal breakdown of interpersonal relations. What happened to CORE? SNCC? SDS? And a hundred other radical organizations, even the poor Diggers of the Flower Children? They were shattered by plain, ordinary hate. Every radical group in America today hates everybody else, most especially their closest potential allies. The black militants are anti-Semites; women’s libbers hate all radical men. Meanwhile there exists in an America in the midst of an economic crisis, a lost war, wholesale unemployment, inflation with a rapidly falling wage rate, not a single effective economic defense organization. Considering the situation, there should be massive welfare rights organizations all over the country. The only effective one seems to be in Harlem and it’s not very. What’s the matter with the American people? The answer is, “They can’t get together.”
The Politics of Heroin
The Left, committed to an economic interpretation of history, has always been hard put to find the primary motive for the war in Southeast Asia. Indochina, as a French colony, was certainly operated as an overall loss, both to the French state and to French capitalism as a whole. Individual Frenchmen of course made fortunes there, but their activities were strictly peripheral and parasitic. In recent years my friends of the Left tell me that the war is being fought for the offshore oil; but nobody knew there was any offshore oil until the war was well under way. Wars for colonial empires are out of date because colonial empires are unprofitable. It’s better to let the “native” demagogues handle the politics and let the economy sink or swim in the seas of modern monopoly.
The war in Southeast Asia, like the Korean War, like the support of Pakistan, like the debauching of Greece, Turkey and Iran by the CIA — or on the other side, like the East German, Hungarian and Czechoslovak invasions by Russia — are only remotely adventures of economic imperialism. Primarily they are part of an elaborate game of geopolitical Go or Chinese checkers. South Korea and South Vietnam were the anchors of the outer shield, of which the center was Taiwan and Okinawa. The outer shield has been made obsolete, or at least too expensive to be worth maintaining, by the development of the technology of destruction. When bombers can make round trips to the mainland from Guam and when every city in China can be obliterated from a couple of stateside air bases in a few hours, it’s not worth the trouble monkeying with a lot of what Lyndon Johnson called “yellow dwarfs” who don’t know what’s good for them and won’t do what they’re told. Hence peace.
There is only one trouble. A new factor had entered American business enterprise. As the newest of the giants, it still behaves like a child, like all businesses behaved in the 19th century. If Time magazine says that the Mafia is today one of the six largest conglomerates or trusts in the world, with a larger cash flow than any of them, it must be true — they ought to know. If the United States Bureau of Narcotics officially admits to more than 500,000 heroin addicts in the country, and its employees privately admit to more than a million, and say that there is no high school, in no matter how remote a region in the United States, that does not have a drug problem, two million would be a safe guess and a conservative one for the heroin addicts in the country.
When Tom Dooley made his last tour of America to raise money for his medical mission in Laos, I was on Kupcinet’s yack show in Chicago with him. During the breaks for commercials I questioned him about the principal crop of Laos, who controlled it and where it went — opium. He knew that he was going to die of cancer in a few months so he spoke with complete frankness, even though Kup was terrified that we might start discussing it on the air. He placed the responsibility directly on the U.S. State Department, Army and CIA and prophesied that once the proper connections were made with the Mafia in the United States and the Corsican and Greek syndicates in the Mediterranean, there would be a deluge of heroin over the world, moved in the first instance from Laos and the Shan states of Burma and northern Thailand with the complicity and in some cases the direct participation of American officialdom, and that if the war dragged on an appreciable percentage of the armed forces in Southeast Asia would become addicts. Perhaps he had the prophetic foresight that comes in the face of death, because it all came true, just like he said.
I have been repeating his information ever since, but all my friends except Allen Ginsberg seem to have thought I was a paranoiac. At last it’s documented — the bone-freezing story of America’s Opium War is told in exhaustive detail in The Politics of Heroin in Southeast Asia by Alfred W. McCoy with Cathleen B. Read and Leonard P. Adams II, Harper and Row, New York, 464 pp., $10.95.
I have never reviewed a book before in this column but this is certainly the most important book to be published this year. Everybody should read it. It should be taught in schools. Wise guy sociologists and jazz critics and bleeding heart academicians should be forced to memorize it. Marxists and others dedicated to an economic interpretation should study it with great care. They will learn that the Hobson-Lenin thesis — that economic imperialism of 1910 was the “final form of capitalism” — was wrong. Orthodox business enterprise has gone merrily on its way, growing fatter and meaner every hour. It may not be the final form, but now we have a new kind of world-encompassing business with many of the characteristics Hobson first pointed to before the First War. Most important — super profits which would make the East India Company look like a bunch of pikers. Percentages cease to be applicable. Like Malthus’s population, the profits of the drug trade increase geometrically. The price of heroin on the streets of San Francisco is more than the cube of the price of opium in a peasant market village in Laos or Burma.
The book is by no manner of means a wild-eyed, irresponsible exposé. In fact, McCoy is very conservative in his charges. He accuses the United States government, the Army and especially the CIA of complicity, and carefully denies participation — for the obvious reason that this cannot be documented. It is not the custom to bring CIA generals and officers to trial for participation in the heroin business. However, everybody in journalism, and a small but appreciable percentage of the public, knows at first or second hand of somebody who has got fabulously rich in Vietnam from dope. More obviously still, McCoy has had to proceed with caution because he knew beforehand that the CIA would move heaven and earth to suppress the book legally and if they could not do that, to deny the charges and vilify the authors. Helms has already issued a series of hysterical blanket denials and by the time this review comes out, Harper’s may have been forced to withdraw the book from the market. Don’t forget as you read the book that the CIA does not consist exclusively of Green Beret types, international adventurers, and thugs. At the top it is run by recruits from the top of the academic community and to a lesser degree from business, good gray scholars and executives. McCoy, Read and Adams are all in their late twenties. Who is responsible for the “Dope Culture” — that absurd term — youth or age?
This horrifying tale is God’s own gift to McGovern, but I am willing to bet he won’t touch it. Every urban political machine in the United States is dirtied to a greater or lesser degree by what addicts call “a connection.”
The Abandonment of Principles
One thing, perhaps the most important, that the recent election demonstrated was that a very large section of the electorate, probably the majority and in both parties, are completely uninfluenced by principles of any sort. The politicians of other nations have always laughed at the high moral tone of their American colleagues and the lofty principles used to justify purely mundane interests and behavior from the Declaration of Independence, the Monroe Doctrine, the Emancipation Proclamation, Wilson’s 14 Points and his League of Nations, down to — when? Perhaps Walt Rostow’s nobly moral Domino Theory finally washed principle out of politics as its absurdity became manifest in thousands of My Lais. According to the polls, shocking scandals like ITT and Watergate shocked nobody and played little role in determining the election, although both were at least as grave as the scandals that made the Harding Administration a byword. If the repudiation of Eagleton shocked anybody they were only sentimentalists and idealists, too old or too young to know better and with no place else to go. Principle in American political life seems to express itself only in virulent opposition of a time-lagging sector of the population to long hair, dark skin, sexual honesty, different costumes and the use of an untaxable substitute for alcohol and nicotine.
One of the most remarkable things about San Francisco is that issues of principle still seem operable in the life of our community. A principled opposition may not win but it is always sufficiently strong to keep the opposition off balance and it does endure. It does find at least a necessary modicum of continuity and centralization of efforts. All our progressives, reformers, bleeding hearts, freaks, dirty commies and queers, whatever one’s individual taste chooses to call them, do manage to work together on the most important issues, even though they may be divided in everyday practice by the most bitter factionalism. Over six years ago bishops and bankers, the Longshoremen’s Union and the Trotskyites managed to unite and prevent a freeway from destroying Golden Gate Park, and there have been a steadily increasing number of such united actions since, although not all of them have been victorious. The City is slowly but steadily being Manhattanized, both with high-rises and the Mafia, two by no means unrelated phenomena, but there is still plenty of resistance and the resistance manages to unite around principles.
I think we all too seldom take thought about what is happening fundamentally to contemporary life. We have passed the tipover point into a mass civilization, the final megalopolis of Spengler’s Decline of the West. Life becomes more and more like that of the Hard Boiled School of science fiction patterned on the Hard Boiled School of detective stories. You know those tales of vast domed cities of a billion people on a dying planet ruled by gangsters with hearts as cold as interstellar space and populations of serfs distinguished by the color of their collars and the varying idiocies of their superstitions. You know the heroes, astronauts on the Albebaran run, who talk exactly like what intellectuals imagine truck drivers and garage mechanics do, who hang out in wild bistros on Venus that serve weird drugs from Alpha Centauri instead of booze and where the entertainers are blue nymphomaniacal mermaids. And the climax — “Xeroxia lay on the electronic Jacuzzi bed and regarded me with lambent purple eyes, glowing with satisfied passion, her feathery antennae pulsed slowly with rising expectations. I cleaned myself with the supersonic douche and then quickly snatched my blaster from my pants and shot her in the belly. ‘Daddy, I didn’t think you’d have the guts,’ she murmured as she died.” Lenin said Bolshevism was socialism with electricity and American efficiency expertise. This didn’t come about, but the free enterprise system is becoming Raymond Chandler with electronics. Remember the conversations that have come back from the first boys on the moon run? They’ve all sounded exactly like what intellectuals imagined the conversations of truck drivers and garage mechanics to be. And amongst these heroes of “the greatest step forward since the invention of fire” have been petty racketeers speculating in postage stamps. The future world of Robert Heinlein didn’t just come true in the backwoods of Hollywood and the California desert, it’s all about us.
Can this be changed? Are we in the grip of an irreversible, all-conquering historical process? Arnold Toynbee is always saying it can be reversed, but as he gets old his words more and more lack conviction. What of course is required is a complete change, a restatement of significant life meaning, the rebirth of a unifying social myth, the reclamation of a body of principles which most people will accept implicitly and on which they will be prepared to act. That’s a very big order. In the history of mankind it has usually taken about 500 years of a Dark Age for such a state of affairs to come about. We have just gone through a presidential election in which the struggle for principle was a significant factor, although the abandonment of that struggle was an even more significant factor in the outcome. But can an even more significant outcome come out, be ensured? Can the idealism, the demand for a meaningful social life, be given any enduring form? Can all the far-out people who made such passionate pleas at the Democratic convention ever not unite, but just plain get together? Can there be created within the Democratic Party, or, if necessary, outside it, a swing vote, a balance of power, of all those people to whom principles are meaningful and the great documents of human liberty are not just expediential incantations to rope in the suckers? I wonder.
Merchandise of Death
As the electioneering mask drops from its face, we are beginning to realize the ruthless cynicism of the Second Nixon Administration in all its horror. It had no sooner started than the final, massive bombing of North and South Vietnam and Laos were puzzling even the Republican editorial writers and columnists.
Why this Christmas present? Anybody who knew anything about holiday merchandising should have been able to tell them. Get rid of your inventory before you’re caught short with the ending of the season. “Dump all this junk on the gooks so we can give the boys some nice, new, fat orders.” So it turned out. We have to have a whole new red hot line of the merchandise of death for the next killing season. The Christmas bombing was a clearance sale. The more bombers destroyed, the better.
Orders for new bombers mean a lot to the boys who first hired Little Dick to run for office with a newspaper ad so long, long ago. He’s a big boy now and from now to 1976 he’s going to pay handsomely for all favors received. Of course he’ll pay with the milk of babies, the education of youth, the opportunities for blacks, and the very lives of the aged.
Under Eisenhower and Johnson we had an ever-widening credibility gap. Today we have to find our way through an all-enveloping blizzard of lies. Nineteen eighty-four has arrived early, and Newspeak is all the language our masters know. Anything the present Administration says can safely be taken to mean the opposite. The business community follows suit.
Immense public relations campaigns are mounted which are pure fraud. The L.A. paper that ran the headline “Nixon Devalues Dollar in War on Inflation” the first time, went right on talking about Nixon’s war on inflation while the dollar collapsed, and he devalued it again, 10 percent, with the power of nothing more than his signature. And even the Wall Street Journal, which makes an effort to inform the business community of what’s really happening, has discussed the devaluation almost entirely in terms of the balance of payments — that is, as an across-the-board protectionist tariff.
The fact of the matter is that the United States has emerged from its drunken orgy in Southeast Asia on the verge of bankruptcy, with many of its resources depleted, and with its major businesses shifting their base, covering their bets, becoming supernational conglomerates, no longer dependent on the possible collapse of the country they have looted.
On the other side of the world the long-term prospects are even more ominous. The British Empire, too impoverished to hold any part of the Indian Ocean littoral, invited the Americans in. As a parting gift the British fought a cheap and successful counter-insurgency war in Malaysia. But the Americans didn’t learn. The superprofits of a major war were too attractive.
All those billions thrown away on bamboo bridges, rice paddies, and jungles meant millions in profit. So today the ever-growing commercial power in the Indian Ocean is Japan; and the profiteers of the Vietnam war have used those profits to establish foundations in safe countries of economic refuge.
The run on the dollar that began in January had nothing to do with the balance of payments. It was engineered by the great international banks, American quite as much as German or Japanese or French. Inflation is like cigarettes or masturbation. Once the habit is established it is almost impossible to break except under deep hypnosis.
Deep hypnosis? It was Hitler who stopped German inflation. It was de Gaulle who stopped the French. Poor Mussolini could never control the lira. For all the racket, his hypnosis wasn’t deep enough.
Runaway inflation is not yet. What we have is an increasingly heavy protectionist tariff, what amounts now to a 20-percent duty on all imports. This is already higher that most of the items in the notorious Hawley-Smoot Tariff which precipitated the 1929 world economic crisis.
However, the effect of Hawley-Smoot was deflationary, as was the economic collapse. What will happen if we get 20-percent unemployment, utility stocks dropping to $10 and hamburgers rising to $5? God only knows. The only solution the 1873 robber-baron capitalism represented by the Nixon Administration knows is more war, a real war this time. The war is there waiting. American business enterprise cannot reclaim the areas already lost to the Japanese by peaceful means, and in a showdown, as was proven last time, the Japanese are completely vulnerable.
The Russians refuse to believe that public opinion in the United States is not directly manipulated by secret government orders, emanating from the bosses of the great banks and corporations. Since they have had to struggle for over 50 years and kill masses of people to keep a potentially pluralistic society from blowing up in their faces, they cannot conceive of a population which enjoys totalitarianization by mutual consent. A wonderful example is the current “energy crisis.” There is no energy crisis. There are many sources of energy ultimately cheaper and less wasteful and destructive than the fossil fuels, but their use would involve a complete retooling of the technology — a more profitable enterprise, incidentally, than a Third World War, and less polluting.
But there is no energy crisis in the fossil fuels. The propaganda is pure lies, covering a demand for still greater superprofits, tax write-offs, special privilege to rape the environment.
So began an Historic Epoch, the era of massive cooptation. Only a few weeks later, after everybody had done a lot of hard thinking night and day, Moe came up with a new idea. “I got a great new slogan. Down With The Gill!” “No, no, you can’t do that. Woodrow Wilson tried it and lost. Now too many of them vote.” “No, not jill, g-i-l-l.” “I don’t dig it — what have you got against fish?” “No, no, not gill, gill, the measure, a quarter of a pint. Think of it, think of the headlines! White House Attacks Inch! Abolishes Peck! Advocates Metric System!”
From then on it was all downhill. By Christmas grass was legalized. New Year’s Day Kate Millet was appointed to the Cabinet as Secretary of Women’s Affairs. The President’s message to Congress appeared first as a Playboy interview. The National Foundation for the Arts subsidized 2000 porny filmmakers and announced a national dirty limerick contest with a pressed Cadillac for first prize. On the eve of the election the White House was turned into an interracial tri-sexual commune with group sex in the Blue Room, broadcast in color via Telestar. LSD had been legalized the previous Christmas. On the Fourth of July a sugar cube a day was made compulsory and Spiro Agnew’s hair reached his shoulders and he burned up all his shoes on the White House lawn. One day, deep in the fifth term, somebody looked out the window. Outside the picket fence on Pennsylvania Avenue an aged man in a tattered bikini, his body completely coated with pancake makeup and his hair dyed bright blue, was tottering along at the head of a little band of four ladies in tennis shoes. They bore a long banner: FLUORIDATION IS CREEPING GENOCIDE. “Who is that?” asked the President. Kissing Henry peered through his binoculars. “It’s that old nut from California, the last of the demonstrators.” “Oh, him,” said the President, “what was his name? “Ronald Reagan,” said Kissing Henry.
Do you think it’s a joke? It’s the oldest ploy in the world. “If you can’t lick ’em, join ’em” was not invented by the Emperor Constantine. But what happened when Constantine embraced Christianity? He embraced it like a grizzly bear, and once it was embraced it ceased to be the religion of Jesus and became the religion of Constantine.
There are only two alternatives: The dominant culture can take over the forms of the counter-culture, empty them, and fill them with its own content, or it can insist on preserving its own forms — every last one, every jot and tittle. To do this it must embark on the most rigid and absolute totalitarianism because if it gives anywhere the wall is breached, and the fortress society falls. At the present juncture in America this would mean a generation of random guerrilla civil war and then it would be discovered that the content of the counter-culture had imperceptibly seeped in and filled all the forms of the dominant one.
All the pundits have been supposing the results of the President’s new China Policy. Let’s suppose. Let’s suppose the advertising men who run this government and the agitprop commissions in Peking and Moscow (the policy doesn’t make any sense unless it’s three-cornered) all get together and sell the slogan, “Share the World!” Where is freedom now?
At the present we are living in a society ridden by conflict and tension everywhere. Internationally, nationally, interpersonally, everything is at cross-purposes — but of course this imparts a very considerable dynamism to life. Solzhenitsyn, Tito, nor the New Economics or the Neo-Marxists would ever have been permitted to exist were it not for pressures from the outside. So we too on our side of the Iron Curtain have, not just Jerry Rubin, or LeRoi Jones, but Robert Oppenheimer and Eugene McCarthy, not to mention Allen Ginsberg. Of course there is always the possibility that we will all blow up in the next five minutes. If only the threats of war, race hatred, poverty, mass starvation, exhaustion of the environment, could all be done away with and the tensions generated by these evils could pass over into a new, purely creative dynamism. As it is, looking down the years ahead, the greatest threat to the human race, next to extinction, is totalitarianization of all life by mutual consent. We like to ignore the evidence that this is in fact the dominant tendency of our time. Hitler and Stalin year after year were “elected” by almost unanimous plebiscites.
It should be obvious that there is very little difference between the set of values advocated by Hugh Hefner and by Jerry Rubin, and both cannot be easily assimilated by despotism, but they are almost certain to be. The same is true of the program of the Black Panthers and the Black Muslims. Would life be any better for either black or white if they were realized tomorrow? So what kind of program do you advocate, Rexroth? It’s simple. Figure out those positive, creative elements of the relations of man to man and people to people that cannot be digested by the sausage grinder and stick to those and interpret all morals, ethics and politics in those terms. It’s really so simple. Who does it? Who ever did it?
[September 1971]
“What is your philosophy of life?” This is a question the young ask the old and laymen ask the specialist, the putative thinker. As you pass the midpoint of life you are supposed to acquire wisdom, and wisdom is supposed to entail a more or less systematic reordering of values. It is assumed you have learned from experience. I wonder. It seems to me that for the wise, life is a long unlearning. Systematic philosophy, like creative mathematics, is a sport for the young when it is meaningful, or a remote specialty by which academicians make their living — when it is meaningless. How do we know we know? Is there anybody else out there? Is there anything out there? Think of the thousands of people who make a good living figuring out new, complicated answers to these questions — which are not questions and which have no answers. The final, unquestionable question is “Why is it there at all?” Why does existence exist, being be? This is the final, totally unfathomable mystery. Religious philosophers have said that it is because of the overflowing love of God and they equate the three words — love, God, and creativity. But this is a “circular definition” and like most answers only restates the question.
Once you’ve had enough of it you learn that experience has very few pointers and those point around in circles. Experience is its own content. There are only questions linked to each other, marching along like the elephants in the circus parade, their tails in each other’s trunks. The answer is just another elephant. Last night I sat out in the moonless winter dark, looking out past the stars with a four-inch telescope. There are quite a few extra-galactic nebulae you can see with so small an instrument if you know where to look, and the nearest, the Andromeda nebula, you can see with the naked eye. There are more universes visible in the largest telescope than there are stars visible in this one. They stretch out and out for billions of light years to the limits of the speed of light. I came indoors and Carol said that her dress Stewart tartan skirt was wearing out. Think of that piece of cloth, woven in a certain pattern, cut in another pattern, the fibers plucked from sheep and picked from cotton plants. It came into existence at a certain moment and endured for a certain number of years and soon it will cease to exist. It embodied its own little tradition, and Queen Victoria loved to wear it when she frolicked sedately at her Scottish castle with her Scottish lover and the neighbors called her “Mrs. Brown.” Did the Young Pretender wear it as his lovers hid him and smuggled him back to Europe after the failure of ’45? A piece of cloth from which reality is known to stretch out for six billion light years in every direction, whirling along through the night with giraffes and sowbugs and people and wheelbarrows. The elephants march by, tails in trunks.
“Who am I? What can I do? What can I hope?” Life takes care of those questions by presenting its own questions. It is itself a question. Today, when it appears that my own life may be coterminous with life itself on this planet, I wonder sometimes if the pure solipsist may not be right, and it may not be just a dream going on in my own head, and being itself will turn out to be something else entirely when I awake, or as the Indian philosophers have said, “For a world epoch Shiva dances. For a world epoch Shiva sleeps. You think this is a time of Shiva’s dancing. It is not. He is asleep. You are Shiva but you dream.”
Yet what comes through the illimitable web of questions is the direct experience of transcendence, unqualified, unpredictable. We know The Other in a different way than we know the details of experience. If we probe deep enough we discover that this knowledge is the basis of all knowledge, the answer to the “epistemological dilemma.” The experience of persons transcends and originates the experience of things, and the experience of Reality, of being as such, breaks in upon us as an experience of the same kind, and we recognize it as the final source of all the rest. This is what is meant when people call Buddhism “pure religious empiricism.” Buddhism says the religious experience is ultimate and unanalyzable. It cannot be described or named but from it flows the love of all sentient creatures and the reverence for all being. This experience and this knowledge, if it can be called knowledge, is available to all men. All that is needed is a turning into The Right Way of life. It is itself the Way.
Is this a philosophy of life? If it is, it’s pretty simple. Nietzsche said that no philosophy was any good unless its fundamentals could be written on a postcard. Everything else is play. What we call philosophies are really works of art. The Summa Theologica of St. Thomas Aquinas is just another Gothic cathedral. The fancy dynamic engineering which theorists like Ruskin thought they saw in the Gothic cathedral have been proven to be illusory.
A philosophy of being and knowing and hoping is simple. The great mystery of life is the behavior of man, what used to be called the Problem of Evil. How could the things which have happened and are happening in our own lifetimes happen? How can an economic and social system in which man is wolf to man endure an hour? Why does anybody consent ever to go to war? Why doesn’t everybody rise up and take an axe to the television set after it’s been in the house for 24 hours? Why do people hate each other because of the color of their skins? How could millions of people have consented to Hitler and Stalin exterminating millions of other people? How can Americans consent to their society of unbridled violence and lies? How can people go right on committing suicide by befouling the earth? These are the mysteries. Of course there are all sorts of books written to explain human conduct, but they do not explain it. Socrates said that if a man really understands the alternatives he will always choose good rather than evil. There isn’t the slightest evidence for this, either in history or in one’s own experience. At the end of his life, H.G. Wells believed that about 10,000 years ago the world had passed through a poisonous interstellar cloud which had deranged the human race. Perhaps he was right.
[March 1972]
One of the most interesting aspects of the Wallace shooting has been the reaction of the country’s liberal writers and what Westbrook Pegler used to call “the butcher paper weeklies” — “This isn’t the real America.” It’s a reaction of guilt in the face of international criticism, because everybody else outside the country thinks it is the real America. Left, right and center, the rest of the world is scared to death of the United States. It does no good to say “In a population of more than 200 million you’re bound to have a lot of dangerous nuts at large and in a democracy it’s impossible to control them sufficiently.” “You cannot attribute to an entire people a national personality, a folk-soul, with attendant syndromes. There cannot be such a thing as a sick national character.”
Take a compass and enclose any other area of two hundred million people on the globe — do you find the kind of violence you find in the United States? You find a different kind of violence in Latin America. You find state-directed, organized violence in China as you once found it in Germany and Russia. All you have to do is compare these kinds of violence to see the differences that distinguish, precisely, national character. What is the real America is determined by the facts and the facts point more and more to uprootedness, alienation, lovelostness, frustration of every wholesome life aim, with the resulting violence.
We are so busy with the rush of commonplace events in our own lives that even those of us who think of ourselves as social critics seldom stop to really know in our guts how profoundly the reality of life is changing. The average American moves about 14 times in his life, but 42 million change their home addresses at least once each year and this rate steadily increases. It is almost twice that of Great Britain and France and three times that of Japan. Americans are becoming a homeless people. This is very different from bygone nomadism. Even the Mongols swept across Asia and eastern Europe in remarkably stable communities. The aristocracy of Europe still claims to be descended from the tightly knit communities of the Goths — their directory is called the Almanac de Gotha. Our American nomads whirl in the winds of change, as lonely as the monads of Leibnitz, which, as he said, “have no windows.” God told Leibnitz’s monads what to do. The American monad has television. When they gave him the third degree to find out if he was a Communist, the man who shot at Roosevelt and killed Mayor Cermak of Chicago, said, “I belong to nobody and I suffer,” a phrase that is gradually replacing “E pluribus unum.”
It is interesting that, at that time, now so long ago in what seems a far mellower and kinder age, even though it was in the depths of the most severe world economic crisis, the wise guys all believed that it was part of a plot, that the assassin was a tool of the Chicago Mafia who wanted to get rid of both Cermak and Roosevelt. People, most especially the wise guys, cannot bear to face the fact that history is meaningless and that even its most crucial events are purposeless accidents. There must be a reason; there must be a plot. It all fits together — that way lies paranoia. Significantly, “paranoia” has become a catch phrase among youth more common than “neuroses” amongst their cocktail-drinking, couch-lying elders. Rightly so. As Western civilization declines and falls we’ve seen an historical pattern in mental disturbance. The old-time hysterical lesions so common in the practice of the young Freud rarely show up in the analyst's office today. The anxiety neuroses and the death wish of the later Freud have followed them. Today we seem to be in the midst of a worldwide pandemic, not of neuroses at all, but sub-psychoses spilling over into outright madness.
During the Tet offensive a news photograph of a South Vietnamese police officer blowing out the brains of a defenseless prisoner circulated all over the world and Robert Kennedy asked in the Senate, “What is happening to America?” It was not long before he received a terrible answer. My Lai was not an action that came down on orders from the White House or the inner recesses of the Pentagon. It was just the way the cookie crumbled. Was Adlai Stevenson poisoned on orders of a secret committee of faceless men? The same ones who ordered the shootings of all the rest — Malcolm X, and George Wallace; Martin Luther King and the Kennedy brothers? Is it all connected? Even the murder of Yablonsky? Dow Wilson? Is America really ruled by a vast, secret organization, like something in an old Pabst movie? What was the reason for the rash of suicides of high government officials that followed the death of Roosevelt? Did the same people kill the anarchist Carlo Tresca, who was exposing the hookup between great wealth, the Mafia, and the New York Communist Party in his newspaper, and Huey Long, of whom both the president and every Democratic machine lived in mortal terror? Has it been going on for over forty years? History must have a meaning. All the violence must have a connection. “I belong to nobody and I suffer” — but if there is somebody there operating it I won’t suffer so much; it must all be a plot.
It’s all connected all right, but not through a committee of masked men at the top, but at the bottom, by the quality of American life. Even the efforts to change the society now are defeated by the universal breakdown of interpersonal relations. What happened to CORE? SNCC? SDS? And a hundred other radical organizations, even the poor Diggers of the Flower Children? They were shattered by plain, ordinary hate. Every radical group in America today hates everybody else, most especially their closest potential allies. The black militants are anti-Semites; women’s libbers hate all radical men. Meanwhile there exists in an America in the midst of an economic crisis, a lost war, wholesale unemployment, inflation with a rapidly falling wage rate, not a single effective economic defense organization. Considering the situation, there should be massive welfare rights organizations all over the country. The only effective one seems to be in Harlem and it’s not very. What’s the matter with the American people? The answer is, “They can’t get together.”
[July 1972]
The Left, committed to an economic interpretation of history, has always been hard put to find the primary motive for the war in Southeast Asia. Indochina, as a French colony, was certainly operated as an overall loss, both to the French state and to French capitalism as a whole. Individual Frenchmen of course made fortunes there, but their activities were strictly peripheral and parasitic. In recent years my friends of the Left tell me that the war is being fought for the offshore oil; but nobody knew there was any offshore oil until the war was well under way. Wars for colonial empires are out of date because colonial empires are unprofitable. It’s better to let the “native” demagogues handle the politics and let the economy sink or swim in the seas of modern monopoly.
The war in Southeast Asia, like the Korean War, like the support of Pakistan, like the debauching of Greece, Turkey and Iran by the CIA — or on the other side, like the East German, Hungarian and Czechoslovak invasions by Russia — are only remotely adventures of economic imperialism. Primarily they are part of an elaborate game of geopolitical Go or Chinese checkers. South Korea and South Vietnam were the anchors of the outer shield, of which the center was Taiwan and Okinawa. The outer shield has been made obsolete, or at least too expensive to be worth maintaining, by the development of the technology of destruction. When bombers can make round trips to the mainland from Guam and when every city in China can be obliterated from a couple of stateside air bases in a few hours, it’s not worth the trouble monkeying with a lot of what Lyndon Johnson called “yellow dwarfs” who don’t know what’s good for them and won’t do what they’re told. Hence peace.
There is only one trouble. A new factor had entered American business enterprise. As the newest of the giants, it still behaves like a child, like all businesses behaved in the 19th century. If Time magazine says that the Mafia is today one of the six largest conglomerates or trusts in the world, with a larger cash flow than any of them, it must be true — they ought to know. If the United States Bureau of Narcotics officially admits to more than 500,000 heroin addicts in the country, and its employees privately admit to more than a million, and say that there is no high school, in no matter how remote a region in the United States, that does not have a drug problem, two million would be a safe guess and a conservative one for the heroin addicts in the country.
When Tom Dooley made his last tour of America to raise money for his medical mission in Laos, I was on Kupcinet’s yack show in Chicago with him. During the breaks for commercials I questioned him about the principal crop of Laos, who controlled it and where it went — opium. He knew that he was going to die of cancer in a few months so he spoke with complete frankness, even though Kup was terrified that we might start discussing it on the air. He placed the responsibility directly on the U.S. State Department, Army and CIA and prophesied that once the proper connections were made with the Mafia in the United States and the Corsican and Greek syndicates in the Mediterranean, there would be a deluge of heroin over the world, moved in the first instance from Laos and the Shan states of Burma and northern Thailand with the complicity and in some cases the direct participation of American officialdom, and that if the war dragged on an appreciable percentage of the armed forces in Southeast Asia would become addicts. Perhaps he had the prophetic foresight that comes in the face of death, because it all came true, just like he said.
I have been repeating his information ever since, but all my friends except Allen Ginsberg seem to have thought I was a paranoiac. At last it’s documented — the bone-freezing story of America’s Opium War is told in exhaustive detail in The Politics of Heroin in Southeast Asia by Alfred W. McCoy with Cathleen B. Read and Leonard P. Adams II, Harper and Row, New York, 464 pp., $10.95.
I have never reviewed a book before in this column but this is certainly the most important book to be published this year. Everybody should read it. It should be taught in schools. Wise guy sociologists and jazz critics and bleeding heart academicians should be forced to memorize it. Marxists and others dedicated to an economic interpretation should study it with great care. They will learn that the Hobson-Lenin thesis — that economic imperialism of 1910 was the “final form of capitalism” — was wrong. Orthodox business enterprise has gone merrily on its way, growing fatter and meaner every hour. It may not be the final form, but now we have a new kind of world-encompassing business with many of the characteristics Hobson first pointed to before the First War. Most important — super profits which would make the East India Company look like a bunch of pikers. Percentages cease to be applicable. Like Malthus’s population, the profits of the drug trade increase geometrically. The price of heroin on the streets of San Francisco is more than the cube of the price of opium in a peasant market village in Laos or Burma.
The book is by no manner of means a wild-eyed, irresponsible exposé. In fact, McCoy is very conservative in his charges. He accuses the United States government, the Army and especially the CIA of complicity, and carefully denies participation — for the obvious reason that this cannot be documented. It is not the custom to bring CIA generals and officers to trial for participation in the heroin business. However, everybody in journalism, and a small but appreciable percentage of the public, knows at first or second hand of somebody who has got fabulously rich in Vietnam from dope. More obviously still, McCoy has had to proceed with caution because he knew beforehand that the CIA would move heaven and earth to suppress the book legally and if they could not do that, to deny the charges and vilify the authors. Helms has already issued a series of hysterical blanket denials and by the time this review comes out, Harper’s may have been forced to withdraw the book from the market. Don’t forget as you read the book that the CIA does not consist exclusively of Green Beret types, international adventurers, and thugs. At the top it is run by recruits from the top of the academic community and to a lesser degree from business, good gray scholars and executives. McCoy, Read and Adams are all in their late twenties. Who is responsible for the “Dope Culture” — that absurd term — youth or age?
This horrifying tale is God’s own gift to McGovern, but I am willing to bet he won’t touch it. Every urban political machine in the United States is dirtied to a greater or lesser degree by what addicts call “a connection.”
[October 1972]
One thing, perhaps the most important, that the recent election demonstrated was that a very large section of the electorate, probably the majority and in both parties, are completely uninfluenced by principles of any sort. The politicians of other nations have always laughed at the high moral tone of their American colleagues and the lofty principles used to justify purely mundane interests and behavior from the Declaration of Independence, the Monroe Doctrine, the Emancipation Proclamation, Wilson’s 14 Points and his League of Nations, down to — when? Perhaps Walt Rostow’s nobly moral Domino Theory finally washed principle out of politics as its absurdity became manifest in thousands of My Lais. According to the polls, shocking scandals like ITT and Watergate shocked nobody and played little role in determining the election, although both were at least as grave as the scandals that made the Harding Administration a byword. If the repudiation of Eagleton shocked anybody they were only sentimentalists and idealists, too old or too young to know better and with no place else to go. Principle in American political life seems to express itself only in virulent opposition of a time-lagging sector of the population to long hair, dark skin, sexual honesty, different costumes and the use of an untaxable substitute for alcohol and nicotine.
One of the most remarkable things about San Francisco is that issues of principle still seem operable in the life of our community. A principled opposition may not win but it is always sufficiently strong to keep the opposition off balance and it does endure. It does find at least a necessary modicum of continuity and centralization of efforts. All our progressives, reformers, bleeding hearts, freaks, dirty commies and queers, whatever one’s individual taste chooses to call them, do manage to work together on the most important issues, even though they may be divided in everyday practice by the most bitter factionalism. Over six years ago bishops and bankers, the Longshoremen’s Union and the Trotskyites managed to unite and prevent a freeway from destroying Golden Gate Park, and there have been a steadily increasing number of such united actions since, although not all of them have been victorious. The City is slowly but steadily being Manhattanized, both with high-rises and the Mafia, two by no means unrelated phenomena, but there is still plenty of resistance and the resistance manages to unite around principles.
I think we all too seldom take thought about what is happening fundamentally to contemporary life. We have passed the tipover point into a mass civilization, the final megalopolis of Spengler’s Decline of the West. Life becomes more and more like that of the Hard Boiled School of science fiction patterned on the Hard Boiled School of detective stories. You know those tales of vast domed cities of a billion people on a dying planet ruled by gangsters with hearts as cold as interstellar space and populations of serfs distinguished by the color of their collars and the varying idiocies of their superstitions. You know the heroes, astronauts on the Albebaran run, who talk exactly like what intellectuals imagine truck drivers and garage mechanics do, who hang out in wild bistros on Venus that serve weird drugs from Alpha Centauri instead of booze and where the entertainers are blue nymphomaniacal mermaids. And the climax — “Xeroxia lay on the electronic Jacuzzi bed and regarded me with lambent purple eyes, glowing with satisfied passion, her feathery antennae pulsed slowly with rising expectations. I cleaned myself with the supersonic douche and then quickly snatched my blaster from my pants and shot her in the belly. ‘Daddy, I didn’t think you’d have the guts,’ she murmured as she died.” Lenin said Bolshevism was socialism with electricity and American efficiency expertise. This didn’t come about, but the free enterprise system is becoming Raymond Chandler with electronics. Remember the conversations that have come back from the first boys on the moon run? They’ve all sounded exactly like what intellectuals imagined the conversations of truck drivers and garage mechanics to be. And amongst these heroes of “the greatest step forward since the invention of fire” have been petty racketeers speculating in postage stamps. The future world of Robert Heinlein didn’t just come true in the backwoods of Hollywood and the California desert, it’s all about us.
Can this be changed? Are we in the grip of an irreversible, all-conquering historical process? Arnold Toynbee is always saying it can be reversed, but as he gets old his words more and more lack conviction. What of course is required is a complete change, a restatement of significant life meaning, the rebirth of a unifying social myth, the reclamation of a body of principles which most people will accept implicitly and on which they will be prepared to act. That’s a very big order. In the history of mankind it has usually taken about 500 years of a Dark Age for such a state of affairs to come about. We have just gone through a presidential election in which the struggle for principle was a significant factor, although the abandonment of that struggle was an even more significant factor in the outcome. But can an even more significant outcome come out, be ensured? Can the idealism, the demand for a meaningful social life, be given any enduring form? Can all the far-out people who made such passionate pleas at the Democratic convention ever not unite, but just plain get together? Can there be created within the Democratic Party, or, if necessary, outside it, a swing vote, a balance of power, of all those people to whom principles are meaningful and the great documents of human liberty are not just expediential incantations to rope in the suckers? I wonder.
[December 1972]
As the electioneering mask drops from its face, we are beginning to realize the ruthless cynicism of the Second Nixon Administration in all its horror. It had no sooner started than the final, massive bombing of North and South Vietnam and Laos were puzzling even the Republican editorial writers and columnists.
Why this Christmas present? Anybody who knew anything about holiday merchandising should have been able to tell them. Get rid of your inventory before you’re caught short with the ending of the season. “Dump all this junk on the gooks so we can give the boys some nice, new, fat orders.” So it turned out. We have to have a whole new red hot line of the merchandise of death for the next killing season. The Christmas bombing was a clearance sale. The more bombers destroyed, the better.
Orders for new bombers mean a lot to the boys who first hired Little Dick to run for office with a newspaper ad so long, long ago. He’s a big boy now and from now to 1976 he’s going to pay handsomely for all favors received. Of course he’ll pay with the milk of babies, the education of youth, the opportunities for blacks, and the very lives of the aged.
Under Eisenhower and Johnson we had an ever-widening credibility gap. Today we have to find our way through an all-enveloping blizzard of lies. Nineteen eighty-four has arrived early, and Newspeak is all the language our masters know. Anything the present Administration says can safely be taken to mean the opposite. The business community follows suit.
Immense public relations campaigns are mounted which are pure fraud. The L.A. paper that ran the headline “Nixon Devalues Dollar in War on Inflation” the first time, went right on talking about Nixon’s war on inflation while the dollar collapsed, and he devalued it again, 10 percent, with the power of nothing more than his signature. And even the Wall Street Journal, which makes an effort to inform the business community of what’s really happening, has discussed the devaluation almost entirely in terms of the balance of payments — that is, as an across-the-board protectionist tariff.
The fact of the matter is that the United States has emerged from its drunken orgy in Southeast Asia on the verge of bankruptcy, with many of its resources depleted, and with its major businesses shifting their base, covering their bets, becoming supernational conglomerates, no longer dependent on the possible collapse of the country they have looted.
On the other side of the world the long-term prospects are even more ominous. The British Empire, too impoverished to hold any part of the Indian Ocean littoral, invited the Americans in. As a parting gift the British fought a cheap and successful counter-insurgency war in Malaysia. But the Americans didn’t learn. The superprofits of a major war were too attractive.
All those billions thrown away on bamboo bridges, rice paddies, and jungles meant millions in profit. So today the ever-growing commercial power in the Indian Ocean is Japan; and the profiteers of the Vietnam war have used those profits to establish foundations in safe countries of economic refuge.
The run on the dollar that began in January had nothing to do with the balance of payments. It was engineered by the great international banks, American quite as much as German or Japanese or French. Inflation is like cigarettes or masturbation. Once the habit is established it is almost impossible to break except under deep hypnosis.
Deep hypnosis? It was Hitler who stopped German inflation. It was de Gaulle who stopped the French. Poor Mussolini could never control the lira. For all the racket, his hypnosis wasn’t deep enough.
Runaway inflation is not yet. What we have is an increasingly heavy protectionist tariff, what amounts now to a 20-percent duty on all imports. This is already higher that most of the items in the notorious Hawley-Smoot Tariff which precipitated the 1929 world economic crisis.
However, the effect of Hawley-Smoot was deflationary, as was the economic collapse. What will happen if we get 20-percent unemployment, utility stocks dropping to $10 and hamburgers rising to $5? God only knows. The only solution the 1873 robber-baron capitalism represented by the Nixon Administration knows is more war, a real war this time. The war is there waiting. American business enterprise cannot reclaim the areas already lost to the Japanese by peaceful means, and in a showdown, as was proven last time, the Japanese are completely vulnerable.
The Russians refuse to believe that public opinion in the United States is not directly manipulated by secret government orders, emanating from the bosses of the great banks and corporations. Since they have had to struggle for over 50 years and kill masses of people to keep a potentially pluralistic society from blowing up in their faces, they cannot conceive of a population which enjoys totalitarianization by mutual consent. A wonderful example is the current “energy crisis.” There is no energy crisis. There are many sources of energy ultimately cheaper and less wasteful and destructive than the fossil fuels, but their use would involve a complete retooling of the technology — a more profitable enterprise, incidentally, than a Third World War, and less polluting.
But there is no energy crisis in the fossil fuels. The propaganda is pure lies, covering a demand for still greater superprofits, tax write-offs, special privilege to rape the environment.
[April 1973]
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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