Inspiring Action through Creative Writing

The two pieces we read this week from our anthology, “The Police Band” by Donald Barthelme and “Che’s Last Letter” by Abbie Hoffman, were interesting in their portrayal of the creative techniques different people were using in trying to influence others to direct action. Barthelme himself put it succinctly when he said that “however much the writer might want to be straightforward, these virtues are no longer available to him. He [the writer] discovers that in being simple, honest, [and] straightforward, nothing much happens.” Barthelme and Hoffman each devised very distinct yet equally imaginative ways of circumventing straightforward appeals to the masses and delivering their messages in more subtle forms.

That said, I must admit that I don’t truly understand Barthelme’s point in his short story, “The Police Band.” The story itself is humorous and enjoyable, but I simply don’t get what exactly he is trying to satire. This is most likely due to my own lack of knowledge about the era—I don’t know if the police really did try outrageous stunts and off the wall ideas along the lines of that described in the story (in which case, Barthelme was mocking them), or if he was suggesting that the police should be more liberal and open-minded to new ideas and more peaceful strategies (in which case, Barthelme was condemning them). I can see the irony either way; I just don’t know which one was meant!

Hoffman’s letter, on the other hand, was perfectly clear. By impersonating the already respected revolutionary figure of Che Guevara, Hoffman hoped to inspire in his readers a gripping passion for the cause of freedom. Here, Hoffman assumes (correctly or not) that being direct would not achieve his desired results. From the beginning of his letter, he relies heavily upon the rhetorical use of pathos, trying to relate Che to the U.S. youth he is addressing. This is particularly apparent in lines such as, “We are somewhere in the jungles of Bolivia … struggling against immense odds. My thoughts turn to the young people struggling for a chance at life in the bowels of plastic America cut off from the lifeline of human existence.” Hoffman also relies upon metaphor, as in, “Surely the destiny of man was to lift himself out of the jungle,” where he creates a new metaphor to relate Che’s supposed situation to that of the U.S. counterculture. These strategies seem like they would be quite effective.

Abbie Hoffman himself is an interesting persona of the ’60s. He has a history of “creative” approaches to influencing others, as this letter is not the first instance of Hoffman’s readiness to deceive in order to attain his goals. As we read in our other textbook, Hoffman (as part of the Youth International Party) purposely attempted to incite riots at the Democratic Party Convention in Chicago—only admitting so after being acquitted of the charges, of course. He succeeded in his plans there… I wonder if anyone at the time really believed that his letter was written by Che?

History and Music

I loved reading Kay Boyle’s “Testament for My Students, 1968-1969.” Not only did I find it amazing and wonderful that a teacher would “sympathize with her radical students and [go] to jail for demonstrating with them,” but also I enjoyed her use of the rhetoric of history—using historic literary references and drawing from her own memories of the past—and the rhetoric of music—the power and influence of music to simultaneously shape and reflect an entire generation.

It was interesting that Boyle dropped names such as Melville, Poe, Dickinson, and Stein, but then quoted only her own students. She seems to have been truly inspired by them, and, in reading the brief snippets of their prose and poetry that she included in her “Testament,” it’s not hard to see why. Protesting against the exclusive, establishment-oriented course that universities were taking at the time, one student proclaimed, “Poetry is for the people and it should represent the people,” while another wryly remarked, “Don’t make too much noise / You might wake up the middle class.” These messages seem difficult to understand, in a way, because universities have become so liberal in the last 40 years, but the underlying tone and sentiment still ring true for many aspects of our contemporary society.

Exploring her memories of her own days as a college student, in the middle of a generation of cold-war conformity, Boyle recreates a long-winded professor full of self-importance who speaks the rhetoric of change while obviously not intending to change a thing. His own discombobulated speech seems focused more on the avoidance of issues than on the confrontation of them: “There is no possibility of successfully inaugurating . . . any course unless that inauguration or initiation has been preceded by a long term study in depth of what it may be advisable to undertake at some future time.” Thus, the professor makes it clear that the process of change and growth he half-heartedly proposes will certainly be a long and drawn-out process—which, of course, it was and still is.

Here, Boyle makes her first reference to the power and influence of music: “That’s what rock and roll is for; . . . It’s the only thing loud enough to drown out the voices of the cautious of our day.” I highlighted that line when I first read this section, thinking it was funny. Later, when I read the section by Andrew Gordon (“Smoking Dope with Thomas Pynchon: A Sixties Memoir”), I found myself highlighting three more references to rock and roll as being the music of the times, and I realized it was more than just humorous—it was significant. This music was truly able to express what was happening, not only the facts, but also the mood, the emotions—anticipation, frustration, excitement, anger, energy, hope. One of Gordon’s music references was also a literary reference: “Kerouac was of the cool fifties; he wrote jazz fiction. But Pynchon was of the apocalyptic sixties; he wrote rock and roll.” The analogy is amazingly fitting.

And “apocalyptic” seems a fitting word to describe the decade of change and upheaval that was the Sixties. The mythos and mystique of this era is so strong, even today. Will we ever have a decade as turbulent and full of real change again? It doesn’t seem possible; all factors had colluded perfectly to create the setting for this one, single, incredible moment in time. As Gordon describes it, “If someone told you the history of the decade as a story, you wouldn’t believe it. . . . You wouldn’t know how to feel, to laugh or to cry.” This is true even now, looking back—so much good and so much evil happened all at once in that era: the Vietnam War, the war protests, the FSM, the Hippies, Haight-Ashbury, environmental awareness, Woodstock, the draft, the music, the drugs… 40 years later, it’s still overwhelming.

Altamont: the Beginning of the End…

From the stories I’ve read and heard about the Rolling Stones concert at Altamont Speedway (or, as it was hyped, “Woodstock West”), it seems the concert went terrifyingly wrong in almost every way. As Michael Lydon describes it, it would have felt like it was truly the beginning of the end of the carefree, communal days of Hippie peace and love.

Perhaps doomed to epic failure from the start, Altamont began with cancelled venues, greedy business owners, commercial hype, and disappointed hopes… none of which seems to be in the spirit of the Hippies. Among other last minute events surrounding Altamont, the owners of the Speedway did not volunteer their services until Friday afternoon, after multiple venues fell through and only hours before the concert was scheduled to open on Saturday morning. In the meantime, competing radio stations were turning the entire festival into a commercial bonanza, in complete contradiction to the intent of a free concert.

Not all was lost at first though, as the hawkers of old Stones concert flyers were chased off the premises and drugs were freely given away and passed around. Lydon compares Altamont to Woodstock insofar as the high expectations of community and cooperation, but he describes the failure as partially due to those very expectations: at Woodstock, necessity produced the amazing final outcome; whereas at Altamont, everyone was trying far too hard to produce another Woodstock.

It seems an old lesson, to want something so much that you can’t see what you really have. The concertgoers, organizers, and participants wanted the event to be something it was not so badly that any real outcome would have disappointed and frustrated. Lydon writes about “the wanting … the unfulfilled desire,” the idea that everyone was trying to escape, but they didn’t know what they were escaping or where they were escaping to… This must have been a horribly frustrating and confusing experience.

The one ideal moment that Lydon portrays happening at Altamont was when the Stones first began to play. I love his description of that perfect sense of “being” brought on by the experience of the music, and I think I have a feeling for what he’s talking about. At a large, outdoor music festival, as evening comes on and the band everyone has been waiting for steps out and begins to play, there can be a powerful sense of shared experience. The culmination of all emotions leading up to that one perfect moment in time is released into the emotion of the music, and, combined, these emotions spill over from each person to all those surrounding. The result is almost a collective consciousness, lost in the power of music and the sense of community.

Unfortunately, the dangerous combination of Hells Angels and Hippies once again brought an unhappy end to the festivities. Reading about the Angels’ random attacks in the crowd was harrowing enough; knowing that they beat a man to death only feet away from the stage is simply incomprehensible. It’s disturbing to know that no one was ever punished for this heinous act, but it may be even more outrageous to know that nobody ever saw (or came forward) with information, even though it happened directly in front of 300,000 people. Lydon may explain this best when he remembers that everyone “seemed beyond the law at Altamont, out there willingly…and on our own.” There is truth to that statement, at least.

FSM, Protest . . . & the Hell's Angels?

The focus in the reading selections this week was on the Free Speech Movement’s various forms of protest and resistance, and I found it to be quite fascinating. It seems there may be an unconscious supposition that the Hippies were unorganized, living in the moment and simply letting things happen as they may, but the disproof of that idea is clear in the flyers, pamphlets, posters, and memoirs that emerged from around Berkeley during this era.

David Lance Goines is (again) my favorite author from this section, as he tells the story of participating in the Sproul Hall protest and subsequently being arrested. His sense of humor is evident in abundance, even as he is questioned by the arresting officer: “’Name?’ ‘David Goines.’ ‘Race?’ ‘Human.’” You simply have to admire gumption like his! Before his arrest, though, we get the first hints of the organization and thoughtful planning behind the protest, all the way down to how to react as you’re being arrested. Goines describes the instructions shouted out among the protesters as the police arrive: “Don’t link arms; go limp and make them carry you. Do NOT resist in any way. . . . Take off your buttons, the sharp pins could stick you. . . . If you see any instances of brutality, get the officer’s badge number.” These students knew the situation they were in, knew how the police would respond, and knew their rights, and they planned accordingly. This strikes me as a much more sophisticated form of protest and resistance than we may generally associate with the Hippie movements.

Reading further, I began to understand how these instructions were spread in the first place. Flyers such as “The Rules of the Game . . . When You’re Busted,” which were distributed “on the streets of Berkeley during the FSM demonstrations,” are amazingly explicit in what you can and cannot do when being stopped, searched, or arrested – even going so far as to quote the specific statutes that apply to each situation. Apparently, being a free spirit doesn’t stop one from doing a little homework! The other flyer, “Wanted: Hip Cops,” is equally fantastic. The idea of “recruiting” among the Hippies themselves to apply for positions in the police force is interesting – and perfect for this country. As Gandhi said, “You must be the change you want to see in the world.”

The next document to provide instructions for resistance comes from Allen Ginsberg himself, in his essay in the Berkeley Barb on how to plan and execute a successful, peaceful demonstration. The famous Beat had plenty of ideas and some fascinating theories, proving that he truly thought the situation through. He suggests everything from bringing “masses of flowers – a visual spectacle” to bringing crosses “held up in front of violence . . . like in the movies dealing with Dracula.” He also puts forth ideas on what to do “in case of heavy anxiety, confusion, or struggle,” including “sit down,” or “intone . . . the Lord’s Prayer [or] Om.” He even suggests carrying “copies of the Constitution,” “little paper halos to offer [Hell’s] Angels [and] police,” and, of course, “movie cameras,” which he notes, “could be used in court in case of legal hassles later.” Finally, he proposes that flyers with these instructions be handed out before marches and protests – which, it appears, they were. Clearly, the Free Speech demonstrations held around Berkeley were well planned, meticulously prepared for, and anything but a random gathering of half-aware Hippies.

Ginsberg mentioned the Hell’s Angels in his essay, and they have also been described in various other readings throughout this course, including the next selection by Hunter Thompson. Thompson explains how the Angels were so intimately connected to the Hippies, and how dangerously delicate that connection truly was. Before taking this course, I had never realized what a huge influence the Hell’s Angels had during this era; when I thought of California Hippies, I didn’t associate the Angels into that mix. However, they seem to have had a great impact on many of the major events occurring in the Bay Area at the time. This seemed strange to me at first, since the Angels often brought violence and right-wing patriotism with them, but the connection is somewhat clarified in reading Thompson’s narrative. If the Angels and the Hippies had anything in common, it was their shared disdain for authority: as Thompson put it, “the Angels had a reputation for defying police, for successfully bucking authority, and to the frustrated student radical this was a powerful image indeed. . . . The Angels’ aggressive, antisocial stance – their alienation, as it were – had a tremendous appeal.”

Of course, it seems inevitable that the very aggression that appealed to the Hippies would eventually divide the two groups. The real crossroads, it turns out, was their respective stances on the Vietnam War. Thompson describes a brutal clash at an anti-Vietnam demonstration where the Angels turned against the Hippies, calling them “Traitors” and “Communists.” “When push came to shove,” Thompson writes, “the Hell’s Angels lined up solidly with the cops.” I suppose this lesson had to arrive at some point: not all who protest against the status quo are looking for the same utopia on the other side of the revolution.

Hippie Counterculture and Commercialization

While reading this week’s section on the Countercultural Movement, I was surprised by the negative attitudes, sarcasm, and bitterness apparent in much of the writing. We always seem to think of the Hippie culture as fun, free, happy, and loving, but in doing so we tend to forget about the larger issues with which the Hippies were dealing. They were protesting against war and the draft, and for civil liberties and free speech; they were taking the brunt of the first wave of our country’s war on drugs; and they were facing the negative stereotyping against them, the prevalence of poverty among them, and the tendency toward materialism and commercialization around them.

Country Joe McDonald’s “I Feel Like I’m Fixin’-to-Die Rag” has powerful lyrics and has become one of the most memorable anti-Vietnam War songs of the era. Yet its tone is very acerbic and cynical, as in the various lines, “Put down your books and pick up your gun / Gonna have a whole lotta fun … You know that peace can only be won / When you’ve blown them all to kingdom come … And you can be the first one on your block / To have your boy come home in a box,” and, of course, the entire chorus. The songs of the Free Speech Movement were ironic in their own right, but somehow in a more subtle manner. The energetic anger that comes through in Country Joe’s lyrics, however, is anything but subtle: if you weren’t paying attention to the war before, you would certainly be in for a rude awakening upon hearing this song.

Not all of Country Joe’s songs seem to be this full of vinegar; in fact, his “Talking Non-Violence” is very reminiscent of the Free Speech songs in its rhetoric of Civil Disobedience (as found in Dave Mandel’s “Battle of Berkeley Talking Blues”). It also brings to mind Martin Luther King Jr.’s powerful demonstration of forgiveness and literally turning the other cheek in the lines, “You’ve got to love that man beatin’ you on the head. / Love him till his hate’s all dead.”

The negativity truly shows itself in Emmett Grogan’s narrative on the San Francisco Human Be-In, in the excerpt from “Ringolevio.” The Be-In sounds wonderful by all other accounts: thousands of peaceful participants, famous rock bands, LSD-laced turkey sandwiches, Timothy Leary persuading the crowd to “Tune In, Turn On, Drop Out,” Allen Ginsberg chanting and reciting, and a mass exodus to the beach to watch the sun set over the Pacific. Grogan recollects someone else’s remarks about the event as being along the lines of, “How wonderful it was with all that energy in one place at the same time. Just being. Being together.” It sounds like a perfect moment in history—so why the negative attitude? Throughout his narrative, Grogan made comments about “watch[ing] them pretend, wondering how long it was going to take before people stopped kidding themselves.”

Finally, he reveals the cause of his disgust: the HIP merchants were making a fortune off the Hippie counterculture, even ruthlessly exploiting the young people arriving in San Francisco to take part in the cultural revolution. The Haight-Ashbury district was becoming a tourist attraction; news mongering was drawing more people in without providing them with food, shelter, or jobs; and the Hippie fashions and hairstyles that were meant to be a statement against the norm were being commercialized and marketed to a mass consumer base. I had no idea that the commercialization and commodification of Hippie culture had occurred so soon. Today, Hippie clothes are the norm—every major department store sells tie-dies, paisleys, flower prints, peace signs. Yet this trend seems to have started almost concurrently with the Hippie era itself! Grogan makes an excellent point when he states that the Diggers, in organizing and operating Free Food, the Free Store, the Free Clinic, and other free workshops, were “doing things that were, at least, pertinent and to the point of some community need.” Yes, one aspect of the Hippie counterculture included the clothes and other commercialized goods, but a far more important aspect was the overarching vision for a truly different way of life. And I believe that that, too, has remained with us to the present day.

Free Speech & the Constitution

You would think that of all the rights for which people were fighting during the '50s, '60s, and '70s, the ones explicitly guaranteed by the Constitution would not be among them. Yes, we now interpret the wording of the Constitution in such a way as to render rights fought for by the Feminist and Civil Rights Movements “explicit” also, but you can almost understand why there was, at one point, debate on whether “man” meant all humans or merely white males, given the context in which our Constitution was written. However, I cannot understand how “Congress shall make no law … abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble ….” could ever be interpreted in any way other than the freedom to speak, write, and peacefully congregate. The fact that there is a section in our anthology on the Free Speech Movement indicates that this impossibility of misinterpretation (or blatant disregard) was, in fact, possible. Of course, before even reading this section, more recent events in our history have already shown that the most basic and fundamental rights guaranteed by the Constitution can be reinterpreted and simply ignored at will by the administration.

In fact, I found it interesting that Richard Kampf’s lyrics in “Hey Mr. Newsman” include the lines, “Don’t know if I’m subversive, just want to say what I please / Strange how us subversives / Keep fighting for democracy.” This sounds sadly familiar—shortly after 9/11, a report was issued on how to identify possible subversives (McCarthyism, anyone?). Among other things, the list of traits to look out for included: if they homeschool their children (I was homeschooled!); if they own guns (isn’t that a Constitutional right, also?); if they have a larder stocked with more than a month’s worth of food (so Costco must be subversive, too); or if they are overly familiar with the Constitution. So knowing too much about your own government is suddenly a sign that you are a suspect, a terrorist, a subversive. This country has not come far since Kampf’s era.

Lee Felsenstein’s “Put My Name Down” touches on the same topic in the lyrics, “What do we want, why the mess? / The Constitution, nothing less!” How outrageous that U.S. citizens have to fight and go through all the hardships described in these pages simply to perform actions that are already guaranteed them in our own Constitution: speaking freely and gathering peacefully. In “Battle of Berkeley Talking Blues,” Dave Mandel adds a positive spin in places, while still commenting on the same dilemma, as when he states, “Free speech is coming cause some spoke out … / To get our rights we’ll have to shout…” Another line in the same song conjures up the long history of such protest in our country: “Civil Disobedience … an essay come alive … education in action.” With these lyrics, the hundred-year-old writings of Thoreau become relevant and immediate—as they did for Martin Luther King Jr. and the rest of the Civil Rights Movement in the south.

In Felsenstein’s Introduction to the song booklet, he urges its readers to “Sing them loud and sing them often. You will be helping to fight the battle for Constitutional rights.” I simply love the idea of songs being a real part of the battle, and it does have a certain ironic logic to it: if speech itself is under contention, what better way to fight back than to sing out loud about it?

Environmental Literature

Generally while I'm reading the assigned literature for the week, I make notations in the margins to comment on/remind myself about interesting sections, and I mark the page by tabbing the corner. When I'm done reading the entire selection, I can easily go back through it and find the tabbed pages in order to figure out what I should write about. This week, however, when I flipped back through the assigned selections, my method didn't help me to narrow down what I should write about -- literally every other page was tabbed.

This only goes to illustrate how fascinated I am by the writings of this era on the environment, the natural world, living in harmony with nature, the importance of ecology, and the interconnectedness of all living things (including, some would say, streams, rocks, mountains, forests, etc). In the introduction to the section on Environmental Literature, there is a quote by Tom Bissell, in which he comments on the "tradition of reflection upon nature and a stubborn activism upon its behalf ... from Henry David Thoreau to John Muir to Rachel Carson." I believe this tradition is exactly what inspires and moves me so much, although I have never been able to identify it as environmental before now. I grew up on a nearly self-sustaining homestead and was instilled with a great love of and respect for nature, so it was also natural for me to find and adore authors from Thoreau to Carson, as well as some of the others in this anthology: Gary Snyder, Edward Abbey, and N. Scott Momaday included.

I first read Silent Spring as a teenager, and even then I recognized the power and beauty of Rachel Carson's rhetoric. She writes vivid, lingering descriptions down to such fine detail; it almost feels like watching a film pan slowly over a serene countryside, dwelling thoughtfully on various aspects of the landscape, picking up all the sounds and smells as well as the sights along the way. The connection she builds between the reader and the scene she paints is so sincere, it comes as a tragedy when she reveals the consequences of careless human actions in this idyllic setting. It is no wonder that her book literally changed the world.

Having never read Peter Matthiessen before, it was a pleasant surprise to find many sentiments and rhetorical strategies in his Wildlife in America as are found in Silent Spring. Matthiessen, too, seems to care deeply about the tiniest details of the environment he writes about, down to the fate of the last microscopic speck of eggshell from last of the now-extinct Auks. There was one line that struck me as unusual yet undeniably true in this excerpt: "There is some comfort in the notion that, however Homo sapiens contrives his own destruction, a few creatures will survive in that ultimate wilderness he will leave behind..." It may sound incredibly fatalistic, but I have actually had similar thoughts before. When I start to get overwhelmed by the destruction humankind is wreaking upon the Earth, I like to think that, whatever we do, the Earth itself will prevail. We may very well wipe ourselves off the face of the planet, and, unfortunately, we may take quite a few species with us, but we simply cannot destroy all life; it would be quite egomaniacal to think that we are that powerful.

This is not, of course, to say that I think we should just give up conservation or caring what we do to the environment. In fact, on a purely selfish level, we should realize that damaging any part of the Earth will somehow manage to come back to haunt us personally. As Edward Abbey put it, "All living things on earth are kindred."

Anne Sexton the Feminist

I was very pleased to see that Anne Sexton was included in our reading selection this week. The indomitable Anne Sexton is a shining example of the feminist spirit in the postmodernist era. She displays a heavy dependence upon oral tradition and the spoken word in her poetry—along with almost every major aspect of feminist tone and style from that profound period of American history. As was the case with the section on the Beats, I enjoyed the poems included in our anthology (especially the profound The Addict), but my favorites were not included here. I believe her most poignant poem is Self in 1958, but Her Kind is also an excellent example of her best work and strong feminist stance.

Sexton’s poems simultaneously express biting wit, repressed fury, and excruciating loneliness, along with the private, “confessional” tone popular with the Beats. In fact, Sexton’s contemporary was Allen Ginsberg, who often contemplated in his own poems her apparent fear that human feeling and natural wonder at the world were being stifled to the point of nonexistence. Sexton picks up this line of thought and carries it forward in a distinctly feminist tone with Self in 1958—her own reaction to the uniform “plasticness” of the people and the world around her, and to her life as a woman trapped in a stifling gender role. In this poem, Sexton seems to yearn for a real world, a real life, and freedom, but she is not able to even summon the emotions necessary for such an awakening anymore: “I would cry / … if I could remember how / and if I had the tears.” She is bearing witness to the so-called “death of feeling,” a fear that the drive toward power, outward success, and the accumulation of wealth were stifling the truth of domestic feelings and personal emotions. Sexton is trapped in an unreal world; perfect in all appearances, but actually a sham—a cover-up so powerful that it becomes ultimately inescapable. She is the fragmented woman described by Betty Friedan, experiencing the “schizophrenic split”: angelic outside and monstrously torn apart inside.

In her other poems, Sexton continues to write powerfully as a response to the pressures of gender role conformity. She uses a kind of heated irony and dark humor (demonstrated piercing in Her Kind), and she often reveals the Freudian influence of imagining a horrific inner life, which she couples with confessional, “therapist’s couch” overtones (painfully illustrated in For My Lover, Returning to His Wife). She is also beautifully talented at utilizing her own, personal “voice” in natural American vernacular and intimate sounding speech (portrayed with heartbreaking exquisiteness in The Truth the Dead Know).

In an important contribution to the emerging admiration and respect for women in the literature world, Anne Sexton gives a brutally honest, painfully self-aware account of a woman’s life in “picture-perfect” 1950s and ’60s suburbia. Opening the secret gates that kept the female sex locked into a mold of male-envisioned womanhood, Sexton reveals complex layers of excruciating confusion, stifled emotion, and suppressed needs: “What is reality / to this synthetic doll / who should smile, who should shift gears, / … and have no evidence of ruin or fears?”

Vietnam and Protests

Of course, reading anything about the Vietnam War is always a wrenching experience. Frustration and anger that we were there at all, sorrow for the soldiers who fought there, pity for the civilians who had their lives torn apart… And now, there’s the vague feeling of déjà vu, thinking about a new country being destroyed, more soldiers senselessly losing their lives, another “holy war without allies,” as Susan Sontag so aptly put it. I guess she was right; “America is just crazy enough to try to do it.”

The list of questions that Sontag answers in her essay “What’s Happening in America” is still very relevant today. I wonder what kind of responses it would elicit? The first question, “Does it matter who is in the White House,” will be answered soon enough. What about “How serious is the problem of inflation?” I’d say very serious, as the current recession demonstrates, but the administration’s response of continuously doling out MORE money is the exact opposite of helping the situation. More inflation will only make the economic bubble larger, and it will burst all the harder. Later questions, “Where do you think our foreign policies are likely to lead us?” and “What, in general, do you think is likely to happen in America?” are harder to answer. Finally, perhaps the most difficult question to transpose to today’s world: “Do you think any promise is to be found in the activities of young people today?” We do not have the major countercultural movements of the ’60s, or at least, now they are more integrated into the mainstream and not as radical – or, I would say, as effective. There is promise in the number of young people who have discovered the logic of Libertarianism, and in the number who chose to speak out against the wrongs our government is committing. However, there is also a distinct lack of promise in the vast number of young people who are lethargic about what is happening in the world today, who know nothing and want to know nothing about politics, economics, the environment, civil liberties, or anything else that should concern us all. Sontag mentioned that “if the Bill of Rights were put to a national referendum as a new piece of legislation,” it would fail. I recently heard that people randomly stopped on the streets of D.C. refused to sign a petition because it was too radical – it was the Declaration of Independence with the first line removed.


There is also that rare and lonely section of literature on the Vietnam War that is uplifting, in its own way. My favorite piece in our reading this week was the excerpt from “The Free Speech Movement” by David Lance Goines. His humor is inspiring, given the subject, and his actions and ideas are both hilarious and pure genius! You simply have to respect someone who responds to his draft notice with a letter that starts, “Gentlemen: Please remove me from your mailing list…” By far the most astounding (and audacious) act Goines performed was the series of letters he wrote to the draft board under the assumption that if you keep your file out and moving, “sooner or later, they will lose it!” And it worked! This is absolutely the best draft-dodging story I have ever heard. Now I want to read not only Goines’ book, but also the one by C. Northcote Parkinson that inspired him to this incredible feat.

Finally, no collection of Vietnam memoirs would be complete without including “The Things They Carried” by Tim O’Brien. The chapter in our text (“The Man I Killed”) is not my favorite from O’Brien’s book, but it is certainly effective. What always strikes me about O’Brien’s writing is how easily he glides back and forth between truth and fiction, and—even more striking—that it is impossible to tell which is which. His point, of course, is that it doesn’t matter: whatever we experience can be explained with deeper truths than fact alone can provide. Perhaps that really is the only way to begin to understand something as awful in U.S. history as the Vietnam War.

LSD, Shrooms, & Other Fun Stuff

I remember being six years old. It was the mid ’80s and I lived in the small, cedar-paneled, wood stove-heated home that my parents had built by themselves on their 40-acre homestead in north Idaho. Our indoor plumbing consisted of a kitchen sink and a huge cast-iron claw-foot bathtub; toilet facilities would be located in an outhouse about 20 yards down a path until I was nearly 11. We had, however, recently acquired electricity, and in the afternoon my parents would play records of some of their favorite artists to get my brother and me to lay still on the pillows and cushions scattered across the wood floor and relax, if not actually nap. A few of the artists I still love to listen to who were introduced to me at this early age were Cat Stevens, Joni Mitchell, The Grateful Dead, Bob Dylan, The Beatles, John Denver, and The Moody Blues. I can still remember singing along gently to the hypnotizing and mystical songs of The Moody Blues, chanting that lyrical-sounding name—“Timothy Leary…”

How little did I know the associations I was invoking.

Timothy Leary seems such a mythical figure now: a guru in the world of hallucinogenic drugs and a master in the art of tripping. Reading about his mansion at Millbrook and the League for Spiritual Discovery feels like reading a work of outrageous fiction—people really did this? This was real? The approach they took to drugs is incredible. People today take drugs to escape or just to have fun; Leary and his League took them to achieve something, to gain understanding. Under the influence of hallucinogens such as LSD or shrooms, the associations with Buddhism and Hinduism come naturally—the intrinsic connection to every particle in the universe; the feeling of enlightenment; the awareness of the presence in animals, tree, rocks, water. To experience this is one thing; to take something away from that experience and incorporate it into the rest of your life is really quite amazing.

Sure, detractors may read Diane di Prima’s account of that Thanksgiving Day at Millbrook as proof of blatant neglect, irresponsibility, or dangerous ignorance. After all, she lets her three-year-old son taste beer—but did you know that in many cultures there is no stigma against children drinking light forms of alcohol? The group accidentally allows a reporter to ingest a huge amount of LSD—but did you read the article about the CIA actually intentionally testing LSD on unsuspecting civilians? And Leary had randomly “dumped half the [LSD] powder” into a can with some vodka and “sloshed it around” as part of his supposedly scientific testing—but didn’t everyone there come of their own accord and know what they were getting into? I firmly believe that people in this country should be free to do to their own bodies whatever they desire. That includes accepted and legal things such as tattooing and piercing, semi-accepted and legally contended things such as abortion, and underground and currently illegal things such as ingesting whatever drugs one chooses. The so-called “war on drugs” has only made drug lords more powerful and the acquisition of drugs more expensive and dangerous than it should be. Have we all forgotten the immense folly of prohibition?

One example of a perfectly harmless drug that has been ludicrously elevated in its illegality to the same status of LSD is, of course, the magic mushroom. I think Andy Lechter had an excellent point when he suggested in Shroom: A Cultural History of the Magic Mushroom that the greatest threat to mushroom users is the danger of picking the wrong kind of mushroom—a danger that could easily be remedied or at least drastically reduced if mushrooms were readily available on a legal market. I’m sure the same goes for many drugs, even those considered by some to be incredibly dangerous. But think of it: would you rather have a friend or relative taking their chances with heroin purchased in a grimy back alley or in a regulated pharmacy? To me, at least, the answer is clear.

Nonviolence in the Civil Rights Movement

Every time I read anything by Martin Luther King, Jr., I am struck by the power of his rhetoric. His Letter From a Birmingham Jail is no exception. His response to those clergymen who wrote so unsympathetically toward him and the entire movement is quite simply amazing and inspiring.

The mere fact that he writes so calmly and thoughtfully in the midst of such a tumultuous and frustrating (to put it mildly) situation is enough to prove King's true belief in the forgiveness and nonviolence that he preached, but there is more than that apparent in his work. King utilizes a strategy of building up and complimenting his detractors in such a way as to render impossible any protest or disagreement on their part. For example, he addresses the clergymen's "concern" by stating that he is "sure that none of [them] would want to rest content with the superficial kind of social analysis that deals merely with effects and does not grapple with underlying causes." And who could possibly contradict a statement like that while leaving their own dignity intact?

King later uses another powerful rhetorical tactic when he "assumes" logical and sympathetic questions coming from his detractors, then compliments them on their thinking abilities and their compassion: "You may well ask, 'Why direct action? ... Isn't negotiation a better path?' You are quite right in calling for negotiation." This technique is incredibly clever, for how can they argue when the idea, so highly praised, is attributed to themselves?

Perhaps even more inspiring than King's own writing, however, are the accounts of his actions written by others around him. Rosa Parks' description of King literally turning the other cheek to the man who attacked him is humbling, to say the least. If only more of us could be so completely true to our beliefs -- the world would certainly be a better place.

Of course, King was not the only civil rights activist during this time, and the other heroic acts of nonviolence and forgiveness and understanding are equally impressive. It was a wrenching experience just to read Anne Moody's horrific tale of being not simply arrested, but tortured in the heat of a locked van and interned in cattle stalls, merely for peacefully marching in protest. But to know that those things were happening constantly during this era and then to read James Baldwin's sympathetic account of the white citizens' reactions to black protest in Montgomery is almost more shocking. Baldwin describes the "huffy, offended silence" of the whites on an integrated bus as the result of "a really serious lovers' quarrel: the whites, beneath their cold hostility, were mystified and deeply hurt." The quiet understanding and empathy displayed in these lines are truly mystifying to me. After enduring so much at the hands of these people, Baldwin still genuinely cares about their emotional and mental well-being.

This nonviolent reaction becomes more powerful to behold when I consider, in contrast, the usual reaction of our nation to any sign of threat, real or perceived. Instead of turning the other cheek, we strike back in fury. Instead of empathizing with bystanders (let alone perpetrators), we carelessly and messily attack. Instead of nonviolence, we use all the force we can muster, with threats of more and insults to any who dare oppose our agenda. The U.S. civil rights movement has now culminated in the election of a black president, but we must remember that the world wide human rights struggle continues. The unknown is always more feared and hated than the known, so, as King said, "Let us hope that the...deep fog of misunderstanding will be lifted from our fear-drenched communities," that we as a nation may choose to live in peace rather than in war, in solidarity rather than in aggression.

Ginsberg and the Beats

Reading poetry by Allen Ginsberg silently to oneself is like watching a movie with the sound turned off. Ginsberg’s poems are as much songs to be sung aloud or speeches to be emphatically voiced or even skits to be acted out as they are words to be read on a page. His use of authentic American dialect and speech patterns (much like Robert Frost or Samuel Clemens used) works to bring his words as easily and smoothly to the lips of his readers as to their minds.

That said, I was a little disappointed with the poem selected for this anthology. Kral Majales is effective (especially in the second half with the repetition of “I am the King of May” before each new thought), but for some reason it’s just not one of my favorites. Nevertheless, it does show the typical expression of irony, anger, and loneliness found in most of his poetry, and it takes on the intimate, almost confessional tone popularized by the apparent movement of writers in the ’50s first to the psychiatrist’s office and then directly to the typewriter to share their most private findings with the world at large.

My favorite poem of Ginsberg’s is one that doesn’t actually show up in the anthology: the classic America. In America, Ginsberg admits, “I smoke marijuana every chance I get. / … When I go to Chinatown I get drunk and never get laid.” Whatever else you may think of them, the pure honesty of the Beats has to be admired. The perfectly open and candid dialogue between the author and his reader proves effective not only in sharing personal details, but also in addressing much larger issues, such as political and social protestation and commentary. Ginsberg grew up in a politically charged household with communist socialist parents, Jewish emigrants from Russia. He was instilled with a strong faith in the power for change to be found in rhetorical protest, and it certainly seems that this belief shines through in his radically politically-minded poetry. At times, he will directly state his solution to a crisis he observes (“America when will you send your eggs to India?”), and, at other times, he seems to know that all he can do about the problem is bring it out into the open (“America I used to be a communist when I was a kid I’m not sorry.”), which he was never afraid to do, even during the era of McCarthyism and enforced conformity.

Proving their worth in literary history, Ginsberg and the rest of the Beats wrote about what was real. They wrote the truth as they saw it, and nothing was too sacred for their exploration—be it politics, American values, sex, drugs, war, their own lives, their secrets, their fears, or their loves.

In the line, “Will we stroll dreaming of the lost America of love”, Ginsberg reflects the feeling that our most human values—love, compassion, wonder—are threatened and even on the verge of extinction in our unfeeling, impassive modern culture. To me, at least, this sentiment (among others) illuminates how the social criticism of the Beats in the ’50s led directly to the humanist movements of the Hippies in the ’60s.