In any event, the Magic Christian concept is one side of the "new politics" coin. It doesn't work, but it's fun. . . unlike that coin's other face that emerged in the presidential campaign of Gene McCarthy and Bobby Kennedy in 1968. In both cases, we saw establishment candidates claiming conversion to some newer and younger state of mind (or political reality) that would make them more in tune with a newer, younger and weirder electorate that had previously called them both useless.
And it worked. Both conversions were hugely successful, for a while. . . and if the tactic itself seemed cynical, it is still hard to know, in either case, whether the tactic was father to the conversion, or vice-versa. Which hardly matters, for now. We are talking about political-action formats: if the Magic Christian concept is one, then the Kennedy/McCarthy format has to qualify as another. . . particularly as the national Democratic Party is already working desperately to make it work again in 1972, when the Demos' only hope of unseating Nixon will again be some shrewd establishment candidate on the brink of menopause who will suddenly start dropping acid in late '71 and then hit the rock-festival trail in the summer of '72. He will doff his shirt at every opportunity and his wife will burn her bra. . . and millions of the young will vote for him, against Nixon.
Or will they? There is still another format, and this is the one we stumbled on in Aspen. Why not challenge the establishment with a candidate they've never heard of? Who has never been primed or prepped or greased for public office? And whose lifestyle is already so weird that the idea of "conversion" would never occur to him?
In other words, why not run an honest freak and turn him loose, on their turf, to show up all the "normal" candidates for the worthless losers they are and always have been? Why defer to the bastards? Why assume they're intelligent? Why believe they won't crack and fold in a crunch? (When the Japs went into Olympic volleyball they ran a blitz on everybody using strange but maddeningly legal techniques like the "Jap roll," the "dink spike" and the "lightning belly pass" that reduced their taller opponents to screaming jelly.)
This is the essence of what some people call "the Aspen technique" in politics: neither opting out of the system, nor working within it. . . but calling its bluff, by using its strength to turn its back on itself. . . and by always assuming that the people in power are not smart. By the end of the Edwards campaign, I was convinced, despite my lifelong bias to the contrary, that the Law was actually on our side. Not the cops, or the judges or the politicians -- but the actual Law, itself, as printed in the dull and musty lawbooks that we constantly had to consult because we had no other choice.
But in November of '69 we had no time for this kind of theory-talk or thinking. I remember a list of books I wanted to get and read, in order to learn something about politics, but I barely had time to sleep, much less to do any reading. As the de facto campaign manager, I felt like a man who had started some kind of bloody gang-fight by accident. . . and as the Edwards campaign grew crazier and more vicious, my only real concern was to save my own ass by warding off a disaster. I didn't know Edwards at all, but by mid-October I felt personally responsible for his future -- and his prospects, at that point, were not good. Bill Dunaway, the "liberal" publisher of the Aspen Times, told me on the morning of election that I had "singlehandedly destroyed Joe Edwards' legal career in Aspen" by "forcing him into politics."
This was the liberal myth -- that some drug-addled egomaniac writer from Woody Creek had run amok on horse-tranquilizers, and then laid his bad trip on the local Head population. . . who were normally quite peaceful and harmless, as long as they had enough drugs. But now, for some goddamn reason, they had gone completely wild -- and they were dragging poor Edwards down with them.
Right. . . poor Edwards: He was recently divorced and living with his girlfriend in a local garret, half-starving for income in a town full of lame dilettante lawyers, and his name was completely unknown except as "that bastard who sued the city" a year earlier, on behalf of two longhairs who claimed the cops were discriminating against them. Which was true, and the lawsuit had a terrible effect on the local police. The Chief (now a candidate for sheriff) had quit or been fired in a rage, leaving his patrolmen on probation to a federal judge in Denver -- who put the suit in limbo, while warning the Aspen cops that he would bust the city severely at the first sign of "discriminatory law enforcement" against hippies.
This lawsuit had severe repercussions in Aspen: The mayor was shackled, the City Council lost its will to live, the City Magistrate, Guido Meyer, was fired instantly -- even before the Police Chief -- and the local cops suddenly stopped busting longhairs for the things like "blocking the sidewalk," which carried a 90-day jail sentence that summer, along with a $200 fine.
That bullshit stopped at once, and it has stayed stopped -- thanks entirely to Edwards' lawsuit; the local liberals called an ACLU meeting, and let it go at that. So only a waterhead could have been surprised when, a year later, a handful of us in search of a mayor candidate decided to call on Joe Edwards. Why not? It made perfect sense -- except to the liberals, who were not quite comfortable with a Freak Power candidate. They didn't mind Edwards, they said, and they even agreed with his platform -- which we had carefully carved to their tastes -- but there was something very ominous, they felt, about the "rabble" support he was getting: Not the kind of people one really wanted to sip vichyssoise with -- wild heads, bikers and anarchists who didn't know Stevenson and hated Hubert Humphrey. Who were these people? What did they want?
What indeed? The local businessmen's bund was not puzzled. Joe Edwards, to them, was the leader of a Communist drug plot to destroy their way of life, sell LSD to their children and Spanish Fly to their wives. Never mind that many of their children were already selling LSD to each other, and that most of their wives couldn't get humped on a bad night in Juarez. . . that was all beside the point. The point was that a gang of freaks was about to take over the town.
And why not? We had never denied it. Not even in the platform -- which was public, and quite mild. But somewhere around the middle of the Edwards campaign even the liberals got a whiff of what his platform really meant. They could see a storm gathering behind it, that our carefully reasoned words were only an opening wedge for drastic action. They knew, from long experience, that a word like "ecology" can mean almost anything -- and to most of them it meant spending one day a year with a neighborhood clean-up crew, picking up beer cans and sending them back to Coors for a refund that would be sent, of course, to their favorite charity.
But "ecology," to us, meant something else entirely: We had in mind a deluge of brutally restrictive actions that would permanently cripple not only the obvious landrapers but also that quiet cabal of tweedy liberal speculators who insist on dealing in private, so as not to foul up the image. . . Like Armand Bartos, the New York "art patron" and jet-set fashion-pacer often hummed in Women's Wear Daily. . . who is also the owner/builder and oft-cursed landlord of Aspen's biggest and ugliest trailer court. The place is called "Gerbazdale," and some of the tenants insist that Bartos raises their rents.every time he decides to buy another Pop Art Original.
"I'm tired of financing that asshole's art collection," said one. "He's one of the most blatant goddam slumlords in the Western World. He milks us out here, then gives our rent money to shitheads like Warhol."
Bartos is in the same league with Wilton "Wink" Jaffee Jr. -- a New York stockbroker recently suspended for unethical manipulation of the market. Jaffee has taken great pains to cultivate his image, in Aspen, as that of an arty-progressive Eastern aesthete. But when the SEC zapped him, he responded by quickly leasing a chunk of his vast ranch -- between Aspen and Woods Creek -- to a high-powered gravel-crushing operation from Grand Junction, which immediately began grinding up the earth and selling it, by the ton, to the State Highway Department. And now, after destroying the earth and fouling the Roaring Fork River, the swine are demanding a zoning variance so they can build an asphalt plant. . . on the elegant Aspen esta
te that Wink Jaffee no doubt describes quite often to his progressive friends on Wall Street.
These, and others like them, are the kind of shysters and horsey hypocrites who pass for "liberals" in Aspen. So we were not surprised when many of them made a point of withdrawing their support about halfway through Edwards' campaign. At first they had liked our words and our fiery underdog stance (fighting the good fight in another hopeless cause, etc.), but when Edwards began looking like a winner, our liberal allies panicked.
By noon on election day, the only real question was How Many Liberals had Hung On. A few had come over, as it were, but those few were not enough to form the other half of the nervous power base we had counted on from the start. The original idea had been to lash together a one-shot coalition and demoralize the local money/politics establishment by winning a major election before the enemy knew what was happening. Aspen's liberals are a permanent minority who have never won anything, despite their constant struggles. . . and Aspen's fabled "underground" is a far larger minority that has never even tried to win anything.
So power was our first priority. The platform -- or at least our public version of it -- was too intentionally vague to be anything but a flexible, secondary tool for wooing the liberals and holding our coalition. On the other hand, not even the handful of people in the powernexus of Joe Edwards' campaign could guarantee that he would start sodding the streets and flaying the sheriff just as soon as he got elected. He was, after all, a lawyer -- an evil tirade, at best -- and I think we all knew, although nobody ever said it, that we really had no idea what the bastard might do if he got elected. For all we knew he could turn into a vicious monster and have us all jailed for sedition.
None of us even knew Joe Edwards. For weeks we had joked about our "ghost candidate" who emerged from time to time to insist that he was the helpless creature of some mysterious Political Machine that had caused his phone to ring one Saturday at midnight, and told him he was running for Mayor.
Which was more or less true. I had called him in a frenzy, full of booze and resentment at a rumor that a gaggle of local powermongers had already met and decided who Aspen's next mayor would be -- a giddy old lady would run unopposed behind some kind of lunatic obscenity they called a "united front," or "progressive solidarity" -- endorsed by Leon Uris, who is Aspen's leading stag movie fan, and who writes books, like Exodus, to pay his bills. I was sitting in Peggy Clifford's living room when I heard about it, and, as I recall, we both agreed that the fuckers had gone too far this time.
Someone suggested Ross Griffin, a retired ski-bum and lifelong mountain beatnik who was going half-straight at the time and talking about running for the City Council. . . but a dozen or so trial-balloon calls convinced us that Ross wasn't quite weird enough to galvanize the street vote, which we felt would be absolutely necessary. (As it turned out, we were wrong: Griffin ran for the Council and won by a huge margin in a ward full of Heads.)
But at the time it seemed necessary to come up with a candidate whose Strange Tastes and Para-Legal Behavior were absolutely beyond question. . . a man whose candidacy would torture the outer limits of political gall, whose name would strike fear and shock in the heart of every burgher, and whose massive unsuitability for the job would cause even the most apolitical drug-child in the town's most degenerate commune to shout, "Yes! I must vote for that man!"
Joe Edwards didn't quite fill that bill. He was a bit too straight for the acid-people, and a little too strange for the liberals-- but he was the only candidate even marginally acceptable on both ends of our un-tried coalition spectrum. And 24 hours after our first jangled phone talk about "running for Mayor," he said, "Fuck it, why not?"
The next day was Sunday and The Battle of Algiers was playing at the Wheeler Opera House. We agreed to meet afterwards, on the street, but the hookup was difficult, because I didn't know what he looked like. So we ended up milling around for a while, casting sidelong glances at each other, and I remember thinking, Jesus, could that be him over there? That scurvy-looking geek with the shifty eyes? Shit, he'll never win anything. . .
Finally after awkward introductions, we walked down to the old Jerome Hotel and ordered some beers sent out to the lobby, where we could talk privately. Our campaign juggernaut, that night, consisted of me, Jim Salter, and Mike Solheim -- but we all assured Edwards that we were only the tip of the iceberg that was going to float him straight into the sea-lanes of big-time power politics. In fact, I sensed that both Solheim and Salter were embarrassed to find themselves there -- assuring some total stranger that all he had to do was say the word and we would make him Mayor of Aspen.
None of us had even a beginner's knowledge of how to run a political campaign. Salter writes screenplays (Downhill Racer) and books (A Sport and a Pastime). Solheim used to own an elegant bar called Leadville, in Ketchum, Idaho, and his Aspen gig is housepainting. For my part, I had lived about ten miles out of town for two years, doing everything possible to avoid Aspen's feverish reality. My lifestyle, I felt, was not entirely suited for doing battle with any small-town political establishment. They had left me alone, not hassled my friends (with two unavoidable exceptions -- both lawyers), and consistently ignored all rumors of madness and violence in my area. In return, I had consciously avoided writing about Aspen. . . and in my very limited congress with the local authorities I was treated like some kind of half-mad cross between a hermit and a wolverine, a thing best left alone as long as possible.
So the '69 campaign was perhaps a longer step for me than it was for Joe Edwards. He had already tasted political conflict and he seemed to dig it. But my own involvement amounted to the willful shattering of what had been, until then, a very comfortable truce. . . and looking back I'm still not sure what launched me. Probably it was Chicago -- that brainraping week in August of '68. I went to the Democratic Convention as a journalist, and returned a raving beast.
For me, that week in Chicago was far worse than the worst bad acid trip I'd even heard rumors about. It permanently altered my brain chemistry, and my first new idea -- when I finally calmed down -- was an absolute conviction there was no possibility for any personal truce, for me, in a nation that could hatch and be proud of a malignant monster like Chicago. Suddenly, it seemed imperative to get a grip on those who had somehow slipped into power and caused the thing to happen.
But who were they? Was Mayor Daley a cause, or a symptom? Lyndon Johnson was finished, Hubert Humphrey was doomed, McCarthy was broken, Kennedy was dead, and that left only Nixon, that pompous, plastic little fart who would soon be our President. I went to Washington for his Inauguration, hoping for a terrible shitrain that would pound the White House to splinters. But it didn't happen; no shitrain, no justice. . . and Nixon was finally in charge.
So in truth it was probably a sense of impending doom, of horror at politics in general, that goaded me into my role in the Edwards campaign. The reasons came later, and even now they seem hazy. Some people call politics fun, and maybe it is when you're winning. But even then it's a mean kind of fun, and more like the rising edge of a speed trip than anything peaceful or pleasant. Real happiness, in politics, is a wide-open hammer shot on some poor bastard who knows he's been trapped, but can't flee.
The Edwards campaign was more an uprising than a movement. We had nothing to lose: we were like a bunch of wild-eyed amateur mechanics rolling a homemade racing car onto the track at Indianapolis and watching it overtake a brace of big Offenhausers at the 450 pole. There were two distinct phases in the month-long Edwards campaign. For the first two weeks we made a lot of radical noise and embarrassed our friends and discovered that most of the people we had counted on were absolutely useless.
So nobody was ready for the second phase, when the thing began coming together like a conquered jigsaw puzzle. Our evening strategy meetings in the Jerome Bar were suddenly crowded with people demanding a piece of the action. We were inundated with $5 and $10 contributions from people whom none of us knew. From Bob
Krueger's tiny darkroom and Bill Noonan's angry efforts to collect enough money to pay for a full-page ad in Dunaway's liberal Times, we suddenly inherited all the facilities of the "Center of the Eye" Photography School and an unlimited credit-line (after Dunaway fled to the Bahamas) from Steve Herron at the Times-owned radio station, then the only one in town. (Several months after the election a 24-hour FM station began broadcasting -- with daytime Muzak balanced off against a late-night freak-rock gig as heavy as anything in S.F. or L.A.). With no local television, the radio was our equivalent of a high-powered TV campaign. And it provoked the same kind of surly reaction that has been shrugged off, on both coasts, by US Senate candidates such as Ottinger (N.Y.) and Tunney (Calif.).
That comparison is purely technical. The radio spots we ran in Aspen would have terrified political eunuchs like Tunney and Ottinger. Our theme song was Herbie Mann's "Battle Hymn of the Republic," which we ran over and over again -- as a doleful background to very heavy raps and evil mockery of the retrograde opposition. They bitched and groaned, accusing us in their ignorance of "using Madison Avenue techniques," while in truth it was pure Lenny Bruce. But they didn't know Lenny; their humor was still Bob Hope, with a tangent taste for Don Rickles here and there among the handful of swingers who didn't mind admitting that they dug the stag movies, on weekends, at Leon Uris' home on Red Mountain.
We enjoyed skewering those bastards. Our radio wizard, an ex-nightclub comic, Phil Clark, made several spots that caused people to foam at the mouth and chase their tails in impotent rage. There was a thread of high, wild humor in the Edwards campaign, and that was what kept us all sane. There was a definite satisfaction in knowing that, even if we lost, whoever beat us would never get rid of the scars. It was necessary, we felt, to thoroughly terrify our opponents, so that even in hollow victory, they would learn to fear every sunrise until the next election.
The Great Shark Hunt: Strange Tales From a Strange Time Page 23