Up Against the Wall Motherf**er

by Osha Neumann

  I now believe that in my fantasy of the abuse heaped on Cardinal Spellman I was both the sodomized choir boys and their sodomizer. In my fantasy of the hand exploring Jacqueline Kennedy’s panties, mine was the hand, and also Jacqueline’s genitals. And I surmise that my Motherfucker persona concealed a hidden longing to be embraced by what I rejected, and that I experienced the pain of the mother-state’s rejection as pleasure.

  I have come to believe that these ambiguities are characteristic of a certain style of predominantly male radical politics. It is a politics which, however worthy its goals, is self-defeating and “infantile” in that it repetitively reenacts the relation of child to parent. The parent restrains the child. He throws a tantrum. He beats his little fists bloody against the bars of his crib. He grows up. The bars of his crib become the bars of his prison. He continues to beat his hands bloody. The bars do not bend or even notice.

  It is easy to dismiss this politics as nothing more than childish tantrums, and to profess that a baleful acceptance of the status quo is more “mature.” It’s more difficult to disentangle, delicately, as one would a bird caught in a net, the genuinely radical and uncompromising elements in this politics from those which are self-defeating.

  From my file box of Sixties memorabilia, I extract a yellowing copy of one of my Motherfucker manifestoes:MANIFESTO

  We demand a society for the prevention of cruelty to fantasy. We know that when our society becomes a society for the preservation and procreation of fantasy it will be a good society.

  Until then fantasy will be at war with society. Society will attempt the suppression of fantasy, but fantasy will spring up again and again, infecting the youth, waging urban guerrilla warfare, sabotaging the smooth functioning of bureaucracies (waylaying the typist on the way to the water cooler, kidnapping the executive between office and home), creeping into the bedrooms of respectable families, eventually emerging into the streets, taking over the streets, waging pitched battles and winning (its victory is inevitable).

  We are the vanguard of fantasy. Where we live is liberated territory in which fantasy moves freely at all hours of the day, from which it mounts attacks on occupied territory. Each day brings new areas under our control. Each day a victory is reported. Each day fantasy discovers new forms of organization. Each day it further consolidates its control, has less to fear, can afford to spend more time in self-discovery. Even in the midst of battles it plans the cities of the future.

  We are full of optimism and courage. We relish the future.

  The manifesto became a Motherfucker flier illustrated with the repeated image of a snarling baboon. Between the images the phrase: “MY UTOPIA IS AN ENVIRONMENT THAT WORKS SO WELL I CAN RUN WILD IN IT.”

  Despite the triumphant tone of my homage to fantasy, I had a problem. I did not much like my fantasies. I had less wish to liberate them than to be liberated from them. “All power to the imagination” was a fine slogan, but the imagination does not discriminate. “All power to the pornographic imagination?” —would that be an appropriate revolutionary slogan? Charles Manson acted out the fantasies I confined to paper. Bernadine Dohrn, with her three-finger salute, paid homage to him. If the System was an obscenity and our fantasy was obscene, were we fighting fire with fire or adding to the blaze?

  For all my militancy, I worried that my fantasy life was viscous and reactionary. I could not reconcile the contradiction between the revolutionary and pornographic imagination, between what I believed was my genuine passion for justice with my equally compelling obsessions. I worried not so much about “cruelty to fantasy” as about the cruelty of my fantasies in which violence, including sexual violence, anger, and shit were identified with the forces of liberation.

  Sometimes my fantasy life found expression in lighthearted provocations. On one occasion, I collected donations for the rent on our store front by carrying an empty toilet bowl up and down St. Marks Place shouting “America shits money. Shit here.” A crowd gathered. Officer Rainey arrived and demanded I hand over the plumbing. The crowd chanted “Free the toilet! Free the toilet! I placed it gingerly in a trash container, where Rainey beat it to death with his nightstick. When he was done smashing it to pieces, he turned to me in a fury and snarled: “That trash basket is for trash, but not for your kind of trash.” Then he arrested me. For littering.

  The toilet bust was fun, but the deeper levels of my fantasy did not lend themselves to comedy. They were the source of a steady stream of quasi-political violent and pornographic musings. I wrote:[A]ggression must now be an ethereal pus, swelling the membrane of America, a bloody ejaculated sperm on the street.

  . . . The peace movement must become a sex crime.

  . . . We are attempting to create a liberated zone, to clear a space for ourselves, to build in it alternate institutions, in order that we may stay alive. But we can also be vitalized by the discovery that there is no way to live, that we are offered only alternative ways of dying . . . If we decide that society has linked for us freedom and death, then we can play with liberation only when we play with death: at demonstrations. Our liberation will be splashing about in a blood bath . . .

  Unlike the Motherfuckers, who were always in battle mode, both Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin played the revolution for laughs. Prancing in front of television cameras they acted the part of revolutionaries having fun playing at being revolutionaries. The revolution would be televised. Revolutionaries would become media personalities. The media was there to be manipulated. It had to be seduced into spreading subversive messages. The first rule for revolutionary engagement with the media was unpredictability: dance between seriousness and put on; invent realities on the spur of the moment; keep them guessing; charm, beguile, threaten, and disrupt; turn politics into a theater of the absurd.

  There was, of course, a price to pay for all that media attention. The paradox of serious revolutionaries playing at being revolutionaries who believed that play was revolutionary tended to collapse into a simple, unparadoxical lack of seriousness. The media invariably extorted its pound of flesh, turning subversion into titillation, subverting the subverters.

  We were both envious and contemptuous of the Yippie media stars. We were the antithesis of the Abbie and Jerry show. The media could not speak our name. We clung to the grubby reality of the Lower East Side. The Black Panthers were more our kin than the Yippies. We did not fuck around.

  In the Sixties Black revolutionaries enacted a dangerous pageant of anger and defiance. They costumed themselves for armed struggle in black leather jackets and carried guns. Their performance was greeted with a rain of bullets. They chanted “Off the Pigs!” but more often than not it was the pigs that offed them. The Motherfuckers, under Ben’s leadership, insisted that Whites must take the same risks as Blacks. When the Black Panthers held a benefit at Bill Graham’s Fillmore East, we leafleted the street with flyers which proclaimed:WE DON’T SUPPORT THE BLACK STRUGGLE

  SUPPORT IS NOT “STRUGGLE”

  “SUPPORT” IS THE EVASION OF STRUGGLE

  To support is not to understand our own needs for liberation. To support is to remain passive in the struggle for life: it is the failure of whites to see their own being, to see the possibilities of their own humanity. . . . [I]t is only through making our own struggle that we join in common struggle: REVOLUTION.

  I passed out fliers side by side with Ben. I could not tell him that the Black Panthers seemed to me to be living in a terrifying corner of reality, where the violence of my fantasy life was realized, and where death was the price of the attempt at liberation.

  The atmosphere of the time was ripe with threats and prophecies. Our politics tended to be judged by where we stood on the question of “armed struggle.” The Black Panthers adopted Malcolm X’s slogan “by any means necessary.” They raised defiant gloved fists in the air. We asked ourselves who would be willing to take up the gun if, as was inevitable, legitimate political processes failed. The Motherfuckers bought shotguns and pistols, cut
the shotguns down, and stashed them beneath the floorboards of our apartments. We were preparing for the coming flood of violence and counter violence.

  A great deal of the fantasy of violence that was rife in the movement originated with men. Valerie Solanis was the glorious exception to male rhetorical domination of the language of terror and retribution. She was the founder and sole member of SCUM, the Society for Cutting Up Men. Her SCUM Manifesto prophesized:SCUM will become members of the unwork force, the fuck-up force. . . . SCUM will forcibly relieve bus drivers, cab drivers and subway token sellers of their jobs and run buses and cabs and dispense free tokens to the public. . . . SCUM will destroy all useless and harmful objects—cars, store windows, “Great Art,” etc. . . . Eventually SCUM will take over the airwaves—radio and TV networks—by forcibly relieving of their jobs all radio and TV employees who would impede SCUM’s entry into the broadcasting studios. . . . SCUM will couple-bust—barge into mixed (male-female) couples, wherever they are, and bust them up. . . . SCUM will keep on destroying, looting, fucking-up and killing until the money-work system no longer exists and automation is completely instituted or until enough women co-operate with SCUM to make violence unnecessary to achieve these goals, that is, until enough women either unwork or quit work, start looting, leave men and refuse to obey all laws inappropriate to a truly civilized society.

  Ben met Valerie one day on the corner of 8th Street and 5th Avenue in the West Village. He was selling Black Mask for a nickel a copy. She came up to him and said “I’d like to have one of those, but I don’t have a nickel. Ben said that’s all right, you can have one. She then went into a bookstore and stole a copy of her manifesto for him. After that they became friends. She sometimes stayed at his loft. She told him he could be part of SCUM’s men’s auxiliary. “We can’t spare you,” she said to him, “but we can save you for last.”

  We never knew when rhetoric would leap the firewall that separated it from reality. During the strike at Columbia University, Valerie climbed through a window in the Mathematics building to ask Ben what would happen if she shot someone. Ben said it would depend on whom she shot and if he died. Less than two months later on, June 3, 1968, she shot Andy Warhol.d As soon as he heard the news Ben cranked out a flier that claimed her as one of us:Andy Warhol Shot by Valerie Solanis. Plastic Man vs. the Sweet Assassin. A tough chick with a bop cap and a .38—the true vengeance of DADA—the ‘hater’ of men and the lover of ‘man’—the camp/master slain by the slave—VALERIE IS OURS.

  Two days later he and Steve traveled uptown and leafleted the Museum of Modern Art. That same day news broke that Robert F. Kennedy had been assassinated.

  In Vietnam, young soldiers, ill prepared for what awaited them, found themselves in a living nightmare that surpassed their wildest fantasies of rape, torture, and death. Back home in the ghetto, Black Panthers were living a dream of killing and being killed in bloody conflict with the pigs. As the Sixties progressed, we felt compelled to become more “militant.” The center was not holding. The freaks of the Lower East Side danced their love dances, swirled their psychedelic garments down the sidewalks, and dreamed acid dreams, while the Motherfuckers teetered towards the realization of the fantasies of Armageddon that filled our flyers. I might hang back just a bit during our violent confrontations with the police, but I could not forever escape the consequences of our rhetoric.

  The Atmosphere of the Time Was Ripe with Threats and Prophecies.

  CHICAGO AND THE FILLMORE EAST

  In the heat of August 1968, television beamed into homes across the United States, images of two Americas clashing on the streets of Chicago. To be more accurate, what viewers saw was one America—the America we called “The System”—beating up on the other America, the America we called “The Movement.”

  Inside the Convention Center, protected by phalanxes of police and security guards, the Democratic Party recommitted itself to the goal of winning the Vietnam War and nominated Hubert Humphrey to be its presidential candidate. The peace candidacy of Eugene “Clean for Gene” McCarthy shriveled and died. “McCarthy girls,” I wrote in the little notebook I carried around with me, “you blond lovelies with silly straw hats and your polka dots, what are you doing in this city bent on blood, what are you doing with your clean pressed collars in this city bent on filth—you with your sorrowful soft faces, what kind of party are you coming to—are you ready for nightmares?”

  Humphrey’s nomination was all too predictable and stupid. Outside the convention center, on the streets and in the parks, all the strands of the movement—serious SDS activists building a movement to stop the war and imagining a revolution; playful Yippies running a pig for president; Latino and Black youth from the ghettos of Chicago attracted by the spectacle; and long-haired hippies, some dreaming of a street fight, others just dreaming—assembled for, what the Yippies called, a “Festival of Life,” to contrast with the “Festival of Death,” which was the Democratic Convention.

  They camped out in Lincoln Park. The strumming of decalladen guitars and the wailing of police sirens filled the night. The flames of campfires, the flashbulbs of cameras, and the floodlights of cops cut openings in the darkness. Lines of police emerged from the shadows, adjusting their gas masks and pulling out their billyclubs. We stood for liberation, personal and political, but it was the cops who broke out of all restraints. Night after night they fell upon the protestors with undisguised relish, pushing them from the park.

  This was an event made to order for the Motherfuckers. A tight-knit political street gang could have taken the lead in battles with the police. We had an opportunity to demonstrate to a nation-wide audience that neither the idle theorizing of SDS nor the Yippies “it’s all fun and games” street theater was an adequate response to the brutal violence the System would unleash if it really felt threatened. The police beat heads and protestors chanted “The whole world is watching.” And it was. But it did not see the Motherfuckers.

  Ben skipped Chicago altogether. He thought there was already too much police attention on him, and he did not want to lead our following of street kids into danger. He had promised them a safe haven and he meant to keep that promise. So he loaded a bunch of them into a rental car obtained with stolen credit cards and took off across the country. He says he was pursued the entire way by the FBI. He ditched that first car before the heat caught up with him, and continued renting and abandoning rental cars till he reached California, where he drove to the edge of the continent, and pushed the last one over a cliff into the Pacific Ocean. Then he slowly made his way back to New York, stopping along the way in New Mexico.

  In Chicago, without Ben and most of the other Motherfuckers, I felt diminished. I managed—not entirely by accident—to avoid the focal points of confrontation. I stayed just outside of harm’s way when the police charged and the billyclubs began to flail, but gave militant speeches in the evening at meetings where we planned the next day’s actions. Towards the end of the week, I found myself with thousands of demonstrators penned into Grant Park, with National Guard troops on one side and Chicago police on the other. We were trapped. Our choices were to stay in the park and have an ineffectual rally or attempt to break out of the encirclement. I was on the stage with Tom Hayden and the other speakers. He gestured to me to come up to the microphone and suggested that I give a speech encouraging the crowd to break through the police lines and take the demonstration to the streets. I gave an appropriately hyperventilating speech, the crowd began to move, and the bloody confrontations continued for another day.

  Perhaps because of my speeches, and perhaps because I was the most visible Motherfucker in Chicago, I was named as an unindicted co-conspirator in the indictment that launched the Chicago Conspiracy Trial.

  Ben’s decision not to go to Chicago represented a turning point for the Motherfuckers. Chicago could have been an opportunity to grow and expand. But we missed it, and remained confined largely to our ghetto. We began a process of withdrawal and shrinking.
Ben has since confessed that his decision reflected an internal change, which he kept secret from me at the time. He was beginning to realize that things were not going to change the way we hoped. He was beginning to search for a new direction.

  The Motherfuckers were active on the margins of a marginal movement. We did our work and lived our lives in the streets. We didn’t keep minutes of meetings and we didn’t own a filing cabinet. We churned out ephemeral fliers, but issued no formal press releases. We shunned publicity and our doings went generally unreported in the press. Therefore there are few records with which to correct, order and solidify failing and imperfect memories.

  Our battle with Bill Graham is a partial exception. Because he was rock and roll royalty, our confrontation with him was duly noted at the time and has been mentioned in various memoirs since then including Bill Graham Presents and My Life in Rock and Roll by Bill Graham and Robert Greenfield.

  Two months after I returned from Chicago, we initiated a campaign to obtain a free night for the community at the Fillmore East, which Bill Graham, had recently opened on 2nd Avenue as a venue for the rock acts he was promoting. Bill had begun his career managing the San Francisco Mime Troop for almost no money, but now he had become the top rock promoter in the country and was raking in the dough. As we saw it he was making big bucks off our culture and it was time for a little payback. We had a meeting with him to present our demands. The meeting took place in his office behind the theater. It did not go well. Ben’s pitch was that suburban kids were coming to the Fillmore in droves to get in on the psychedelic experience, while the kids who lived on the streets of the Lower East Side couldn’t afford the price of a ticket. Bill wasn’t impressed. The discussion got heated. We made threats and Bill shouted at us that when he was a kid he’d crawled across Europe to escape the Nazis and if he’d survived Hitler, he’d damn well survive us. So that was it. To Bill Graham, born Wolfgang Grajonca, a Jewish orphan born in Berlin, whose mother died in Auschwitz, I had become the equivalent of a Nazi. I tried not to let my distress show, avoided his eyes and concentrated on his watch that had two dials, one set for east coast time, one for west coast time.18