by Sanders, Ed
Voice [maybe Kerouac’s]: Good.
[Laughter]
Sanders: So all these people were forced into the streets, with no place to go, except for the benevolence of a couple of churches, to sleep. There was a bus strike in Chicago, there was a cab strike, and there was no live TV coverage of anything, so they were forced into the street. The police attacked, pushed, pulled, maimed; it’s really what happened. Now the other Movement was the Mobilization movement—they wanted to march upon the Amphitheater [where the Democratic Convention was being held]. And that’s Rennie Davis, and that’s Tom Hayden, but also Dave Dellinger, who’s an avowed pacifist, and benevolent leader of some standing. And they wanted to have a peaceful march on the Amphitheater, split up into groups, and those who wanted to march on would march on, and those who wanted to sit down would sit down. But there was never any violent confrontation planned.
And when the Chicago people thwarted and frustrated constantly anybody’s attempts to have peaceful demonstrations, naturally frustration, it mounted. But the amount of brick throwing was so negligible compared to the number of peaceful people there for peaceful purpose, namely, to protest with their loving bodies what was going down at the alcoholic Amphitheater.
Buckley: What were you saying, Mr. Kerouac?
Kerouac: I said there are people who make a rule of creating chaos so that once the chaos is under way, they can then be elected as the people who take care of the chaos.
Buckley: And you think this applies to the Chicago situation?
Kerouac: No, I don’t know about Daley. I don’t know anything about him, I wasn’t there. I’m talking about his idea [points over at me] of protesting and running around and making noise all over the place. If you create chaos, you can become the commisaaaar, of the control of chaos.
Yablonsky: I think there was a situation that was operative there. To go back to Prague, maybe to the thirties, a guy named Kapek wrote a book called RUR, a great writer, related to the Universal Robot; what he was doing was making a statement that man is turning into kind of a machine, that there’s no love, there’s no communication, no humanity, and in Chicago we had a Political Machine which was airtight, plastic, solid as a rock, and here were some antagonists, but not really antagonists. They were people who were trying to be spontaneous, to do something else, to loosen the situation up, and we had these forces, kind of at opposite ends of the continuum, and a clash took place. I think this was part of the problem.
Buckley: I think that’s an interesting theory, but I’m not sure how convincing it is in light of the fact that the Democratic Party was by no means airtight. It may have been airtight up against People who want to storm the Amphitheater and burn it down, but it was certainly not airtight in terms of the tussles going on with it. There was very spirited debate and there was a very high permeability for ideas that were fired in from about every Democratic philosopher in America In other words, this was not a Tito-like neat little culminating session. . . . A lot of people had decided that they wanted Humphrey, and they were not shaken.
Sanders: But you do not have to stack the galleries with “We Love Daley” signs; you don’t have to shake down Mrs. McCarthy, and search her purse when she’s surrounded by four Secret Service guards; you don’t have to run people up to the wall, and smack them down.
Buckley: A lot of people say you don’t have to publish the sort of stuff you publish in order to love people.
Sanders: Well, you know, then why don’t we just unite with the Russians and dance around?
Kerouac: You know what my mother calls Humphrey?
Buckley: I don’t know.
Kerouac [singing]: Fat Fake floogie with a floy floy.
[Laughter]
Buckley: I’m surprised he wasn’t nominated vice president.
Kerouac: And you know what Agnew’s real name is? I not nostopolis, which means the son of the reader. In Messina, in ancient Greece, the Turks have taken over ancient Greece, Messina, and they said, Don’t read. You’re censored. And his father read all the books. Very proud name.
Buckley: I say some day you’ll become vice president.
Kerouac: My father, my brother, and my sister, and I always voted Republican. We voted for Hoover. I was six years old, voting for Hoover.
[Laughter]
Sanders: The only thing that that type police state repression forces upon us—the next convention we’re going to have to take ten thousand of us and run naked through the streets smeared with strawberry preserves.
Kerouac: Maybe I can lick it!
Sanders: My wife, maybe. They force you into an incredible position in the world when you want to protest, or you want to make your voice known in a benevolent way, and yet at the same time, you’re pushed and clubbed. . . .
Kerouac: You make yourself famous by protest.
Sanders: Who does? Not me. I make myself famous by singing smut.
Kerouac: I made myself famous by writing songs and lyrics about the beauty of the things that I did, ugliness, too.
Sanders: You’re a great poet.
Kerouac: You made yourself famous by saying, “Down with this! Down with that!” Go exit this; go exit that.
Sanders: I hope not. That’s not what I want.
Kerouac: Take it with you. I cannot use your abuse; you can have it back.
Sanders: You’re a great poet, we admire you, in fact it’s your fault.
[Segment ends here.]
Buckley: Now, Mr. Yablonsky, in your book, you list what you call the psychedelic creed. I take it that these are articles of faith to which most hippies would adhere. I think it would be interesting to check them out with Mr. Sanders and Mr. Kerouac. For instance, you say that “the hippie movement is a spontaneous evolution, it is not a heavy workout plan.”
Yablonsky: I would say that those creeds are kind of summarizations based on several hundred interviews with people on the scene, and what they say, and it’s not . . .
Buckley: It wasn’t handed out on some tablet; you infer it. Now then you say, “Drugs are a key to the Gods in men, drugs are sacraments for a greater knowledge of the universe, drugs are a vehicle to a cosmic consciousness.” Is there a considerable [unclear] on this point?
Yablonsky: A lot of people in the movement do take the position that every man is a god, and it’s a very individualistic kind of a movement; each individual should be free to do his own thing. It’s rather anarchist actually . . . .
Buckley: How are standards arrived at in hippie culture? On the basis of what one decides is somebody’s thing?
Yablonsky: I saw someone assaulting someone in a commune up in Northern California. And I started to intervene, and several people rather gently said, “Well, he’s just going through his violence bag; let him do his own thing.” And I said, “What if he kills him?” Their position was that everyone should be free to do their own number. I don’t share this view. . . .
Buckley: Do you endorse that particular impulse, Mr. Sanders?
Sanders: I’ve seen a lot of communes, and I’ve never seen a commune that really tolerated violence. I think that’s one of the chief characteristics of a community of free people, that they’re there to get away from violence. And when there’s like drug-induced violence or other types of violence, in my experience it’s generally quelled.
Yablonsky: Every commune I went to I saw some degree of violence, anarchy, and chaos, and they would tell me about another one, and I went to around four. The last one I was way back in the hills, and I was rather frightened, because there was a rather high degree of violence; there were a lot of people freaked out on drugs. It was a rather chaotic scene.
Buckley: And how do victims of this violence characteristically act?
Sanders: Ouch.
[Laughter]
Buckley: They have no mechanisms to which to appeal.
Yablonsky: This was one of the few times in my life that I wish police were around. It was the black flag of anarchy.
Buckley: W
ould you say their leaders are “spontaneous” and they’re not pushy leaders who are self-appointed. They are selected by hippie constituents, because they are “spiritual centers.” How are they selected, and what authority, once selected, do they have?
Yablonsky: The philosophical theme would be that certain individuals are purer, more loving, more tuned into nature than other people and that people seek them out.
Buckley: What power do they have?
Yablonsky: They deny they have any. And claim to have no power.
Buckley: So that a victim in one of these situations would get no way by addressing his complaint to the quote “leader.” Because the leader would have no authority to address those grievances?
Ed Sanders [breaking in]: Are we talking about reality or not? I’ve never seen such a situation. He’s talking about say a desert commune, or a commune that’s isolated from the fabric of the police. And I’m familiar with the communes in New York City, for instance, where you’re constantly reacting and relating to the so-called other world, and you’re never really without police protection. You usually have a phone.
Yablonsky: Up in Big Sur and places like that . . .
Kerouac: I was at Big Sur.
Yablonsky: When were you there?
Kerouac: Oh, get off it!
Yablonsky: Were you there lately?
Kerouac: When were you ever there?
Buckley: Is it okay for a hippie to call the police when he needs help, or is that considered anti-something?
Sanders: Sure, you got some snuffer that’s going to get you, call the police, of course. Why not? You’re attaching all these theoretical tags. That’s the problem with using the word hippie. They all have middle-class equipment, a lot of them, and they can plug right back in. It’s easy, gee, let’s see, police, you dial them. You know, 9–1–1.
Yablonsky: Isn’t one of the goals of a lot of people on the scene to turn off all middle-class values, and tune into some other sense of reality?
Kerouac: Nixon’s the middleman. Man for the middleman, and Agnew.
Sanders: What we’re really involved in is the definition of the word “dropout.” I think that thinking “hippies” are involved in a new interpretation of what dropping out means. You naturally retain some connection to the police, the fire department, the hospital.
Yablonsky: Isn’t this a negative retention of things your parents laid on you?
Sanders: I’m glad they laid hospitals on me.
Kerouac: Hey, Ed.
Sanders: Huh?
Kerouac: Ed. I was arrested two weeks ago. And the arresting policeman said, I’m arresting you for decay.
[Big burst of laughter]
[End of segment]
[Questions from the audience]
Voice [unclear]: I’m interested in what kind of future you see for the hippie movement.
Yablonsky: I think a lot depends on American society. If it becomes more open, and less plastic, and more loving, and a lot of the rigidified institutions that have developed like a lot of our families and whatever, if things begin to change, there won’t be any need for people to react in a rather extreme form, looking for love. It will be found in the regular social system, in that case it will disappear, or it may grow if things become more rigidified, if Nixon gets elected. . . .
Buckley: I’d like to comment on that. [laughter] It may very well grow to the extent that we all encourage (a) intellectual irresponsibility, and (b) personal irresponsibility. It may very well be that the psychologists are correct who say that what precisely has encouraged the hippie movement to be irresponsible is a complete lack of leadership. Maybe when we start writing books about them, we ought even to muster up the courage to say certain things they do they ought not to be permitted to do.
Question: Would any of you regard the hippie not only as a reflection of the inadequacies of the society as a whole, but also as a manifestation of the psychological inadequacies of the individual hippies themselves?
Yablonsky: Well, there’s such freedom within the framework of the movement, that people who society would classify as “psychotic” are allowed to do their thing and they live and eat and are taken care of by others and appreciated. In fact, to a great extent this is one of the interesting facets of the hippie movement, that there’s a humane approach to certain people who society would label in an extreme fashion, and so there are a lot of young people who don’t make it through the usual channels that find a life for themselves on the hippie scene.
Buckley: The question itself poses a methodological challenge, doesn’t it, because it’s hard to establish by mutually agreed upon means what normalcy consists of. Maybe Mr. Sanders is normal, for all we know.
Kerouac: Maybe I am, too.
[Laughter]
Yablonsky: If people get nude, as Ed described, and put strawberry jam on, and run through the streets . . .
Kerouac: Scatological there, Sanders.
Yablonsky: It’s a movement; if one guy does it, he’ll get arrested in a moment.
Kerouac: Why do you want followers?
Buckley: Did you want to comment on that, Mr. Kerouac? Sorry.
Kerouac: I was asking why he wants followers.
Buckley: Who? Mr. Sanders?
B Abramowitz, or whatever his name is. [Laughter]
Yablonsky: Don’t get anti-Semitic with me. I happen to be Jewish. My name is Yablonsky.
Kerouac: I called you by your name.
Yablonsky: Why did you call me Abramowitz?
Kerouac: What is it?
Yablonsky: Yablonsky.
Kerouac: Oh, Yablonsky.
[Laughter]
Buckley: You didn’t mean to be rude, did you? Come on, Kerouac.
Kerouac: No. No. I forgot his name.
Buckley: Did you want an answer to that question?
Kerouac: Which question? Yes, I’ll answer that question over there about the methodological.
Sanders: What about emotional paraplegic.
Buckley: Here’s one for you.
Voice: Hippies and those who live in a commune, are they making it a lifetime occupation? Are they going to sit down and watch the world go by?
Sanders: Everybody sits down part of the time and watches the world go by.
Voice: Are they adding anything?
Sanders: It’s like there are certain religious movements, like the Brethren or the Quakers, who don’t believe in proselytizing but live by example. And you’ll never get any queries from the Church of the Brethren to join their beliefs, but at the same time they try to live an exemplary life, and that’s probably the main motivation behind a commune life. Rather than say, “Come here and join us,” they would show an example and hopefully accrue . . .
Voice: Do you plan to be a Fug when you’re fifty?
Sanders: When I’m fifty, I plan to be an emotional paraplegic smoking peace-herbs.
Kerouac: Neurasthenic psychotic.
Buckley: Do you think that would be an improvement, Mr. Kerouac?
Kerouac: No, no. I was just kidding.
Buckley: Why should this particular impulse ever last? Why when you get around thirty or thirty-five you think, oh I’m going to put my youth behind me and go to work for the First National Bank?
Yablonsky: A lot of the young people who are in this movement, they look up and see their fifty-year-old father, who did everything, has all the goodies, 2.89 cars and three houses, and whatever, and he’s kind of miserable, and he’s not communicating with his wife and whatever. And they say, well, if I go to the right schools, and do all these things, this is what is going to happen to me. I’m going to try something else. And I think that the hippie movement is partly this, kind of a social experiment.
Buckley: Partly a social experiment that understands the likelihood of its own futility. Will anybody be thinking about the hippies ten years from now other than in the sort of hula skirt sense?
Sanders: By then, the hippies will be in the command generation, an
d all the pot-smoking law students and all the young legislators who are introducing legalization of pot bills and all the young professionals who are “turned on” and articulate and who are aware of Mr. Kerouac’s and Mr. Ginsberg’s great contribution to American Civilization.
Kerouac [breaking in]: You hope. I’m not connected to Ginsberg. Don’t put my name next to his.
Sanders: Okay, Mr. Kerouac’s contribution to American Civilization, those people will be quote “command generation,” and hopefully retain some of the humane . . .
Kerouac: Command generation!
Sanders: Well, that’s what it’s going to be. That’s what Time Magazine calls it.
Then the program ended. Things were quite friendly once the cameras clicked off. Afterward we all went out to a bar in Times Square to light up the neon liver. I never saw Jack again. I think he was buried, a little more than a year later, in the very checked jacket he was wearing on Firing Line. Allen Ginsberg was soon off to his farm in Cherry Valley, in upstate New York, where he would set a group of William Blake poems to music, using a large old Victorian-era ornately wooded pump organ.
”Win a Fug Dream Date” Competition
Reprise Records ran an ad in various newspapers announcing a “Win a Fug Dream Date” Competition.
Ad for Fug dream date.
Here were a couple of entries into the contest.
Pigasus to the U.S. Embassy in Montreal
We flew to Montreal to play a week at a club called New Penelope. We also brought the Yippie candidate for president Pigasus, to the U.S. Embassy in Montreal, accompanied by a television crew from Canadian Broadcasting. I put out a press release at the time.
Crackdown on the Underground Press
The CIA set up a domestic program to suppress what it called “Underground Newspapers” for their “almost treasonous anti-establishment propaganda.” Around October a CIA Chaos agent (Chaos was a disruption program against the antiwar movement) whacked out a memo that noted “the apparent freedom and ease in which filth, slanderous and libelous statements and what appear to be almost treasonous anti-establishment propaganda is allowed to circulate” in underground papers. The CIA smut sleuth then suggested a strategy for silencing the underground: “Eight out of ten,” he wrote, “would fail if a few phonograph record companies stopped advertising in them.”