One Hand Jerking

by Paul Krassner

  TRASHING THE RIGHT TO READ

  While serving five years in federal prison for growing medical marijuana in Los Angeles, Todd McCormick contributed a couple of stories—about his experiences with psilocybin and ketamine—to my collection, Magic Mushrooms and Other Highs: From Toad Slime to Ecstasy, and when it was published, I immediately sent him a copy.

  But the warden rejected it “because on pages 259-261, it describes the process of squeezing toads to obtain illicit substances which could be detrimental to the security, good order and discipline of the institution.” This was pure theater of cruelty. Federal correctional facilities do not have a toad problem, and outside accomplices have not been catapulting loads of toads over barbed wire fences to provide the fuel for a prison riot.

  McCormick commented, “Can you believe this shit! I wonder how much we pay the guy/girl who actually sits and reads every book that comes in for offending passages. How about you tear out pages 259-261 and re-send this book back with a copy of the rejection and a notation that the offending pages have been removed.”

  Which is exactly what I did. This time, though, my cover letter to the warden was ignored, and the book was returned, stamped “Unauthorized.” I had called their bluff. Obviously, McCormick was being punished simply because he happened to be a prisoner.

  I then corresponded with several friends in prisons around the country to find out what they had not been allowed to read. I wanted to see other examples of arbitrary and frivolous censorship by prison personnel. Here are some results of my informal survey:

  ☞ “The Texas Department of Corrections blocked Bo Lozoff ’s Breaking Out of Jail, a book about teaching meditation to prison inmates.”

  ☞ “Disallowed: Trainspotting because of its ‘glorification of drug use.’ Tom Robbins’ Still Life With Woodpecker because it has a chapter that ‘contains information about bombmaking.’”

  ☞ “An inmate couldn’t get nude pictures of his wife sent to him but could get a subscription to Playboy. The rationale: A wife deserved more respect.”

  ☞ “They kept out The Anarchists Cookbook. No kiddie porn, no tales or photos suggesting sex with a guard, no photos showing frontal or rear nudity—not even a wife or friend.”

  ☞ “The Utah prison system banned Rolling Stone as being an anarchist publication.”

  ☞ “A Revolution in Kindness is banned from the Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola as ‘a threat to internal security.’ It was intended for Herman Wallace, who contributed an essay about how he organized a chess tournament on his cell block as a way of easing tensions and minimizing violence between inmates. Wallace is one of the Angola Three—Black Panthers who have been in solitary confinement for 31 years for trying to improve conditions in the ‘bloodiest prison in America’ in the early 1970s.”

  ☞ “All hardback books forbidden, because the covers could be fashioned into weapons. Educational textbooks—a new rule precludes prisoners on death row [including this particular prisoner] or in lockdown from taking correspondence courses—and I’ve had a couple of books returned to sender on the claim they appeared to be for a course. MAPS [Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies]—their publication was sent back several times because maps are not allowed in here. High Times was repeatedly denied because it posed a danger to the safe, secure and orderly operation of the institution. ‘Smut mags’ like Hustler are reviewed monthly.”

  ☞ “There’s a whole new genre of men’s magazines—Maxim, Stuff, For Him—which show it all except for nipples and beaver. Now the feds want to ban Maxim due to ‘security’ reasons. The ‘rejected mail’ slip they send you when some verboten material arrives has a box to check (to specify offending matter) which says ‘pubic hair.’”

  ☞ “Peace activist William Combs spent eight days in solitary confinement for receiving and sharing with other imates what federal authorities consider disruptive, if not subversive, political literature. The offending ‘propaganda’ included commentary by such extremists as Bill Moyers and Ellen Goodman, and included an article published in Reader’s Digest. The common thread was that they all questioned the wisdom of government policy.”

  The name of the game is control in the guise of security—a microcosm of the nation outside prison walls—the practice of power without compassion.

  After Magic Mushrooms and Other Highs was rejected for the second time, I appealed to the Regional Director of the Bureau of Prisons (as instructed by the warden) for an independent review. I also wrote to the ACLU. I heard back from neither. Todd McCormick was released from prison in December 2003. Among so many other things to catch up on, he would finally be able to read what he had written. However, he was discharged to a halfway house, where all his books and magazines were confiscated as “paraphernalia.”

  JEWS IN THE NEWS

  It was ironic that a generation which considered leaving the Lower East Side to be a sign of advancement, was dismayed when their children began emigrating there to gain a sense of community. In 1966, the same year a section was rechristened the East Village, I moved to a loft above a bar on Avenue A.

  As a stand-up comedian, I had a routine about comic-strip superheroes being Jewish. You could tell by their names: Superman, Batman, Hawkman, Spider-Man, Flashman, SkyMan, Doll Man. Captain Marvel was really a Jew pretending to be a Protestant; his power-word “Shazam!” was just a euphemism for “Shalom!”

  However, in the film version of “Spider-Man,” according to the Jewish weekly The Forward, the trouble with Tobey Maguire’s Spidey was “that he isn’t Jewish enough.” (Conversely, a top NBC executive originally dismissed the pilot of Seinfeld as “too Jewish.”) Yet, in From the Lower East Side to Hollywood: Jews in American Popular Culture, Paul Buhle writes that Spider-Man’s alter-ego, Peter Parker, is now “on his way to becoming sarcastic—yet another Jewish example of the vernacular aspiring uplift to something better.”

  Buhle, a Gentile columnist for the Jewish magazine, Tikkun, seems to be referring to himself when he calls comic artist R. Crumb “genetically Gentile, but cryptically Jewish.” Of Bill Griffith, creator of Zippy the Pinhead, he states: “Not born with Jewishness, he was assimilated into it (no doubt with some help from his wife, Diane Newman, as Crumb has had help from his two Jewish wives).”

  Griffith tells me, though, “I always thought I was Jewish, or some sort of Wasp version of a Jew, because all my friends were Jewish. Growing up in the suburbs, Levittown was a kind of dividing line for Jews and Italians. I knew I wasn’t Italian because of my name. I was soaked with Yiddish humor from Harvey Kurtzman in the early Mad magazine. At one point I had a Jewish girlfriend, and her mother said that I must be Jewish because I was so smart. She didn’t want me to not be Jewish. It was some way of ushering me in.”

  And Newman, wondering why Buhle labels her as Griffith’s “talented, excessively self-conscious Jewish wife and fellow artist,” says, “I never met the guy, so I don’t know why he said that. It could be that he’s talking about my art as opposed to my personality, but he doesn’t really discuss my art in the book at all. I don’t think my artwork is particularly self-conscious, I think it’s satirical. DiDi Glitz doesn’t seem like a self-conscious character to me, and it’s not me. I seem to exist primarily to establish Bill as someone he can talk about with some kind of Jewish connection.”

  One of the Jewish connections that Buhle makes is the gay connection. On Broadway: “The historic Jewish subtext of musicals having now been replaced by a gay subtext . . . in the theatrical world, ‘Jewish’ and ‘gay’ so often flow into each other.” On David Geffen: “[He] had a special feeling for gay rights. Nineties billionaire Geffen himself was gay, after all, and that might be the largest fact of change in Jewish-American entertainment business life.” This connection can be explained by “a Jewish world where surviving or reviving Yiddish at once takes on a gay affect (the marginal re-embracing the marginal).”

  Allen Ginsberg was, of course, the epitome of a gay Jew. Buhle
writes, “Half-Jewish Lawrence Ferlinghetti, whose launching of City Lights (the store and the publisher) in 1953 brought the message to millions, including the similarly half-Jewish Diane di Prima, protofeminist queen of the Beats, also introduced City Lights’ all-time champion author, Allen Ginsberg. . . . Howl and Other Poems (1956), in addition to being a sort of poetic declaration of Beatitude, was patently a recollection of Jewish left-wing memory held up against a crazed, postwar consumerist goyishe America.”

  I’ve had mini-dialogues with countercultural icons about various aspects of Jewishness.

  Lenny Bruce told me, “I know some Jews who are so reformed they’re ashamed they’re Jewish.” I asked Mort Sahl if he considered himself Jewish. “No,” he said, “I belong to me. And that’s enough. I don’t consider myself anything. And I’m having a tough time finding any kinship. You know, you get along with people who have ideas, that’s all.” I asked Abbie Hoffman, “Do you think it’s an ego trip for me to be concerned about whether my readers think I’m on an ego trip?” “That’s because you’re Jewish,” he laughed. Timothy Leary said, “The Weather Underground was amusing. They were brilliant, brilliant Jewish Chicago kids. They had class and dash and flash and smash.”

  I asked Ram Dass, “If you and I were to exchange philosophies—if I believed in reincarnation and you didn’t—how do you think our behavior would change?” He paused, and then: “Well, if you believed in reincarnation, you would never ask a question like that.” Bob Dylan was a true minimalist. I asked why he was taking Hebrew lessons (in 1970), and he answered, “I can’t speak it.” And when I pointed an imaginary microphone at him and asked how he felt about the six million Jews who were killed in Nazi Germany, he simply said, “I resented it.”

  I asked Woody Allen if he agreed with the motivation of the Buddhist monks who set fire to themselves in Vietnam. “I don’t think so,”he replied. “No, I think that they don’t know what they’re doing. I think they’re nuts. That’s not the answer. When you’re home at night, and you say to yourself, ‘Tomorrow morning I’ll get up at eight o’clock and set fire to myself,’ there’s something wrong. I wouldn’t do it that way. I can see dying for a principle, but not that way. At the very minimum, if you are going to die for something you should at least take one of them with you. Go back to the Jews in Germany. If you have a loaded gun in your home, and the state comes to get you, you can at least get two or three of them. I’m not opposed to violence as a course of action in many instances. Sometimes passive resistance is fine, but violence in its place is a good and necessary thing. But setting fire to yourself is not the answer. With my luck, I would be un-inflammable.”

  Buhle associates Jews with progressive politics in general and the blacklist in particular. “In 1947,” he recalls, “Representative John Rankin of the House Committee on UnAmerican Activities warned Congress about the true identities of various actors, including Danny Kaye, Eddie Cantor, Edward G. Robinson, and Melvyn Douglas. Like others using stage names, they were essentially parading under Gentile labels, a practice that Rankin considered prima facie evidence of their ‘UnAmerican’ intentions. . . .

  “[T]he Committee Chair had opened the hearings to notorious anti-Semites on the premise that Jewish control of Hollywood demanded redress. By the later 1940s, internal FBI memos complained that the Jewish press failed to take up its patriotic duty of supporting the blacklist. . . . After hesitating, Hollywood’s power brokers fell in line with the blacklist, conducting it themselves with the help of notorious anti-Semites and of some noted Jewish institutions alike.”

  There is something unsettling—but, I suppose, necessary for his book—about the way Buhle focuses on actors through Hebrew-colored glasses, from “There was something Jewish about John Garfield, even if only New Yorkers seemed to know for sure” to “Only a blind person could fail to see the Jewishness of Judy Holliday,” from “At least [Montgomery] Clift was psychologically troubled, if not actually Jewish” to “Jose Ferrer in his dark looks and cerebral talk [was] almost definitely perceived as Jewish.”

  Should the fact that Irving Berlin wrote “Easter Parade” and “White Christmas” be considered a sign of assimilation?

  Not even animated cartoon characters can escape the laser beam of Buhle’s peripheral vision: “Betty [Boop] offered a total contrast to the shy but red-blooded Mickey [Mouse], himself modeled after the goyishe and anti-Semite aviator sensation Charles Lindbergh. . . . No one east of the Hudson, at least, would describe her as a Gentile: at times her parents have Yiddish accents, and Jewish in-jokes can often be heard (like the Samoan Islanders who greet her with a roaring Sholem Aleichem!), Hebrew lettering and all.”

  Although From the Lower East Side to Hollywood serves as an ambitious slice of Jewish-American cultural history, it certainly isn’t a comprehensive one. For example, missing entirely from its pages except for footnotes are Jerry Lewis (“In the comedy trade, and apart from his charity grandstanding, he was best known for ridiculing women comics”) and Jackie Mason (“The most famous or notorious Jewish story of the Ed Sullivan Show was the firing of Jackie Mason for acting ‘too kikey’ on camera”).

  I happen to be an e-mail recipient of an Internet anti-Semitic listserv, and many of Buhle’s descriptions are uncomfortably similar, such as: “Film star Peter Coyote (not surprisingly the adopted name of a Jewish red-diaper baby)”; “Mama Cass Elliott was born Ellen Naomi Cohen”; “the very Jewish Jew, [Morey] Amsterdam”; “. . . the very often Jewish-inflected Saturday Night Live”; “the very Jewish Gabe Kaplan”; “the emphatically Jewish Roseanne Barr”; “Mel Brooks . . . one of the most blatantly Jewish [of successful filmmakers].” It is the ultimate irony of Buhle’s book that it will appeal to Jews and anti-Semites alike.

  A MELLOW HOWL

  Remember that opening line of Howl: “I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked. . . .” Well, a new biography of Allen Ginsberg—American Scream by Jonah Raskin—has a surprising revelation:

  “In the mid-1970s, in the midst of the counterculture he had helped to create, he promised to rewrite Howl. Now that he was a hippie minstrel and a Pied Piper for the generation that advocated peace and love he would alter Howl, he said, so that it might reflect the euphoria of the hippies. He would include a ‘positive redemptive catalogue,’ he said.”

  In 1982, there was a celebration of the 25th anniversary of Jack Kerouac’s On the Road, at Naropa, a Buddhist college in Boulder, Colorado, where presumably they refer to his book as On the Path. I was invited to moderate a discussion, “Political Fallout of the Beat Generation.” The panelists: Ginsberg, William Burroughs, Abbie Hoffman and Timothy Leary. We were all invited to sign posters for the event. Hoffman wrote his signature extra large, with great care.

  “The guy who shot John Lennon,” he explained, “complained that Lennon gave him a sloppy autograph, so I ain’t takin’ any chances.”

  Hoffman had recently “debated” Watergate conspirator G. Gordon Liddy, currently a radio talk-show host.

  “Liddy,” he shouted, “I got just one question for you. Do you eat pussy?” The audience cheered. This was really off the wall. “Come on, Liddy, answer me! Do you eat pussy?” Liddy couldn’t respond over the roar of the crowd. Hoffman bleated over and over, “Do you eat pussy? Do you eat pussy?”—like some kind of sexual street fighter chanting his mantra—“Do you eat pussy? Do you eat pussy? Do you eat pussy?” The audience went wild. Hoffman was triumphant.

  Finally, Liddy was able to reply: “You have just demonstrated, more than I ever could possibly hope to, the enormous gap which separates me from you.”

  Since Leary had also encountered Liddy in a series of debates, Hoffman now asked him if Liddy ate pussy.

  “I can attest to the fact that he does,” Leary replied. “At least he made it a point at some of our debates to announce that he is definitely not monogamous.”

  During the Beat Generation panel, Ginsberg said, “I think there was one
slight shade of error in describing the Beat movement as primarly a protest movement. That was the thing that Kerouac was always complaining about. He felt the literary aspect or the spiritual aspect or the emotional aspect was not so much protest at all, but a declaration of unconditioned mind beyond protest, beyond resentment, beyond loser, beyond winner—way beyond winner—beyond winner or loser . . . but the basic thing that I understood and dug Jack for was unconditioned mind, negative capability, totally open mind—beyond victory or defeat. Just awareness, and that was the humor, and that’s what the saving grace is. That’s why there will be political aftereffects, but it doesn’t have to win because having to win a revolution is like having to make a milliion dollars.”

  As moderator, I asked, “Abbie, since you used to quote Che Guevara saying, ‘In a revolution, one wins or dies,’ do you have a response to that?”

  Hoffman: “All right, Ginzo. Poems have a lot of different meanings for different people. For me, your poem Howl was a call to arms.”

  Ginsberg: “A whole boatload of sentimental bullshit.”

  Hoffman: “We saw in the sixties a great imbalance of power, and the only way that you could correct that imbalance was to organize people and to fight for power. Power is not a dirty word. The concept of trying to win against social injustice is not a dirty kind of concept. It all depends on how you define the game, how you define winning and how you define losing—that’s the Zen trip that was learned by defining that you were the prophets and we were the warriors. I’m saying that you didn’t fight, but you were the fighters. And I’ll tell you, If you don’t think you were a political movement and you don’t like winning, the fuckin’ lawyer that defended Howl in some goddamn obscenity suit—you wanted him to be a fuckin’ winner, I guarantee you that. That was a political debate.”

  Abbie would’ve been shocked to learn that Ginsberg had planned to rewrite Howl , this time beginnng with an upbeat line: “I saw the best minds of my generation turned on by music. . . .”