This had been a problem all along. We had tried to mobilize a huge underground vote, without frightening the burghers into a counterattack. But it didn’t work—primarily because most of our best people were also hairy, and very obvious. Our opening shot—the midnight registration campaign—had been ramrodded by bearded heads; Mike Solheim and Pierre Landry, who worked the streets and bars for head voters like wild junkies, in the face of near-total apathy.
Aspen is full of freaks, heads, fun-hogs, and weird night-people of every description ... but most of them would prefer jail or the bastinado to the horror of actually registering to vote. Unlike the main bulk of burghers and businessmen, the dropout has to make an effort to use his long-dormant vote. There is not much to it, no risk and no more than ten minutes of small talk and time—but to the average dropout the idea of registering to vote is a very heavy thing. The psychic implications, “copping back into the system,” etc., are fierce ... and we learned, in Aspen, that there is no point even trying to convince people to take that step unless you can give them a very good reason. Like a very unusual candidate ... or a fireball pitch of some kind.
The central problem that we grappled with last fall is the gap that separates the Head Culture from activist politics. Somewhere in the nightmare of failure that gripped America between 1965 and 1970, the old Berkeley-born notion of beating The System by fighting it gave way to a sort of numb conviction that it made more sense in the long run to Flee, or even to simply hide, than to fight the bastards on anything even vaguely resembling their own terms.
Our ten-day registration campaign had focused almost entirely on the Head/Dropout Culture: they wanted no part of activist politics, and it had been a hellish effort to convince them to register at all. Many had lived in Aspen for five or six years, and they weren’t at all concerned with being convicted of vote fraud—they simply didn’t want to be hassled. Most of us are living here because we like the idea of being able to walk out our front doors and smile at what we see. On my own front porch I have a palm tree growing in a blue toilet bowl ... and on occasion I like to wander outside, stark naked, and fire my .44 Magnum at various gongs I’ve mounted on the nearby hillside. I like to load up on mescaline and turn my amplifier up to 110 decibels for a taste of “White Rabbit” while the sun comes up on the snow-peaks along the Continental Divide.
Which is not entirely the point. The world is full of places where a man can run wild on drugs and loud music and firepower—but not for long. I lived a block above Haight Street for two years, but by the end of ’66 the whole neighborhood had become a cop-magnet and a bad sideshow. Between the narcs and the psychedelic hustlers, there was not much room to live.
The idea of asking young heads to “go clean” never occurred to us. They could go dirty, or even naked, for all we cared ... all we asked them to do was first register and then vote. A year earlier these same people had seen no difference between Nixon and Humphrey. They were against the war in Vietnam, but the McCarthy crusade had never reached them. At the grass-roots of the Dropout Culture, the idea of going Clean for Gene was a bad joke. Both Dick Gregory and George Wallace drew unnaturally large chunks of the vote in Aspen. Robert Kennedy would probably have carried the town, if he hadn’t been killed, but he wouldn’t have won by much. The town is essentially Republican: GOP registrations outnumber Democrats by more than two to one ... but the combined total of both major parties just about equals the number of registered Independents, most of whom pride themselves on being totally unpredictable. They are a jangled mix of Left/Crazies and Birchers: cheap bigots, dope dealers, Nazi ski instructors, and spaced-out “psychedelic farmers” with no politics at all beyond self-preservation.
At the end of that frenzied ten-day hustle (since we kept no count, no lists or records) we had no way of knowing how many half-stirred dropouts had actually registered, or how many of those would vote. So it was a bit of a shock all around when, toward the end of that Election Day, our poll watchers’ tallies showed that Joe Edwards had already cashed more than 300 of the 486 new registrations that had just gone into the books.
The race was going to be very close. The voting lists showed roughly one hundred pro-Edwards voters who hadn’t showed up at the polls, and we figured that one hundred phone calls might raise at least twenty-five of these laggards. At that point it looked like twenty-five might make the nut, particularly in a sharply divided three-way mayor’s race in a town with only 1,623 registered voters.
So we needed those phones. But where? Nobody knew ... until a girl who’d been working on the phone network suddenly came up with a key to a spacious two-room office in the old Elks Club building. She had once worked there, for a local businessman and ex-hipster named Craig, who had gone to Chicago on business.
We seized Craig’s office at once, ignoring the howls and curses of the mob in the Elks bar—where the outgoing mayor’s troops were already gathering to celebrate the victory of his handpicked successor. (Legally, there was nothing they could do to keep us out of the place, although later that night they voted to have Craig evicted ... and he is now running for the state legislature on a Crush the Elks platform.) By six o’clock we had the new headquarters working nicely. The phone calls were extremely brief and direct: “Get off your ass, you bastard! We need you! Get out and vote!”
About six people worked the lists and the phones. Others went off to hustle the various shacks, lodges, hovels, and communes where we knew there were voters but no phones. The place filled up rapidly, as the word went out that we finally had a headquarters. Soon the whole second floor of the Elks Club was full of bearded freaks yelling frantically at each other; strange-looking people rushing up and down the stairs with lists, notebooks, radios, and cases of Budweiser . . .
Somebody stuck a purple spansule in my hand, saying, “Goddamn, you look tired! What you need is a hit of this excellent mescaline.” I nodded absently and stuck the thing in one of the twenty-two pockets in my red campaign parka. Save this drug for later, I thought. No point getting crazy until the polls close ... keep checking these stinking lists, squeeze every last vote out of them ... keep calling, pushing, shouting at the bastards, threaten them . . .
There was something weird in the room, some kind of electric madness that I’d never noticed before. I stood against a wall with a beer in my hand and watched the machinery working. And after a while I realized what the difference was. For the first time in the campaign, these people really believed we were going to win—or at least that we had a good chance. And now, with less than an hour to go, they were working like a gang of coal miners sent down to rescue the survivors of a cave-in. At that point—with my own role ended—I was probably the most pessimistic person in the room: the others seemed entirely convinced that Joe Edwards would be the next mayor of Aspen ... that our wild-eyed experiment with Freak Power was about to carry the day and establish a nationwide precendent.
We were in for a very long night—waiting for the ballots to be counted by hand—but even before the polls closed we knew we had changed the whole structure of Aspen’s politics. The Old Guard was doomed, the liberals were terrorized, and the Underground had emerged, with terrible suddenness, on a very serious power trip. Throughout the campaign I’d been promising, on the streets and in the bars, that if Edwards won this mayor’s race I would run for sheriff next year (November 1970) ... but it never occurred to me that I would actually have to run; no more than I’d ever seriously believed we could mount a “takeover bid” in Aspen.
But now it was happening. Even Edwards, a skeptic from the start, had said on election eve that he thought we were going to “win big.” When he said it, we were in his office, sorting out xerox copies of the Colorado election laws for our poll-watching teams, and I recall being stunned at his optimism.
“Never in hell,” I said. “If we win at all it’s going to be damn close—like twenty-five votes.” But his comment had jangled me badly. Goddamn! I thought. Maybe we will win . . . and what then?
Finally, at around six thirty, I felt so useless and self-conscious just hanging around the action that I said what the hell, and left. I felt like Dagwood Bumstead pacing back and forth in some comic-strip version of a maternity-ward waiting room. Fuck this, I thought. I’d been awake and moving around like a cannonball for the last fifty hours, and now—with nothing else to confront—I felt the adrenaline sinking. Go home, I thought, eat this mescaline and put on the earphones, get away from this public agony . . .
At the bottom of the long wooden stairway from Craig’s office to the street I paused for a quick look into the Elks Club bar. It was crowded and loud and happy ... a bar full of winners, like always. They had never backed a loser. They were the backbone of Aspen: shop owners, cowboys, firemen, cops, construction workers ... and their leader was the most popular mayor in the town’s history, a two-term winner now backing his own handpicked successor, a half-bright young lawyer. I flashed the Elks a big smile and a quick V-fingered “victory” sign. Nobody smiled ... but it was hard to know if they realized that their man was already croaked; in a sudden three-way race he had bombed early, when the local Contractors’ Association and all their real estate allies had made the painful decision to abandon Oates, their natural gut-choice, and devote all their weight and leverage to stopping the “hippie candidate,” Joe Edwards. By the weekend before Election Day, it was no longer a three-way campaign ... and by Monday the only question left was how many mean-spirited, Right-bent shitheads could be mustered to vote against Joe Edwards.
Our program, basically, was to drive the real estate goons completely out of the valley: to prevent the State Highway Department from bringing a four-lane highway into the town and, in fact, to ban all auto traffic from every downtown street. Turn them all into grassy malls where everybody, even freaks, could do whatever’s right. The cops would become trash collectors and maintenance men for a fleet of municipal bicycles, for anybody to use. No more huge, space-killing apartment buildings to block the view, from any downtown street, of anybody who might want to look up and see the mountains. No more land rapes, no more busts for “flute-playing” or “blocking the sidewalk” ... fuck the tourists, dead-end the highway, zone the greedheads out of existence, and in general create a town where people could live like human beings, instead of slaves to some bogus sense of Progress that is driving us all mad.
After a savage, fire-sucking campaign we lost by only six (6) votes, out of 1,200. Actually we lost by one (1) vote, but five of our absentee ballots didn’t get here in time—primarily because they were mailed (to places like Mexico and Nepal and Guatemala) five days before the election.
We came very close to winning control of the town, and that was the crucial difference between our action in Aspen and, say, Norman Mailer’s campaign in New York—which was clearly doomed from the start. At the time of Edwards’ campaign, we were not conscious of any precedent ... and even now, in calm retrospect, the only similar effort that comes to mind is Bob Scheer’s 1966 run for a U.S. Congress seat in Berkeley/Oakland—when he challenged liberal Jeffrey Cohelan and lost by something like 2 percent of the vote. Other than that, most radical attempts to get into electoral politics have been colorful, fore-doomed efforts in the style of the Mailer-Breslin gig.
This same essential difference is already evident in 1970, with the sudden rash of assaults on various sheriff’s fiefs. Stew Albert got 65,000 votes in Berkeley, running on a neo-hippie platform, but there was never any question of his winning. Another notable exception was David Pierce, a thirty-year-old lawyer who was actually elected mayor of Richmond, California (population 100,000 plus), in 1964. Pierce mustered a huge black ghetto vote—mainly on the basis of his lifestyle and his promise to “bust Standard Oil.” He served, and in fact ran, the city for three years—but in 1967 he suddenly abandoned everything to move to a monastery in Nepal. He is now in Turkey, en route to Aspen and then California, where he plans to run for governor.
Another was Oscar Acosta, a Brown Power candidate for sheriff of Los Angeles County, who pulled 110,000 votes out of something like two million.
Meanwhile in Lawrence, Kansas, George Kimball (defense minister for the local White Panther party) has already won the Democratic primary—running unopposed—but he expects to lose the general election by at least ten to one.
On the strength of the Edwards showing, I had decided to surpass my pledge and run for sheriff, and when both Kimball and Acosta visited Aspen recently, they were amazed to find that I actually expect to win my race. A preliminary canvass shows me running well ahead of the Democratic incumbent, and only slightly behind the Republican challenger.
The root point is that Aspen’s political situation is so volatile—as a result of the Joe Edwards campaign—that any Freak Power candidate is now a possible winner.
In my case, for instance, I will have to work very hard—and spew out some really heinous ideas during my campaign—to get less than 30 percent of the vote in a three-way race. And an underground candidate who really wanted to win could assume, from the start, a working nut of about 40 percent of the electorate—with his chances of victory riding almost entirely on his Backlash Potential; or how much active fear and loathing his candidacy might provoke among the burghers who have controlled local candidates for so long.
The possibility of victory can be a heavy millstone around the neck of any political candidate who might prefer, in his heart, to spend his main energies on a series of terrifying, whiplash assaults on everything the voters hold dear. There are harsh echoes of the Magic Christian in this technique: the candidate first creates an impossible psychic maze, then he drags the voters into it and flails them constantly with gibberish and rude shocks. This was Mailer’s technique, and it got him fifty-five thousand votes in a city of ten million people—but in truth it is more a form of vengeance than electoral politics. Which is not to say that it can’t be effective, in Aspen or anywhere else, but as a political strategy it is tainted by a series of disastrous defeats.
In any event, the Magic Christian conceit 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 campaigns 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 s
pike,” 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 it 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.
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 trade, 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.