The Stockholm Manifesto
by Steven Hager
EPUB ISBN: 978-1-4661-1373-2
copyright 2012 by Steven Hager
Originally written in 1971
Foreword
Thanks to mom filling out an application to Valparaiso University, I briefly attended college after barely graduating high school. Mom figured I’d jump on it since my favorite cousin, Tom Hutton, had just returned from Vietnam and enrolled there on the GI Bill. I’d kept up a correspondence with Tom during his entire tour, a time during which he went through some heavy, heavy changes and emerged as an ardent anti-war activist.
My cousin Tom Hutton, age 16; Tom got a swimming scholarship to Southern Illinois University specializing in the butterfly stroke. He went to California in 1966 and checked out the surfer scene: note the trademark white Levi’s, which was the official surfer uniform in the mid-sixties.
I’d been living in Oakland when I got the news I’d been accepted, so I hitch-hiked back east, and checked out the Lutheran college both my parents graduated from. Unfortunately, I felt tremendously isolated from all the devout Christians, although I did create two lasting friendships with fellow searchers on the path of illuminated fun I’d been scouting the past three years (The Merry Pranksters being my ultimate role model). We discovered a hay-filled barn with a giant rope swing and it became 24-hour party central. A lot of swan dives into the haystack while intoxicated on LSD, beer or both. After the Kent State Massacre, however, I stopped attending class, and just spent my time studying the art of having fun all the time. When the school music building burned (suspected arson), it came down the grapevine I was the number-one suspect being investigated.
Eventually, my dad caught wind of the situation and cut me off completely, having already wasted $5,000 on tuition fees alone. The best thing that came out of Valpo was an encounter with Joseph Heller, who clued me into Louis-Ferdinand Celine, a tremendous influence on Henry Miller, William S. Burroughs, Joseph Heller, J.D. Salinger, to name but a few.
Maybe I wasn’t attending class, but I was educating myself in my own way and I burned through everything Celine wrote (that I could find) in a few days. My draft number was low, so when my cousin Tom discovered my circumstances, knowing I’d be inducted straight from the physical exam into boot camp, plunked down $350 for a one-way ticket to Stockholm, where his army buddy, Ed Keeling, was attending the university. I had very few possessions, just a letter from Tom explaining my hasty exit from the States and could he help me out? I had virtually no money, and slept the first few nights on the floor in Ed’s tiny dorm room, with Ed wondering what the hell was going on and when was I going to get the hell out of there?!
I was soon rescued, however, by a couple of amazing Swedish goddesses, one blonde, one brunette. Eva, the blonde, took me under her wing and introduced me to her revolutionary cellmates. She put up with my cynical rants and was even amused by them. Eva sensed I was going to evolve into a great, great revolutionary. In fact, I think she was convinced that’s exactly what was going to happen. This made me laugh. I loathed Marxism more than I did organized religion!
Eva was certainly beautiful and I undoubtedly had a shot with her, but I chose Marta, who appears on the cover of this ebook and who was a dead ringer for a French movie star. Or maybe Marta picked me? In a way, she became my first real girlfriend. Marta was a year or two older and gave me some necessary schooling in art of making love. I was living my down-and-out-in-Europe fantasy and having a blast! I even got some extra work in the film Joe Hill, which gave me enough money to buy a typewriter so I could commence creating the first great counterculture novel of my generation, the rock’n'roll, garage band, go-for-broke generation that actually created the sixties. I never got beyond the opening chapter.
The Stockholm Manifesto
Here it comes. I am vomiting all over you.
What would you like me to say? Clue you in on my mystical insights? Revelations concerning man's place in the universe? Calm yourself. This author has no intentions of usurping your zeitgeist. Keep it to yourself, and I will too. It's not my place to shatter your illusionary existence, and if I run into you later in life, you can fill me in on the details later.
I sense some of you might be getting somewhat excited right now. You sympathize with my plight, or maybe not? You want to show me the error of my ways? Believe me, the sun has shined on all this before. This dance goes on and on...and on. This is war and I can't lose! It's lopsided. The mob is always on your side. The majority is always right. I'm not arguing, everything you say is true. Believe me, there is room for us all.
Today, I am treading water, and have been for some time.
What could be worse than offering up your life for some supposedly-worthy cause only to wind up—in the end—an object of complete indifference halfway across the world from anything that really matters to you? I can't blame my fellow deserters for their current state of affairs, but when will they learn? A few hundred desperately needed dollars has just been tossed down the drain because they wanted to make a documentary, something in the Eisenstein tradition, so the reality of our noble suffering could be viewed with sympathy across the globe?
"You really think anyone could care less?" I snorted. My concept was to offer something much more meaningful (although it was obvious any attempt to derail those monomaniacal minds was going to be futile). "Make them think they're getting a privileged peek into a drugged-out, orgy-filled, teenage counterculture, anything, but don't bother them with your petty sufferings."
Now we're stuck with a ridiculous 8mm collection of crap no distributor in the world wants to look at, must less distribute! But instead of throwing-up in disgust, my comrades couldn't be happier! They're delirious with the suffering of it all!!
"Wait until the revolution! We'll all be heroes!"
For sure, they've dragged me into their last scheme. Last time we were all going to be famous writers...going to have an anthology of our inspired creativity published and even get paid for it! The American Deserters' Anthology of Exiled Poetry. Barry supposedly had a Swedish publisher committed. "It's only a matter of time," he assured me. He'd locked down all the details. I fell for it hook, line and everything else. I slurped my beer, nodding furiously to all the blue-sky projections. Yes, I have poetry. Yes, I want to be published. Yes, I desperately need money.
But my raging insomnia kept me up all night and I have a tendency to get absent-minded when I'm exhausted, so halfway to the Otherside (that quaint clubhouse for homeless Americans in Stockholm), I realized I had nothing to read on me. It didn't matter, since it was supposedly just a preliminary reading anyway.
They were serving coffee and (yum-yum) doughnuts, of which I fiendishly devoured four or five in rapid succession. Barry was standing near a podium talking to some poetical-looking people, looking, as always, very well-groomed and sincere. When he saw me across the room, he waved, and gave the rostrum several slaps, calling the meeting to order.
"Welcome, brothers and sisters. Our publisher has been unavoidably detained, I spoke to him only minutes ago on the telephone and there is a good chance he will arrive soon, but we have been encouraged to go ahead and get started without him."
What a grand feeling! As if this entire event could not get started without me and commenced immediately upon my arrival! Everyone found a seat and Barry, our efficient organizer, opened with a wonderful speech, expounding our good fortune, our aims and goals, our poverty-stricken desperation, which, due to his persistent efforts, was about to be rectified. And as our leader and poet laureate, Barry would read one of his own verses first....
"My poem...," Barry began, "...is entitled, Uncle Sam."
A twitter of appl
ause trickled through the audience.
"Uncle Sam is a dirty old man who screws just any old whore. His cock is big and filled with cum, and his finger points at you. Uncle Sam is a murdering fiend, his hands drip red with blood. He wipes his cum on stars and stripes, a flag that drips with crud. But Uncle Sam is a frightened man, who smells his coming end..."
"Right on!" shouts a voice in the crowd.
"Uncle Sam will sing no more, his songs of war and woe. The people rise, his reign will end, that's killed both friend and foe."
I think from that point on, I went into a state of semi-shock. Naturally, upon finishing, Barry asked me to follow on the stage, and I, of course, shook my head, "no, no, no" and held up my empty hands (thank god). Why