The Adding Machine: Selected Essays

  ‘Let’s see your guns.’

  Young man has a Belgian assault rifle 9M... handsome boy about 20 has an M-16, a little fat boy about 16 has a .22 held together with wire and tape.

  ‘Fifty years old’ he tells us, smiling.

  Man in his thirties, nice smile: ‘Me, I got no gun.’

  Well where are the Russian K-47s you are supposed to be getting from Cuba?’

  ‘No hay.’ (There aren’t any)

  Look at these faces. Nice faces. Johnson faces. You can’t fake it. That old Spaniard couldn’t have been a KGB Colonel, or a Cousin, or M-l6. No agent could have that cover. Because it isn’t a cover. It’s the real thing.

  Three guns for 20 men. Shy handsome boy of 15 has been with the guerrillas since he was 14. Why? No ideology no rubbish. Self defence. Once you take up arms against a bunch of shits there is no way back. Lay down your arms and they will kill you. I’ve seen the Policia Nacionale in action in Colombia during the civil war. Vicious thugs. No Johnson faces there.

  That’s all the orientation I need to make up my mind about El Salvador. Don’t want to hear Haig’s lies or any other lies. Haig is no Johnson. He’s got one of the most basically dishonest faces I ever saw. And the same look on his face when he lies as General Westmoreland ... LIE LIE LIE written all over it.

  Civilian Defence

  C.D. Civilian Defence started with names on cards. These ID cards identify the bearer — photo and fingerprints, description and address — as a Civil Defence Agent. Each card has a number. I think it was no accident that one of the original 13 early card holders was a computer programmer. The idea behind the C.D. card was and is very simple: We will follow the example set by the Guardian Angels. We will patrol the subways, acting to stop crime, to aid and protect victims of crimes in accordance with our plain duty as citizens and fellow humans. We hope that our example will inspire other citizens to help themselves and each other. We hope to instill a get-in-this-and-help reflex, instead of a keep-out-of-it-walk-away-shut-your-lousy-mouth reflex. We intend to make it fashionable to defend ourselves and others. We will be of all ages and all walks of life. You join by filling out a form and obtaining a C.D. Card. You are expected to patrol one night a month but may do so as often as you wish.

  The Angels carry no weapons. Our policy on weapons is that the field agent on patrol may carry whatever weapons he wants to carry, for which he assumes the legal responsibility. The most commonly carried legal weapon is a cane or walking stick. He can equip himself at a C.D. store (in the beginning these were simply lost addresses) after showing his C.D. card. At first the stores sold mostly canes of heavy wood and simple designs, with a brochure showing some of the basics of cane fighting. Weapons of doubtful legality were tear gas guns and short sticks carried concealed. It was C.D. policy to try out various weapons for a court decision. This attracted some sharp legal brains.

  C.D. caught on like mad. And with it came a new spirit of release. The ordinary citizen felt that he didn’t have to take it lying down anymore. He could do something about it right now. Join C.D.

  The T.O.T. Decision gave us tremendous impetus. The Tool of Trade Decision, which involved a concealed awl and a dead punk, stipulated that a citizen may not be arrested or charged for carrying the tools of his trade unless the artifacts in question are specifically controlled by other statutes. The defendant was a part-time leather worker.

  ‘You can drive a trailer track through T.O.T.’ wailed the Commissioner. ‘They’ll carry anything and call it a tool of their trade.’

  We are setting up centers where courses in stick and hand to hand fighting are given. Friendly C.D. Advisors are there to help you. They will give you a list of reliable merchants who install security devices in apartments. They will put you in touch with other people in your neighborhood who may have the same problems. We advertise on the subways.

  Poster shows the grinning Buddies all with C.D. T-shirts, patches, arm bands, hat bands .. .

  THERE’S SAFETY IN NUMBERS

  BECOME A SUBWAY BUDDY

  Get to know the other citizens who ride the same trains at the same time you do. Become a Subway Buddy. Every Buddy will help you when you need help, and you will help every Buddy. JOIN NOW. Take one ...

  Subway Buddies really caught on. I mean, who would slink around not being a Subway Buddy? There they are on the platform laughingly comparing their canes and staffs and golf clubs. ‘For close in chops I favor a niblick. For the home stretch a loaded driver.’ Now they settle in a car and leer knowingly at each other. A plumber fondles a heavy pipe wrench. Nobody’s going to chain snatch his subway buddies. The C.D. Stores are now vast weapon supermarkets. Here is a fetching array of carpenter suits in leather and denim with reinforced pockets and pouches and sheaths for awls and ice picks, do fridge jobs on the side you know, and those lovely ice hammer crow bars, all one gorgeous hunka stainless ... and exquisite ball pens with whip handles.

  ‘Don’t forget your Union Card, sir. You are now a member of the C.D. Carpenter’s Union.’ The clerk winks broadly. ‘It’s legal as Hell. And this battery powered drill right in his muggin’ eye sir! And this air hammer can be used as a walking stick. It’s a rapturin’ perforating tool, if you’ll pardon the expression, sir.’ We stroll on to the Exterminator section. ‘Now this blower shoots a finely divided black cyanide dust. One good whiff sir. Not recommended for crowd situations sir.’

  The Farmer’s Market gets a big play. Window Box Farmers fancy themselves as Death with a scythe, and one old joker incinerated two rowdies with a flame thrower.

  ‘Fanner you know. We use them for killing weeds. Never without it... haw haw ...’

  Some of these devices were shot down in the courts. Flame throwers and all incendiary devices, for example, were outlawed by Fire Department regulations, but new ones kept popping up until the courts were jammed with weapons cases.

  ‘Darling I’ve been doing a lot of research and there is absolutely no license required to buy a flint lock or percussion gun, or to carry one. Or a sword for that matter, carried openly.’

  ‘My God!’ screamed the old transit cop. ‘Fifty of them with cavalry sabres and civil war revolvers.’

  And the Golfers with their loaded drivers and their charge cry: ‘FORE!’ The Baseball Players, brutal burly men, beat your maggin’ brains out. The Polo Boys, lithe aloof young men faultlessly attired in riding clothes. They are adept at tripping with their mallets, or they may prefer to disembowel a mugger with a back kick of razor sharp spurs, bare their teeth and roll their eyes like a fucking horse as they emit their terrible whinny of triumph.

  C.D. becomes obligatory like jury duty. We computerize our records. We have records not only on those who have committed crimes, but on those who can be expected to commit certain types of crimes in the future. These assessments are based on field agents’ reports. A Field Agent knows everybody in his district inside out. He records their voices. He takes-pictures. A lot of this goes into the Top Secret Only Fools file. (Only fools do those villains pity who are punished e’re they have done their mischief.)

  There is no stopping C.D. Knock on any door. Walk down any street C.D. T-shirts, patches, arm bands, rings, discreet gold lapel pins, luminous rainbow hat bands — ‘Her glow in the dark.’ Many wear their C.D. card in a little plastic window. C.D.! C.D.! C.D.! Our deadly field hands, as we jokingly call them, are everywhere stopping crime. They know where to look they know who to follow.

  ‘They are undermining the very concept of police!’ the Commissioner moans.

  ‘We are the police and we need no criminals,’ was the terse telex rejoinder from Wise Guy the C.D. Computer.

  Any C.D. member can put this solution to any question into Wise Guy, who chews them all up and spits out a solution. Wise Guy thinks that some crimes are much more portentous, that is more basically criminal, than others. These crimes receive special attention.

  Is it good for our space program? This basic criterion is programmed into Wise
Guy and he dictates his decisions. Man just released from mental hospital stabs a sleeping man to death with a sharp stick; little bitch sees someone sleeping on the subway, dowses his hair with lighter fluid and sets him afire. ‘I just felt like it,’ she said. Other victims have been old transients sleeping on pavements or in vacant lots. The common denominator is sleeping.

  On space craft people may have to go into bio-stasis. We need some little whore prowling around turning off our life support systems? Now human beings are merely the carriers for certain entities. We don’t want any carriers of this entity in our surroundings. So we organized a crack team of outraged citizens and grabbed a torcher dowsed it with water and threw it on the third rail. Gave that entity pause. And here is another. It happens every Halloween: Little girl three years old been trick-or-treatin’ comes back and her mother finds a pin in a pink sugar candy with cream centers, the pinhead white to look like sugar. Now this can only be described as poisoning the water supply. We don’t want anything like that aboard space ship earth.

  The Colonel looked into the fire. He is a member of the elite corps of E.S. — Evolutionary Security. The function of E.S. is to create a safe environment for biologic experiments free from brutish, malignant interference.

  ‘Of course we knew it would come to this sooner or later — individual assassinations. ‘Hits’ you call them I believe. Well it wasn’t too hard to find this one. Little frame house reeked of it. Not even a weed will grow in the yard. She works in the library, which is almost never used because no one can get the book he orders, and if he does, keeps getting nasty letters for years demanding the return of books he never withdrew. She used sleeping pills. It was easy. We also impounded some interesting documents. For years this old witch had been writing letters to newspapers. Some, dating back to the days of capital punishment,* were abusive anonymous letters sent to the parents of those executed, timed to arrive on the day of execution. And here is a four year old boy attacked by guard dogs, critically ill in hospital, and she writes to the mother: ‘He should die soon. I hope he will.’

  And her diary ... ‘Christmas 1848 ... I think I’ve made a “catch”.

  ‘December 27 ... My prayers have been answered.’

  She was a very religious woman. The only book in her house was the Bible.

  At the very moment of her death waves of happiness and euphoria swept the neighborhood: ‘It was a feeling of relief,’ one neighbor said. ‘Like something awful went away and you can breathe again.’

  ‘C.D. can stand for Common Decency. When someone needs help you give help. When someone wants to be left alone you leave him alone. He has a right to his space. The principles of the Johnson Family.

  ‘God must have loved the Johnsons because he made so many of them.’

  We postulate that man is an artifact designed for space travel. He is not designed to remain in his present biologic state any more than a tadpole is designed to remain a tadpole. This postulate, agreed upon, gives us a standard evaluation. Is a proposed course of action conducive to realizing space conditions? Art, science, technology, what is it contributing to the space program? As for individuals, ask yourself — would I like to be in space with that person? Postulate that there is no privacy and no deceit possible in space: Your innermost thoughts, feelings and intentions are immediately apparent to those around you. So you want to be careful who is around you.

  And what has prevented the Johnsons from realizing their potential for space travel? Who is keeping us from realizing our biological and spiritual destiny? These people are known as shits. They can’t mind their own business, because they have no business of their own to mind any more than a small pox virus. The mark of a basic shit is that he has to be RIGHT. And in order to be RIGHT he has to make someone else WRONG. We know that the shits will take action against us since they are artifacts specifically designed to keep us out of space.

  Our research is directed towards effecting biologic alterations in the human artifact. The human body is much too dense for space conditions. However, we have a model to hand that is much less dense in fact almost weightless: the astral or dream body. This lighter body, a ‘body of light,’ as Crowley called it, is much more suited to space conditions.

  Recent experiments have shown that dreaming is a biological necessity like sleep. The dream serves as a link to our destiny in space. Deprived of that air line we die. And when we see the Rev. Jerry Falwell and his Moral Majority cutting our airlines, we classify such behaviour as criminal interference.

  The step into space is a step into the unknown, a change as drastic as the transition from water to land. Those who now attempt to impose by sheer force a rigid dogma can only be seen as the mortal enemies of C.D. They threaten the life and the space destiny of every decent well-intentioned Johnson. It is the role of C.D. to protect new life forms in the vulnerable stages of mutation. Perhaps many times before beautiful new life forms with great potentials were brutishly stamped out by those who cannot tolerate anything different from their stupid, bigoted, hideous selves. This is a Manichean conflict. The outcome is in doubt.

  Footnote

  * Capital punishment fell into disuse in the U.S. for some years, but has been restored by the judiciary under President Reagan.

  Sexual Conditioning

  The whole area of sex is still shrouded in mystery and ignorance. Any attempt to apply objective experimental methods to the study of sexual phenomena has been irmly discouraged. People who do not think of themselves as religious — doctors, sociologists, psychiatrists — are still thinking in terms laid down by the Christian Church. The church assumes that any sexual activity except intercourse with a legal spouse is absolutely wrong because the Bible says so. They condemn so-called deviant behavior in the strongest terms. Psychiatrists, substituting the word ‘sick’ for ‘wrong’, follow the old Christian line. Recent experiments with electric brain stimulation, however, has provided a much more precise means of conditioning than psychoanalysis and psychotherapy.

  Admittedly, a homosexual can be conditioned to react sexually to a woman, or to an old boot for that matter. In fact, both homo- and heterosexual experimental subjects have been conditioned to react sexually to an old boot, and you can save a lot of money that way.

  In the same way, heterosexual males can be conditioned to react sexually to other men. Who is to say that one is more desirable than the other? Who is competent to lay down sexual dogmas and impose them on others? The latter-day apologists of St. Paul who call themselves psychiatrists have little to recommend them but their bad statistics. They couldn’t get away with statistics like that in any other line of business. Suppose you run a business and the traffic department isn’t getting the consignments out. They say they need more money and more personnel, and the situation gets worse. Consignments stack up like patients in a state hospital. They say they need yet more money and more personnel to cope with the evergrowing traffic problem. How long before you fire the entire traffic department and get someone in there who can do the job? Psychiatrists say they need more money and personnel to deal with the ever-growing problem of mental illness, and the more money and personnel that is channelled into this bottomless pit, the higher the statistics on mental illness climb. Personally I think that mental illness is largely a psychiatric invention.

  On December 3rd, 1973, the American Psychiatric Association decided that homosexuality would no longer be considered a mental deviation. Well, if they have more mental patients now than they can handle, it would seem to be a step in the right direction to remove homosexuals from this category. But the decision has caused a storm of protest. One psychiatrist compared the decision to ‘a psychiatric Watergate which we hope won’t be our Waterloo.. .’ They just don’t like to see any prospective patients escaping; it could start a mass walkout. Doctor Charles Socarides, associate clinical professor of psychiatry at the Albert Einstein Clinic staunchly opposes the new A.P.A. approach: ‘The A.P.A. has done what all civilizations have trembled to
do . .. tamper with the biologic role between the sexes.’ Fancy that — and in a letter to Playboy in June of 1970, Dr Socarides says, ‘Five hundred million years of evolution have established the male/female standard as the functionally healthy pattern of human sexual fulfillment.’

  Just a minute here, Doctor — the human species is not more than one million years old according to the earliest human remains so far discovered. Other species have had a longer run. Three hundred million years have established a big mouth that can bite off almost anything and a gut that can digest it, as a functionally healthy pattern for sharks. About 130 million years established large size as functionally healthy for dinosaurs. What may be functionally healthy at one time is not necessarily so under altered conditions, as the bones of discontinued models bear silent witness. But sharks, dinosaurs, and psychiatrists don’t want to change.

  The sexual revolution is now moving into the electronic stage. Recent experiments in electric brain stimulation indicate that sexual excitement and orgasm can be produced at pushbutton control or push-button choice, depending on who is pushing the buttons. None of these bits of technology are in the future; the knowledge, and most of the hardware, exist today.

  For example, there already exists a device that can be used in conjunction with bio-feedback and electric brain stimulation. I quote from an article by Patrick Carr, entitled ‘The Sonic Dildo: At Last, the No-Contact Orgasm’, about how a man named How Wachspress of San Franscisco has developed an audio machine that puts sound into the human body through the skin: ‘He begins to play with the controls of his synthesizer, programming a series of sonic patterns for sensual effect, and this feeling begins to spread down from my stomach toward my crotch, most certainly turning me on and relaxing me at the same time. My instant desire is for the same, only louder. Lovely sensations spread over my hips, crotch, stomach, and spine, and I am beginning to sense surprisingly precise nuances of tone and pattern as How performs ‘frequency sweeps’, a sharp attack with a long decay, a long rise with a sharp decay... oh, yes . .. “Very Indian, huh?” says How. “Y’know, I’m certain that ragas would be great for the body...” Afterward, disconnected from the unit, I experienced a wonderful body-buzzing calm.’