Miami and the Siege of Chicago

  An end to all censorship. We are sick of a society which has no hesitation about showing people committing violence and refuses to show a couple fucking.

  We believe that people should fuck all the time, anytime, whomever they wish. This is not a program to demand but a simple recognition of the reality around us.

  ... a national referendum system conducted via television or a telephone voting system ... a decentralization of power and authority with many varied tribal groups. Groups in which people exist in a state of basic trust and are free to choose their tribe.

  A program that encourages and promotes the arts. However, we feel that if the Free Society we envision were to be fought for and achieved, all of us would actualize the creativity within us. In a very real sense we would have a society in which every man would be an artist.

  ... Political Pigs, your days are numbered. We are the Second American Revolution. We shall win. Yippie!

  But let us go to Lincoln Park on this Sunday afternoon.

  11

  A moment:

  The following is a remark by Dino Valente, an electric guitarist. It ran as the headline in an advertisement in the East Village Other for an album of his records.

  “You take this electrical power out of the wall and you send it through the guitar and you bend it and shape it and make it into something, like songs for people and that power is a wonderful thing.”

  Yes, the Yippies were the militant wing of the Hippies, Youth International Party, and the movement was built on juice, not alcoholic juice which comes out of the mystery of fermentation—why, dear God, as fruits and grains begin to rot, does some distillate of this art of the earth now in decomposition have the power to inflame consciousness and give us purchase on visions of Heaven and Hell?—no, rather, we are speaking of the juice which comes from another mystery, the passage of a metallic wire across a field of magnetism. That serves to birth the beast of all modern technology, electricity itself. The Hippies founded their temple in that junction where LSD crosses the throb of an electric guitar at full volume in the ear, solar plexus, belly, and loins. A tribal unity had passed through the youth of America (and half the nations of the world) a far-out vision of orgiastic revels stripped of violence or even the differentiation of sex. In the oceanic stew of a non-violent, tribal ball on drugs, nipples, arms, phalluses, mouths, wombs, armpits, short-hairs, navels, breasts and cheeks, incense of odor, flower and funk went humping into Breakthrough Freak-out Road together, and children on acid saw Valhalla, Nepenthe, and the Taj Mahal. Some went out forever, some went screaming down the alleys of the mad where cockroaches drive like Volks-wagens on the oilcloth of the moon, gluttons found vertigo in centrifuges of consciousness, vomitoriums of ingestion; others found love, some manifest of love in light, in shards of Nirvana, sparks of satori—they came back to the world a twentieth-century tribe wearing celebration bells and filthy garments. Used-up livers gave their complexions a sickly pale, and hair grew on their faces like weeds. Yet they had seen some incontestable vision of the good—the universe was not absurd to them; like pilgrims they looked at society with the eyes of children: society was absurd. Every emperor who went down the path was naked, and they handed flowers to policemen.

  It could hardly last. The slum in which they chose to live—for they were refugees in the main from the suburbs of the middle class—fretted against them, fretted against their filth, their easy casual cohabiting, their selflessness (which is always the greatest insult to the ghetto, for selflessness is a luxury to the poor, it beckons to the spineless, the undifferentiated, the inept, the derelict, the drowning—a poor man is nothing without the fierce thorns of his ego). So the Hippies collided with the slums, and were beaten and robbed, fleeced and lashed and buried and imprisoned, and here and there murdered, and here and there successful, for there was scattered liaison with bikers and Panthers and Puerto Ricans on the East Coast and Mexicans on the West. There came a point when, like most tribes, they divided. Some of the weakest and some of the least attached went back to the suburbs or moved up into commerce or communications; others sought gentler homes where the sun was kind and the flowers plentiful; others hardened, and like all pilgrims with their own vision of a promised land, began to learn how to work for it, and finally, how to fight for it. So the Yippies came out of the Hippies, ex-Hippies, diggers, bikers, drop-outs from college, hipsters up from the South. They made a community of sorts, for their principles were simple—everybody, obviously, must be allowed to do (no way around the next three words) his own thing, provided he hurt no one doing it—they were yet to learn that society is built on many people hurting many people, it is just who does the hurting which is forever in dispute. They did not necessarily understand how much their simple presence hurt many good citizens in the secret velvet of the heart—the Hippies and probably the Yippies did not quite recognize the depth of that schizophrenia on which society is built. We call it hypocrisy, but it is schizophrenia, a modest ranch-house life with Draconian military adventures; a land of equal opportunity where a white culture sits upon a Black; a horizontal community of Christian love and a vertical hierarchy of churches—the cross was well-designed! a land of family, a land of illicit heat; a politics of principle, a politics of property; nation of mental hygiene with movies and TV reminiscent of a mental pigpen; patriots with a detestation of obscenity who pollute their rivers; citizens with a detestation of government control who cannot bear any situation not controlled. The list must be endless, the comic profits are finally small—the society was able to stagger on like a 400-lb. policeman walking uphill because living in such an unappreciated and obese state it did not at least have to explode in schizophrenia—life went on. Boys could go patiently to church at home and wait their turn to burn villages in Vietnam. What the Yippies did not recognize is that their demand for all-accelerated entrance into twentieth-century Utopia (where modern mass man would have all opportunities before him at once and could thus create and despoil with equal conscience—up against the wall mother-fucker, let me kiss your feet) whether a vision to be desired or abhorred, was nonetheless equal to straight madness for the Average Good American, since his liberated expression might not be an outpouring of love, but the burning of his neighbor’s barn. Or, since we are in Chicago, smashing good neighbor’s skull with a brick from his own back yard. Yippies, even McCarthyites, represented nothing less by their presence than the destruction of every saving hypocrisy with consequent collision for oneself—it is not so easy to live every day of your life holding up the wall of your own sanity. Small wonder the neighborhood whites of Chicago, like many small-town whites in other places, loved Georgie Wallace—he came in like cavalry, a restorer of every last breech in the fort.

  Somber thoughts for a stroll through Lincoln Park on a Sunday afternoon in summer, but the traffic of the tourists and the curious was great; one had to leave the car six blocks away. Curiosity was contained, however, in the family automobile: the burghers did not come to the park. Young tourists and cruisers were there in number, tough kids, Polish and Irish (not all plainclothesmen) circulating around the edges of the crowd, and in the center of the southern part of Lincoln Park where the Yippies had chosen to assemble on an innocuous greensward undistinguished from similar meadows in many another park, a folk-rock group was playing. It was an orderly crowd. Somewhere between one and two thousand kids and young adults sat on the grass and listened, and another thousand or two thousand, just arrived, or too restless to sit, milled through an outer ring, or worked forward to get a better look. There was no stage—the entrance of a flatbed truck from which the entertainers could have played had not been permitted. so the musicians were half hidden, the public address system—could it work off batteries?—was not particularly clear. For one of the next acts it hardly mattered—a young white singer with a cherubic face, perhaps eighteen, maybe twenty-eight, his hair in one huge puff ball teased out six to nine inches from his head, was taking off on an interplanetary, then galactic,
flight of song, halfway between the space music of Sun Ra and “The Flight of the Bumblebee,” the singer’s head shaking at the climb like the blur of a buzzing fly, his sound an electric caterwauling of power come out of the wall (or the line in the grass, or the wet plates in the batteries) and the singer not bending it, but whirling it, burning it, flashing it down some arc of consciousness, the sound screaming up to a climax of vibrations like one rocket blasting out of itself, the force of the noise a vertigo in the cauldrons of inner space—it was the roar of the beast in all nihilism, electric bass and drum driving behind out of their own non-stop to the end of mind. And the reporter, caught in the din—had the horns of the Huns ever had noise to compare?—knew this was some variety of true song for the Hippies and adolescents in the house, in this enclave of grass and open air (luxury apartments of Lake Shore Drive not five football fields away) crescendos of sound as harsh on his ear, ear of a generation which had danced to “Star Dust,” as to drive him completely out of the sound, these painted dirty under-twenties were monsters, and yet, still clinging to recognition in the experience, he knew they were a generation which lived in the sound of destruction of all order as he had known it, and worlds of other decomposition as well; there was the sound of mountains crashing in this holocaust of the decibels, hearts bursting, literally bursting, as if this were the sound of death by explosion within, the drums of physiological climax when the mind was blown, and forces of the future, powerful, characterless, as insane and scalding as waves of lava, came flushing through the urn of all acquired culture and sent the brain like a foundered carcass smashing down a rapids, revolving through a whirl of demons, pool of uproar, discords vibrating, electric crescendo screaming as if at the electro-mechanical climax of the age, and these children like filthy Christians sitting quietly in the grass, applauding politely, whistles and cries of mild approval when the song was done, and the reporter as affected by the sound (as affected by the recognition of what nihilisms were calmly encountered in such musical storm) as if he had heard it in a room at midnight with painted bodies and kaleidoscopic sights, had a certainty which went through gangs and groups and rabble, tourists and consecrated saints, vestal virgins with finger bells, through the sight of Negroes calmly digging Honkie soul, sullen Negroes showing not impressed, but digging, cool on their fringe (reports to the South Side might later be made) through even the hint of menace in the bikers, some beaks alien to this music, come to scoff, now watching, half turned on by noise so near to the transcendencies of some of their own noise when the whine of the gears cohabited with the pot to hang them out there on the highway singing with steel and gasoline, yeah, steel and gasoline exactly equal to flesh plus hate, and blood plus hate; equations were pure while riding the balance of a machine, yes, even the tourists and the college boys who would not necessarily be back contributed nonetheless to the certainty of his mood. There was a mock charade going on, a continuation of that celebration of the Yippie Convention yet to come, when Pigasus, a literal pig, would be put in nomination. Vote Pig in ’68, said the Yippie placards, and now up at the stage, music done, they announced another candidate to a ripple of mild gone laughter across the grass, Humphrey Dumpty was the name, and a Yippie clown marched through the crowd, a painted egg with legs, “the next President of the United States,” and in suite came a march of the delegates through an impromptu aisle from the stage to the rear of the crowd. A clown dressed like a Colorado miner in a fun house came first; followed Miss America with hideous lip-sticked plastic tits, stars of rouge on her cheeks; Mayor Daley’s political machine—a clown with a big box horizontal to his torso, big infant’s spoon at the trough on top of the box, and a green light which went on and off was next; then the featured delegate, the Green Beret, a clown with a toy machine gun, soot, and red grease on his face, an Australian bush hat on his head. Some sort of wax vomit pop-art work crowned the crown. Yes, the certainty was doubled. Just as he had known for one instant at the Republican Gala in Miami Beach that Nelson Rockefeller had no chance of getting the nomination, so he knew now on this cool gray Sunday afternoon in August, chill in the air like the chill of the pale and the bird of fear beginning to nest in the throat, that trouble was coming, serious trouble. The air of Lincoln Park came into the nose with that tender concern which air seemed always ready to offer when danger announced its presence. The reporter took an unhappy look around. Were these odd unkempt children the sort of troops with whom one wished to enter battle?

  12

  The justifications of the March on the Pentagon were not here. The reporter was a literary man—symbol had the power to push him into actions more heroic than himself. The fact that he had been marching to demonstrate against a building which was the living symbol of everything he most despised—the military-industrial complex of the land—had worked to fortify his steps. The symbol of the Pentagon had been a chalice to hold his fear; in such circumstances his fear had even flavored his courage with the sweetest emotions of battle.

  But in Chicago, there was no symbol for him. Not the Amphitheatre in the stockyards, for he had a press pass to enter, and had entered indeed—it did not seem as much of a protest to march to a building he had entered already. Besides, the city would not allow a march: one was offered then the choice to be tear-gassed or abstain. Of course, there was the Conrad Hilton for a convenient symbol, but it was Democratic Party Headquarters and Press Headquarters, and he had a room in the Hilton, in fact it was the only Hilton Hotel he did not dislike, for it was old, not new, and had thousands of little rooms, or so it seemed, like the St. George in Brooklyn, plus a dingy rear twenty-five stories high with the sad legend, “World’s Largest and Friendliest Hotel” painted in black and white on the weary color-dead elephantine brick. There was Lincoln Park, and anyone who wished to protest the horrors of the continuing war in Vietnam, or the horrors of this Democratic convention which would choose the candidate least popular and least qualified by strength, dignity, or imagination to lead, could bed down in Lincoln Park. The city, we may remember, had refused to issue a permit to the Yippies. So they could not sleep in the park. They had been ordered to vacate it by eleven. Their leaders had even told them to vacate it.

  Paul Krassner:

  “Sleeping in Lincoln Park after 11 p.m. isn’t as important as living our revolution there the rest of the day (the park opens at 6 a.m.).”

  Jerry Rubin:

  “... Chicago is a police state, and we must protect ourselves. The cops want to turn our parks into graveyards. But we, not them, will decide when the battle begins.”

  In fact, as everyone knew, many were not going to vacate the park, they were going to force the police to drive them out; so one could protest with one’s body, one could be tear-gassed—with what unspoken later damage to the eyes had never necessarily been decided—and one could take a crack on the head with a policeman’s stick, or a going-over by plainclothesmen. The reporter had an aversion to this. Besides, he was afraid of his own violence. It was not that he was such a good fighter, but he was not altogether courteous either—he had broken a man’s jaw in a fight not so long before, and was not certain the end of that was yet heard; it had left him nervous and edgy about fights. He was not afraid of his own violence because he necessarily thought it would be so heinous to break a policeman’s jaw, good law-abiding citizen that he was! It was more that he was a little concerned with what the policeman’s friends and associates might do to him immediately afterward. He had taken a hint of a bad beating once or twice in his life; he was, conceivably, ready to take much more, but he could not pretend that he welcomed it.

  So he went that night—after the visit to the park on Sunday afternoon—to a party, and from there to the Hilton and a quick visit on impulse to Humphrey’s private headquarters, where, late at night, there was nobody to receive him but six or eight young Secret Servicemen or F.B.I. with bullet-faces, crew cuts, and an absurd tension at the recognition of his name.

  The mission to see Humphrey fruitless
as he had known it would be, he had merely wanted to look at the style of Humphrey’s cops, he then went down a few floors and to bed, and did not know until the morning that there had been a battle already in Lincoln Park, and the Yippies driven out long after the 11 p.m. curfew with tear gas, and what was more sensational some reporters and photographers showing press cards had been beaten with the rest.

  Monday night, the city was washed with the air of battle. Out at the stockyards, some hours after the convention had begun, the streets were empty but for patrol cars and police barricades at every approach. The stench of the yards was heavy tonight, and in a district nearby where the Mayor lived like the rest of his neighbors in a small wooden frame house, the sense of Chicago as a city on the plains (like small railroad cities in North Dakota and Nebraska) was clear in image, and in the wan streetlights, the hushed sidewalks, for almost no one was out in this area, the houses looked ubiquitously brown, the fear within almost palpable outside. The average burgher of Chicago, cursed with the middling unspiked culture of that flat American midcult which lay like a wet rag on the American mind, was without those boulevards and mansions and monuments of the mind which a thoroughgoing culture can give to paranoia for enrichment; no, the Chicagoan hiding this Monday night (as he was to hide Tuesday night, Wednesday night, Thursday night) inside his home was waiting perhaps for an eruption of the Blacks or an avalanche of Yippies to storm the chastity of his family redoubts. So fear was in these empty streets, and the anger of the city at its own fear, an anger which gave promise not soon to be satisfied by measures less than tyranny.

  Seven miles to the northeast, just so far as from Greenwich Village to the middle of Harlem, the air of men ready for combat was up in Lincoln Park. It was after eleven, even close to midnight, and police cars were everywhere, and platoons of policemen every few hundred feet, enough for a parade. In the meadow in the angle between North Clark Street and LaSalle Drive, where the reporter had heard the music the afternoon before, there were now a few hundred people milling about. In the dark, there was no way to count, perhaps a few thousand in all of the park, youths up for an event with every muted mix of emotion, fear as clean as skiers before a steep downhill run, and vigorous crazy gaiety in the air like college pranksters before a panty raid; with it, the night nonetheless not without horror, very much not without horror, as if a fearful auto accident had taken place but ten minutes before and people wandered about now in the dark with awareness that bodies wrapped in bloodstained blankets might be somewhere off a shoulder of the road. In the near distance, the blue light of a police car was revolving through the dark, the menacing blue light turning 360 degrees around and around again, and a white-silver light pierced the retina in alternation, lighting up the faces of boys not twenty-two, not twenty, some of them in Indian blankets or ponchos, others in white shirts and khaki pants, sleeves rolled up, some with jackets, some with bikers’ helmets, others with football helmets, a fencing jacket or two, and the hint of a few with private weapons, spade cats drifting in and out, emitting that high smoke of action carried from night to night in the electrified cool of the blood.