Hayduke Lives!
And the leaders, where were they? What leaders? There weren’t none. They were all leaders.
Miss Dugelby adjusted the mike (solar-powered, of course, by a portable array of purple panels mounted on a trailer), sent a few electric crackles through the ambience and spoke:
“Greeting, compañeros y compañeras. Hope you all had enough to eat. Don’t forget to recycle your garbage at the garbage separation centers. Hope everyone who likes them has found the porta-johns by now and that you appreciate the location; Dave and the boys did their best to set them up in places with a good view. The rest of you, I trust you’re digging your catholes deep and at least a mile back in the woods. Burn your toilet paper with care or we’ll have the Forest Freddies on our necks with a hundred firefighters and pumper trucks rampaging around all over the place. What else? More bio-regional and deep ecology workshops tomorrow: see the schedule at the EF! propaganda booth. Please contribute as much as you can to the kitty; some people put out a lot of money to rent those stinking porta-johns and the solar power unit. Tonight we’re having more music and moonlight dancing: a midsummer night’s maypole dance, a square dance with music by the Organic Nutty-Gritty Peanut Butter Jug Band, a sacred ritual holy Druid Dance over in the scrub oak thicket, general free-style dancing in the meadow, music by the Lounge Lizards, and another cowboy stomp dance out on the point, music by Peter Gierlach and the Rusty Spurs. First though, an announcement from Erika about the action she’s planning at the Neck pretty soon. Erika, where are you?”
Erika, tall, slender, beautiful, Princess of Moon Power, appeared from the shadow of the pines and began to work her way through the packed crowd toward the platform. Before she reached it there was a small outburst from the Berkeley group up front. A portly fellow stood there waving a document, shouting at the emcee: “Equal time, equal time …”
Dugelby hesitated, glancing at Erika still some distance off. “Okay,” she said to the man with the paper, beckoning him onstage. “Five minutes.” She looked at the moon, rising pale and round and waferwise through the crowns of the trees.
The portly fellow struggled at the edge of the stage; there were no steps, his legs short, his belly large. Barbara leaned down, gave him a hand, hauled him up. Bernie Mushkin took the microphone, red in the face and panting. A man of sixty or so, bald on top, flatfooted at bottom, wide-assed narrow-minded and slope-shouldered, he resembled in shape a child’s toy known as Mr. Potato-Head. (Life is not fair.) He suffered furthermore from inadequate chin whiskers: despite forty years of concentrated effort he still had not succeeded in growing a man’s beard. Like that aging teenybopper balladeer Bobbie Dylan, the best he’d been able to do was sprout a scraggly furze of pale fuzz along the jawline, while the chin itself remained downy as a boy soprano’s. Even his voice had a tendency to break — up an octave — at inconvenient moments of stress, Sturm und Drang, stormy weather and clogged-up drains.
Nevertheless: Bernie Mushkin, old-time Marxist, sectarian revolutionary, tenured professor, academic writer, pedagogue, demagogue, ideologue, was drawn to political controversy as a moth to the flame — or a blowfly to a rotting hog. Inept and passionate, fiery-tempered and humorless, graceless but relentless, he had acquired a reputation, over the decades, among the far-out fringes of the urban-American left wing, as an intellectual blowhard. Which meant, in that element, leadership. (Who’s your leader? What leader, we got no leader, we’re all followers, baa baa baa. …)
Clutching the mike stand with his left fist, Professor Mushkin raised his right in the good old Nazi salute. “Sieg heil!” he barked, standing on tippytoe to bring his lips close to the microphone, which he’d neglected to readjust (downward). Barbara approached to do it for him; impatiently he waved her aside. “Sieg heil!” he repeated, “sieg heil!”
If he hoped to provoke a howl of outrage in response, he must have been disappointed. Most of the crowd, who knew nothing about him, stared in bewilderment; a few tittered and laughed; some twinkled, waggling hands at ears, in mock approval.
Mushkin raised his paper and read his statement. “Earth First! eco-fascists,” he announced, “I congratulate you on setting back the cause of justice, decency, ecology and environmentalism by at least fifty years in America.”
Cheers. Applause. Scattered twinkling.
“Your well-publicized advocacy of sabotage and monkey-wrenching has made Earth First! a synonym for terrorism.”
Scattered applause. Polite cheers. Faint twinkling.
“Your well-known support of famine in Africa, as preached by your official spokesperson Foreman, has revealed you as fascist, neo-colonialist and anti-humanitarian.”
Heavy twinkling. Sporadic sparkling, quickly doused.
“Your enthusiastic support of immigration control, as preached by your official ideologists Hardin and Abbey, has revealed you as nationalists and xenophobes, quite the opposite of the fun-loving anarchists you pretend to be.”
Cheers, applause, twinkling.
“I might add that your opposition to immigration, especially your opposition to immigration from Third World nations, which means of course immigration by people of color — “
“Colored people?” someone shouted. “That’s a racist term, you lousy bigot!”
“I said people of color,” Muskin shouted back, his voice abruptly squeaking into boy-soprano range again. “People of color, I said.” Trembling with rage, he fought for self control; the microphone shook in his hand. He looked at his paper. He continued: “Your dogmatic opposition to immigration by people of color from oppressed Third World nations — oppressed mainly by capitalist America, I might point out — exposes you, exposes you —” he emphasized, “as not only nationalists, xenophobes, neo-colonialists, cultural chauvinists and running dog lackeys for economic imperialism, but also I must say, and it pains me to say it — “
Cheers. Applause.
“ — exposes you as a hypocritical mob of creeping fascist hyenas and elitist Nazi racists. Emphasis added. Sieg heil!” He saluted.
No one returned the salute except for the Three Snake-Haired Furies from Berkeley stationed up front. “Sieg heil!” they screeched in perfect unison. “Sieg heil!”
“Furthermore,” Mushkin went on, glancing at his notes — easily distracted, he was not a good extemporaneous speaker — “Furthermore, and with this point I conclude — “
Loud and prolonged cheering, whistling, yelling; massive twinkling and a brief outburst of sparkling.
“Your basic doctrine, laughably called ‘deep ecology,’ a ludicrous term better rephrased as ‘deep zoology’ …” Mushkin paused to relieve himself with a scornful laugh; his acolytes, catching the cue, barked like seals. “Your so-called deep ecology or ‘eco-la-la-la!,’ as sketched so far by Naess, Sessions, Devall, Snyder, Leopold, Flowers, Manes and who knows what other intellectual bantamweights —” Mushkin curled his lip; his claque cackled. “— is basically antihuman misanthropic people-hating bigotry. Not philosophy but bigotry. Biocentric, you call it, or eco-centric. I call it eccentric, in the most vicious sense of that term. All living things are equal, you proclaim. Does that include the bear and the lion?”
“Yes!”
“The cockroach and the rat?”
“Sure …”
“The centipede and the pit viper?”
“Yeah.”
“Yes? Well what about the smallpox virus and the AIDS virus?”
Confusion in the ranks.
Mushkin paused, awaiting an answer. Tough talk; he smiled his scornful smile as the silence spread, his rhetorical question sinking deep.
A fat little boy, wearing a T-shirt that argued “No Guts No Glory,” broke the silence by piping up. “Mister Munchkin” he squeaked.
“Yes?”
“Wanta get rid of ten pounds of ugly fat?”
“What?”
“Cut your head off!” the boy squealed and broke down howling. Every child in the audience, and there were at least a hundred of them, listening in
tently when they heard the tip-off line, joined in the chorale of laughter. The contagion spread, the hilarity became general.
Professor Mushkin waited. When the laughter waned at last, he said, “Finally — “
A storm of applause, cheering, whistling.
“Finally, I’d like to point out that your gross display of flags here, with clenched fists, coiled rattlesnakes, red monkey wrenches and the feared hated brazen banner of capitalist militarist imperialist racist Amerika — I spell it, of course, with the appropriate ‘k’ — reveals the basically macho, redneck, sexist, violence-prone frontiersman mentality of your Earth First! image makers. Your own symbols give you away, reveal and expose you for what you are: a drunken ignorant low-class (but not true working class) lumpen-proletariat led and misled by a power-greedy clique of petit-bourgeois shop clerks, writers manqués, failed academics, corrupt journalists and petty businessmen, the traditional raw material, as seen in Italy, in Germany, in Latin America, of Fascism and Nazism.” Mushkin paused. “And so I say, once more, ‘Sieg heil’ to you Earth First! right-wing pigs and if you want to hang me for it, hang me!”
Defiant, proud, heroic, hands at his side, Professor Bernie Mushkin tilted back his head, baring his pale plump wattles to the screaming mob.
The screaming mob gave him a sitting ovation, with full Twinkler honors, while one of the aspen girls draped a garland of flowers around his neck, and others helped him lower himself from the stage, pressed a frothing can of Schlitz into each Mushkin hand, slapped his shoulder blades in congratulation and hustled him back to his waiting disciples. Those three worthies, sternly facing down the wolf pack, took Bernie’s beers from his shaking hands, emptied them — with full socio-feminist contempt — upon the dusty pine needles, and escorted the professor back to his rental car (a Nipper of the Komatsu brand). From there they drove him to his hotel in nearby Las Vegas only three hundred miles away, in their eyes and in his the nearest outpost of proper civilization in the entire northern Arizona-Utah-Nevada region. At least there is a university in Las Vegas. Hospitals. A foreign-film cinema. Fern bars. Lesbian bookstores. And a synagogue or two or three. And Wayne Newton and Liberace and Bette Midler and a four-lane superhighway leading direct to the airport, with connections for L.A., Bakersfield, Fresno and Berkeley-by-the-Bay, Home of Advanced Thought, Third World Liberation, the Livermore Nuclear Radiation Laboratory.
The crowd simmered, waiting. Then a chorus of cheers rose high as everyone stood up.
Liberté mounting the barricades. A hard act to follow but Erika the Svenska Maid was obliged to try. Taking the mike, raising it a foot, she thrust her right fist ad astra and shouted at the milling mulling moiling musing merry multitude —
“Zee Eart’ She First!”
This time the crowd responded properly, as they had not done for the others. The battle cry, “Zee Eart’ She First!” echoed and re-echoed from a thousand hoarse throats. Hoarse from too much laughter, too much bawling of huzzahs, despite the lubrication of a thousand quarts of beer. They wouldn’t do it for the others, but who would not do anything for Erika? Looking at her standing there, regal, tall and slender, rosy, bright-eyed, radiant, lovely as a Nordic flower in her snug T-shirt, her skintight cowgirl jeans, her dark and glowing hair falling like a lion’s mane from crown of head to swell of crupper. My Gawd but she was beautiful, so beautiful that she existed somewhere beyond the envy of other women, safe from the animal lust of even the simplest young men. All loved her, all looked upon her as a work of natural art rather than (as simply) an object of sexual inspiration. Erika herself, Princess of Moon Power, lived within and lived throughout all through her youthful beauty, conscious of it not as a lucky attribute but rather as an expression of her unconscious zest for life. Her beauty was not hers; she was beauty’s; and living what she was, and being what she lived, in essence and appearance one and the same vibrant harmonious whole, she melted every heart.
“Down wiss empire up wiss spring!”
Both hands palm upward spread toward the sky, smiling like an angel, body arched and breasts upsurging, she waited for the antiphon.
“Down wiss empire up wiss spring!” they roared in perfect mimicry, amplified a thousandfold. The trees shivered. The secret police grinned nervously. Young J. Oral stared in awestruck adoration. The old graybearded rednosed wrinklenecked correspondent in Perverts’ Row — too perverse and old for purity — gaped up with wonder in his bleary eyes, a silent groan of archaic desire rising from his groin through heart to throat and brain. Silent? He meant it to be silent. But a number of people standing nearby glanced his way for a moment.
In the brief stillness that followed the antiphony, a woman shouted: “Erika! What do you say to Bernie Fuzzchin?”
Erika hesitated only a moment. “Vat do I say? Vat do vee say?” Pause. “Vee say … ven you haff fight zee beeg bulldozer you no haff time worry about zum housefly buzzing round your head.”
They loved it. The ruffian riffraff, hoi polloi of American environmentalism, ate it up, howling with delight. She had them eating from her hand, licking at her palm, drooling in her spoon, slobbering on her graceful instep.
“Ven you face zee great GOLIATH,” she went on, “you no wess time wiss insex crawling up our leg.”
They roared with approval, whistled, yawhooed, twinkled, sparkled, yawped and yelled and pounded palm on palm.
Insex, the old gringo journalist noted in his notebook, I like that. I love that. And crawling up her leg! Holy Mary, Mother of Gawd, to be an insex on a moonlit midsummer’s night. What foolishness these morals be. Puck, Puck, you skipping scamp of lust, stop plucking at my scrotal hairs. Oh the itching and the twitching, the bitching twitching itching of romantic love.
“… which brings to zee point of ziss announcement. Ven GOLIATH he gets to zee Neck I am being there to stop him. I put my body where he comes. But not all by my alone person must I surely hope. I ask for sisters, brothers, comrades, put your body where I put my body. I say — and ziss iss joke, yes? but also more zan joke, I say — put your body where your mouse is. Vee talk big, vee talk very tough, now iss time to show vee act like talk, no? Yass? Ja?”
“Ja, ja, Erika!”
Mouse, the correspondent noted, puts her body where her mouse is. Good. Very good. The girl’s a poet. The blood of Ibsen, Hamsun, Laxness, Strindberg, Bjornsen, Lagerlof, Undset, and J. V. Jensen flows through those splendid Viking veins.
“… ask for one thousand bodies meet at zee Neck between Last Eden Canyon and zat how you call? Radium Canyon? when Super-G.E.M. he finally get to zat point which is what? maybe ten days? two weeks? Zere vee stop him, he no can go around, Neck iss only forty meters wide, vee pile up livink human bodies, my bodies, your bodies, everybody’s bodies, on zee solid rock, vee stick monkey wrench in works, vee put flowers on zee Big Bucket, vee put flowers on zee driver’s neck and hug heem, her? it? and kiss and luff and squeeze and make GOLIATH stop. Make it turn around, go home, nevair come back to God country, your country, my country, our country, are you coming wiss me, folks? vill you join to your body my body?”
“Yes!” they thundered, male and female. “Yeah!” they rumbled, girls and boys alike, as they whistled, sparkled, twinkled, hollered, cheered and clapped. “We are coming, Princess Erika, one thousand bodies strong!”
We are coming, Father Abraham, one hundred thousand strong. Ga-lory hallelujah! The journalist, on his feet, yelling and cheering with the rest, scribbling madly in his notebook, felt tears trickling down his bourbon-rubicund cheeks. He sniffed, furtively rubbed the tears away with back of hand, glanced left then right beneath his shaggy eyebrows and saw on every side young pink firm glossy cheeks likewise glistening with tears of joy. Okay then. He wept, he scribbled, he rejoiced.
“Eart’ First!” called Erika, shaking both her little fists at the moony sky, stretching that splendid body toward the stars.
“Eart’ First!” the mob howled back.
“No more zat fuckink compromise —!”
“No more fucking compromise …”
“ — in defense ziss Mutter Eart’!”
“… in defense of Mutter Eart’!”
An uproar of cheering. “Let zee revels now begin!”
The young woman leaped from the stage with a Valkyrie’s cry of triumph (a perfect high C, 2093 hertz, cycles or vibes per second) above the arms of Perverts’ Row into the arms of those beyond, where she was promptly hoisted onto some eco-freakish hulking bearded brute’s shoulders and paraded around the platform and across the meadow and through the woods and back to the meadow and around the bonfire, followed by a thousand or so dancing shouting laughing maniacs.
Viz., From San Diego up to Maine, on every field and hill, where eco-folk defend our Earth, it’s there you find our gril [sic]. As Joe Hillstrom himself might have sung it, had he lived another fifty years, and seen the evolution of the I.W.W. into the IEF!
“Well?”
“Well what?”
“What do you think?”
“What do I think?” He relit his cigar, which had gone out during the height of the joyful hysteria. “Well …”puff, puff. “I’ve never seen so gay a mob of hero-worshipping anarchists. I think they really yearn for a king — or a queen, rather. Like most Americans, really. Or, where all think alike, no one thinks much.”