Beginning with the anonymous Digger Papers in the fall of 1966, the San Francisco Diggers amassed a voluminous and compelling body of radical texts. This page will
be the master index for the Digger writings. Included for each item is a
scan of the original, a transcription, and in some cases a commentary.
The content of this section of the Digger Web includes all the early
street sheets that were signed "THE D I G G E R S" as well as all
subsequent tracts that were written by the core group of Diggers which
eventually numbered dozens. Also included here are writings from the
Digger movement that was spawned by the original actors in the following
months.
First Digger Papers 1966
The eight street sheets below were the first printed communication
from the two comrades who would surreptitiously mimeograph them in the
SDS offices at the SF Mime Troupe studio and distribute them on Haight
Street. Sept-Oct 1966. Everyone wanted to know who "The D I G G E R S"
were. One of the sheets answered the question: "regarding inquiries
concerned with the identity and whereabouts of THE DIGGERS: happy to
report THE DIGGERS are not that."
The following are texts by the first two Diggers and the rapidly
growing contingent, many of whom came out of the SF Mime Troupe. These
texts would appear in underground newspapers or in Communication Company
broadsides.
NOTE: except for one of the first Digger Papers (above) none can be
dated. Their DP catalog numbers (DP001, DP002 etc.) only reflect the
order they were obtained over the decades, not the order they were
produced. For example, we know that DP006 was the first
Digger Paper, according to Grogan, Ringolevio, p. 238. This set of
eight street sheets is distinctive for the unique signature spacing.
where is PUBLIC at?
where are PUBLIC streets at?
therefore
an erection in the panhandle.
the PUBLIC parks — here you can pitch a tent anytime.
PUBLIC streets on riot with truckloads of arms protecting the
private property of super-charging merchants.
the PUBLIC beaches — here you can paddy-cake any old time.
PUBLIC streets where fantasy laws justify the concepts of
LOITERING & VAGRANCY.
the PUBLIC schools — here you can be conditioned to PUBLIC
opinion in order to express yourself
in the PUBLIC consensus.
PUBLIC streets where agents patrol, undercovered in 'hip'
costumes.
the PUBLIC transport system — here drivers black and white
riders for free.
PUBLIC streets where parking meters tick off legality.
the PUBLIC hospitals — here you can born, healed, passed away
away.
PUBLIC streets where exhausting autos pollute the air and
mutilate the people.
the PUBLIC housing developments —
here you can live a life now
done.
PUBLIC streets where lonliness crowds silent, up-tight sidewalks.
the PUBLIC officers — here is the understanding of PUBLIC
service.
Where in the street can two fingers touch
Where in the street can you get out of neighborhoods
Where in the street can you escape the economic net
Where in the street can you trip out your door and smile
at sincere
Where in the street can you hitch a hike down the block
Where in the street can you take off your shoes and sing
and
dance without disturbing the death called peace
in voice THE D I G G E R S demand an ERECTION!
THE BALLING BOWL
a FREE PUBLIC structure in the panhandle where individuals can
swim in vinyl pools filled with vaseline, WAIL LOVE to downcast
brows, and carry-on as much as they want until they think it
beautiful to stop.
THE D I G G E R S fully understand that the cost of erection
can be added to the PUBLIC debt and especially appreciate Captain
Kiely's generous offer of men and machines to quicken the rise of
the ERECTION and give meaning to its eventual climax.
Public Nonsense Nuisance Public Essence Newsense Public
News
The Public is Any Fool On The Street
The Public is Any Fool On The Street
PUBLIC INFORMATION FOOLS ALL OF THE PUBLIC ALL OF THE
TIME
The Public is Any Fool On The Street
PUBLIC STREETS CONVEY MACHINES -- ONLY A FOOL WALKS IN
TRAFFIC
The Public is Any Fool On The Street
The Public is Any Fool On The Street
[graphic rules]
2 (TWO) SQUARE EVENTS
(for any foot on the street)
THE D I G G E R SQUARE
[graphic of a painting frame]
A square frame to view reality
"An informed public is its own worst enemy." -- M.
McLuhan
Public enemies watch reality — don't change that dial — an
eventful new season of enemy spectacles
FREE FRAME OF REFERENCE to be worn around the neck, carried,
displayed
Watch the D I G G E R news!
[graphic lines separating columns]
THE INTERSECTION GAME
[diagram of a street intersection with dashed lines crossing each
direction]
Any number of fools can play
Game Board formed by intersection of public streets
OBJECT: Complete all designs within diagram
Lesser Triangle
Greater Triangle
Double Triangle
The Square
STYLE: DON'T WAIT DON'T WALK
(umbrella step, stroll,
cake-walk, sombersault, [sic]
finger-crawl, squat-
jump, pilgrimmage,
philly dog, etc.)
BRING A SQUARE TO DIG THE INTERSECTION GAME
TEST MATCH — HAIGHT AND MASONIC — MONDAY OCT 31 — 5:30 pm
Let Me Live In A World Pure
Let Me Have Around Me
The Pure
The Pure Heros
there are no more negroes, jews, christians. there is only one
minority in America. and we ask:
When will BOB DYLAN quit working on Maggie's Farm?
When will RALPH GLEASON realize he is riding in a Hearst?
When will TIMOTHY LEARY stand on a streetcorner waiting
for no one?
When will the JEFFERSON AIRPLANE and all ROCK-GROUPS quit
trying to make it and LOVE?
When will NORMAN MAILER fill his brooklyn town house with
presses and feed words to a day-tight night-tight
generation?
When will OSWLEY STANLEY expose the traffic of
alkaline acid and pour his background into LSD-25?
When will the NEW LEFT RADICAL POLITICOS stop laying down
limp and liberate the consumer?
When will PABLO PICASSO take the seven thousand paintings
he has in storage and give them away with a smile?
When will KEN KESEY swallow the ocean and take us all to
Yucatan?
When will MICHAEL BOWEN and friends use, look through,
but not package the expansion of human consciousness?
When will ALLEN GINZBURG be blessed by his own seed
and golden hairy nakedness?
When will ART-FOR-ART'S-SAKE climb higher than the social
responsibility of the civilized past?
When will they all hear the death of LENNY BRUCE?
Our bowels quake
in constipated false alarms.
We are often naked and nameless
in boring rooms with tedious records
and toy tops that make colored sparks
for drug stained eyes,
smelling of weeds.
Ghosts haunt our heads,
demons are loose in our spinal fluid.
Uptite over glass beads
that focus where we are at
for just a little while...
on dirty strings hung
from Victorian gas fixtures.
Somebody cries in a slow motion bag
and blows the mind
of a skinny, drab redhaired girl
freaking out the gathering
sending everybody to the icebox
checking out the seconal supply.
Somebody in the tall, dark highway
is still c r y i n g for Lenny,
and won't come down just yet.
A-Political Or, Criminal Or Victim Or Or Or Or Or Or Or
"And so, on the surface of daily life, consciousness
forms beings and bodies that one can see gathering and
colliding in the atmosphere, to distinguish their
personalities. And these bodies form hideous cabals where
every eventuality comes into the world to argue against what
is beyond appeal.
I am not Andre Breton and I did not go to Baltimore but this
is what I saw on the banks of the Hudson."
You're born a citizen of a nation.
A citizen of a nation with rulers who legislate rules
commanding you to be free.
Free to be conditioned in school until you're sixteen.
Free to be a compulsory soldier.
Free to pay sixty percent of your taxes to the military
budget.
Free to get legally married.
Free to work for a minimum wage.
Free to vote when you're twenty-one.
Free to vote for the democratic or republican party of
your choice.
Free to buy clothes, food, and property from the 200
corporations which account for 45% of the total U.S.
manufacturing in 1966.
Free to obey arbitrary curfews.
Free to have your freedom regulated by officers who are
your friends and who protect you.
PROTECT you from obscenity.
PROTECT you from loitering.
PROTECT you from nudity.
PROTECT you from sedition and subversion.
PROTECT you from marijauna, LSD, DURGS. [sic]
PROTECT you from gambling.
PROTECT you from homosexuality.
PROTECT you from statutory rape.
PROTECT you from common-law marriage.
PROTECT you from abortion.
PROTECT you from lonely you.
PROTECT you from demonstrations against your protectors.
So, don't worry about surface reality. Afterall, Terrance
O'Flaherty in today's Chronicle, says you're the average fool on
the street and have no right to speak for yourself. So trust
society. Trust the specialists. And trust the merchants,
especially the associates of the Psychedelic Shop, the Artists
Liberation Front, and the I/Thou. They have a dialogue with the
protectors, who cordially greeted you 8:15 Thursday night, for
your own safety and their own private property. Police are
your friends. But don't by all means, don't ask George Metevsky
[sic] — his answer would be a medley of incoherent shouts of
fury.
Cool Cranberry Horsehaired Mouth Cluttered With Apple Cores
and so, i suffered from an awful frenzy of collapsed
assumptions.
Regardless, I tried to pick my nose on the handlebars of
willowed macaroons as they tripped towards the vestibule of
Tracy's funeral parlor and danced in the middle of the ice block
where Super Spade directed jellied traffic to the high way of
chewed Bazooka bubble gum and fat city dog kennels.
Needless to say, REVOLUTION NOW -- now spinning -- now now --
invisible -- now floating -- somewhere -- outthere -- waiting to
grind someone's brain. Someone questioning Something without
getting Somewhere and Somehow losing inner rest while revolution
g o e s spinning -- floating -- outthere -- somewhere -- waiting
to grind someone's brain.
Never-The-Less, Walter Slezax pumped the pomegranite until the
concrete swill of crisp clear delusions squeezed the galaxies
between the corniced web of my purple laughing cheeks.
but i did tell the personnel manager and his shirt and tie and
parted hair that i would accept three dollars an hour for fifty
forty hour five day weeks and fully appreciate the overwhelming
opportunity to do what i wanted to get done on all those fast
backed saturdays, sundays, legal holidays and two-week vacations
where all those wide-haired nipples suck the fun life.
Besides Chemical Heaven IS an old faithful preacher delivering
sermons on the impossibility of f i g h t i n g p a r a n o i a w
i t h PARANOIA while hecklers mill about a Mercedes Benz waiting
to be taught old trips.
SPOON DOON MOON COON HEY SPOON YOU'RE A BUNDLE O' JOY YOU'RE
AN UGLY MOTHERFUCKER BUT YOU'RE STILL MY BOY. yea. yea.
FLASH
striking results of guidelines -- between 1960 and 1965 profits
went up by 52% after taxes -- dividend payments to stockholders
increased by 43% -- the weekly after tax take home pay of factory
workers was up by only 21% -- oh yes -- ho hum............
AFTERALL: i need a sick school teacher lover for two weeks to
teach me where it's at. somebody ugly anyway. i hate moles.
anyone who could compare my age with the calendar of idols and
damn my drugged infancy for its bleating canals and cornponed
nostalgia. HOWEVER, i don't want to kiss her. but i need to. i
need you. i just want to hold you...you. you really gottahold on
mi. i say you really got a hold on me. you really do. and so they
do. reely. speaking of all these incredulous
thoughtsmellsofyodel. and i want to know why i consent to words
when so many other possible scenes do really exist for some who
are on welfare.
I say what I have seen and believe and whoever says I have not
seen what I have seen, I will now tear off his head.
FORGET the war in vietnam. Flowers are lovely.
FORGET America's 3300 military bases. Make music.
FORGET Wichita Vortex Sutra. Words are stronger than flesh.
FORGET planned war with China. Beauty is Carnaby Street.
FORGET the Dominican Republic. Todo Todo Hassan Sabbah.
FORGET police Brutality. The cops are your friends.
FORGET upheaval in negro ghettos. Spades ain't hip.
FORGET the Rumford Act. Show love.
FORGET the National Guard. Positively Fourth Street.
FORGET inmates on deathrow. It's a long time passing.
FORGET hypocracy of business. The merchants are your friends.
FORGET U.S. billion dollar investment in South Africa. Money is.
FORGET HUELGA DiGiorgio. We all live in a yellow submarine.
FORGET organized crime. Eternity is long and, sometimes, wide.
FORGET HUAC. The sun's not yellow, it's chicken.
FORGET concentration camps for subversives. It's a bummer.
FORGET FSM, VDC, SDS, SNCC, MARK COMFORT. Big Brother and the
Holding Co.
FORGET Mime Troupe, Lenny Bruce, The Beard. Strobe lights are
groovy.
You're free to forget. So forget! Follow the calm business
tactics of the Psychedelic Shop, the I and Thou, and all other
marketeers of expanded consciousness (Moe's Bookstore is
important, really!) and dig yourself. Touch reality only for sex,
only to eat, and only to join the Artist's Liberation Front for your
own safety.
Afterall, expanded consciousness is a selfish hippy
kissing the system's ass for the greater glory of the lonely
dropout, isn't that right, Uncle Tim!
Mr. Answer Man | what is a weapon | worse | ten times | worse, | than
the
Hydrogen | Bomb?
Why a cunt | which is | ten times | larger | than the largest | cock
| | extent, | mickey.
Degoutante, | said mickey | kissing cop | to hedge the bet.
Take a cop to dinner.
Racketeers take cops to dinner with payoffs.
Pimps take cops to dinner with free tricks.
Dealers take cops to dinner with free highs.
Business takes cops to dinner with graft.
Unions and corporations take cops to dinner with post-retirement jobs.
Schools and professional clubs take cops to dinner with free tickets to
athletic events.
The Catholic Church takes cops to dinner by exempting them from
religious duties.
The Department of Justice takes cops to dinner with laws giving them the
right to do almost anything.
The
Department of Defense takes cops to dinner by releasing them from all
military
obligations.
Establishment newspapers
take cops to dinner by propagating the image of
the friendly, uncorrupt
policeman.
Places of entertainment take cops to
dinner by admitting them without
charge.
Merchants take cops to dinner with
discounts and gifts.
The Psychedelic Shop takes cops to dinner by
catering to them with signs in
their window.
The I/Thou takes cops to dinner with free coffee and
discussions offering
discriminating insights into hipsterism.
Cops take cops to dinner by granting them immunity to prosecution for
misdemeanors.
Cops take themselves to dinner by inciting riots.
AND SO, IF YOU OWN ANYTHING OR YOU DON'T, TAKE A COP TO DINNER THIS WEEK AND
FEED HIS POWER TO JUDGE THE MORALITY OF SAN FRANCISCO.
n.b. GOURMET GEORGE METEVSKY WOULD REMIND EVERYONE NOT TO MAKE THE MISTAKE OF
ARNOLD SCHUSTER WHO SERVER [sic] THE RIGHT COURSE AT THE WRONG TIME.
THE D I G G E R S*
*regarding inquiries concerned with the identity and whereabouts
of THE D I G G E R S: happy to report THE D I G G E R S are not that.
AND NOW I LIVE AND NOW MY LIFE IS DONE MY LIFE NOW AND I LIVE DONE
[Vertical text:] INSTANT CONSTANT
elaine esposito thirty-one a world record in human tragedy
twenty-five year coma is longest period of human unconsciousness
consciously known listed in guinness book of world records marathon
begins on 6 august 1941 only child given anesthesia during surgery for
ruptured appendix NEVER TO KNOW consciousness NEVER TO KNOW mother or
father NEVER TO KNOW incipient encephalitis NEVER TO KNOW the life she
clings to NEVER TO KNOW the baffle of medical science NEVER TO KNOW
meticulous nursing of mother NEVER TO KNOW immaculate as a baby NEVER TO
KNOW eight onces [sic] of special formula through a nasal tube four
times a day NEVER TO KNOW desperate effort to rescue her from
quarter-century nod NEVER TO KNOW the unstirring figure in the pink bed
with the blue bows.
SO WHAT!
COMA
THE ESTATE means it Jesus Christ.
THE ESTATE means it Adolf Eichman.
THE ESTATE means it Julius, Ethel Rosenberg.
THE ESTATE means it Sacco, Vansetti.
THE ESTATE means it Carl Chessman.
THE ESTATE means it Lee Harvey Oswald.
THE ESTATE means it Goodman, Schwerner, Chaney.
THE ESTATE means it Andrew Johnson, Leonard Deadwyler.
THE ESTATE means it Patrice Lumumba, Malcolm X.
THE ESTATE means it John Dillinger.
THE ESTATE means it Arnold Schuster.
THE ESTATE means it Dow Wilson.
THE ESTATE means it Lenny Bruce.
THE ESTATE means it Thalidomide Babies.
THE ESTATE means it Six Million Jews.
THE ESTATE means it Hiroshima.
THE ESTATE means it David Carnevale.
THE ESTATE means it Firing Squads, Gas Chambers, Electric
Chairs, Tar and Feathering, Crucifixtion,
Garroting, Hanging, The Rack, Dunking,
Drawn and Quartered, Burned At The
Stake, Economic WARWARWARWARWAR.
And so by THE WAY
YOU ARE BY YOURSELF, ANY FOOL ON THE STREET. NOTHING IS REALLY
IMPORTANT. IF ONLY THEY LEFT YOU ALONE. NOT A CHANCE. DEATH IS THE LIFE
OF THE ESTATE. YOU AS CONSUMER ARE A FROZEN PRODUCT. YOU LIVE IN THE
CEMENT ENVIRONMENT OF THE AUTHORITY INSTRUCTORS. AND IF YOU SAY THE
RIGHT WORDS THEY'LL GIVE YOU 20 YEARS EVEN IF YOU DON'T.
THE D I G G E R S .
[Vertical text:] AND LIVE MY LIFE NOW DONE AND DONE LIVE NOW LIFE NOW
DONE
By George Metevsky
Berkeley Barb, Oct. 21, 1966, p. 3
In the afternoon, at a little before four, they come down Ashbury, cross Oak and gather around a Eucalyptus tree in the Panhandle.
They wear wide eyes, tattered clothes, and talismans around their necks. Some are in their teens, most in their twenties, and a few are closing in on forty.
They talk about anything, smile about everything and do what they want to do with the food that they bring to each other.
They are THE DIGGERS. And everyday at four o'clock they provide anybody with anything to eat.
The first time I noted them I thought it was a picnic. The second time I thought I was hallucinating. The third time I had to stop. And I sat down with them and ate food and discovered that I didn't but I did.
I talked to a young girl with bare feet and hair that fell over her shoulders and whose name began with an N.
"Who are the Diggers?"
She smiled: "I don't know. I'm not a Digger. Are you a Digger?"
"FUCK THE DIGGERS!!!, shouted a kid with a scar and everyone laughed and repeated it.
I asked him whose food it was. He said it was free.
"Yes, but who donated it? Who's laying it on?"
"It's free because it's yours," came a reply.
A yellow micro-bus pulled up onto the grass, the side doors flew open and somebody threw out a thousand apples. A hippy with a blanket for a robe started throwing them into the air yelling: "Food as Medium!" Another stuffed a tree trunk with lettuce. Another fed a bunch of scallions to a great Dane. One poured some stew into a hole in the ground and claimed he was feeding his archetype heritage. Most of them, however, sat around and ate and smiled and gave each other cigarettes.
There was quite an assortment of food. Most of it was good, some of it was hot, all of it was healthy: Shopping bags filled with day old bread, wooden crates of tossed green salad, a ten gallon milk container steaming hot with turkey stew, and apples all over the ground.
A patrol car pulled up to the curb. A sergeant got out and stood in the street and watched. Somebody invited him to dinner, but he shook his head no. And, after a while, he left.
Someone started mouthing a harp, someone else a recorder, then a flute and everybody's bowls became drums beating out a song against the 'Evil Auto' and the noise it makes and the accidents it involves and the war it supports and the air it pollutes and the monopolies it feeds.
The cars gushed up and down the streets of the Panhandle with a steady roar while their drivers stared out of windows wondering what was going on.
Some of them knew. They stopped and passed food to the DIGGERS. Sometimes a cake, sometimes fruit, sometimes a bushel of radishes. A farmer in Carmel dropped off a box of tomatoes via a friend who was on his way to Oregon who promised to bring something back with him.
He was thanked, but warned with a chuckle: "If you have to buy it, the DIGGERS don't want it!"
Everyone was relaxed. Words were used to sparkle eyes, break mouths into smiles, letters into tongued vibrations and meaning in-coherent.
The DIGGER PAPERS reflect this kind of atmosphere. They're mimeographed sheets with words jammed onto them and DIGGERS hand them out once or twice a week on Haight street around six o'clock. Nobody seems to know who writes them, but most agree that the DIGGERS are behind autonomy.
An orange PAPER is headed COOL CRANBERRY HORSE-HAIRED MOUTH CLUTTERED WITH APPLE CORES and begins "and so, I suffered an awful frenzy of collapsed assumptions." The footnote at the end reads: "Regarding inquiries concerned with the identity and whereabouts of the DIGGERS: We are happy to report that the DIGGERS are not that."
"Delving .." is ostensibly an account by one of the BARB
reporters, but given the admonition in Inner Space that any
articles signed George Metesky or Zapata are considered to be Digger
Papers, the assumption is that this is one too.
[Catalog No.: DP101]
Ideology of Failure
Berkeley Barb, Nov. 18, 1966, p.6
From the time we begin to call our childhood our past we seek to regain its simplicity. Its tense of presence. We tumble into drugs and cleave reality into so many levels of game. We turn our backs on the mess and walk into the woods, but only for a time. A game is a game is a game is a game and we return to the silent -- crowded -- uptight sidewalks with our pockets full of absurdity and compromise between cowardice and illusion.
Wearing hipsterism on our sleeves, we make music with mercenary groups who bleed money from any fools on the street, or we carve leather into sandals for twenty dollars a pair, or shape forms into art while a psychiatrist whispers formulae for a healthy life-lihood into our ear. And we smile all the time and stack a stereo with names we meet at parties and scoff at all the Sanpaku people cluttering up outside. We explode the myth of seriousness and wrap our bodies in a vinyl shield to coat our minds with microcosmic awareness of our own safety. We sophisticate our tastes in order to tap dance by hassles and shove the poignancy of 'bring downs' into impersonal shadows. We focus everything towards the transcendence of daily consciousness: macrobiotic diets, hallucinogens, eastern and western aesthetics, philosophies, etc.
Our salaried hipness blankets us in the warmth of security until we masturbate ourselves into an erection of astral rapaciousness and grab whatever pleasures we might in the name of Love, always quick to contrast ourselves with middle-class man.
If there is a contrast, it is slight. Hip and middle-class (as well as communist, fascist, socialist, and monarchist) values, goals, reactions and attitudes offer different styles, but amount to the same end: personal, national, or racial success. "Rien ne reussi comme le suces."
The Hipster, however, invites the indignation of his allies with a mockery of 'straightness' and his alienation from the social norms of morality and dress. He is the perfection of success -- liberated from the inhibitive life of bourgeoise conformity and established in a packed class of happiness which combines the highest material pleasure with a total lack of commitment to middle-class humanism.
He is hated, feared, and envied. He is a man who can sing about the evils of the world, the beauty of touch, the delicacy of flowers, and scream systemicide while margining profits into war economies and maintaining his comfort on a consumer level of luxury. (Oh, excuse me. I see. He's educating the mass and his pay is only incidental -- compared to the millions of converts he has inspired with his orchestrated love. Ho, hum . . .)
Well, when some of us get to that bracket, either through fame or fortune, we look at ourselves and remember the 'Funk" that pushed us into the Lime, and we react. We may open peace centers with our money and contribute to the cause of freedom, or we may plow ourselves into the corner of "who cares" and paddy-cake fortunes, or we may drop out all over again and go back to the woods, and stare at the preposterousness of doing our thing within the frame of a reality that can incorporate and market anyone, anything, anytime. And then we may begin to understand that if some attempt is not made to manage the world with love, it will run mad and overwhelm everything, including the woods.
And so, we stay dropped-out. We won't, simply won't play the game any longer. We return to the prosperous consumer society and refuse to consume. And refuse to consume. And we do our thing for nothing. In truth, we live our protest. Everything we do is free because we are failures. We've got nothing to lose, so we've got nothing to lose.
We're not fooled anymore by the romantic trappings of the marketeers of expanded consciousness. Love isn't a dance concert with a light show at $3 a head. It isn't an Artist Liberation Front "Free" Fair with concessions for food and pseudo psychedelia. It is the SF Mime Troupe performing Free Shows in the parks while it is being crushed by a furious $15,000 debt. It is Arthur Lisch standing under a blue flag in Hunters Point scraping rust off the tin-can memorial to Matthew Johnson from two to five everyday. It is free food in the Panhandle where anyone can do anything with the food they bring to each other. It is Love. And when love does its thing it does it for love and separates itself from the false-witness of the Copsuckers and the Gladly Dead.
To Show Love is to fail. To love to fail is the Ideology of Failure. Show Love. Do your thing. Do it for FREE. Do it for Love. We can't fail. And Mr. Jones will never know what's happening here, do you Mr. Jones.
There has been talk of a psychedelic revolution (overthrow or return to source). It is yet to be seen. There is perhaps a germinal revolution, barely born, but already torn at and choked by residue from the past. We are at a loss for a frame of reference within which to operate freely, harmoniously and generously.
These questions are dedicated to re-discovering that province bordered by childhood and compromise, death and resurrection.
There is a magazine on the stands called ID. It has a full page ad by Bally shoes, a full page by Town Squire and a nice picture of Big Brother and the Holding Co. It's mod, camp, -- an organ of the revolution. There are tribes of natives that will not be photographed because they believe that the photographer then possesses their spirit. One might laugh, but they are correct. Big Brother had his image lifted while he wasn't looking. Whatever the revolutionary implications of his band are, none threaten Town Squire and Bally and all they stand for. By sponsoring the magazine the merchants simply attached the rock-revolution image to their product the same way they would have attached Loretta Young's in the '40s or Mickey Mantle's in the 50's.
The Charlatans recently filmed a hair tonic commercial. What is their excuse for contributing to an unlovely and crumby state of mind, a lie (people will love you if your hair's combed/breath's bright/tits big)? Is it money? Exposure? Why that's just like Jayne Mansfield. The fame/power/money trip is the old story again, hardly central to making music or beads or flutes or any disinterested act of involvement, of worship. It's a bad habit, or are the boys telling us where they really are?
Why is it necessary to pay two and a half dollars to go to a dance. What's revolutionary about that? Bands don't have to join the union. The unions don't care a damn about consumers, they're out for their slice of the pie. Why join except to get your slice? Why pay rent on a hall? Why not pressure the city into putting on block dances, parking lot dances, FREE dances. Would Chet Helm and Bill Graham oppose that? That would be a revolution; something joyous and free in America.
It seems curious that the first public manifestation of psychedelics was the dances at two and a half a shot. Liberation on weekends. Get rid of your filthy materialistic cash .....give it to me.
Where will Jefferson Airplane, Grateful Dead et al go but up to bigger gigs, better publicity, managers -- etc. until they are ***STARS***. Where's the revolution? Long-hair? Beautiful clothes? Would our soldiers be substantially different if we dressed them mod? John Wayne in Carnaby St. clothes.
Reaction is not liberation. Why do kids panhandle for dimes instead of tomatoes? Why steal indiscriminately. Why not ask for what you really want (or is it money?)? Why not steal from the victimizers (use your imagination) and leave the victims (use your instincts) alone?
Have we come this far to be caught in the game of opposites? If the society is A are we to be anti-A or can we make the leap to B or out of alphabets altogether? As it is now, the street scene is the subliminal content of capitalism: egocentric, competitive, and material. The reaction to lousy politics is no politics; the reaction to mind-prison Communism has been no communism; the reaction to bullshit ideology has been no ideology ... in all cases the logical obverse; the least imaginative and most obvious recourse.
Safety lies in the imagination, in harmony, in the resolution of contradictions between knowledge and action. We have lots of knowledge but it's useless unless it changes acts or frame of reference. We live in a society which is structured in such a way as not to admit knowledge which will damage it and we grow up with these same dichotomies. nice man like Ralph Gleason writes for an organ of our contemporary consciousness; the factory owner studies the Greeks at night and gives scholarships, Africa's Voerward was a philosopher. What in his knowledge of that discipline prevented him from being a fascist?
An instant behind the professors' lectern innocent people, yellow children of God, are being sizzled by the idea that gives Sonny a yellow Chevrolet. America tells us that there is no mangled foot in the glove compartment, but some shrink stink gets us dizzy at high speeds. The teacher grades the integers of war industry, has to, always will until he stops. The only way to avoid a game is to stop playing it.
The problem is to preserve human consciousness long enough to alter it. We must recognize that tactically (though not as a principle) there is an "us" and "them" and them wants our ass. Not to recognize that is crazy dangerous. The McCarthy period, as its euphemistically referred to showed quite clearly what happened to the loner in the face of centralized oppression: thousands of people were quietly pulled from their jobs while their colleagues stood idly by or replaced them in an effort to hold onto what they had. If they hadn't stood by there would have been something like a general strike and McCarthy would have died glad years earlier than he did. Expect to face the same oppression and expression of fear and outrage that all dissenters through history have faced.
Things are going well but should go better. They can only go better when we investigate our own directions and see which are outmoded reactions from the past and which are true.
The "hip" merchants along Haight Street with notable exception (Psych shop and Phoenix) are talking about ridding the street of "loiterers" (on public streets?) and panhandlers -- the kids that made the scene they are there to capitalize on. "Money doesn't talk, it swears" so do it for free. Do it for love. That way is safety.
One more frame of reference: Man is a herd animal. Ecologically the herd is a protective device. It is also warm and comforting in the dark.
This is a letter from the Diggers that appeared in Innerspace Magazine, December 1966.
inner space:
any articles by metevsksy or zapata may be considered D I G G E R
PAPERS. for now.
the diggers have been giving out, providing each other with free FREE
FOOD since the first week of October. and have never missed a day.
diggers have gone to jail for giving FREE SHOWS on the street.
diggers have gone to jail for suspicion of stealing slabs of meat, sacks
of potatoes, etc.
diggers have gone to jail for giving out free acid, grass, dope.
diggers have gone to jail simply because someone wanted them there.
but diggers have never gone to jail peace-fully-ably.
everyone tries to find out who sponsors the digger FREE FOOD. the CP
thinks it's the SP, the SP thinks it's the CP, SDS thinks it's PLP …
they all know it's a conspiracy.
well the diggers despise conspiracy … the old left … the new left …
they're indifferent to their tactics and don't even bother talking to
them … (SDS NATIONAL COMMITTEE invited D I G G E R S to their national
conference: "no thank you, but thanks just the same. you see. it's
getting late. and well. the turnips. for chrissake the turnips!"
d i g g e r s are street people: they just don't give a fuck! they
live their protest. they have nothing and nothing to lose. they do their
thing for free. and you can ask why? and how revolution? and if you did
this then maybe … but the diggers don't. no, they really don't. and it's
hard for me to understand, but it's true. they're tough. they put down
the psychedelic fashion (revolution is killing people and taking their
property away. if not literally, then figuratively. but never asking
them to buy …), protestors (who keep their leftovers in DOW chemical
baggies) guilt-ridden gift-bearers (a favorite: a guy will come up to a
d I g g e r and say I think what you're doing is beautiful and sort of
palm a ten or twenty across and then have his stomach turned when the
throng is brought together to thank the gentle-man and burn his offering
to saint george metevsky who really hated all those buildings he nicked
with bombs for twenty-three years. all anarchists have a strange fear of
buildings … the diggers, if they are anarchists, don't … they've got a
FREE FRAME OF REFERENCE GARAGE at 1762 Page St. (the address is not a
mailing one for who knows when blue coat will produce his chocolate gun
and duel them out … back to the granite.) where free clothes, food,
total, all, pans/pots … will be available from Dec. 3.
provos …. no, the d i g g e r s are not that. they're total drug
oriented mad ones, who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved,
desirous of everything of the same time, the ones who never yawn or say
a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn, like a fabulous yellow roman
candle exploding like spiders across the sky, and in the middle you see
the blue center light pop and "Awww!" people who have ridden the crest
of kerouac's bum's romance and slammed to earth wailing love! and lady,
they're wailing for maybes. maybe two fingers can touch. maybe streets
won't run into neighborhoods any more. maybe there is something beside
acid indigestion and copsuckers and the gladly dead. just maybe.
WHO AM I?: just a guy who overheard a guy named allan talking to a
guy they call Mr. D i g g e r about a letter you wrote and thought it
would be nice to, seeing he wouldn't …
[In vertical typography:]
the black mask is only as conscious as izzy stone. silly coherents
This piece appeared in Innerspace No. 3 (December, 1966), a
publication edited by Linn (Freeman) House in New York City. It is
important not just for its content but as a missing link between the
early Digger Papers that were distributed in the Haight in September and
October 1966 and the early articles in the Berkeley Barb that were
variously signed George Metesky and Zapata.
Our authorized sanities are so many Nembutals. “Normal” citizens with store-dummy smiles stand apart from each other like cotton-packed capsules in a bottle. Perpetual mental out-patients. Maddeningly sterile jobs for strait-jackets, love scrubbed into an insipid “functional personal relationship” and Art as a fantasy pacifier. Everyone is kept inside while the outside is shown through windows: advertising and manicured news. And we all know this.
How many TV specials would it take to establish one Guatemalan revolution? How many weeks would an ad agency require to face-lift the image of the Viet Cong? Slowly, very slowly we are led nowhere. Consumer circuses are held in the ward daily. Critics are tolerated like exploding novelties. We will be told which burning Asians to take seriously. Slowly. Later.
But there is a real danger in suddenly waking a somnambulistic patient. And we all know this.
What if he is startled right out the window?
No one can control the single circuit-breaking moment that charges games with critical reality. If the glass is cut, if the cushioned distance of media is removed, the patients may never respond as normals again. They will become life-actors.
Theater is territory. A space for existing outside padded walls. Setting down a stage declares a universal pardon for imagination. But what happens next must mean more than sanctuary or preserve. How would real wardens react to life-actors on liberated ground? How can the intrinsic freedom of theater illuminate walls and show the weak-spots where a breakout could occur?
Guerrilla theater intends to bring audiences to liberated territory to create life-actors. It remains light and exploitative of forms for the same reasons that it intends to remain free. It seeks audiences that are created by issues. It creates a cast of freed beings. It will become an issue itself.
This is theater of an underground that wants out. Its aim is to liberate ground held by consumer wardens and establish territory without walls. Its plays are glass cutters for empire windows.
free store/property of the possessed
The Diggers are hip to property. Everything is free, do your own thing. Human beings are the means of exchange. Food, machines, clothing, materials, shelter and props are simply there. Stuff. A perfect dispenser would be an open Automat on the street. Locks are time-consuming. Combinations are clocks.
So a store of goods or clinic or restaurant that is free becomes a social art form. Ticketless theater. Out of money and control.
“First you gotta pin down what’s wrong with the West. Distrust of human nature, which means distrust of Nature. Distrust of wildness in oneself literally means distrust of Wilderness.” —Gary Snyder
Diggers assume free stores to liberate human nature. First free the space, goods and services. Let theories of economics follow social facts. Once a free store is assumed, human wanting and giving, needing and taking become wide open to improvisation.
A sign: If Someone Asks to See the Manager Tell Him He’s the Manager.
Someone asked how much a book cost. How much did he think it was worth? 75 cents. The money was taken and held out for anyone, “Who wants 75 cents?” A girl who had just walked in came over and took it.
A basket labeled Free Money.
No owner, no Manager, no employees and no cash-register. A salesman in a free store is a life-actor. Anyone who will assume an answer to a question or accept a problem as a turn-on.
Question (whispered): “Who pays the rent?”
Answer (loudly): “May I help you?”
Who’s ready for the implications of a free store? Welfare mothers pile bags full of clothes for a few days and come back to hang up dresses. Kids case the joint wondering how to boost.
Fire helmets, riding pants, shower curtains, surgical gowns and World War I Army boots are parts for costumes. Nightsticks, sample cases, water pipes, toy guns and weather balloons are taken for props. When materials are free imagination becomes currency for spirit.
Where does the stuff come from? People, persons, beings. Isn’t it obvious that objects are only transitory subjects of human value? An object released from one person’s value may be destroyed, abandoned or made available to other people. The choice is anyone’s.
The question of a free store is simply: What would you have?
street event — birth of haight /
funeral for $ now
Pop Art mirrored the social skin. Happenings X-rayed the bones. Street events are social acid heightening consciousness of what is real on the street. To expand eyeball implications until facts are established through action.
The Mexican Day of the Dead is celebrated in cemeteries. Yellow flowers falling petal by petal on graves. In moonlight. Favorite songs of the deceased and everybody gets loaded. Children suck deaths-head candy engraved with their names in icing.
A Digger event. Flowers, mirrors, penny-whistles, girls in costumes of themselves, Hell’s Angels, street people, Mime Troupe.
Angels ride up Haight with girls holding Now! signs. Flowers and penny-whistles passed out to everyone.
Penny-whistle music, clapping, flowers thrown in the air. A bus-driver held up by the action gets out to dance a quick free minute. No more passers-by, everybody’s together.
A chorus on both sides of the street chanting Uhh!–Ahh!–Shh be cool! Mirrors held up to reflect faces of passersby.
The burial procession. Three black-shrouded messengers holding staffs topped with reflective dollar signs. A runner swinging a red lantern. Four pall-bearers wearing animal heads carry a black casket filled with blowups of silver dollars. A chorus singing Get Out Of My Life Why Don’t You Babe to Chopin’s Death March. Members of the procession give out silver dollars and candles.
Now more reality. Someone jumps on a car with the news that two Angels were busted. Crowd, funeral cortege and friends of the Angels fill the street to march on Park Police Station. Cops confront 400 free beings: a growling poet with a lute, animal spirits in black, candle-lit girls singing Silent Night. A collection for bail fills an Angel’s helmet. March back to Haight and street dancing.
Street events are rituals of release. Re-claiming of territory (sundown, traffic, public joy) through spirit. Possession. Public NewSense.
Not street-theater, the street is theater. Parades, bank robberies, fires and sonic explosions focus street attention. A crowd is an audience for an event. Release of crowd spirit can accomplish social facts. Riots are a reaction to police theater. Thrown bottles and over-turned cars are responses to a dull, heavy-fisted, mechanical and deathly show. People fill the street to express special public feelings and hold human communion. To ask “What’s Happening?” The alternative to death is a joyous funeral in company with the living.
who paid for your trip?
Industrialization was a battle with 19th-century ecology to win breakfast at the cost of smog and insanity. Wars against ecology are suicidal. The U.S. standard of living is a bourgeois baby blanket for executives who scream in their sleep. No Pleistocene swamp could match the pestilential horror of modern urban sewage. No children of White Western Progress will escape the dues of peoples forced to haul their raw materials.
But the tools (that’s all factories are) remain innocent and the ethics of greed aren’t necessary. Computers render the principles of wage-labor obsolete by incorporating them. We are being freed from mechanistic consciousness. We could evacuate the factories, turn them over to androids, clean up our pollution. North Americans could give up self-righteousness to expand their being.
Our conflict is with job-wardens and consumer-keepers of a permissive looney-bin. Property, credit, interest, insurance, installments, profit are stupid concepts. Millions of have-nots and drop-outs in the U.S. are living on an overflow of technologically produced fat. They aren’t fighting ecology, they’re responding to it. Middle-class living rooms are funeral parlors and only undertakers will stay in them. Our fight is with those who would kill us through dumb work, insane wars, dull money morality.
Give up jobs, so computers can do them! Any important human occupation can be done free. Can it be given away?
Revolutions in Asia, Africa, South America are for humanistic industrialization. The technological resources of North America can be used throughout the world. Gratis. Not a patronizing gift, shared.
Our conflict begins with salaries and prices. The trip has been paid for at an incredible price in death, slavery, psychosis.
An event for the main business district of any U.S. city. Infiltrate the largest corporation office building with life-actors as nymphomaniacal secretaries, clumsy repairmen, berserk executives, sloppy security guards, clerks with animals in their clothes. Low key until the first coffee-break and then pour it on. Secretaries unbutton their blouses and press shy clerks against the wall. Repairmen drop typewriters and knock over water coolers. Executives charge into private offices claiming their seniority. Guards produce booze bottles and playfully jam elevator doors. Clerks pull out goldfish, rabbits, pigeons, cats on leashes, loose dogs. At noon 1000 freed beings singing and dancing appear outside to persuade employees to take off for the day. Banners roll down from office windows announcing liberation. Shills in business suits run out of the building, strip and dive in the fountain. Elevators are loaded with incense and a pie fight breaks out in the cafeteria.
theater is fact/action
Give up jobs. Be with people. Defend against property.
Trip Without a Ticket was first published as an eight-page booket with the cover as seen here. It was then reprinted with some minor changes by the
Communication Company. Finally, the Free City Collective included it in The Digger Papers 1968. The following version is a medley
of those three versions. To view the full booklet in PDF format, click here
about time we started doin our own livin' and dyin'
[April 20, 1967]
about time we started doin ' our own livin' and dyin'
And so, six months ago you watched two guys bring a milk can full of
turkey stew into the panhalde and start the diggers. two weeks later
free food in the panhandle at four o'clock was advertised in the berkely
barb and it never missed a day.
somebody asked: Why free food?
and anyone answered: free clothes.
the first free store opened in a six car garage on page street and it
was small and the crowd knew each other and someone had written
winstanley on the door and then the rains came and the roof fell in, the
landlord was harrassed by the police and said please… and someone said
it was nice while it lasted.
and the diggers grew.
at 520 frederick street the second free store formed. and everything was
regular again. free food all time.
lieutenant korelac headed a panty raid on the joint charging one of the
two guys with maintaining and operating an opium den.
and the place folded with hot dog bike trash trying to show
somebody their cocks.
1775 became the second wave greta garbo and things happened like
birthdays in the street, benfits for the diggers were thrown all over
the place with no admission, cover, or any charge, and free food was
back in the park.
soon a pipsqueak prelate offered the diggers his church ladies' kitchen,
and an office and all sorts of help.
and the two guys and the friends they had made sort of faded.
the diggers changed hands and money suddenly became a necessity.
1775 needed rent money. people needed bail money. lawyer money. sound
equipment money. gas money. and the diggers took donations. let's buy
armenian hall! let's buy a bus! let's buy property somewhere.
and free food got plenty scarce.
newspapers ran articles on the diggers and their mythical hero
hogansand the stage got a little bigger.
a new breed slipped in and sat in the office getting sixteen dollar
rewards for runaways, cashing 175$ checks into theirpersonal bank
accounts, and didn't do a fucking thing for nobody! ever!
factions grew: turner was going to have tobacco killed and apache wanted
to confront the cops and nobody cared anymore. somebody quietly opened a
trip without a ticket on cole street and someone else put the page
street back together as a children's arts and crafts workshop and the
street filled to a bulge and sunday dance concerts in the park are
getting to be a drag.
1775 is now a closed shop complete with tenure and seniority.
848 was abandoned to the selfishness of sidewalk bike riders.
and free food hasn't been around for a long time.
jackson king of ksol annouces that chester anderson lays down
techniques of surviving the haight scene without becoming a casualty …
the chronicle still calls the people the love generation.
well love is a slop-bucket and we are the children of awareness
but our courage has yet to manifest itself within our floating
community … we put down the merchants, the bullshitters, the hustlers
and we sit around and it's all the same and there's nothing new under
the sun and free food seems a long time gone because we're playing the
game of the 1930's we're the new cry babies and james dean's tears have
finally taken root in a shallow weak kneed series of cabals which expect
some one to take care of their livin'. some revolution
[Singed "X"]
printed 4/20/67 by the communication company (ups)
The Hopi counselors had come to the home of a son to listen to Dick Alpert, PhD, the I Am Church, and peyote sectarian hippies advise them of the benefits of a Be-In this June at the Grand Canyon.
Alpert, PhD, explained that the national publicity of such an event would certainly reveal to the public the injustices of reservation life and give way to redress at the hands of the Federal Gov't. He referred to the prophecy of the Hopi which states that the sons of the white-evil-man will be brothers to the Indian. He called for spiritual unity among brothers and spoke of 10-20,000 warm bodies soaking up the magic sun of Arizona.
Ginsberg recalled 'The Gathering of the Tribes' in S.F. and how colorful — how perfect — how warm and full of love — but cautioned the fact that many were stoned and a few were zonked.
Thomas, interpreter for the Hopi People of the Third Mesa, said no. No, because you mean well, but you are foolish. You are foolish because you don't think of the Inidan. — We are a small people — You fathers crush us. You are a tribe of strangers to yourselves — You gather and you disperse — You are not together — You are not one with each other. — There is no need for us to invite brothers to our home — There is no need to advertise in all underground papers of a Be-In in Hopi Land — There is no need to organize the discovery of one's self into a false tribe of 15,000 seekers. If you want to come to Hopi Land you will. If you want to understand the Indian way you will come to us and be silent and watch with closed eyes and we will not have to invite you nor will you have to invite each other — it will be.
Larry Bird spoke of the hunt and how the hunter is the target. He said it was a time of coming together with oneself as nature is adjusting to the unnatural acts of money man. You cannot look beyond yourself and not see nothing. (Besides the temperatures in the Canyon are 120 degrees throughout the summer and there is no water and the Arizona cops are already arresting 150 hitch-hikers a week and slamming them into small town jails forever.)
Princess Morning Star (spokeswoman through descent of small L.A. tribe) spoke of the Omnibus Bill, whose author is anonymous, and how it will go through Congress and, finally, terminate the land rights of all Indians on and off reservations. She asked for help — help from those who pay taxes and vote and whose fathers have made the laws to negate nature and the timelessness of time. And then she gave Larry Bird three eagle feathers from her headpiece and said her heart felt that he would help his people like few others. Larry Bird said nothing.
Grogan talked from his youth and sought awareness — He questioned the motives for a Be-In at Hopi Land. No, we have a community. We have many communities. And these have grown out of a natural explosion — Now we must follow the organic steps toward our own development as a tribe.
At this point some of us are fed up with cities and the psychology of its streets — We are hungry for our own rituals and lines of life. But there is no need, on behalf of the people, to organize a Be-In, publicize a Be-In, construct a Be-In — Let the Oracle and EVO and the ad-men keep that artificial symbol of solidarity to themselves.
The young people of this world who are ready will feel it beautiful to leave the cities this summer and go to Hopi Land and other Indian communities and no one will have to tell anyone anything — They will go because it is time for them to go. And some of them will homestead land in Idaho or New Mexico and we will never hear from them until they want us to. The great Be-In—Pow-Wow in San Francisco was a shuck! It was as empty as the news copy it engendered. It was removed from the people and organized by merchants. It was a mere celebration of figures who have chosen to be our leaders and a glorification of their stage hands. Only the people can do it — only the people will do it. On June 21 — Summer Solstice — the people are going to celebrate their lives in the community of San Francisco. The people will develop their own rituals — they will learn that a street has brothers and a city has tribes. The people will look to no one but themselves. They will build their courage and leave Be-Ins to the college students, ad men, and news media. They will look to the college students, ad men, and news media. They will look to their brothers not men who claim to be their leaders. And they will never tell anyone what they saw.
—————
The Hopi, Larry Bird, Ginsberg and Grogan left. And a little while later — Alpert, PhD, and his friends (all of whom either own or work in tourist shops in New Mexico) decided to have a Be-In anyway. On June 21 at Raton Pass near Taos, N.M. Then they smiled at each other and began wording invitations to rock groups and press-releases to the media and Alpert, PhD, talked about his trip to India — he leaves June 15.
here is your answer
here is your answer
here is your answer
here is your answer
again
from City Government
from City Government
Sunday
april
december
today
yesterday
merchants
[the middle half of the front side reads as a character composite spelling out the words FUCK YOU HIPPIE. The characters of the phrase are interspersed with single words such as:]
$$money is your answer
fuck success
fuck money
from City Hall Government is work here
bust is your answer
[at the bottom of front page is a word flow diagram with lines connecting words and phrases typed over the page]
HERE IS YOUR ANSWER
don't let it flow
work —> success —> money
control —> suppress —> no freenow
busts —> harassment —> jail
war on hippies —> fuck you hippie
fragmentation —> splitting
[reverse side:]
Hippie - here is your answer from the sick sick sick sick rotten paranoids:
DON'T pick up hitchikers, in fact, grimacing and giving the finger to hitchikers
Get a JOB, and DON' T quit often because you'll get a bad reputation
DON' T talk to strangers
DON'T walk around at night, especially in unsafe neighborhoods
KILL for peace
Stay in SCHOOL so you can graduate and get a good JOB and make $$MONEY$$ (don't worry about being creative)
DON'T make love
DON'T do L.S.D.
DON'T do grass
DON'T do alcohol
DON'T walk around nude
DON'T walk around with no shoes
DON'T stand on street corners waiting for nothing
DON'T gamble
DON'T house and feed people under eighteen years of age
They'll tell you how they watch movies
They'll tell you how they watch T.V.
They'll tell you how they watch go-go dancers
They'll tell you how they watch ball-games
They'll tell you how they watch magazines for clothes and hairstyles
They'll tell you how they watch rock bands
They'll tell you how they watch spontaneous demonstrations on Haight Street
And they'll tell you that they work from nine to five and that their jobs aren't bad and that their pay is O.K. and that their boss is all right (he gives them a five dollar bonus every year at Christmas) and that their two-week sightseeing vacation was a groove.
Are you ready for all that sickness? Read those again, because they conflict with all actions of people coming together and being joyous. And the Hippies say unto you — take your sickness and tightness and impersonalness and work and rules and rationalizations and unwillingness to change and experience and stick them in your own head and brains and owned mouth and owned ears and owned ass, in your unspeakable cocks and cunts. We want to be and to create now and CREATION AND BEING ARE FREE. We want to be and to create and to express now, and that means FREENOW
There is now there is now NOW there is … there is (on a small physical scale)
Hippie — here is your answer from City Government:
(and they are our brothers and sisters)
For the last six months , or has it been six thousand years the city government has invited us to talk- talk talk- talk while they have thrown this sick shit on us. The Park Department demanding identity cards and viciously busting people for panhandling, breaking away from their parents, taking de-conditioning drugs, etc. The Building Department condemning houses used as free space for hundreds of people. (Their rationale being that if there are any more than five people living in a house it is no longer a home but a hotel, and a license is needed-also that it might cause outbreaks of Bubonic plague.) The Health Department enforcing restaurant and public assembly laws in places where free food is given.
Well city government, we're tired of your whimpering, controlled voices. ("I'm an ordinary man with an ordinary job," "I'm just obeying orders," "It's not only my job," "It's not my decision," "I'm not the one to interpret the law — I don't like being here and I want to end this as quickly as possible.") We can't and don't want to pound ourselves into your impersonal bureaucratic categories. We have found that you have no eyes no ears, no features, no feelings — that you are completely anonymous and unflowing. We don't want to live in your static, dead world, so we are creating a sub-culture of Free Forms.
The free families are coming together now to create these forms, and they need the open beach street and park spaces to come together. The city has to close the street and the hippies have to get together and get free space so that they can do their thing Free. If fusion is suppressed by harassment and arrest and other established sicknesses, the energy for uniting of the families will be fragmented into chaos and violence.
+Hippie here is your answer from radio and tv:
CENSORED vocalization (can you imagine that you can't say FUCK? If you say that little sound, the sick ones press a little button to make sure that it doesn't go through the delicate communication lines.)
EDITORALIZED film clips that spread prejudice and death, not understanding! or awareness! Programming, tasteless middle-aged minds (witness Michael McClure's half-hour television program. He was told that he would be the sole narrator of a documentary on H-A, uninterrupted by commercials. It came on at ten-thirty with commercials and with a second narrator who imposed such words as "CRIMINAL" "DEGENERATE" and emphasized merchandise objects rather than the spirit and true values of the people) can you imagine where these people are at?
+Hippie-here is your answer from magazines and newspapers:
from LIFE, TIME, RAMPARTS, LOOK, NEWSPEAK
reporters that filter and try to freeze the Hippie free-spirit into the sick concepts of leadership, structure, control, efficiency, etc. (where are these people at? hee hee)
[reverse side:]
And now you see I.B.M. secretaries with bells around their necks, wearing machine-psychedelic dresses
(CAN YOU IMAGINE WHERE THEY'RE AT?)
Hippie - here is your answer from the merchants:
The store's business is better than ever — SELLING SELLING SELLING "authentic" Hippie belle and beads, misrepresenting our beliefs and fucking up our values —
FREENOW
SELLING to susceptible tourists to our new brothers and sisters who are still prisoners in the dungeon of the Establishment — still chained to the system that tries to buy and sell love and happiness — the confused system of frustrated, tangled minds —
[another character map made up of $$$ signs and the words: IT SELLS with interspersed lower case words throughout:]
deductions
bonds
economize
profits
proceeds
stocks
shares
expenses
etc.
(where in the Hell are they at?)
AND IT SELLS!!!!
Store merchants, what are you going to do with the money?
Rock bands merchants are travelling all over the United States, having radio, television, and newspaper interviews, and making more money than ever — WHOOPEE!!!
Rock bands, what are you going to do with the money?
Dance merchants, what are you going to do with the money?
Drug dealer merchants — you are facing the same problems as the dance merchants. Gangsters are buying their way into the rock dance and drug scene. Are you going to give us a way to distinguish between you and the gangsters and Establishment merchants?
AND WHAT ARE YOU GOING TO DO WITH THE MONEY?
The Hippies have a lot of ideas — what we need most now most of all is space — FREE space. The only thing you merchants can do with money is buy land from the Establishment and set it free — buy land, and invite people to be free on it.
Ca. Summer 1967. This appears to be an early version of "Mutants Commune" which appeared in the Berkeley Barb, August 1967.
INMATES
break out of the mental institutions
break out of the mental institutions
break out of the break out of the mental institutions of political systems
(police, power, coercion, manipulation, control)
break out of the mental institutions of economic systems
(money, compulsory consumption, efficiency, property, monopoly)
break out of the mental institutions of education systems
(language conditioning, censoring, diploma-con, self-righteousness)
break out of the mental institutions of military systems
(violence, force, terrorism, national guard)
break out of the mental institutions of religious systems
(sacredness, secretness, sin, and guilt)
break out of the mental institutions of language systems
(mass syntax , mass morphology, mass phonology, mass semantics)
free you are open people not to be closed into the mental institution systems
revolve your head and nervous system, do acid, spinspiril. do yourself. create free forms.
do your free thing.
freeall
freall
f real 1
MILITARY institutional systems are horizontal and vertical heirarchies frozen for coordinating programmed corpses. (soldiers) giving you the alternatives of either killing and burning people to death or going to jail for not obeying the established authorities — the general idols
EDUCATIONAL institutional systems are horizontal and vertical heirarchies frozen for coordinating programmed corpses. (students) giving you the alternatives of either successful mental programming and physical conditioning or jail until you're 16 and guilt forever after for not obeying established authorities — the teacher idols
ECONOMIC institutional systems are horizontal and vertical heirarchies frozen for coordinating programmed corpses. (workers) giving you the alternatives of either becoming a workable tax paying efficiency freak or going to jail for vagrancy (no money) for not obeying established executive idols
POLITICAL institutional systems are horizontal and vertical heirarchies frozen for coordinating programmed corpses. (citizens) giving you the alternatives of either voting for war, monopolies, police, and the national guard or politics is death for not obeying established president idols
RELIGIOUS institutional systems are horizontal and vertical heirarchies frozen for coordinating programmed corpses. (members of the multitude) giving you the alternatives of either believing in their gods or being condemned to doo-doo land for not obeying established idol orders
[reverse side]
digger food novas have been doing since sept 66.
nova or novas doing food thing one or two or many days in same or different place with same or different facilities. the days no nova does…..no free food in park
music novas
doing together exploding and re free forming or free splitting
novas are constellations of people who voluntarily free form — the alternative to groups that are hired to function in the mental institutional systems. novas are freely open to all all the time in all ways forever. move. flex. pulse. expand. inpand. grow.
closed seniorized heirarchical institutional systems physical and mental are death.
kings, presidents, generals, mothers, teachers, executives, and other authority icons and idols are death. nova and novas are born free and die free as doing is done. be. be. be free. freely choose nova or novas. find natural identity in nova, not in the planned obsolescence of mass images and plastic formulas.
FUCK the poor boy image always getting bargains and always getting over payed.
FUCK the middle boy image grey in cortivans going to college to get ahead.
FUCK the rich boy image always saying that's the way it always was and will be and one can't fiux it.
flow through novas
birth — do your thing—death. birth—do your thing. death cibernation obsoletes vertical and horizontal heirarchical people slots— credit, debts, and bankers are death. The account books are closed. dead
slot and cubicle existence is obsolete? flow open. nomads—create and recreate the novic architecture in each envir9innent
break out the confining walls—build grow relate in the electro-magnetic communes.
decentralize language—the establishment controls attitudes and opinion by using mass language and mass images censored through the mass media — API newspapers UPI images | Luce magazine syndicate images | NBC t.v. CBS images | ABC radio WOR images | Hollywood movies images
decentralize language—consciously communicate on non-verbal levels. telempathy-mime, hand gestures, body movements, babble sounds, telepathy.
decentralize language—each community should have a language that is continually and rapidly fluxing. language created from own environment and situations. any crowd-be-in |any cop-Guerrins | free form-nova |communication company-c.c. |Maverick-straight Oracle
term paper:
the relationship between poetry and revolution has lost its ambiguity — gregory corso's poem POWER was the sole reason behind the
concept of the Diggers: autonomy.
The issue is no longer the status of an american minority, but the status of America. the diggers are a rebellion against commodities and the hierarchy of commodity values.
Through FREE diggers expose the lie of the oppressive rationality of commodities and affirm their human superiority.
THE ROAD OF EXCESS LEADS TO THE PALACE OF WISDOM. when it is no longer bought with money, the commodity lies open to criticism and modification.
affluence is by no means natural or human, it is simply an abundance of goods. the cops' job is to make sure that a commodity maintains the magical property of having to be paid for instead of becoming a mute, passive, insensible, submissive thing. how do men make history starting from the pre-established conditions to persuade them not to take a hand in it/
WATTS DROP-OUTS DIGGERS FREE
freedom now is for the first time not freedom from poverty, but freedom from material abundance.
WE demand the control of abundance, not just the changing way it is shared out, but the
redefining its every orientation, superficial and profound alike. this is the first skirmish in an enormous struggle, infinite in its implications….
THE BLACKS, isolated for so long in their struggle, are not alone any longer a new consciousness is forming in america — the consciousness of not being the master of one's activity, of one's life, in the slightest degree. WE all refuse modern capitalism and communism and ism and ismismismsimk WE express a disgust for affluence and its price WE are the advanced sector whose autonomous activity denies its values
INTEGRATION for the BLACK man is absurd because intergration ne plus ultra of all intergration promised is intergration into a system of isms
WE are the products of modern induotry and are repulsed by the material paradise. Commodities are universal and as the world of commodities is based on class conflict they are hierarchic and we all live within that universal hierarchisation.
the Diggers have proven the communal possibility of living without having to earn wages or hire yourself to the highest bidder. other groups should pool their resources and
stick with it for the holding action….soon there will be organic communes all over the world and anyone is welcome.————
Western society has destroyed itself. the culture is extinct.
Politics are as dead as the culture. capitalism, communism, socialism are political confrontations and are meaningless.
BE SICKENED BY THE ONCOMING MASS STARVATION AND CONCOMITANT REVOLTING DEGREE OF OVERPOPULATION AND THE ACCOMPANYING PRODUCTION OF INCREDIBLE NUMBERS OF USELESS PHYSICAL OBJECTS WHOSE RAW MATERIALS DEMAND A DESTRUCTION OF THOSE PARTS OF NATURE WE KNOW AS BEAUTIFUL
EACH MAN IS INNOCENT BUT THE POINT OF LIFE IS NOT REST BUT ACTION.
DEATH IS REST. EVERYONE WILL HAVE ENOUGH REST FOR ETERNITY
NOW IS THE TIME FOR ACTION
THE WORLD MUST BE SEEN CLEARLY
create alternatives…turn people onto their own creative powers….
the public is any fool on the street and power is standing on a streetcomer waiting for no one
AND WE ARE NOT GUILTY
WE ARE LIVING CREATURES
kill voyeurism.
the colombia encyclopedia.
This manifesto is one of the core foundational Digger texts (imho). Written by Billy Digger and illustrated by Billy Batman (both
anonymously) it first appeared in the Berkeley Barb in August 1967. In part it
was a "long poetic essay about American materialism corrected by Haight-Ashbury
culture, including free" (DTF)
and reported what had been accomplished in the Free community
since its inception the previous fall 1966. It is also a blueprint for creating
a new social form of "free novas" meaning the communal groupings that had
developed in the wake of the Summer of Love. In that sense it reads like the
utopian visions of the 17th
century Diggers
INMATES fellow mutants
break out of the mental institutions
break out of the mental institutions
break out of the mental institutions.........political systems
[typewriter graphic "DEATH" made up of the words: police power, control,
manipulation, coercion, death]
break out of the mental institutions.........economic systems
[typewriter graphic "DEATH" made up of the words: money monopoly, property,
compulsory consumption, efficiency, money death]
break out of the mental institutions.........education systems
[typewriter graphic "DEATH" made up of the words: censoring conditioning,
righteousness, intelligence censoring, diploma conditioning]
break out of the mental institutions.........military systems
[typewriter graphic "DEATH" made up of the words: force, violence,
terrorism, national
guard, death]
break out of the mental institutions.........religious systems
[typewriter graphic "DEATH" made up of the words: guilt (sin), sacredness, secretness, sin, death]
break out of the mental institutions.........language systems
[typewriter graphic "DEATH" made up of the words: mass syntax, abcde, mass
phonology, mass morphology death, mass syntax, mass semantics]
break out of the mental institutions.........mafia systems
[typewriter graphic "DEATH" made up of the words: heroin, prostitution,
money, sex, gambling, betting, opium, loan sharking]
break out of the mental institutions.........family systems
[typewriter graphic "DEATH" made up of the words: alimony, divorce, marriage,
two-people-family, adultery, death]
FREE YOU ARE OPEN PEOPLE NOT TO BE CLOSED
INTO THE MENTAL INSTITUTIONAL SYSTEMS.
mutants revolve your head and nervous system. do acid. do the holy cities.
spinspiril. do yourself and bod. create free forms. novas. do free.
freeall
freal
f real l
[end cover page]
1750 ECONOMIC institutional systems are horizontal and vertical pyramid
hierarchies boxed and frozen for coordinating programmed corpses. (workers)
G.M. A.T.&T. Dow giving you the wheeler-dealer alternatives of becoming a
workable taxpaying efficiency gnome or going to jail for vagrancy (no money) for
not obeying established leader authorities?he pop executive idol images.
1919 FAMILY institutional systems are horizontal and vertical pyramid
hierarchies boxed and frozen for coordinating programmed corpses. (households)
father mother grandparents giving you the "my how you've grown" alternatives
of following in the footsteps of dear old dad's and mom's together head or being
sent out into the world without any cookies for not obeying established leader
authorities?he pop mom-dad team idol images.
1854 POLITICAL institutional systems are horizontal and vertical pyramid
hierarchies boxed and frozen for coordinating programmed corpses. (citizens)
Rep. Dem. Blk. Panthers giving you the "a vote for me is a vote for you"
alternatives of voting for war, monopolies, police, and the national guard or
being totally non-represented for not obeying established leader authorities?he
pop president idol image.
prehistoric MILITARY institutional systems are horizontal and vertical
pyramid hierarchies boxed and frozen for coordinating programmed corpses.
(soldiers)
army navy air force giving you the "go get 'em" alternatives of burning and
killing people or going to jail for not obeying established leader
authorities?he pop general idol images.
1860 EDUCATIONAL institutional systems are horizontal and vertical pyramid
hierarchies boxed and frozen for coordinating programmed corpses. (students)
Harvard Yale Vassar M.I.T. giving you the "rah rah" alternatives of
successful mental programming and physical conditioning or jail until you're
sixteen and guilt forever after for not obeying established leader
authorities?he pop teacher idol images.
1367 RELIGIOUS institutional systems are horizontal and vertical pyramid
hierarchies boxed and frozen for coordinating programmed corpses. (members of
the multitude)
Catholic Jewish Protestant giving you the blessed alternatives of believing
in their gods or being condemned to doo-doo land for not obeying established
leader authorities?he pop god-representative idol images.
1936 GANGSTER institutional systems are horizontal and vertical pyramid
hierarchies boxed and frozen for coordinating programmed corpses. (big wheels)
Mafia Cosa Nostra small-time hood giving you the bang-bang alternatives of
paying 6 for 5, house rates and rakes or getting beat up or shot for not obeying
established leader authorities?he pop good bad guy idol images.
GET OUT OF THE RECTILINEAR BOXED STRAIGHT
LINE 1600's STATIC CARTESIAN COORDINATE SYSTEMS. HELP EACH OTHER DYNAMICALLY
FLOW TOGETHER AND APART IN POST ATOMIC, POST RELATIVITY FREE FORM ONE TO ONE
NOVAS
presidents, kings, generals, mothers, teachers, executives, gangsters, and
other leader authority icons, idols, and images are death. nova and novas are
born free and die free as doing is done. be. be. be free. freely choose nova or
novas. find natural identity in nova, not pre-fabricated identity in plastic
formulas and mass planned obsolete images.
FUCK the poor boy image always getting bargains and always working
overtime. CLASS.
FUCK the middle boy image grey in cortivans going to college to get a
head. SUCCESS.
FUCK the rich boy image always saying that's the way it always was and
will be and one can't flux it. ADORABLE.
combine in one to one relations-novas.
novas are constellations of people who voluntarily free form?he alternative
to groups that are hired to function in the mental institutional systems. novas
are freely open to all all the time in all ways forever. move. flex. pulse.
undulate. expand. inpand. grow.
one to one is confronting each thing and situation as itself, as specific, as
unique, free, open, flowing, changing, dynamic, on the wing, mysterious,
infinite-sided, beyond reference. being. beyond games of power, property, force,
guilt, money.
decentralize language—The Establishment controls attitudes and opinion by
using mass language and mass images censored through the mass media·
API
newspapers UPI images
LUCE magazines U.S. News and World images
NBC t.v. CBS
images
ABC radio WOR images
COLUMBIA movies M.G.M. images
decentralize language—consciously communicate on non-verbal levels.
telempathy-mime [sic], hand gestures, facial expression, body movements, babble
sounds, telepathy. twitch.
decentralize language—each community should have a language that is
continually and rapidly fluxing. language created from own environment and
situations.
any crowd-be-in
any cop-Guerrins
free form-nova
communications company-c.c.
There exists a lag between the psyche of the leader authorities, controlling the
great-grandfather mental institutions, and the psyche of the fuck-leader youth
trying to be free in the cybernated-pill-acid-missile technological environment
they have no free in.
The leader authorities are agents of the death penalty.
The fuck-leader youth
want to open life.
The leader authorities command work and inductions under
penalty of jail.
The fuck-leader youth want voluntary novas.
THE FUCK-LEADER YOUTH SEARCHER AND MAKER OF VOLUNTARY LIFE IS A MUTANT.
mutation-n. (ME.; mutacion; L. mutation/to change) change under threat of
extinction maybe. chromosome flux. a discreet change. abrupt. snap. drop off.
drop out.................. open...................flow
a mutant is a hippie is an automation 1916 1942 computer acid 1943 t.s. 1938
the pill 1952 1942 missile 1945 atom-bomb youth explosion 67. always. infinite.
forever. now. ?nd changing·br>
and where are you at mr jones doe Smith? the anonymous mass institution death
trip·/p>
1854 donkey elephant political institution.
1750 industrial revolution factory institution.
1267 "who you know" union guild institution.
1860 steam heat school house institution.
1919 007 betty crocker miss clairol family institution.
prehistoric john wayne military institution.
1367 bing crosby renaissance church institution.
1936 ed g. robinson gangster institution.
1620 uncle tom institution.
and your creation is niggers (you can't tell a book by its color)
your creation is bookmakers (don't take candy from strangers)
your creation is Spellmans (god helps those who help themselves)
your creation is war (laugh and the world laughs with you)
your creation is thalidomide babies (I'll be ready as soon as I put on
my face)
your creation is juvenile delinquency (children should be seen and not
heard)
YOUR CREATION IS MASSIVE STIFF DEATH MASKED WITH EFFICIENCY STATISTICS
and you are right. right in the 1854, 1750, 1267, 1860, 1919, prehistoric,
1367, 1936, 1620, niggers, bookmakers, spellman, war, thalidomide, delinquency,
stiff death bag.
and you're afraid to change because you're afraid to face the unfamiliar the
unknown LSD
and you hide in your locked houses, cars, and offices, and you
create paranoid children.
and now you have unconsciously helped create the
mutants, the freaks.
and they will tell what you are afraid to tell.
LIFE, TIME, MENTAL AND PHYSICAL INSTITUTIONAL INSURANCE POLICIES ARE DEATH.
and they will do what you are afraid to do.
create free
give free
take free
be free
everyways
=====[end of sideways column]
GET OUT OF THE 1860 EDUCATION FORM—
the 1860 steam heat schoolhouse institution is a death form. the grammar
school-high school-university mass education-death trip. little classrooms,
cramped with sitting, suffocating children.
"Don't talk, children, sit there and listen to me for the next six hours, for
the next five days, for the next forty weeks. If you successfully pass through
the first eight years imprisonment, you can do four more years in high school.
Then, if you are intelligent, fortunate, and have money enough, you can do four
more years in a university. Then you can graduate and proudly be imprisoned in
offices, factories, and institutions throughout the world until, at long last,
you are sixty-five. Then you are free to take off more than two weeks in a row."
("Don't ask stupid questions") ("I'm busy right now")
Amen, brother.
THIS MAY BE
In a free form, the child's natural curiosity could flow. Their growth in
certain subjects which interest them would not be stunted by the compulsion to
study the same subjects with the same teacher at the same time in the same room
with students of the same age.
(IMAGE FLASH ON A SCREEN WITH THE NAME OF THE IMAGE PRINTED UNDER IT. PRESSING
KEYS TO LIGHT UP LETTERS UNDER THE PRINTED WORDS)
There are teaching machines that could start to teach two-year olds to read,
write, and type. Machines like this could be made available to every child.
If a child wanted to know about the t.v., you could take or send him to an
automated t.v. factory, where there would be classes for various levels of
instruction. A five-year old could assemble his own t.v. by inserting proper
numbered parts in their matching holes. Just like blocks. A ten-year old could
solder some parts on the chassis of the t.v. or hand-operate a machine that is
now automated. A twelve-year old could alternate various parts to get different
effects. A fourteen-old could design different sets around the same principles.
A sixteen-year old could start feeling God.
When doctors came to their house, they could inform the children of medical
realities. When plumbers come to the house, the kids could go on a plumbing
trip.
Along with the decentralized teaching of various subjects in automated factories
and from personal contact, there could be the University where all the different
elements of the community could be represented. This would offer all subjects to
all ages.
In the Haight-Ashbury community, none of these ideas were carried out in the
past year. The ideas are still a little too far out to exist under the existing
conditions. Most of the education of children came from personal contact with
people living in communes. The only developments in the Haight-Ashbury besides
personal contact were two free nursery homes and the Huckleberry House for kids
under eighteen who split from their parents.
GET OUT OF THE 1919 FAMILY FORM—
The 1919 007 betty crocker miss clairol family institution is a death form.
Marriage, responsibility for children, alimony are death. Let's do away with the
meaningless, unnecessary bullshit of "I want my kids to have more than I had",
"My kids will starve", "I don't have time to listen to your abstract ideas, I
have to support my family."
THIS MAY BE
The basic unit of the culture could be the commune instead of a house with
one man and one woman in it. The commune would not be owned by one person or one
group but it would be open to all people at all times, to do whatever they
wished to do in it.
There would be no marriage contracts, but people could still have huge
ceremonies when they met someone they dug. And if someone dug a different person
every day, he could have a different ceremony every day.
All children, from the moment they were born, would be the responsibility of
everyone, not only of the blood mother and father.
<<==>><<==>>
In the Haight-Ashbury during the last year, there was none of the shut-in
paranoid one-man-and-woman-and-children family structure. Most people lived in
communes because they were open and fun. People taught other people what they
knew, whether it was about guitars, printing presses, dope, confronting
slumlords, cooking, confronting police, raising children, painting, sex, etc.
People became aware of the hassles of living with people, and had their minds
blown by being continuously and intimately involved with ten or fifteen people.
Children were confronted with multiple character images rather than just their
mother's and father's. For most people, it was more stimulating, more open, more
knowledge-giving, more self-expressive than any other family form they had lived
in.
GET OUT OF THE 1750 ECONOMIC FORM
The 1750 industrial revolution factory institution we live in is a death
form. Really straight people, let's put it down. Let's burn all the dollars
under pots and pop popcorn together. Let's put the budget books in the archives
for future history freaks who wish to groove on the past. Let money, credit,
capital, debts, and banking flow away. For really straight people these ideas
are anachronisms.
THIS MAY BE
Production of goods can be done almost totally by machines. Free.
Distribution of goods can be done free.
dig this scene:
fifteen people getting stoned and doing their thing in some room in a commune.
someone decides to turn on the t.v. and by some weird coincidence he is staring
at channel 137. some cat in a clown outfit is in the middle of a riff about how
ten people are needed to deliver bread to a few of the free stores. so one cat
says, "Let's go down there and goof" and they split./cut
There would be an unlimited supply of some goods. These could be distributed to
individuals. There would be a limited supply of others. For example, jet planes.
These could be distributed equally to areas instead of to individuals. There
would be, say, ten jet passenger planes per county. The only restriction on the
use of the plane would be that it had to be broadcast on channel 168 at least a
half hour before it was taken. If someone tries to take the plane who doesn't
know how to fly it, we wish him lots of luck.
Services can be done free.
People performing these services wouldn't have to hurry, kill time, or be
efficient. If you wanted your car fixed, you could notify channel 438 and then
start getting the goodies necessary for the party in honor of the car mechanic
when he comes over to fix the car.
Division of labor (doing)
So many people have to be farmers . . . so many people have to be scientists . .
. so many people have to be mechanics . . . so many people have to be carpenters
. . . etc. If all things were free and people were free to do what they chose,
people would willingly and happily learn to do the things that necessarily had
to be done, in order for those conditions to continue to exist.
Value?his is the hang-up, brother mutants.
People groove on making things, giving them away, and flxing them up. It gives
people identity. You are what you do. The problem is that there is only a
limited amount of things can be made. Who is going to decide what to do with the
limited resources that exist? In the United States today, the Federal Government
makes the decision of what will be done with the resources. They do this by
appropriating 60% of the budget to the industrial-military complex. The
rationale goes that if we don't have the strongest military force, we will be
conquered by those who do, the commie bastards, whoever they are. Since 1945, no
one could conquer the United States and its allies unless the whole fucking
solar system was thrown out of balance.
<<==>><<==>>
In the Haight-Ashbury during the last year, most aspects of a free economic
form were accomplished.
PRODUCTION—There are no production plants in the Haight-Ashbury, so
there were few things produced from raw resources into finished objects. The few
exceptions have been the food grown and brought into the city from free farms,
fish brought in from fishing boats, and guitars, jewelry, etc., made out of
rocks, shells, and wood.
DISTRIBUTION—Almost every kind of article has been distributed free in
the Haight-Ashbury?ars, clothes, paper clips, children, television sets, record
players, ice-cream pops, bananas, LSD, cardboard boxes, ecstasy, cameras,
leather, eyebrow pencils, birth control pills, fish 'n chips, bubble gum, belly
button lint, harmonicas, rosaries, cookie makers, parking tickets, i.d.s.,
flowers, beds, sunshine, dynamite.
SERVICES—Every service has been performed free. Free food, free clothes,
free shelter, free stores, free dances, free lawyers, free doctors, free
painters, free sculptors, free engineers, free garbage collectors, free cooks,
free actors, free joint-rollers, free house-painters, free clothesmakers, free
carpenters, free mechanics, free printers, free chemists, free buses, free
firemakers, free sandalmakers, free glassblowers, free electronic bugs, free
guitar makers. Few office jobs have been done free. If all things were free,
there would be little need of office jobs.
It is beyond doubt that people will produce, distribute, and service things
free. The problem under the present conditions is getting the resources and
getting the space to use the resources free. The people who run the Avalon and
Fillmore dance halls are willing to give free dances all of the time, but
they're caught in the bag of paying rent for the space. Most of the musicians
who play in the dance halls are willing to play for free, but they need money to
pay for their equipment and to pay rent for living space.
(If we may digress for a minute?he idea of property is bullshit. someone gets
money for a piece of space on the planet earth because he says he owns it. well,
who owns the earth? if one of the flying saucer people landed and took out a
piece of stone and said that it said right there that he owned the earth, and
that everyone on it had to pay him rent, would you believe it? believe it! and
the next time the landlord comes around to collect the rent, tell him not to
worry, you already paid the rent to the saucer people.)
The same willingness to always do free applies to lawyers, carpenters, and all
the other people mentioned above, but they are hung up in the same space and
resources bag. In fact, we are all hung up in the space and resources bag. And
now we are going through the phase of doing free and doing money.
There are those who believe free and who do free all the time, but who are still
forced to be dependent on other people to freely give them space and resources.
There are those who think and say they believe free and who do free once a week
or once a month. And there are the liberals and shuck-people who think and say
they believe free, but who never do free.
The free spirit will grow when people do more free stores, free dances, free
papers, etc. In cities, towns, high-schools, and colleges throughout the United
States and the Universe.
give free take free
GET OUT OF THE 1854 POLITICAL FORM—
The 1854 donkey elephant political institution is a death form. After 113
years of success, the people in this country are where they're at. Straight
people, we don't like to have to break your stiff security, but let's dig the
cliche "it's time to change" and let's blow our brains and do more than just
change candidates?et's change from a political system to a free form. novas.
THIS MAY BE
There are only two functions of government: to protect property and to
protect people. In a free form, all property would be freely owned by all. In a
free form there would be only one limitation, one restriction, one action that
would be forbidden, one action that would be against orders, (one action that is
stupid), one action that would be unlawful:
that you cannot cause physical
restraint or damage to another person's bod, regardless of age.
As an alternative to breaking up the area of the United States into fifty
states, the area could be broken up into a thousand counties that are already
demarcated. These boundaries would be used not only for equal distribution of
goods, but also for the judging of violations against the one and only law
stated above.
If it took you twenty years to build and furnish your house, and someone wanted
to destroy it, the physical destruction of the house of which you were a
resident would imply your physical destruction. In this case, you would go
before the county judging t.v. channel 675 and you would state your case and let
the people of the county judge your case to decide whether or not the house
should be destroyed. Everyone would have the right to appeal the county judging
and appear before the national judging channel 4567.
Any violators of the one and only law would be ostracized to the state of Kansas
which would be isolated from the rest of the country. The state of Kansas might
be broken up according to the seriousness of the violation. There would be the
crime of irresponsibility creating a machine or structure that caused physical
damage, i.e., an unqualified person who built a bridge or structure that
collapsed or ran amuck. There would be the crime of distributing drugs that
cause damage to another person's bod. The crime of psychopathic killing.
<<==>><<==>>
From around September of 1966 until around April of '67, before all the national
publicity and the coming of the tourists, in the free community part of the
Haight-Ashbury, there were very few power, control, manipulation, and coercion
games. When people do free they do free. It has been learned that when you do
free, if someone tries to control, manipulate or have power over you, you just
split. When you do free, you have nothing to lose and nothing to gain. When you
do free, you have something to lose and something to gain. When you live on a
power level, you lose your freedom. When you live on a free level, you lose your
power.
The only people who try to have power over others are the stiff paranoids
wanting self-insurance. The only people who will conform to these power plays
are the mass sheep self-insurance people.
Millions of free events on individual and large novas scale have been enacted in
the last year. These free actions have generated energies of free joy to tens of
millions of people in the United States and the world. Tens of thousands of
people have lived here during the last year, free from power games and almost
totally free from violence.
Until April, we lived on the street for over a year, and we saw only one fight
and heard of only five others (not counting incidents of police brutality). If
you're wondering what this riff is about, the point is that it is totally
believable that men can live in an almost totally free environment without power
games or violent performances.
Free people have offered to do the city dog pound, the city's Farmers Market,
and the city's Weights and Measures Department for free. The Board of
Supervisors in the city of San Francisco has denied the free spirit of these
people and also denied the taxpayers the hundred thousand dollars that would
have been saved, if these doings had been done free.
And 3 free stores have been closed by the San Francisco Building Department,
dozens of free houses have been closed by the Health Department.
And bands have been busted for playing free music in the parks, and the tens of
thousands of busts made by the cops, who protected America the Beautiful from
the mutants.
The only alternatives open for these free people are either to ignore the city's
political institution or to violently attack it.
GET OUT OF THE PREHISTORIC MILITARY FORM—
The prehistoric john wayne military nationalism institution is a death form.
Being drafted into the army against one's choice is death.
THIS MAY BE
If all the institutions were made voluntary, we would become the most
revolutionary country in the world. We would become the model for every
revolution whose purpose was to free. We would need a military novas, not only
to protect free in this space, the United States, but also to help other people
to become free if we decided to do this.
There would be a rule that any military movement would have to be agreed upon by
the whole country.
<<==>><<==>>
In the Haight-Ashbury, it developed that the Hell's Angels was the military
force. And it was really, really strange, fellows, to find out that they would
just as well fuck as fight, and just as well get stoned and be friendly as
terrorize. Can you dig it?
GET OUT OF THE 1936 GANGSTER INSTITUTION—
The 1936 Mafia, Costra [sic] Nostra gangster ed g. robinson institution is a death
form. Horse-betting, card-betting, ball game-betting, number-betting,
prostitution, heroin, opium, downer dealing, loan sharking money, money-sex,
money-dope is death.
THIS MAY BE
atrophied
Before April, the Haight-Ashbury was a sort of upper-lower class district where
nothing happened in the heroin, prostitution, loan-sharking categories. A few
hippies distributed their own grass, acid, and mescaline.
Now it is t.v. radio newspaper magazine merchant paradise neon quickly spreading
along the walls for looking tourists who have ventured once again into buy-buy
land, and in the love-shuck consumer carnival emerges prostitution of a street
kind, gangland murders, underworld opium and heroin, and bits of loan-sharking.
GET OUT OF THE 1367 RELIGIOUS FORM—
The 1367 bing crosby spellman renaissance church institution is a death form.
Segregated churches of every denomination.
And the congregation parades
through the door,
nylon, girdled life virgins dressed in their sunday best
Sermons about love of your fellow man
Blessings the collection of money
And the congregation shuffles out the door,
to become soldiers.
THIS MAY BE
In the Haight-Ashbury, the origins and endings of the universe are mysterious
and unknown, which each individual has to seek out for himself. May each man see
the unknown in everything. May each man find his own God.
AND
we all had the experience, when we were in grammar school, of the
leader-authority teacher who became so oppressive and stiff that the idea spread
around the class that everyone should get up and walk out.
There was the small artistic smart kid who probably originated the idea.
He
would do it.
There was the medium-sized athletic kid who was friendly with everyone in class.
He would do it.
There was the powerful tough kid.
He would do it.
And the smart kid would confront the other smart kids and find out that they
were afraid to do it because they were afraid the teacher would get angry at
them and lower their grades. And besides, why should they do it? They were at
the head of the class and had everything to lose. The kids at the bottom of the
class goofed and were stupid and had nothing to lose.
And the athletic kid would confront the middle-grade kids, and find out that
they would do it if everyone else in the class would do it.
And the athletic kid
and the tough kid would confront the lower part of the class and find out that
they were afraid to do it because they were afraid they would flunk.
?jones brown and carmichael?
The impulse for free had been created by the stiff oppressiveness of the
teacher, but it was killed by the stiffness and oppressiveness of their own
IDENTITY.
The smart kids didn't want to lose their identity of being the smartest in the
class, and they didn't want their parents to know they were naughty in class.
The middle kids did not want to lose their identity of almost being as smart as
the smart kids and as tough as the tough kids, and they didn't want their
parents to know they were naughty in class.
The tough kids were afraid of getting the identity of being flunkees, and they
didn't want their parents to know they were naughty in class.
. . . . So they stayed in class and they stayed not free, and they insisted on
keeping their not free identities. And the girls sat there, not knowing what to
do, smiling once in awhile.
And the kids got a little older and they saw the city black man hate the middle
class white man. The middle class white man threatened the IDENTITY of the black
man. The middle class white man was better than the city black man because he
had all those cadillacs and color t.v.'s.
And the city black man threatened the
IDENTITY of the middle class white man. The middle class white man said he
believed in freedom and equality, and all he had to do was to look at that black
to know that he was a liar.
And the middle class man hates the rich man. The rich man threatens the identity
of the middle class man. The rich man is better than the middle class man
because he goes on all those groovy vacations, and has those groovy cars, and
that groovy house, and he doesn't have to worry about money after he retires.
And the rich man hates the middle class man because the middle class man
threatens his identity. The rich man dangles the jobs in front of the nose of
the middle class man and says that he can make it if he works hard enough, but
all the rich man has to do is to take one look at those middle class men to know
that he's a liar. There is only one job like that for every 30,000 middle class
men.
but on / and on / and on / and on / the Niggers threaten the identity of the
spicks / the spicks threaten the identity of the limeys / the mockies threaten
the identity of the square-heads / the square-heads threaten the identity of the
greaseballs / the greaseballs threaten the identity of the guineas / the micks
threaten the identity of the dagos
AND
the dealers threaten the identity of the musicians . . . the musicians threaten
the identity of the cops . . . the cops threaten the identity of the merchants
. . . the merchants threaten the identity of the politicians . . . the college
kids threaten the identity of the high school kids . . . the two-year old
threatens the identity of the father
everybody has something to lose—
THEIR FIXED MENTAL INSTITUTIONALIZED IDENTITY.
and all the time they choose to lose their freedom rather than their identity
And all that horseshit about leaving your wife, as if there weren't at
least one million other women you could groove with.
And all that fixed identity horseshit about leaving your blood children
as if there weren't at least a billion other kids you could groove with.
And all that fixed identity horseshit about leaving your job, as if
there weren't an infinite number of jobs you could groove with.
And all that fixed identity horseshit about cars, t.v.'s, cameras,
equipment, houses, as if you couldn't use them without owning them.
THEY COULD BE YOURS FREE, IF YOU HAD A FREE IDENTITY INSTEAD OF THE STATIC
FIXED IDENTITY WHICH YOU CLING TO.
A FREE PERSON HAS NO NEEDS, NO NECESSITIES. HE IS FREE TO CHOOSE ANY
ALTERNATIVE.
get a few tabs of acid and go into the mountains with a friend. go during the
wintertime. stay in the mountains for a couple of days and get the feel of the
country around you. then, on a bright, sunshiny day at 12 o'clock, drop some
acid. there will be the warmth of the sun, and the multiple smells, colors,
sounds, and patterns of nature. and somewhere around 5 o'clock, you will see
that the sun is about ready to go over the horizon. and you will notice that as
it approaches the horizon, it gets colder and colder. and you will become aware
that if you don't collect wood and build a fire soon, you will probably freeze
to death.
and your friend and you will build a fire and you will keep warm and
you will find that you have made it through the night.
and you will do this together for a time and you will find that you do not need
any help from your friend, and maybe you will venture out into the mountains by
yourself, and learn that the stars can give you directions.
and one night you will look up for direction and you will see that the stars are
gone. and it will start raining. and you will find a place where you can have
shelter from the rain and keep warm, and you will survive the night.
and as you go on you will become aware of the stars, and the clouds, and the
animals, and the trees, and the flowers, and the winds, and you will continue to
grow more secure in all your surroundings. you will learn where to fish, where
to trap, where to pick berries. Your efficiency and skill and security will
become greater as they feed each other. then one day you will twist and break
your ankle on a rock, and in a flash, you will reflect that you had become too
secure and self-confident.
and you'll lie there on the ground not knowing what to do
you'll lie there on
the ground in pain
you will be about to die
and then by some magic, a little old man will probably appear and he will show
you how to fix your ankle so you will be able to walk alone again. and after a
few days, you will go off alone again. a little bit stronger.
and then you will notice that there are more men who travel in the mountains and
after awhile you will become aware of where they will be about what time. and
you will form a sometimes community with them. and then one day you will
probably decide to go back to the city. and in the city you will see sheep
running around saying that they need to do that and they need this and they need
this and they need that, and you will find that they identify with things and
ideas which they do not need to identify with, even though they think they do.
and you will tell them that the only things they need are warmth, shelter, a
little food, and some clothing. and that if they know they always can have these
they can be free anywhere. that if they understand this, they can leave any
situation that a free man can fulfill all his needs if he has to.
maybe he's just a country boy.
and maybe he can become a city boy, if the city
people want to be free.
The revolutionaries talk about the unbearable conditions of poverty, ghettos, no
jobs, collapsing family structures, brutal police forces, etc. They concentrate
on all the unbearable conditions outside to each individual. And the politicians
for millennia have been saying "Don't worry, folks, things will be better in the
future. Heaven, Paradise, and Utopia are just around the program before your
eyes. We are trying, trying, the world can't be free, you know." And
descriptions, explanations, and promises are sometimes well intended and true,
but they grossly miss the point.
You can stick a gun in his hands, and fulfill the IMAGE of a man.
You can
stick a girl in his arms, and fulfill the IMAGE of a lover.
You can stick
money in his pockets, and fulfill the IMAGE of success.
You can stick a suit
on his back, and fulfill the IMAGE of dignity.
You can stick a t.v. before his
eyes, and fulfill the IMAGE of being informed.
And you can give him a house, a
job, radios, cars, refrigerators, telephones and fulfill the image of being
affluent
BUT
the only thing that will make him free in nitty-gritty marrow soul is the
knowing that he can take care of all his needs himself. Alone. Only then will he
have the alternatives of either being with someone or not.
Each individual has to have no needs, no necessities, in order to be free. This
is impossible, since he is a living organism. So he has to travel second best.
He has to know that he can fulfill his necessary needs of food, clothing,
shelter, and warmth. When he can fulfill all those needs alone, he can leave any
situation and the identity that goes with the situation, knowing that he hasn't
lost anything, that he will survive, and that he is still free.
The world is filled with horrors because people identify with gripping images
which they think they need to become. They viciously struggle for objects and
situations that will make the image become reality. They rationalize it and set
up rules to make leaders who have power.
Power is the ability to execute or throw someone in jail for not obeying
established leader authorities. DEATH. It may be that people could INFLUENCE
people. INFLUENCE. In fluid. Flowing. A geographical area where all objects,
where all groups, were voluntary. nova. Where each individual knew within
himself that he could fulfill all his needs without being trapped by identity.
BEING.
Amen, brother
FREE
[end]
2020-07-14. Corrected some spacing and formatting in the text. The original
was typewritten in a poetic free form style. Translating to HTML required a
modified format.
