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There wasn't a sound in the huge main hall of the Roundhouse for a full thirty seconds or more. Nobody even moved. Then, all at once, it exploded with the fury of one thousand persons who thought they'd been had, been messed over, come out on the short end of a dirty deal! They directed their rage at Emmett who got his ass out of there real quick, and then they completely flipped, breaking things up, setting stuff on fire, and spilling their anger outside onto the street where they began fighting with those few who thought that Emmett Grogan had showed them just how jive rhetoric really was by putting them all on, beautifully.

Emmett was still laughing the next day when he returned to the Roundhouse for a discussion workshop that was arranged by those few hundred radicals who dug what he taught them about themselves and revolution. They wanted to learn anything else he could teach them before he left later that afternoon on his week-long return trip to the United States through more than a dozen cities in six or seven countries.

So he opened up his bag of experience, showing them everything he knew that wasn't supposed to be kept secret, and closed the bag by advising them that some of Adolf Hitler's early speeches weren't bad or wrong at all. It was just another case of people ". . . picking up on the singer and not the song, which, of course, usually blows the singer's mind, like it did Schicklgruber's who began to take seriously the lunacy of his own fantasies and proceeded to actualize them, using the people as his pawns. I mean, the cat knew they were digging him and the way he said things, rather than what he had to say. He was all he had to say, as far as they were concerned! You can see that in any old newsreel film clip of him standin' up at some podium in the middle of a few hundred thousand screamers and all he's sayin' is numbers! EINS! ZWEI! DREI! You know what I mean?"

What Emmett did best was advise communes or collectives of black or white or yellow or brown or pink radical street people on how to get whatever they needed, how to get themselves economically together to continue their work. After the conference, he spent a rush-hour week, flying around to all the different countries of Europe on the same tourist class ticket for his return flight to New York. He visited every city where he knew something heavy was happening to meet the people responsible, like the Provos in Amsterdam; Joe the Fever in Prague; Communes #1 and #2 and the Free University in Berlin; the Mistral Bookshop and Post Office and [end page 434]

 

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