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Particular propriety, which is the cause of all wars, blood-shed, crime, and enslaving Laws, that hold the people under miserie."

It was stone idealism--something neither Billy nor Emmett had tried before but felt was needed to shake up the street's rite of purification: a purification of the young people which began with their depurification on the streets. Every few days, after dark, Emmett would sneak into the SDS office next to the Mime Troupe's studio with Billy, and they would mimeograph their handbills on the students' Gestetner without anyone knowing. Late afternoon of the following day, Emmett would walk on one side of Haight Street, and Billy down the other, giving them out.

The Digger Papers were also a reaction against the pansyness of the S.F. Oracle underground newspaper, and the way it catered to the new, hip, moneyed class by refusing to reveal the overall grime of Haight-Ashbury reality. Essentially, however, the Papers were an attempt to antagonize the street people into an awareness of the absolute bullshit implicit in the psychedelic transcendentalism promoted by the self-proclaimed, media-fabricated shamans who espoused the tune-in, turn-on, drop-out, jerk-off ideology of Leary and Alpert. The first paper successfully antagonized the acid community with its mocking refrain: "Time to forget because flowers are beautiful and the sun's not yellow, it's chicken!"

Another and probably the most famous Digger Paper was a response to statements by self-appointed spokesmen, and to notices placed in shopwindows by the Haight Independent Proprietor (HIP) merchants association, which advised the people to invite policemen to share a meal with them--to build up better community relations with the force. It said:

Take a Cop to Dinner Cop a Dinner to Take a Cop Dinner Cop a Take

Mr. Answer Man

what is

a weapon Why a cunt

worse which is

ten times ten times

worse, larger

than the than the largest Degoutante,

Hydrogen cock said Mickey

Bomb~ extant, kissing cops.

Mickey. to hedge the bet.

[end page 238]

 

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