While serving five years in a California prison for growing medical marijuana, Todd McCormick contributed a couple of stories--about his experiences with psilocybin and ketamine--to my anthology, Magic Mushrooms and Other Highs: From Toad Slime to Ecstasy, and when it was published, I immediately sent him a copy.  But the warden rejected it “because on pages 259-261, it describes the process of squeezing toads to obtain illicit substances which could be detrimental to the security, good order and discipline of the institution.”
This was pure theater of cruelty.  Federal correctional facilities do not have a toad problem, and outside accomplices have not been catapulting loads of toads over barbed wire fences to provide the fuel for a prison riot. McCormick wrote to me, “Can you believe this shit!  I wonder how much we pay the guy/girl who actually sits and reads every book that comes in for offending passages.  How about you tear out pages 259-261 and re-send this book back with a copy of the rejection and a notation that the offending pages have been removed.”
Which is exactly what I did.  This time, though, my cover letter to the warden was ignored, and the book was returned, stamped “Unauthorized.”  I had called their bluff.  Obviously, McCormick was being punished simply because he could be.  I then corresponded with several prison correspondents around the country to find out what inmates had not been allowed to read.  I wanted to see other examples of arbitrary and frivolous censorship by prison personnel.  Here are some results of my informal survey:
*“The Texas Department of Corrections blocked Bo Lozoff’s Breaking Out of Jail, a book about teaching meditation to prison inmates.”
*“Disallowed: Trainspotting because of its ‘glorification of drug use.’  Tom Robbins’ Still Life With Woodpecker because it has a chapter that ‘contains information about bombmaking.’”
*“An inmate couldn’t get nude pictures of his wife sent to him but he could get a subscription to Playboy.  The rationale: A wife deserved more respect.”
*“They kept out The Anarchists Cookbook. And no kiddie porn, no tales or photos suggesting sex with a guard, no photos showing frontal or rear nudity--not even a wife or friend.”
*“The Utah prison system banned Rolling Stone as being an anarchist publication.”
*“A Revolution in Kindness is banned from the Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola as ‘a threat to internal security.’  It was intended for Herman Wallace, who contributed an essay about how he organized a chess tournament on his cellblock as a way of easing tensions and minimizing violence between inmates.  Wallace is one of the Angola Three, Black Panthers who have been in solitary confinement for [more than three decades] trying to improve conditions in the ‘bloodiest prison in America’ in the early 1970s.”
*“All hardback books forbidden, because the covers could be fashioned into weapons.  Educational textbooks--a new rule precludes prisoners on Death Row [including this particular prisoner] or in lockdown from taking correspondence courses--and I’ve had a couple of books returned to sender on the claim they appeared to be for a course.  MAPS [Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies]--their publication was sent back several times because maps are not allowed in here.  High Times was repeatedly denied because it posed a danger to the safe, secure and orderly operation of the institution.  ‘Smut mags’ like Hustler are reviewed monthly.”
*“There’s a whole new genre of men’s magazines--Maxim, Stuff, For Him--which show it all except for nipples and beaver.  Now the feds want to ban Maxim due to ‘security’ reasons.  The ‘rejected mail’ slip they send you when some verboten material arrives has boxes to check (to specify offending matter), one of which says ‘pubic hair.’”
*“Peace activist William Combs spent eight days in solitary confinement for receiving and sharing with other inmates what federal authorities consider disruptive, if not subversive, political literature.  The offending ‘propaganda’ included commentary by such extremists as Bill Moyers and Ellen Goodman, and included an article published in Reader’s Digest.  The common thread was that they all questioned the wisdom of government policy.”
     The name of the game is control in the guise of security--a microcosm of the nation outside prison walls--the practice of power without compassion.
After Magic Mushrooms and Other Highs was rejected for the second time, I appealed to the Regional Director of the Bureau of Prisons (as instructed by the warden) for an independent review.  I also wrote to the ACLU.  I heard back from neither. Todd McCormick was released from prison in December 2003.  Among so many other things to catch up on, he would finally be able to read what he had written.  However, he was discharged to a halfway house, where all his books and magazines were confiscated as “paraphernalia.”
Postscript: Prisoners at a jail in South Carolina are being denied any reading material other than the Bible. In May 2011, the ACLU asked a federal judge to block enforcement of that policy. A staff member at the prison told plaintiff Prison Legal News: “Our inmates are only allowed to receive soft back bibles in the mail directly from the publisher. They are not allowed to have magazines, newspapers, or any other type of books.” There is no library there, and since 2008, all copies of Prison Legal News that were sent to prisoners have been “returned to sender.”
In July 2017, the national Human Rights Defense Center organization has filed a federal lawsuit against the Kentucky Department of Corrections for violating free speech. It has unconstitutionally blocked the delivery of many books to state prisoners, including the Prisoner Diabetes Handbook, the Merriam-Webster Dictionary of Law, and the Prisoners Self-Help Litigation Manual. 
Welcome to Camp Mogul

My irreverent friend, Khan Manka, Chairman & CEO of Manka Brothers Studios, had broken his ankle and was afraid he wouldn’t be able to attend the 26th annual gathering of the nation’s most powerful executives and their trophy wives in Sun Valley, Idaho.  I really wanted to spy on this 2008 summer camp for billionaires, so I suggested that Manka get a wheelchair, then I could serve as his official wheelchair pusher, and he immediately went for the idea.
	This by-now traditional five-day extravaganza for three hundred guests was hosted by Wall Street investment banker Herbert Allen, President and CEO of Allen & Company.  There were moguls all over the campground, overflowing with the country’s most influential leaders in business, entertainment and media.  I could feel myself developing a severe case of imposter syndrome.
Saturday was Talent Night, and it was absolutely hysterical.  Part-time Sun Valley resident Tom Hanks served as the emcee.  Warren Buffett was the opening act, performing a medley of Jimmy Buffett songs, all rendered out of tune.  Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos skillfully juggled five Kindles (wireless electronic books).  Edgar Bronfman from Warner Music--dressed like the character Tevya in Fiddler on the Roof--sang with zest, “If I Were a Rich Man.”  Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang--who had previously turned down an offer from Microsoft to buy Yahoo--sang a duet with the ex-CEO of Microsoft, Bill Gates, harmonizing on a song from Annie Get Your Gun, “Anything You Can Do, I Can Do Better.”  Meg Whitman of EBay did a striptease, auctioning off each item of clothing, one at a time, and over 3 million dollars was raised for an unnamed charity.  Oracle Corp. CEO Larry Ellison gave a hilarious lecture on “How to Destroy Evidence and Make False Statements.”
There had been a lot of drinking in the evening, and it was obviously too much booze that loosened up Fox mogul Rupert Murdoch’s tongue.  He was shouting at the moon: “Who says there are twenty-seven million slaves around the world?  And where the fuck can I get one?  How would anybody know it’s twenty-seven million anyway?  Do they have census takers or what?  You tell me!  I’ll decide!”
Also, a screaming match broke out between Google co-founder Sergei Brin and Google CEO Eric Schmidt, over the infamous cover of the New Yorker, which depicted Barack and Michelle Obama as the new President and First Lady, a terrorist couple doing that fist-bump gesture in the Oval Office.  Sergei thought it was a brilliant satirical illustration, but Eric thought it was racist and irresponsible.
Last year, the surprise guest was former British Prime Minister Tony Blair.  This year, it was Steven Beschloss, the editor of a new magazine, scheduled to be launched in October 2008 and be delivered to 100,000 U.S. households with an average net worth of $25 million.  There were piles of preview copies scattered about.
While Beschloss was holding court in an outdoor area, annoying mosquitoes kept buzzing around the crowd.  Mark Zuckerberg, the founder of Facebook, yelled at him, “I guess we’ll never hear your readers whining about a mental recession.  And those of your subscribers who were in the sub-prime mortgage industry--these mosquitoes are their fault, because, along with all the home foreclosures they’re responsible for, the stagnant water in abandoned pools turns into new breeding grounds for mosquitoes.”
Someone yelled out, “Where are you from, In-Your-Facebook?”  Others drowned out Zuckerberg’s apparently serious rant by singing the mogul version of a couple of good old-fashioned camp songs, “This Land Is My Land, This Land Is My Land” and “KumBuyYahoo.”   I couldn’t help but notice that billionaire activist Carl Icahn snapped his fingers as if having an epiphany; a week later he ended up on Yahoo’s board of directors.
Khan Manka explained that the bigwigs at these events have so-called “informal” meetings which always take place where a pair of individuals can have their discussions alone without any interruption--on the golf course, hiking along an isolated trail, fly-fishing at Silver Creek--but Manka had been privy to only one specific example that he could share.
“Back in 1995,” he told me, “Disney honcho Michael Eisner met with Robert Iger, who was then the head of ABC.  And exactly one month later, these two giant companies merged into one media megamonster.  Coincidence?  I don’t think so.  Their deal had been sealed when Eisner and Iger exchanged friendship bracelets that they had worked on at Camp Mogul.”










HIGHER THAN THOU

Checkmating With Pawns

It was a hot day at the chess tournament in Phoenix, Arizona—103 degrees, to be exact—and 14-year-old Nathaniel Dight was elated over his custom-made chess set. Those carved wooden pieces had been weighted precisely for the smooth moves he liked to make. Each one had been lacquered and, for this extreme heat, carefully protected by matte acrylic spray. But before the game could begin, young Nathaniel was ordered to take a urine test.
“I know why you’re doing this,” he snarled. “It’s because I’ve won three tournaments in a row, isn’t it?”
“No, son, that’s just a coincidence. This is a random drug test.”
“I don’t do any drugs. I mean like when I get a headache from playing chess too long, I won’t even take an aspirin.”
“Look, here’s a cup. I need you to go fill it, right now . . .”
All right, I confess, I made all that up, but consider the implications of something that I haven’t made up:
America’s drug czar, Barry McCaffrey, wrote in an article published in Chess Life magazine: “Research proves that mentoring youngsters and teaching them games like chess can build resilience in the face of illegal drug use and other destructive temptations. Drug testing is as appropriate for chess players as for shot-putters, or any other competitors who use their heads as well as their hands.”
Accompanying the television image of a couple of eggs sizzling in a frying pan, the phrase, “This is your brain on drugs” has always carried negative connotations, but apparently General McCaffrey has changed his mind about that. He now seems to believe that drugs can actually improve the way your brain functions.
There was an infamous chess player named Alexander Alekhine who held the world championship longer than anybody else. His games often had superb surprise endings, known in chess circles as “brilliancies.” For instance, he would checkmate with a pawn move that no sane and sober mind could ever imagine. However, he was a notorious alcoholic, and McCaffrey is only referring to illegal drugs.
“Just when I thought I’d heard it all from McCaffrey,” was the reaction of Allen St. Pierre, executive director of the NORML (National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws) Foundation. “Drug testing for chess players? What’s next from this overreaching drug czar? Drug testing for tiddlywinks players? How about bingo players?”
Moreover, McCaffrey’s proposal smacks of subliminal racism. Social psychologist Walli Leff tells me, “I think most of the movement to involve young people in chess is directed toward the African-American community, and the assumption is, if the kids are black they’re going to be drug users. I think white middle-class suburban parents would have a fit if their kids had to take drug tests for their extracurricular activities. Or am I out of it and am I missing a new, white middle-class suburban submissiveness?”
McCaffrey had been influenced by Chesschild, a group sponsored by the Office of National Drug Control Policy (ONDCP). Chesschild is a substance abuse prevention program conducted in libraries and schools, promoting a combination of drug-free lifestyles and chess.
“Policy recommendations like this one from ONDCP,” said St. Pierre, “demonstrate a deep and disturbing pathology that goes well beyond opposing drug-law reform efforts.”
Maybe the drug-law reformers should follow the example of gay-rights activists by having celebrities come out of the pot-smoking closet. Already, veteran stand-up comic George Carlin—in an interview by The Daily Show’s Jon Stewart following Carlin’s HBO special—admitted that he smokes a joint to help him “fine-tune” his material. “One hit is all I need now and it’s punch-up time.”
At the Shadow Convention that took place while the Democrats were in Los Angeles, Bill Maher revealed to the audience, “I’m not just a pot reformer, I’m a user”—something which ABC forbids him to say on Politically Incorrect—then quickly added, “Just making a light remark there, federal authorities.”
Actor and hemp activist Woody Harrelson has stated, “I do smoke.” Willie Nelson confirmed in his autobiography that he smoked pot in the White House. And on KRLA, radio talk-show host Michael Jackson’s program, Michelle Phillips, actress and former member of the Mamas and the Papas, said that she still enjoys smoking marijuana.
Just as Ellen DeGeneres appeared on the cover of TIME magazine saying, “Yep, I’m gay,” there might come a day when a presidential candidate will appear on the cover of Newsweek saying, “Yep, I’m stoned.” Isn’t that what young pot-smokers need—good role models—so they won’t be ashamed of their private pleasure seeking?
Meanwhile, drug czar McCaffrey would continue his crusade, not only against illegal substances, but perhaps also against certain food supplements, such as a popular herbal mixture with a reputation for aiding memory and concentration. Who could ever have dreamed that chess players might get in trouble for using ginkgo biloba as a performance enhancer?


Tim Leary, Ram Dass, and Me

     In 1964, I assigned Robert Anton Wilson to write a front-cover article in The Realist, which he titled “Timothy Leary and His Psychological H-Bomb.” When that issue was published, Leary invited me to visit the Castalia Foundation, his borrowed estate in Millbrook, New York.
     The name Castalia came from The Bead Game by Herman Hesse, and indeed, the game metaphor permeated our conversation. Leary talked about the way people are always trying to get you onto their game-boards. He discussed the biochemical process “imprinting” with the same passion that he claimed he didn’t believe anything he was saying, but somehow I managed to believe him when he told me that I had an honest mind.
“I have to admit,” I said, “that my ego can’t help but respond to your observation.”
“Listen,” he assured me, “anybody who tells you he’s transcended his ego . . .”
     Leary and his research partner, Ram Dass (then Richard Alpert) were about to do a lecture series on the West Coast. At the University of California in Berkeley, there was an official announcement that the distribution only of “informative” literature (as opposed to “persuasive” literature) would be permitted on campus, giving rise to the Free Speech Movement, with thousands of students protesting the ban in the face of police billy clubs.
Leary argued that such demonstrations played right onto the game boards of the administration and the police alike, and that the students could shake up the establishment much more if they would just stay in their rooms and change their nervous systems. But it wasn't really a case of either-or. You could protest and explore your 13-billion-cell mind simultaneously.
     I became intrigued by the playful and subtle patterns of awareness that Leary and Alpert manifested. If their brains had been so damaged, as mythologized by mainstream media, how come their perceptions were so sharp? I began to research the LSD phenomenon, and in April 1965 I returned to Millbrook for my first acid experience. Tim Leary was supposed to be my guide, but he had gone off to India.
     Dick Alpert was supposed to take his place, but he was too involved in getting ready to open at the Village Vanguard as a comedian-philosopher. I chatted with him for a while. He was soaking his body in a bathtub, preparing his psyche for the Vanguard gig. He had taken 300 acid trips, but there I was, a first-timer, standing in the open doorway, reversing roles and comforting him in his anxiety about entering show business.	When I told my mother about taking LSD, she was quite concerned. She warned me, “It could lead to marijuana.” And she was right. It did. 
     After Leary got arrested in Texas for possession of pot, the notoriety of his research in Millbrook spread. Law enforcement in nearby Poughkeepsie, led by Assistant District Attorney G. Gordon Liddy, raided the estate. In the summer of 1966, Leary and his associates ran a two-week seminar on consciousness expansion, culminating in a theatrical production of Hesse's Steppenwolf legend that weaved its way around the Millbrook grounds and buildings. Leary invited Liddy and members of the grand jury that indicted him, but none showed up.
Leary told me about prominent people whose lives had been changed by taking LSD: actor Cary Grant, director Otto Preminger, think-tanker Herman Kahn, Alcoholics Anonymous founder Bill Wilson, TIME magazine publishers Henry and Clare Boothe Luce. Of course, it wasn't so difficult to drop out when you had such a stimulating scene to drop into. On the day that he announced the formation of a new religion, the League for Spiritual Discovery (LSD), I signed up as their first heretic.
Alpert and I enjoyed what he called “upleveling” each other with honesty. On one occasion, we were at a party. I was particularly manic and he pointed it out, choosing an eggbeater as his analogy. I appreciated his reflection and calmed down.
     On stage at the Village Theater, Alpert was sitting in the lotus position on a cushion, talking about his mother dying and how there seemed to be a conspiracy on the part of relatives and hospital personnel alike to deny her the realization of that possibility. He also talked about some fellow in a mental institution who thought he was Jesus Christ. Conversely, I teased him about discussing his mother openly but concealing the fact that the man who thought he was Christ was his brother--death obviously carrying more respectability than craziness. At his next performance, Alpert identified the man as his brother.
*   *   *
The essential difference between Tim Leary and G. Gordon Liddy was that Leary wanted people to use LSD as a vehicle for expanding consciousness, whereas Liddy wanted to put LSD on the steering wheel of columnist Jack Anderson’s car, thereby making a political assassination look like an automobile accident. But who could have predicted that, sixteen years after the original arrest, Leary would end up traveling around with Liddy in a series of debates? 
I attended the debate in Berkeley in April 1982. Leary warned the audience that Liddy was a lawyer--“trained in the adversary process, not to seek truth. I was trained as a scientist--looking for truth, delighted to be proved wrong.” He confessed that “Liddy is the Moriarty to my Sherlock Holmes--the adversary I always wanted--he is the Darth Vader to my Mr. Spock.”
“As long as it's not Doctor Spock,” said Liddy. He argued that “the rights of the state transcend those of the individual.” Not that he was without compassion. “I feel sorry,” he admitted, “for anybody who uses drugs for aphrodisiacal purposes.”
“Gordon doesn't know anything about drugs,” countered Leary. “It's probably his only weakness.” He looked directly at Liddy. “It's my duty to turn you on,” he said, “and I'm gonna do it before these debates are over.” Then he made a unique offer: “I'll eat a rat if you'll eat a hashish cookie.”
Liddy turned down the offer--one can carry machismo only so far, and he had to draw the line somewhere--but he did provide appropriate grist for my own stand-up comedy mill. According to Liddy's book, he actually ate a rat. He did it to overcome his fear of eating rats.  Certainly a direct approach to the problem. None of that gestalt shit. Now, I'm not sure how he ate the rat, whether he just stuck it between a couple of slices of bread, or barbecued it first, or chopped the rat up and mixed it with vegetables in a stew.
     But there were rumors that when Leary and Liddy were on tour, the Psychedelic Liberation Front found out their itinerary and began feeding hash brownies to rats and releasing them, one by one, in Liddy's room at the various motels he stayed at, while he was debating, in the hope that nature would sooner or later take its course, and one night Liddy would feel in the mood for a midnight snack, catch the rat that was left in the room, eat it and, by extension, the hash brownie the rat had eaten, and then Liddy would think he got stoned from eating the rat. This would, of course, be right on the borderline on the ethics of dosing.
     *   *   *     
     Each tablet of Owsley White Lightning contained 300 micrograms of LSD. I had purchased a large enough supply from Alpert to finance his trip to India. The day before he left to meditate for six months, we sat in a restaurant discussing the concept of choiceless awareness while trying to decide what to order on the menu.
In India, he gave his guru three tablets, and apparently nothing happened. Alpert's postcard to me beckoned, “Come fuck the universe with me.” Instead, I stayed tripping in America, where I kept my entire stash of acid in a bank vault deposit box.
     Richard Alpert returned as Baba Ram Dass. Eventually, he dropped the Baba. He was now just plain Ram Dass. His father called him Rum Dum. His brother called him Rammed Ass. One afternoon he was visiting me, and I taped our conversation.
“In 1963,” I said, “I predicted as a joke that Tiny Tim would get married on the Johnny Carson show, and in 1969 it happened. You and I talked about that, and you called it 'astral humor,' but I never knew exactly what you meant by that phrase.”
“Well, it's like each plane of reality is in a sense a manifestation of a plane prior to it, and you can almost see it like layers, although to think of it in space is a fallacy because it's all the same space, but you could think of it that way. And so there are beings on upper planes who are instruments of the law. I talk about miracles a lot, but I don't live in the world of miracles, because they're not miracles to me. I'm just dealing with the humor of the miracle concept from within the plane where it seems like a miracle, which is merely because of our very narrow concept of how the universe works.”
Ram Dass knew of my involvement with conspiracy theory. “I'm just involved in a much greater conspiracy,” he continued. “You can't grasp the size of the conspiracy I understand--but there's no conspirator--it's the wrong word. That's why I say it's just natural law. It is all perfect.”
“Would you agree with the concept--what William Blake said, that humans were created 'for joy and woe'--the implication of which is that there will always be suffering?”
“I think that suffering is part of man's condition, and that's what the incarnation is about, and that's what the human plane is.”
So I asked Ram Dass, “If you and I were to exchange philosophies--if I believed in reincarnation and you didn't--how do you think our behavior would change?” He paused for a moment. “Well,” he said, “if you believed in reincarnation, you would never ask a question like that.”
     And then his low chuckle of amusement and surprise blossomed into an uproarious belly laugh of delight and triumph as he savored the implications of his own Zen answer. I would find myself playing that segment of the tape with his bell-shaped spasm of laughter over and over again, like a favorite piece of music.
Remembering Scott Kelman

     Scott Kelman had seen me perform stand-up satire at Town Hall in New York in 1962, and again twenty years later at the L.A. Stage Company in Hollywood. He moved to Los Angeles and in 1984 launched an alternative theater in the grungy, old, industrial skid-row area of downtown. He named it the Wallenboyd (at the corner of Wall and Boyd) Theater and invited me to open there as soon as it was completed.
In fact, on the first night of my performances, the crew was still banging in the final nails. At the time, I was living in San Francisco, so Scott slept at his office and I stayed at his apartment in Venice Beach. A year later, I moved to an apartment on that same block. Scott became my producer and my close friend. We never had any need for a signed contract.
     As my producer, he would occasionally give me suggestions and I would follow those that I felt worked for me. He’d say in his distinctive gravelly voice (he was addicted to cigarettes), “It doesn’t matter if you fuck up—it’s how you recover.” That was theatrical advice, but it also applied to life.
     And it was a two-way street. For Scott, whatever happened in life automatically became grist for his theatrical mill. He was an exemplary explorer. Knowing I was an unbeliever, he once asked me, “What do atheists say during sex when they come?”
     “Oh, no-God!” I responded, interspersing those words with moans and groans. “Oh, no-God! Oh, no-God! Oh, no-God!” He suggested that I expand that concept into a stage piece, and it evolved into a ten-minute meditation on the relationship between religion and orgasms.
     Scott conducted theatrical workshops, and one of his students was John Densmore, the former drummer for The Doors. “I stumbled into the downtown art scene,” Densmore told me, “after a big peak in rock’n’roll. It felt as creative as the ’60s. I now get off on the process, and it doesn’t matter if it’s fifty people at the Wallenboyd or twenty thousand at Madison Square Garden, it’s the work that rings my bell.”
     Scott also produced Peter Bergman, of the Firesign Theatre. Scott thought that Peter, Paul and Harry would be a great title for an evening of political satire at the Museum of Contemporary Art. He asked the curator if she knew of an appropriate performer named Harry. She suggested Harry Shearer. Scott asked me about him. “He’s brilliant,” I said, “let’s do it.” And so he produced a completely sold-out series that was extended for two weekends.
     But if Harry had been named after his other grandfather, there wouldn’t have been a Peter, Paul and Harry. Each of us prepared to perform in our own particular way. Peter stared at himself in the mirror and made strange sounds to exercise his vocal cords. Harry sat in a separate room where his makeup woman, who had flown in from Iowa, transformed him into Derek Smalls from the mockumentary Spinal Tap.
And I was off hiding behind some boxes, toking away on a joint of the marijuana that served as my creative fuel. Scott was sure that I performed better when I wasn’t high, and he was under the impression I was straight when he told me one night, “That was the best show you’ve ever done.” I confessed that I had smoked a giant doobie before I went onstage. The irony was that Scott sold pot to help pay the rent, and that was exactly the stash that got me stoned that night.


The 20th Anniversary of the Summer of Love

     I never went to any of my high school or college reunions, but I couldn't resist attending the twentieth anniversary of the Summer of Love in San Francisco. At noon on the summer solstice of 1987, young and middle-aged hippies--gray hair and potbellies, but not having erased a certain gleam in their eyes--were marching in an All Beings parade down Haight Street. Costumes ranged from a giant snail to Zippy the Pinhead. 
One fellow still in civilian clothes explained, “I was supposed to be Tarzan, but I had to wash the dishes.”
Local countercultural fixtures were all there: The Mime Troupe, Rosie Radiator and her fleet of tap dancers, the Automatic Human Juke Box, and a panhandler asking, “Can you spare a hundred dollars?” The buses now had posters that suggested Shop the Haight.
The charm of that entrepreneurial urge was not to be confused with the mission of the Haight-Ashbury Preservation Society, whose targets were symbolized by a walking Big Mac cheeseburger, a prisoner of Thrifty’s in chain-store chains, mock pallbearers carrying a casket to mourn the wished-for death of Round Table Pizza, a sign warning Don't Mall the Haight! and somebody in a Merlin the Magician outfit with a placard, You don't need magic to fight the franchising. A lone, sad-faced clown bore a banner with a white dove in a red heart.
In Golden Gate Park, an emcee asked the crowd a series of rhetorical questions to rev them up: “How many people were here in the sixties? . . . How many are here now? . . . How many don't know? . . . How many don't care?” A musician announced, “We were told not to have amplifiers, but we decided to break the law today.” Hog Farmer Sharon Share-alike offered her roll of hard candy to novelist Herb Gold, which immediately aroused his fear of dosing. He asked, “These really are Life Savers, right?”
The Summer of Love reunion continued at the I-Beam, a disco on Haight Street. On stage, I compared the decades:
    In the sixties, marijuana was ten dollars an ounce. In the eighties, it's three hundred. In the sixties, teenagers used to hide their pot smoking from their parents. In the eighties, parents have to hide it from their kids. In the sixties, the favorite chemical drug was LSD. In the eighties, it's Ecstasy. In the sixties, Ken Kesey wasn't allowed to donate blood because he had ingested acid. In the eighties, there are those who are afraid to get a blood transfusion because of AIDS. In the sixties, Lenny Bruce got arrested for saying “cocksucker” on stage. In the eighties, Meryl Streep got an Academy Award for saying it in Sophie's Choice. Now, almost the entire audience at a Grateful Dead concert is younger than the number of years the band has been together--but these kids have less deconditioning to go through than we did. They have less innocence to lose. 

    When a group of students and other protesters, including Abbie Hoffman and Amy Carter (the president’s daughter), won their case against CIA recruiting on campus by using a “necessity defense,” attorney Leonard Weinglass told me that the turning point for the jury was the testimony of Ralph McGehee, who revealed how he had been recruited right off the football field by the CIA, only to become a star player in their assassination-squad program. Members of the jury would not have voted that way in the sixties because they weren't prepared to believe such testimony as they are in the eighties. 

    In the sixties, we knew that the CIA was smuggling heroin from Southeast Asia. And in the eighties we know that they're smuggling cocaine from Central America. The same planes that fly weapons for the contras to airports in Panama, Honduras and Costa Rica come back to Florida, Louisiana and Arkansas with their cargoes filled to the brim with cocaine, even though the administration is carrying on its anti-drug campaign. The pilots only have to be careful to evade the radar screen. So while Nancy Reagan is saying, “Just say no,” the CIA is saying, “Just fly low.”

Meanwhile, the quality of co-option had not been strained. The slogan “Today is the first day of the rest of your life” was used in a TV commercial for Total breakfast cereal. Tampax promoted its tampon as “Something over thirty you can trust.” Beatles songs were used to sell cars, or, if you preferred to walk, they also sold sneakers. Time magazine was being peddled by the Byrds' version of Pete Seeger's song, “Turn, Turn, Turn”--based on Ecclesiastes—t here's a time for this and a time for that, get it?
The Youngbloods once sent a copy of their song “Get Together” to every member of Congress and the Senate, with a suggestion that it be established as the new national anthem, but who could ever have guessed that it was really destined to become a jingle in a jeans commercial? Or that a Jefferson Airplane song would be used in a bank commercial? Or that Timothy Leary would model a Gap shirt for a full-page ad in Interview, and Ram Dass would peddle a rejuvenating skin cream at a Saks Fifth Avenue counter? People magazine was selling the twentieth anniversary of the Summer of Love with a feature story set off by a double-paged cover with psychedelic artist Peter Max's signature on both pages.
In red spray paint, on a brick wall just off Haight Street, standing out among the graffiti like John Hancock's signature on the Declaration of Independence, this message summed it all up: Love Is Revenue.












                         POLITICS









The Last Election

The Republicans’ party line that Barack Obama was “palling around with terrorists” didn’t work, although some people believed it because then they wouldn’t need a racist reason not to vote for Obama. Next, the campaign acted as though his advocacy of age-appropriate sex education for kindergarteners meant putting condoms on cucumbers. That didn’t work, either. Then John McCain tried calling him a “socialist.” Also didn’t work. Ironically, Socialist Party candidate Norman Thomas ran for president six times, and never won, but every one of his platform planks were eventually adopted by Democrats and Republican administrations alike. They just didn’t call it socialism.
In January 2009, Christian broadcaster Pat Robertson stated that God told him America is headed for veritable socialism as well as an economic rebound under President-elect Obama. “What the Lord was saying,” he claimed, “the people are willing to accept socialism to alleviate their pain. Cast off all the gloom and the doom because things are getting ready to turn around. I say with humility, I hope I’ve heard the Lord. I spend time praying and asking him for wisdom, and if there’s a mistake, it’s not his fault, it’s mine.” Humility in action.
In any case, one of the factors in Obama’s win was indeed the confidence-destroying financial crisis, and now he faces a food chain of euphemisms. Hey, is this like the Great Depression? Nah, it’s not a depression, it’s only a recession. Wait, it’s not a recession, it’s just an economic downturn. No, it’s not an economic downturn, it’s a correction. Oops, it’s not a correction, it’s an adjustment. Hurry, get me a chiropractor. Similarly, there’s a food-chain of solutions to the problem. From the Troubled Asset Relief Program to the Bailout Bill to the Rescue Package to the Emergency Economic Stability Act to Alan Greenspan confessing “My bad” to Free Botox for Everybody.
Perhaps the most bizarre byproduct of the campaign began with an anonymous ad on Craigslist, headlined: “Need Sarah Palin Lookalike ASAP for Adult Film.” The pay would be $3,000 and, it was duly noted, “No anal required.” This porn flick, it turned out, would be shot by Hustler Video, and no, Tina Fey did not apply for the job. The climactic scene was a threesome with Sarah Palin, Condoleezza Rice and Hillary Clinton.
Hillary was played by veteran porn star and sex educator Nina Hartley, who told me that “The big hullabaloo over the movie is being generated by feminists from both the pro- and anti-porn sides. They're up in arms that ‘women are being non-consensually satirized’ by Big Evil Porn, and The Big Bad Larry Flynt. The usual nonsense from the usual suspects. Even some pro-porn feminists are upset at Palin being ‘targeted’ by porn. They conveniently overlook the fact that most porn satirizes white men in power: politicians, police, professors. Most recent case in point, The Elliot Splizter Story . . .”
Who’s Nailin’ Paylin was ready for release before the election, as was an issue of the horror comic book Tales From the Crypt, which featured on the cover a painting of Sarah Palin swinging her hockey stick to disperse the Vault-Keeper and other ghoulish characters as she sneeringly asks, “Didn’t we get rid of you guys in the ’50s?”--a reference to the censorship problems faced decades ago by EC Comics, the original publisher of Tales From the Crypt, and concomitantly a criticism of Palin for her “rhetorical question” about removing objectionable books from library shelves.
 However, another publisher was producing a comic-book biography of Palin that wouldn’t be released until February 2009, so two endings were prepared.  But an edition of South Park--broadcast the day after the election--took a risk with only one ending, which lampooned Obama’s victory. Co-creator Trey Parker explained, “We’re just going to make the Obama version, and if McCain somehow wins, we’re basically just totally screwed.” Likewise, Garry Trudeau gambled that Obama would win, and his syndicated Doonesbury strip--published the day after the election--depicted three soldiers in Iraq watching the returns on TV as a reporter is saying, “And it’s official--Barack Obama has won.”
Some editors were undecided about whether to publish it. Trudeau encouraged them to choose hope over fear. “If I’m wrong,” he told the Los Angeles Times, “it’ll be my face that’ll be covered with eggs, not theirs.” Times editors had decided, in the interest of accuracy, to wait for the election results, and if Obama won, they would publish the strip on Thursday, but then they must have realized it was just a comic strip, not investigative journalism, and they published it on Wednesday after all.
Trudeau thought that newspapers should run the strip because “polling data gives McCain a 3.7% chance of victory.” Indeed, a week after Obama’s win, McCain himself admitted to Jay Leno, “I can read the polls--they tried to keep ’em from me.” There were dozens of polls, from ABC to Zogby, and, psychographic sophistication aside, they didn’t always exactly agree. For example, in Nevada during the last week of October, one poll put Obama’s lead at 12%, another at 7%, another at 5% and two others at 4%, which meant that, given the margin of sampling error, McCain could conceivably have been slightly ahead. This, then, was the last presidential election. In the future, you’ll only need to vote for the pollster that you trust the most.
During the 1968 Democratic convention in Chicago, I was among 15,000 protesters who had gathered in Grant Park for a rally when the police, triggered by the actions of one of their own provocateurs, attacked the demonstrators and sadistically beat as many as they could reach. It seemed impossible that we could ever work within the system. But now, forty years later, there were 200,000 celebrants who had gathered in that same park, giddy with the excitement of Obama’s victory. They had worked within the system.
During the past four decades, there has been a linear progression from Jimi Hendrix playing “The Star-Spangled Banner” at Woodstock to Aretha Franklin singing “My Country, ’tis of Thee” at the inauguration. Is it possible that this event signified the early tremors of a nonviolent revolution? As the late singer/songwriter Harry Chapin once said to me backstage at a benefit: “If you don’t act like there’s hope, there is no hope.” And remember, placebos work. My hope is I don’t get disappointed. [But I did.]
Meanwhile, the memorabilia business flourishes as millions of voters seek a variety of tangible items to remind them of the part they played in history simply by voting. Mouse pads, baby bibs, aprons, dog jerseys, bobble-heads, niche buttons (“Ventriloquists for Obama”), T-shirts (“Now I Don’t Have to Move to Canada”) and, as reported by NPR, Obama condoms. Somebody bid $400 on eBay for the November 5th issue of the New York Times. USA Today printed 500,000 extra copies; the Washington Post printed 350,000 extras. The only thing I saved was a full-page ad by the 99 Cents Only stores, which included a “Joe the Plumber Special” plunger. There was no limit on how many I could buy. 

A Letter to Barack Obama

October 10, 2010

Dear President Obama,

	It seems that the theme emanating from the White House is “Eat, Pray, Be Disappointed.” And yet, whenever I do feel disappointed, I always realize that the alternative was John McCain, with Sarah Palin just one Halloween “Boo!” away from the presidency, and then I always feel a sense of relief.
Actually, you’ve kept one big campaign promise--to send more troops to Afghanistan--so I guess we can’t fault you for that. In fact, according to Bob Woodward in Obama’s Wars, all you want to do now is get out of Afghanistan. Well, why don’t you just do what Osama bin Laden did; cross over to Pakistan. Since we bribe Pakistan to be our ally, you’d think they would never consider harboring bin Laden, though they reek with empathy when our outsourced drones drop those bombs.
Also, during the campaign, you said you believe that the legality of same-sex marriage should be decided by the states, but that you personally think marriage should be between a man and a woman. Which is exactly the position that eventually led to the revocation of Carrie Prejean’s Miss USA crown. And another thing. You promised to end the raids on medical marijuana dispensaries, but they haven’t stopped.
[In 2009, Attorney General Eric Holder issued a memo ordering an end to federal raids of medical marijuana dispensaries. In March 2011, there were 28 such raids in a duration of 24 hours.]
Here’s how I understand Washington. America’s puritanical political process serves as a buffer between the status quo and the force of evolution. For instance, in order to get Republican votes for the children’s healthcare bill, Democrats agreed to fund $28 million to their abstinence-only program.
And, during your own campaign, you admitted, in the context of health care reform, that the multinational insurance conglomeration is so firmly entrenched that you would be unable to dispense with it. So there would have to be compromises. Now, what with the compromises made to help passage of Prop. 19, amnesty becomes the single-payer system of marijuana reform, and growing your own pot becomes the public option. Meanwhile, as long as any government can arbitrarily decide which drugs are legal and which drugs are illegal, then anyone serving time for a nonviolent drug offense is a political prisoner.
In his new book, Bob Woodward writes about Colin Powell’s status as an adviser to you. Referring to his previous book, Plan of Attack, the New York Times then reported that “Secretary of State Colin Powell disputed Woodward’s account….He said that he had an excellent relationship with Vice President Dick Cheney, and that he did not recall referring to officials at the Pentagon loyal to Cheney as the ‘Gestapo office.’” Who among us would be unable to recall uttering such an epithet? Powell later apologized for it. He has also changed his mind about gays in the military. In my capacity as a stand-up satirist, I used to conduct an imaginary dialogue with Powell.
“General Powell, you’re the first African-American to be head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and you come from the tradition of a military family. So you know that blacks were once segregated in the Army because the other soldiers might feel uncomfortable if blacks slept in the same barracks. And now that’s what they say about gays, that other soldiers might feel uncomfortable about gays sleeping in the same barracks.”
     “Well, you have to understand, we never told anybody we were black.”
And, Mr. President, that was the forerunner of the same “Don’t ask, don’t tell” policy that you promised to rescind, only you haven’t been acting like a Commander-in-Chief. All you have to do is sign such a directive. Those who serve in the military are trained to follow orders. If they can follow orders to kill fellow humans, they can certainly follow orders to treat openly gay service people with total equality.
Not only is the current guideline counterproductive, but also this display of trickle-down immorality must, on some level of consciousness, serve as a contributing factor to enabling the anti-gay bullying and torturing of innocent victims. I know, you don’t want to take a chance that retracting the policy would interfere with your re-election. You’ve made the point that you don’t want Mitt Romney to win in 2012 and turn around all the good things you’ve accomplished.
Incidentally, Romney had wanted to overturn Roe vs. Wade, yet, in 1994, when he was running for the Senate, he came out in favor of choice for women. However, freelance journalist Suzan Mazur revealed that he admitted to Mormon feminist Judith Dushku that “the Brethren” in Salt Lake City told him he could take a pro-choice position, and that in fact he probably had to in order to win in a liberal state like Massachusetts.  Pandering trumps religious belief.
Meantime, since gays and lesbians have waited so long for basic fairness, they might as well just wait for the next election. If you win, then would you kindly do immediately what you believe is right, constitutionally and in your heart, and end this injustice? The ultimate irony is that gays in the military are fighting, being maimed and dying unnecessarily, supposedly to protect the freedom their own country is denying them.
 Sincerely,
Paul Krassner
Postscript:
	I sent a copy of the letter to some folks that day. Among the responses, I received a message from a mother: “I am trying to explain this to my twelve-year-old son, who wants to know why, if men and women don’t share barracks in the military, why gay men and hetero men should share barracks, but then follows with ‘They should all sleep in the same place.’”
And that evening I received this email from a seasoned journalist: “I know it's late, but I cannot wait to ask if this letter is a spoof, or you've actually sent it to Obama. If it's a spoof and you've not sent it to him, would you like to? I've got his fax number and he's got a great sense of humor. May I have your permission to send this to him?”
“Absolutely.” 
Two days later, to the dismay of Obama--who told a town hall meeting that he was restricted because the “Don’t ask, don’t tell” policy was written into law, adding, “This is not a situation where I can, by the stroke of a pen, end this policy”--he wanted Congress to repeal it after the November midterm election, but Federal Judge Virginia Phillips upset that timetable by issuing an immediate and permanent ban on what she considered to be unconstitutional. This ruling was not a spoof, though it was treated as one by an appeals court that set aside her injunction. In December 2010, Congress repealed the 17-year-old law.
Nor was it a spoof when Attorney General Holder—having been pressured by nine former DEA chiefs, plus the president of Mexico--warned that if Prop. 19 was passed, making California the first state to legalize pot, the federal government would not look the other way, as it has done with medical marijuana. Holder (who wouldn’t prosecute the Bush administration for promulgating torture) explained:
“Let me state clearly that the Department of Justice strongly opposes Proposition 19. If passed, this legislation will greatly complicate federal drug enforcement efforts to the detriment of our citizens. We will vigorously enforce the [law] against those individuals and organizations that possess, manufacture or distribute marijuana for recreational use, even if such activities are permitted under state law.”
In a truly free society, the distinction of whether marijuana is used for medical or recreational purposes would be as irrelevant an excuse for discrimination as whether the sexual preference of gays and lesbians is innate or a matter of choice.
     And so it came to pass that Barack Obama was re-elected. His opponent, Romney, fell to his knees and pleaded, “Oh, dear Lord, you promised that I would win. Why hast thou forsaken me?” And the voice of God boomed out, “HEY, MITT, LISTEN--I WAS JUST FUCKIN’ WITH YA . . .” 

Unsafe at Safeway

It was Steve Allen, and later Lenny Bruce, who said that “Comedy is tragedy plus time.” But everything is accelerating. Even the rate of acceleration is accelerating. The time between tragedy and comedy gets shorter and shorter.  The more horrible the news is, the more victims there are to involuntarily serve as setups for punchlines.
Reality has long been nipping at the heels of comedy, and it finally caught up. Example: On the same day that people were being burned alive in the fire at the Branch Davidian headquarters in Waco, Texas, Jay Leno did a joke in his Tonight Show monologue about there being two kinds of cult members there--“regular and crispy.”
Of course, events like the recent madman massacre outside a Safeway supermarket can be challenging. How could made-up humor possibly top the actual absurdity of mass murderer Jared Loughner asking his MySpace friends not to be mad at him. After all, he was merely planning to indiscriminately kill as many innocent human beings as he could, with democracy itself as collateral damage. 
The night before Loughner committed his senseless slaughter, he had taken photos of himself posing with his gun while wearing a bright red G-string and displaying his naked ass. Satirist Harry Shearer observed that “The nightmare in Tucson is the inevitable result of a society where a mentally confused young man can purchase a red G-string anywhere at any time, and pose with it as he sees fit. Can't we all agree now to lower the temperature on underwear?”
Speaking of lowering the temperature, in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, editorial cartoonist Rob Rogers depicted the U.S. Civil Discourse Gun Shop where a customer is asking the clerk: “Do you have anything versatile enough to go from a campaign breakfast to a protest march to a Town Hall meeting?” And in the Orlando Sentinal, Dana Summers depicted another gun store featuring semi-automatic 31-clip weapons, where the clerk is explaining to a customer: “Say you have thirty-one burglars break into your house.”
On the Monday following the tragic weekend, Jon Stewart was unable to find anything funny about it. Nor was Stephen Colbert, although he did present a montage of news clips with various explanations of Loughner’s behavior, and the final one, from Fox News—“He is also being described as a left-wing political pothead”—managed to evoke laughter from the audience. And Rush Limbaugh called him a “marijuana junkie.”
In October 2008, Loughner told an old friend, Bryce Tierney, that he wasn’t going to smoke marijuana any more. Tierney never saw him smoke pot again, and was surprised at media reports that Loughner was rejected by the Army in 2009 for failing a drug test: “He was clean…I saw him after that continuously. He would not do it…After he quit, he was just off the wall." But Loughner did not fail a drug test that day at the processing station. Rather, he admitted on an application form that he had smoked marijuana “hundreds of times.” He didn’t know that the military has an official maximum of times you can admit to smoking pot.
A journalist I know acknowledges that he tried to join the Air Force at the San Diego recruitment office, but, “When the subject of drugs came up, I figured, okay, I have long hair, I look maybe homeless, they're going to know I'm lying if I say I've always been straight. I'll say I've smoked pot seven or eight times--something ridiculously, embarrassingly low. Whatever it was, it was too high. The recruiter said. ‘You can't have smoked more than five times. Go away, kid. Maybe the Marines will take you.’ Two weeks later I was at the Sacramento recruitment office and I had the  ‘magic number.’ I joined the Air Force. One of the stupider things I've done.”
Indeed, Chris Hedges wrote on TruthDig: “Power does not rest with the electorate. It does not reside with either of the two major political parties. It is not represented by the press. It is not arbitrated by a judiciary that protects us from predators. Power rests with corporations. And corporations gain very lucrative profits from war, even wars we have no chance of winning. All polite appeals to the formal systems of power will not end the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. We must physically obstruct the war machine or accept a role as its accomplice.”
When it comes to bloodbaths, the only difference between such invisible corporations and Jared Loughner is that he did it face-to-face.
Obviously, Loughner is crazy, but not legally insane, because he knew right from wrong, as indicated by his expectation of life in prison or execution for his unspeakable crime. True, John Hinckley was crazy when he tried to assassinate Ronald Reagan—his motivation was to impress actress Jodie Foster so she would go out bowling with him--yet he was sentenced to serve his time in a mental hospital, including occasional outings with his parents, which resulted in public outrage and a weakening of the insanity defense.
Ironically, Hinckley came out for gun control, and Reagan came out against it.





The Yippies and the Occupiers

     As a co-founder of the Yippies (Youth International Party)—known for demonstrating against the Vietnam War at the 1968 Democratic convention in Chicago--I find myself comparing and contrasting the Yippies and the Occupy Wall Street protesters.
We had to perform stunts to get media coverage of our cause, so a group of us went to the New York Stock Exchange, upstairs to the balcony, and threw $200 worth of singles onto the floor below, watching the gang of manic brokers suddenly morph from yelling "Pork Bellies" into playing "Diving for Dollars." Then we held a press conference outside, explaining the connection between the capitalist system and the war.
Now, a particular placard, “Wall Street Is War Street,” gives me a sense of continuity. Other anonymous Occupier spokespersons carried posters proclaiming: “God Forbid We Have Sex & Smoke Pot. They Want Us to Grab Guns & Go to War!” “I am an immigrant. I came here to take your job. But you don’t have one.” “$96,000 for a BA in Hispanic transgender gay & lesbian studies and I can’t find work!” And a woman in a wheelchair: “Stand Up For Your Rights!”
By the sheer power of numbers without the necessity of stunts, the Occupiers have broadened public awareness about  the economic injustice perpetuated by corporations without compassion conspiring with government corruption that has resulted in immeasurable suffering. The Yippies were a myth that became a reality. The Occupiers are a reality that became a myth. The spirit of nonviolent revolution is what connects them.
NPR waited until eleven days of Occupy Wall Street had passed before reporting its existence. The executive news editor explained that the Occupiers “did not involve large numbers of people” (actually, there were already several hundred), no “prominent people” showed up (thus ignoring Michael Moore and Susan Sarandon), the lack of “a great disruption” (the police pepper-spraying protesters trapped in a cage of orange netting finally met that need), “or an especially clear objective” (oh, right, like all those flip-floppy pandering politicians whose clear objective is to get elected).
	The Occupiers appear to be a leaderless community—most likely, you can’t name a single one; not yet, anyway—whereas Abbie Hoffman, Jerry Rubin and I served as spokespeople for the Yippies. We had media contacts and knew how to speak in sound bytes. If we gave good quote, they gave free publicity for upcoming demonstrations. It was mutual manipulation.
Sample: A reporter asked me about the 1968 counter-convention we were planning, “Will you be staying in tents?” I replied, “Some of us will be intense. Others will be frivolous.”
During an interview with Abbie and me for the CBS Evening News, taped at his apartment, Abbie paraphrased Che Guevara and said, “I'm prepared to win or die.” However, that never got on the air. When the reporter asked me, “What do the Yippies actually plan to do in Chicago?” I smiled at her and said, “You think I'm gonna tell you?” That portion of my answer was used to end Walter Cronkite's segment on the Yippies, but my follow-up sentence--“The first thing we're gonna do is put truth serum in the reporters' drinks”--was omitted. They had beaten me at my own game.
The Yippies were inspired by the Buddhist monk in Vietnam who set himself on fire in order to call attention to the war. The photo of that incident traveled around the globe, and I wore a lapel button which featured that flaming image. Similarly, in 2010, a street vendor in Tunisia refused to pay a police bribe, then immolated himself, which inspired a revolution there, and next in Egypt, spreading into Arab Spring, which ultimately inspired American Autumn in 2011.
Inspired by the Yippies attempt to levitate the Pentagon, pie-thrower Aron Kay wanted to get fellow Occupiers to levitate Wall Street. No interest. Likewise, inspired by the Yippies nomination of an actual pig named Pigasus for president, Michael Dare tried unsuccessfully to persuade fellow protesters at Occupy Seattle to carry out his notion that, “If corporations are people, let’s run one for president.” I offered myself as Secretary of Greed.
The evolution of technology has changed the way protests are organized and carried out. The Yippies had to use messy mimeograph machines to print out flyers that had to be stuffed into envelopes, addressed, stamped and mailed. The Internet generally—and social media such as Facebook and Twitter—have enabled Occupiers to inexpensively reach countless people immediately.
When the Yippies were being tear-gassed, and beaten sadistically and indiscriminately, we chanted, “The whole world is watching!” But now, when a bloodbath was expected to happen if the New York police forced the Occupiers out of the park—and then that didn’t happen—Michael Moore asked a cop, “Why don’t you think the eviction happened?” The reply: “Because the mayor’s afraid of YouTube.”
(One month later, Mayor Bloomberg apparently lost that fear; by his order, the eviction happened at 1 a.m. The next afternoon, a protester, before being allowed back in, was overheard remarking, “The cops have occupied Zuccotti Park. We're just trying to figure out what their demands are.")
Not only what occurred in Chicago in 1968 was officially labeled “a police riot” by a government-sponsored investigation, but also an undercover police provocateur—who was disguised as a local biker and acted as Jerry Rubin’s bodyguard—would ultimately state that he participated in pulling down the American flag in Grant Park, destroying it, then running up the black flag of the Viet Cong in its place.
“I joined in the chants and taunts against the police,” he said, “and provoked them to hitting me with their clubs. They didn’t know who I was, but they did know that I had called them names and struck them with one or more weapons.”
Now, as the Occupy model has spread around the country, police brutality has increased, and it’s not surprising that there have been accusations of provocateurs sabotaging the nonviolent principle, not to mention an assistant editor at a conservative magazine who infiltrated a group of protesters in Washington, D.C., later claiming that his purpose was “to mock and undermine them in the pages of the American Spectator,” and that he helped incite a riot at the National Air and Space Museum, getting pepper-sprayed in the process.
     Moreover, a document from the Houston FBI revealed their plan “to engage in sniper attacks” and “kill the leadership” of the Occupy activists “if deemed necessary.”
The Yippies were essentially countercultural, an amalgam of radicalized stoned hippies and straight political activists. And, although the Occupiers are essentially mainstream, their demonization by right-wing media pundits has been providing a repeat performance of neutralizing a progressive cause.
Bill O’Reilly called the Occupiers “drug-trafficking crackheads” and “violent America-hating anarchists.” Sean Hannity said they “sound like skinhead Nazi psychos.” Ann Coulter referred to them as mobs of “teenage runaways” and “tattooed, body–pierced, sunken-chested 19-year-olds getting in fights with the police for fun.” Glenn Beck warned that they “will come for you and drag you into the streets and kill you.” Andrew Breitbart declared that Occupy Wall Street is “a group of public masturbating violent freaks.”
And Rush Limbaugh labeled them “dumbed down” and “propagandized” and asked a rhetorical question reeking with layers of irony: “Whatever happened to the ’60s--Question Authority?” At this point, Limbaugh is like a castrated canine that is still busy humping the living-room sofa by force of habit.





















PORN AGAIN 

Remembering Pubic Hair

Okay, call me old-fashioned, but I still like pubic hair. Internet porn sites now present several choices--completely shaved, vertical landing strips that look like exclamation points, heart shaped, the Charlie Chaplin with just a little patch above the clitoris, and a tiny triangle that serves as an arrow pointing to the clit--yet, for a full bush, one would have to search the Web for “hairy” sites that are considered as “specialty,” “kinky” or “fetish.”
Retired porn stars have commented on this phenomenon. Gina Rome, retired after six years, shaved every day. “It was part of getting ready for work.” When she switched from acting to film editing, she stopped shaving and let her pubic hair grow out. “Shaving was work. I don’t have to do it any more, so I don’t.” And Kelly Nichols says, “I was a Penthouse model in the early 1980s, and I posed with a full bush. No one in adult entertainment shaved back then. Now everybody does.”  
Although Martha Stewart is back on TV, you can be sure that she’ll never give any suggestions on what to do about those big red razor bumps that result from shaving your vagina, so here’s a helpful hint I’d like to pass along--they can be largely eliminated with, of all things, Visine eye drops. But pubic hair is practical; serves as a cushion against friction.
The porn industry has played an important part in shaping pubic styles. Jordan Stein writes in an article titled Has Porn Gone Mainstream?: “Consider the near icon status the female porn star has achieved. She is so mainstream that even good girls are imitating her various styles of undress, disappearing hair and all. Porn chic? You bet.”
However, Julia Baird writes in Celebrity Porn: “The idea that the fashion industry can strip, then exhibit women in the name of ‘porn chic,’ is a bit silly, frankly. But ‘flesh is the new fabric’ could be the new catch-cry. Americans call their bush George W. It’s fashionable--the curious fact is that it is fueled by the porn aesthetic that celebrities love to love.”
Among Hollywood actresses, Gwyneth Paltrow and Kirstie Alley have both admitted favoring Brazilian wax jobs, where most of their pubic hair is removed, leaving a small tuft that remains hidden under a thong bikini. Sara Jessica Parker’s character, Carrie Bradshaw, had her pubic hair removed during the third season of Sex In the City. Presumably, it’s now in the Smithsonian museum along with Archie Bunker’s easy chair and the Fonz’s leather jacket.
On ABC’s Women’s Murder Club, a medical examiner directs her gaze to the crotch of a female corpse and says, “That’s not your mama’s bikini wax.” On The View, Joy Behar said, “No pubic hair creates a wind tunnel.” And in a hysterical episode of HBO’s dark comedy series, Curb Your Enthusiasm, former Seinfeld producer Larry David performed oral sex on his wife, and in the process he sort of swallowed one of her pubic hairs. The next day, he was still choking on it, like a cat trying to get rid of a hairball. 
A psychologist at Harvard Medical School and author of Survival of the Prettiest: The Science of Beauty, Nancy Etcoff, writes that “There’s also an erotic, sexual component to hairlessness because your skin is more sensitive when it’s more exposed. Women today are emulating porn stars who have no pubic hair, and I think men like it.” 
My own resistance to the plethora of bald pussies stems from my pre-adolescent days when pubic hair was such a big taboo that I became obsessed with it. In those pre-bikini days, I would go to Coney Island and stroll around the sand, sneaking glances at ladies in the hope of finding a few stray curlicues of forbidden pubic hair peeking out from their various and sun-dried crotches. And if I was able to discover any, why, it felt as though I had experienced a really productive afternoon.
Betty Dodson, sex educator and producer of Viva La Vulva, says, “I think we have changing ideas about what’s public and what’s private. And now that nudity is more public--nude beaches, routine nudity in film, and the enormous amount of exhibitionism and porn on the Web--I’m not surprised to see a trend toward pubic shaving. I think it’s probably here to stay.” She told me that, “Thanks to the lack of a comprehensive sex education for kids, young girls now want their vulvas to look like porn stars because that's what their boyfriends jerk off to and prefer. It's all they know.” But a new study has concluded that pubic hair is returning: “The men don’t care and the women don’t can’t bother.”
     Welcome back, good old bush. Hide and seek a friendly clit.
Ironically, although Arnold Schwarzenegger was only joking when he announced that he was going to get a Bikini wax, actually Beverly Hills skin care and waxing expert Nance Mitchell has about fifty regular male customers that come for pubic waxing who “are not gay and they are not porn stars. Some go totally bare, some just do the shaft and up around the pelvic area.” She explains that “It depends on what their wives and girlfriends want.  Men go along because removing the hair makes the whole package look bigger.”
     Ah, yes, the illusion of size does matter.
The Taste of Sperm

Online sexology columnist Sandor Gardos was asked, “How do I increase the amount of my ejaculate? I’ve noticed porn stars seem to ejaculate copious amounts of fluid, and I’d like to be able to wow my partner.” Dr. Gardos points out that “the actors in porn films are professionals. Even they often don’t ejaculate that much--sometimes movie makers will supplement with synthetic semen shot from a small tube.”
Well, I’m just shocked to realize that somewhere in America there must be a group of scientists in a laboratory who earn their salaries by manufacturing fake semen.
Meanwhile, ManNotIncluded.com has become the first cyberspace sperm bank for lesbians and single women who want to become pregnant. They are matched with anonymous donors who have the desired race, eye color, height and weight, then sent instructions on how to inseminate themselves. John Gonzalez, founder of the website, hopes this service will overcome the hurdles presented by bureaucracies and fertility clinics who are prejudiced against same-sex couples.
“Lesbians hook up with gay men all the time,” he says, “either friends or guys they’ve met through personal ads. We are now simply allowing them to do so safely and without discrimination.”
On the other hand, in the movie, Sarah Silverman: Jesus Is Magic--a performance by one of the best and raunchiest female stand-up comedians--she describes a sure method of birth control: “coming all over her face.” Of course, that punchline is derived from the ever popular image on Internet porn sites, where I look in vain for the small print with messages warning, “Do Not Try This Particular Money Shot At Home” and “This Is Not Exactly What She Means When She Says She’d Like To Get a Facial For Her Birthday.”  
Furthermore, in Chelsea, Michigan, Book Crafters has refused to print Baboon Dooley, Rock Critic, a collection of John Crawford’s comic strip, because his protagonist accidentally drinks from a glass of semen. He spits it out upon learning the content, only to be called a sexist, and challenged: “You’d expect a woman to drink it, right?”  However, on CNN, author Hugh Prather was a guest, and the subject was couples. A caller revealed his problem: “The trouble is, when I come in her mouth, she can’t really swallow it all.” The anchor quickly hung up on this premature ejaculation.
Cartoonist Mary Lawton depicted a character saying, “I just found out that alfalfa sprouts smell like sperm. Does this mean I should practice safe salad?” Yet humorist Jacqueline Shtuyote tells me that “Sperm is basically tasteless. The truth should be out about this. Men seem to think that their white stuff is a culinary delight, yet I know of no culinary courses extolling the flavor of sperm. And if, as rumored, Jack-in-the-Box cooks occasionally spill their cum on an irritating customer’s hamburger, how many of us would be pleased with the added ingredient?  
“Why can’t we find something that changes the flavor of cum? Then men could squirt red stuff that is raspberry flavored, or brown stuff that is chocolate flavored. Shy women could finally delight in swallowing their lover’s cum. No sperm would ever be spit out again. There could be a pill to make cum taste like fast-food hamburgers. Maybe then we wouldn’t mind if we found out that the secret sauce on top of Jack-in-the-Box hamburgers is, after all, sperm.”
But let’s not forget those who don’t eat meat. They face an ethical dilemma--whether or not it’s an acceptable practice for a vegetarian to give a blow job, and if so, is it all right to swallow? The general practice is that, yes, it’s definitely okay to give a blow job because no animal is harmed in the process. And, yes, it’s also okay to ingest the sperm because it’s a good source of protein, something that’s often lacking when meat is removed from the diet.
Finally--and this could possibly be an urban legend--in a biology class at Harvard University, a professor was discussing the high glucose levels found in semen which give the spermatozoa all that energy for their journey. A female freshman raised her hand and asked, “If I understand you correctly, you’re saying there is a lot of glucose, as in sugar, in semen?”  
“That’s correct,” replied the professor.
     The student asked, “Then why doesn’t it taste sweet?”
“It doesn’t taste sweet,” he answered as she realized what her question implied. She blushed, picked up her books and headed for the door, as he continued, “because the taste buds for sweetness are on the tip of your tongue and not the back of your throat.  Have a good day.”

Eating Shit for Fun and Profit

I am in complete awe of the democracy of the Internet, which presents an infinite menu for individual tastes and ideologies, and in this context, specifically to viewers of online pornography. From golden showers to farm animals, the World Wide Web caters to virtually every imaginable desire. With the privacy provided by a computer screen, you can worship at the fetish of your choice. But, in the process of surfing porn sites—for research purposes only, of course—I realized that I had never come across a site specializing in coprophagia. It means eating shit. Literally.
There’s an old saying among nutritionists: “You are what you eat.” However, comedian Darryl Henriques, playing the role of a New Age swami, says, “You are what you don’t shit.”
One of the nastiest things you can say to someone is, “Eat shit.” A nonfiction book, The Pit, reveals a strange cult in San Francisco where a group of successful businessmen were forced, along with other acts of humiliation, to eat their own shit. Ultimately, they were represented in a lawsuit by flamboyant attorney Melvin Belli. But that was more-or-less involuntary shit eating, and what we’re talking about here is the voluntary kind.
For many years I heard stories that comic actor Danny Thomas, the star of Make Room for Daddy, was a coprophagiac. I assumed it was just another urban legend until I bumped into an old friend who was now working as a prostitute in Hollywood. Over lunch, she mentioned the names of some of her celebrity clients, including Danny Thomas. She told me how he had hired her to save her solid waste in her panties so that he could rub those panties on his face and gobble up her shit as though it were cotton candy.
When he finished, he would wash his hands and face thoroughly then pay her and, as if coming out of a trance, he’d say, “Where was I?” He was trying to distance himself from what he had just done. Instant denial. Since then, I have believed that Danny Thomas’s fundraising for Saint Jude’s Hospital was really for the purpose of having secret access to their bedpans.
Anyway, I googled “eating shit.” Topping the list was “Shit Eating Grins: In Defense of Adam Sandler.” But sure enough, I was soon led to hardcore shit-eating sites, which I found totally disgusting, yet absolutely riveting. You may not want to read any further, but we both know you will.
There are photos of beautiful women shitting. If you click for a close-up you can spot a yellow kernel of corn in one big brown chunk o’ shit. Women are spreading shit all over their naked bodies and inside their vaginas. A pair of lovely lesbians are eating handfuls of shit, then tongue kissing each other. Two women are eating the same lengthy turd, starting from opposite ends. A woman, fully dressed, wearing a mini-skirt, is shitting as she walks along the sidewalk. One woman is shitting into another woman’s mouth. Mmmm, good to the last dingleberry.
Among the shit-eating sites, there are Asian movies. Here’s a couple of descriptions: “A bunch of kinky Japanese guys find some truly hot looking girls and take them down below the streets of Tokyo into a real sewer full of shit.” And “Cute Kyoko’s diarrhea suddenly acts up again. Her piano teacher becomes a willing student of hot scat games. Lots of shit pours out of her hot ass into his waiting mouth. Then she asks if he would rub it all over her. ‘Sure, why not,’ he says.”
If there is one particular image that remains in my mind’s eye, it is an innocent-looking, attractive teenager—she’s over 18, of course—and she is cheerfully drinking a shit shake through a straw in an old-fashioned, malted-milk glass.
I thought about her father discovering that video in cyberspace, yet he is unable to confront his daughter about it because he would then have to admit what he was doing at that site. I mean, this isn’t exactly the type of thing that would be mass emailed by one of those selfless spammers, is it? And even if the father did confess to his daughter, he would undoubtedly hesitate to ask if he could eat her shit, because that could be considered a form of incest, and you have to draw the line somewhere, right?
There must be an especially strong bond among coprophagiacs, though, because they have experienced in common a form of liberation from a taboo that can be traced all the way back to infancy, when a parent would cringe and say, “Stop! Don’t eat that! I said no!”
Who knows, some day coprophagia might even become a religion?
Holy shit!




“I Fuck Dead People”

You don’t see many porn sites that feature intercourse with corpses, and if you do, how do you know they’re really dead? But, say what you will about California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, you have to give him credit for signing a bill to forbid necrophilia. Under the new law, sex with a corpse is now a felony punishable by up to eight years in prison.
Age is no barrier. The state’s first attempt to outlaw necrophilia--in response to a case of a man charged with having sex with the corpse of a 4-year-old girl in Southern California---stalled in a legislative committee, but the bill was revived after an unsuccessful prosecution of a man who was found in a San Francisco funeral home, passed out on top of an elderly woman’s corpse.
Necrophiliacs have been getting away with it all this time, but district attorneys will no longer be stymied by the lack of an official ban. According to Tyler Ochoa, a professor at Santa Clara University of Law who has studied California cases involving allegations of necrophilia, “Prosecutors didn’t have anything to charge these people with other than breaking and entering. But if they worked in a mortuary in the first place, prosecutors couldn’t even charge them with that.”
Whether necrophilia is a victimless crime may still be open to debate. Nevertheless, claiming that the act was consensual will not be considered as a legal defense. It should be noted that the necrophilia community ranges from those who are monogamous and stick with one partner for a lifetime, to those who are promiscuous and hop from casket to casket.
According to his own journal entry, Ralph Waldo Emerson, one of the most revered figures in American literary history, was so devastated by the death of his young wife, Ellen, that, shortly after her burial, he went out to the cemetery one night and dug up her corpse, though he didn’t mention exactly what he did with it.
One of the most popular episodes of the police TV show, Homicide, Life On the Streets, was about the investigation of an old lonely widower, a mortician, who used to party with the corpses, setting them around a table as if they were alive. They investigated him because he shot a neighbor who knew about this practice, and then sat in the garden and waited for the cops. But again, the mortician’s relationship with those corpses may have been purely platonic.
Let us now eavesdrop on the dialogue of a few participants in an Internet support group, Necrophiliacs Anonymous:
“Obviously, neither a corpse nor a 4-year-old can provide consent, but if you leave permission in your will for your lonesome spouse or significant other to have one last fling with your mortal coil, shouldn’t the state of California respect your wishes?”
“I still think that organ donation is a better cause. It’s just that I believe the only offense here is really violation of private property. I wonder if someone gives their partner, in a will, the right to have sex with their body after their death, will it be legal?”
“Or, even without that permission, if you are an only heir of somebody, doesn’t it mean their body belongs to you? It sounds gross, but isn’t it an issue of private rights in the United States of America, that likes so much the idea of individualism and is ready to exploit people and the environment in the name of that ideal?”
“I never understood why people think that having sex with a dead body is worse than raping a living person. To me, that’s the worst kind, and then raping poor helpless animals. I really couldn’t care less about my own dead body.”
Conversely, Sam Kinison, the late evangelist who turned into a comedian, had a great routine about necrophilia: “Well, that’s it, man--I’m dead.  Nothing else bad can happen to me now. Wait a minute--what’s that? What’s this guy doing? What’s going on here? [Screams] Oh oh oh oh oh OH OH OH OH OH OOOOOOHHHHHH NOOOOOOO!!! Live in Hell!!!”
	The majority of cannibalistic serial killers are motivated by a kind of necrophilia--it’s usually a highly sexually arousing experience for them when they eat their victims. Here, from my “Great Moments in Necrophilia” file, is a dispatch from Associated Press:
“The prosecution in the insanity trial of serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer rested its case. Dahmer has confessed to killing and dismembering 17 young males since 1978. A jury must decide if he will be sent to prison or a mental institution. The final prosecution witness, Dr. Park Dietz, a psychiatrist, testified that Dahmer wore condoms when having sex with his dead victims, showing that he could control his urge to have intercourse with corpses.”
I smell a public service announcement there: “If Jeffrey Dahmer is sane enough to have safe sex, what about you?”








                    COMEDIANS


Remembering Lenny Bruce


     August 3rd, 2016 marked the 50th anniversary of groundbreaking comedian Lenny Bruce’s death from an overdose of morphine, while his New York obscenity conviction at Café Au Go Go was still on appeal. On that same day he received a foreclosure notice at his Los Angeles home.
     But it wasn’t a suicide. In the kitchen, a kettle of water was still boiling, and in his office, the electric typewriter was still humming. He had stopped typing in mid-word: “Conspiracy to interfere with the 4th Amendment const”…constitutes what, I wondered.
     Lenny was a subscriber to my satirical magazine, The Realist, and in 1959 we met for the first time at the funky Hotel America in Times Square. He was amazed that I got away with publishing those profane words for which other periodicals used asterisks or dashes. He had been using euphemisms like “frig” and asked, “Are you telling me this is legal to sell on the newsstands?”
     I replied, “The Supreme Court's definition of obscenity is that it has to be material which appeals to your prurient interest.” He magically produced an unabridged dictionary from the suitcase on his bed, and looked up the word “prurient.” He closed the dictionary, clenching his jaw and nodding his head in affirmation of a new discovery. “So,” he observed, “it’s against the law to get you horny.”
     When we were about to leave the room, he stood in the doorway. “Did you steal anything?” he asked furtively. I took my watch out of my pocket since I didn't like to wear it on my wrist, and without saying a word I placed it on the bureau. Lenny laughed one loud staccato “Ha” and kissed me on the forehead.
     We developed a friendship integrated with stand-up comedy.	In his act Lenny had broken through traditional stereotypical jokes about airplane food, nagging wives, Chinese drivers, annoying mothers-in-law. Instead he weaved his taboo-breaking targets--teachers' low salaries versus show-business celebs, religious leaders’ hypocrisy, cruel abortion laws, racial injustice, the double standard between illegal and prescription drugs--into stream-of-consciousness vignettes.
     In each succeeding performance, he would sculpt and re-sculpt his concept into a theatrical context, experimenting from show to show like a verbal jazz musician. Audience laughter would sometimes turn into clapping for the creative process itself. “Please don't applaud,” he’d request. “It breaks my rhythm.” 
     Lenny was writing an autobiography--How to Talk Dirty and Influence People--which Playboy planned to serialize, then publish as a book, and they hired me as his editor. We met in Atlantic City, where he was taking Delaudid for lethargy, and he sent a telegram to a contact, with a phrase--DE LAWD IN DE SKY--as a code to send a doctor's prescription.
     At a certain point he was acting paranoid and demanded that I take a lie-detector test, and I was paranoid enough to take him literally. I couldn't work with him if he didn't trust me. We got into an argument, and I left.
     He sent a telegram that sounded like we were on the verge of divorce. “WHY CAN'T IT BE THE WAY IT USED TO BE?” he wrote. I agreed to try again, and in 1962 I flew to Chicago. Lenny was performing at the Gate of Horn, where he was asking the whole audience to take a lie-detector test.
     Lenny was intrigued by the implications of an item in The Realist, an actual statement by Adolf Eichmann that he would have been “not only a scoundrel, but a despicable pig” if he hadn't carried out Hitler's orders. Lenny wrote a piece for The Realist, “Letter From a Soldier's Wife,” namely Mrs. Eichmann pleading for compassion to spare her husband's life.
     Lenny had been reading a study of anti-Semitism by Jean-Paul Sartre. Now, on stage, giving credit to Thomas Merton's poem about the Holocaust, he requested that all the lights go off except one dim blue spot. Then he began speaking with a German accent:
    My name is Adolf Eichmann. And the Jews came every day to what they thought would be fun in the showers. People say I should have been hung. Nein. Do you recognize the whore in the middle of you–that you would have done the same if you were there yourselves? My defense: I was a soldier. I saw the end of a conscientious day's effort. I watched through the portholes. I saw every Jew burned and turned into soap.

    Do you people think yourselves better because you burned your enemies at long distance with missiles without ever seeing what you had done to them? Hiroshima auf Wiedersehen. [German accent ends.] If we would have lost the war, they would have strung Truman up by the balls, Jim. Are you kidding with that? Not what kid told kid told kid. They would just schlep out all those Japanese mutants. “Here they did; there they are.” And Truman said they'd do it again. That's what they should have the same day as Remember Pearl Harbor. Play them in unison.

     Lenny was arrested for obscenity that night. One of the items in the Chicago police report complained: “Then talking about the war he stated, ‘If we would have lost the war, they would have strung Truman up by the balls.’” The cops also broke open Lenny's candy bars, looking for drugs. They checked the IDs of audience members, including George Carlin, who told the cops, “I don’t believe in IDs.”  Then they arrested him for disorderly conduct, dragged him along by the seat of his pants and hoisted him into the police wagon. 
     “What are you doing here?” Lenny asked. 
     “I didn’t want to show them my ID.”
      “You schmuck.”
     Lenny was released on bail, but the head of the Vice Squad warned the Gate of Horn manager: “If this man ever uses a four-letter word in this club again, I'm going to pinch you and everyone in here. If he ever speaks against religion, I'm going to pinch you and everyone in here. Do you understand? You've had good people here. But he mocks the pope--and I'm speaking as a Catholic--I'm here to tell you your license is in danger. We're going to have someone here watching every show.”
And indeed, the Gate of Horn's liquor license was suspended. There were no previous allegations against the club, and the current charge involved neither violence nor drunken behavior. The only charge pressed by the city prosecutor was Lenny Bruce's allegedly obscene performance. Nobody’s prurience was aroused, but that made no difference. After all, there wasn’t any law against blasphemy. 
     “Chicago is so corrupt, it’s thrilling,” Lenny said.
     Chicago had the largest membership in the Roman Catholic Church of any archdiocese in the country. Lenny's jury consisted entirely of Catholics. The judge was Catholic. The prosecutor and his assistant were Catholic. On Ash Wednesday, the judge removed the spot of ash from his forehead and told the bailiff to instruct the others to do likewise. The sight of a judge, two prosecutors and twelve jurors, every one with a spot of ash on their foreheads, would have all the surrealistic flavor of a Lenny Bruce fantasy.
     Since he often talked on stage about his environment, and since police cars and courtrooms had become his environment, the content of Lenny's performances began to revolve more and more around the inequities of the legal system. “In the Halls of Justice,” he declared, “the only justice is in the halls.” But he also said, “I love the law.” Instead of an unabridged dictionary, he now carried law books in his suitcase. His room was cluttered with tapes and transcripts and photostats and law journals and legal briefs.
     Once he was teasing his ten-year-old daughter, Kitty, by pretending not to believe what she was telling him. “Daddy,” she said, “you'd believe me if it was on tape.”
Lenny's jazz jargon was gradually being replaced by legal jargon. He had become intimate not only with the statutes concerning obscenity and narcotics but also with courtroom procedure, and his knowledge would be woven into his performances. But as clubs became increasingly afraid to hire him, he devoted more and more time and energy to the law.
     In less than two years, Lenny was arrested 15 times. Club owners were afraid to book him. He couldn’t get a gig in six months. On a Christmas day, he was alone in his hotel room, and I brought him a $500 bill. With a large safety pin, he attached it to his denim jacket. When he finally got a booking in Monterey, he admitted, “I feel like it's taking me away from my work.”
Lenny lived way up in the hills. His house was protected by barbed wire and a concrete gate, except that it was always open. He had a wall-to-wall one-way mirror in his living room, but when the sun was shining you could see into the room instead of out. He was occasionally hassled by police on his own property. One evening in October 1963, we were talking while he was shaving, when four officers suddenly appeared, loud and obnoxious. He asked them to leave unless they had a search warrant.
     One of the cops took out his gun. “Here's my search warrant,” he said. Then Lenny and the cops had a discussion about the law, such as the rules of evidence, and after half an hour they left. Lenny tried to take it all in stride, but the encounter was depressing, and he changed his mind about going out that night.
     When everything was quiet, we went outside and stood at the edge of his unused swimming pool. Dead leaves floated in the water. Lenny cupped his hands to his mouth. “All right, you dogs,” he called out. “Bark for the rich man!”--thereby setting off a chain reaction of barking dogs, a canine chorus echoing through Hollywood Hills. 
     We ordered some pizza, and he played some old tapes, ranging from a faith healer to patriotic World War II songs. “Good-bye, Mama, I'm off to Yokohama, the Land of Yama-Yama…”
     Back at the Café Au Go Go arrest in New York, Lenny had told a fantasy tale about Eleanor Roosevelt, quoting her, “I've got the nicest tits that have ever been in this White House…” The top of the police complaint was “Eleanor Roosevelt and her display of tits.” At the trial, Lenny acted as his own attorney. He had obtained the legislative history of an Albany statute, and he discovered that back in 1931 there was an amendment proposed, which excluded from arrest in an indecent performance: stagehands, spectators, musicians, and--here was the fulcrum of his defense--actors. The law had been misapplied to him. Despite opposition by the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice, the amendment was finally signed into law by then-Governor Roosevelt, but to no avail.
“Ignoring the mandate of Franklin D. Roosevelt,” Lenny observed, “is a great deal more offensive than saying Eleanor has lovely nay-nays.”
On October 13, 1965 (Lenny's 40th birthday), instead of surrendering to the authorities in New York, he filed suit at the U.S. District Court in San Francisco to keep out of prison, and he got himself officially declared a pauper. Two months before his death in 1966, Lenny wrote to me: “I'm still working on the bust of the government of New York State.” And he included his doodle of Christ nailed to a crucifix, with a speech balloon asking, “Where the hell is the ACLU?”
After he died, at a séance, his mother brought his old faded denim jacket. That large safety pin was still attached to it. And at the funeral, his sound engineer friend dropped Lenny's microphone into his grave before the dirt was piled on. Lenny's problem had been that he wanted to talk on stage with the same freedom that he had in his living room. That problem doesn’t happen to stand-up comedians any more.
     As for me, I’m working on my long awaited (by me) first novel. It’s about a contemporary Lenny Bruce-type satirist. Those scenes where my protagonist performs, I’ve developed onstage myself, although at times it felt like I was actually channeling Lenny, until the day that he said, “C’mon, Paul, you know you don't believe in that shit.” Well, this ended that wishful-thinking delusion.
I told my friend Avery Corman--author of Oh, God and Kramer vs. Kramer-- how I welcomed the challenge of writing fiction.
“But, you know,” I added, “it’s really hard to write. You have to make everything up.”
And he said, “Hey, listen, you’ve been making stuff up all your life.”
“Yeah, but that was journalism.”


My Acid Trip With Groucho Marx

LSD was influencing music, painting, spirituality, and even the stock market. Tim Leary once let me listen in on a call from a Wall Street broker thanking him for turning him onto acid because it gave him the courage to sell short. Leary had a certain sense of pride about the famous folks he and his associates had introduced to the drug.
“But,” he told me, “I consider Otto Preminger one of our failures.”
I first met Preminger in 1960 while I was conducting a panel on censorship for Playboy. He had defied Hollywood's official seal of approval by refusing to change the script of The Moon Is Blue. He wouldn't take out the word virgin.
     At the end of our interview, he asked, “Ven you tronscripe dis, vill you vix op my Henglish?”
“Oh, sure,” I replied quickly. “Of course.”
“Vy? Vot's drong viz my Henglish?”
I saw Preminger again in 1967. He was making a movie called Skidoo, starring Jackie Gleason as a retired criminal. Preminger told me he had originally intended that role for Frank Sinatra. Skidoo was pro-acid propaganda thinly disguised as a comedy adventure. However, LSD was not why the FBI was annoyed with the film. Rather, according to Gleason's FBI files, the FBI objected to one scene in the script where a file cabinet is stolen from an FBI building. Gleason was later approved as a special FBI contact in the entertainment business.
One of the characters in Skidoo was a Mafia chieftain named God. Screenwriter Bill Cannon had suggested Groucho Marx for the part. Preminger said it wasn't a good idea, but since they were already shooting, and that particular character was needed on the set in three days, Groucho would be playing God after all. During one scene, Preminger was screaming instructions at him. Groucho yelled back, “Are you drunk?”
     I had dinner with him that evening. He was concerned about the script of Skidoo because it pretty much advocated LSD, which he had never tried, but he was curious. Moreover, he felt a certain responsibility to his young audience not to steer them wrong. He had read my descriptions of acid trips, so he asked if I could I possibly get him some pure stuff, and would I care to accompany him on a trip? I did not play hard to get. We arranged to ingest those little 300-microgram white tablets one afternoon at the home of an actress in Beverly Hills.
Groucho was especially interested in the countercultural aspects of LSD. I mentioned a couple of incidents that particularly tickled him, and his eyes sparkled with delight. One was about how, on Haight Street, runaway youngsters, refugees from their own families, had stood outside a special tourist bus–guided by a driver “trained in sociological significance”--and they held mirrors up to the cameras pointing at them from the windows, so that the tourists would get photos of themselves trying to take photos.
     The other was about the day that LSD became illegal. In San Francisco, at precisely two o'clock in the afternoon, a cross-fertilization of mass protest and tribal celebration had taken place, as several hundred young people simultaneously swallowed tabs of acid while the police stood by helplessly
     “Internal possession wasn't against the law,” I explained to Groucho.
“And they trusted their friends more than they trusted the government,” he said. “I like that.”
We had a period of silence and a period of listening to music. I was accustomed to playing rock’n’roll while tripping, but the record collection at this house consisted entirely of classical music and Broadway show albums. First, we listened to the “Bach Cantata No. 7.” “I'm supposed to be Jewish,” Groucho said, “but I was seeing the most beautiful visions of Gothic cathedrals. Do you think Bach knew he was doing that?”
“I don't know. I was seeing beehives and honeycombs myself.”
Later, we were listening to the score of a musical comedy, Fanny. There was one song called “Welcome Home,” where the lyrics go something like, “Welcome home, says the clock,” and the chair says, “Welcome home,” and so do various other pieces of furniture. Groucho started acting out each line, as though he were actually being greeted by the clock, the chair, and the rest of the furniture. He was like a child, charmed by his own ability to respond to the music that way.
There was a bowl of fruit on the dining room table. During a snack, he said, “I never thought eating a nice juicy plum would be the biggest thrill of my life.” Then we talked about the sexual revolution. Groucho asked, “Have you ever laid two ladies together?”
     I told him about the time that I was being interviewed by a couple of students from a Catholic girls' school. Suddenly Sheila, The Realist's “Scapegoat,” and Marcia, the “Shit-On”--she had given herself that title because “What could be lower than a Scapegoat?”--walked out of their office totally nude. “Sorry to interrupt, Paul,” said Sheila,  “but it's Wednesday--time for our weekly orgy.”The interviewers left in a hurry. Sheila and Marcia led me up the stairs to my loft bed, and we had a delicious threesome. It had never happened before, and it would never happen again.
At one point in our conversation, Groucho somehow got into a negative space. He was equally cynical about institutions, such as marriage--“legal quicksand”--and individuals, such as Lyndon Johnson, referred to as “that potato-head.”
     Eventually, I asked, “What gives you hope?”
He thought for a moment. Then he just said one word: “People.”