Acid Dreams: The Complete Social History of LSD (31 page)

Leary’s rap was such an affront to the radical community that at one point when he brought his traveling religious road show to the Bay Area, the editors of the
Berkeley Barb
urged antiwar activists to demonstrate against the acid guru. Even his ostensible allies were put off by his apolitical stance. Gary Snyder felt that dropping out could easily mean copping out unless people cultivated techniques of self-sufficiency as a prerequisite to building a new social order. He did not want to reject those who made tremendous sacrifices for the cause of social justice, although he hoped they could be brought around to what he considered “a more profound vision of themselves and society.” That was where LSD might prove useful—to help broaden the very definition of politics and thereby enhance the historical vision of the New Left. Snyder understood that student radicalism and the psychedelic subculture derived from similar roots, and he tried to encourage a creative dialogue between the two.

The flower power ethos was in some sense a caricatured extension of the nonviolent pacifist ideology that dominated the early history of the New Left. During the mid-1960s the psychedelic underground plugged into the spiritual rhetoric of the civil rights movement, which had nothing to do with “expanded consciousness” per se. Although acid in and of itself does not imply a particular moral framework or political outlook, as a nonspecific catalyst of psychic
and social
processes (the two realms are intimately connected) it brings out “the flavors and ingredients of whatever happens to be cooking in the cultural stew,” as Michael Rossman put it. That LSD and the subculture it inspired came to be so closely associated with peace and love and tra-la-la was in no small part due to the prevailing left-wing political gestalt of passive resistance.

The rhetoric of nonviolent pacifism constituted only one aspect of the legacy that was adopted by the acid subculture. Members of the Berkeley Free Speech Movement, SDS, and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), the radical youth wing of the civil rights movement, were trying to create alternative structures within which “the loving community” could flourish. This notion—which harked back to the Wobblies’ slogan a half-century earlier, “Forming the new society within the shell of the old”—became
a moving force in the Haight. By early 1967 a number of thriving alternative institutions already existed in the psychedelic city-state: the
Oracle
, the Community Switchboard, the Hip Job Coop, Happening House (a cooperative teaching venture), Radio Free Hashbury; in coming months the Free Medical Clinic would open its doors. Even the neighborhood merchants formed a business council, HIP (Haight Independent Proprietors). The idea of building a parallel society smack-dab in the belly of the beast held great appeal to many a shell-shocked pacifist who’d grown weary of sit-ins, demonstrations, and police violence. For these people the futility of trying to reform the system was amply confirmed by the landslide election of Ronald Reagan as governor of California. They were ready for a different approach; rather than try to overhaul the social and economic structures of mass commercial society, they would simply try to outflank them.

By dropping out and joining the Haight-Ashbury scene, young people were not necessarily renouncing their commitment to social change. But they felt that the personal and the political could not be split into separate categories. Human liberation was something to be acted out because it was right on, a better way to live, rather than an item petitioned for during protest hour. If, as Charles Olson proposed, “the private is public, and the public is where we behave,” then the clearest political statement was how people chose to comport themselves on a daily basis. This premise informed the hip penumbra of the radical left, that widening sphere where culture and politics overlapped in ways both complementary and problematic. The Haight became a crucible of dynamic interchange as leftwing activists cross-fertilized with turned-on poets, drifters, artists, and dropouts who were refashioning themselves into living articulations of the struggle against bureaucracy. A hybrid army of young rebels was on the move: politicos loosened up and grew their hair long, antiwar posters appeared in psychedelic design, and demonstrations incorporated more colorful elements of music, dance, and absurdity.

The hippies, for their part, never completely deserted the peace movement, despite Leary’s proddings. At their best they represented an edge where the perspectives and tactics of the New Left were being transformed. Although there were important distinctions that placed the two groups at either end of the spectrum of dissent, the common ground they shared was significant. Both were expressions
of the “Great Refusal,” and the existential project they embraced was essentially the same: the regeneration of personality. The cultural renaissance fueled by LSD was the force that broke the stranglehold of bourgeois morality and the Protestant work ethic. It provided the passionate underpinning for a lifestyle that existed on the far side of power politics. Above all it insisted upon a revolution that would not only destroy the political bonds that shackle and diminish us but would also, in the words of Antonin Artaud, “turn and face man, face the body of man himself, and decide once and for all to demand that
he change
.”

7
The Capital Of Forever

STONE FREE

Something’s astir on Haight Street. Thousands of hippies are making the scene when a roving band of mysterious characters suddenly appears among the day-trippers, passing out handbills that bear two enigmatic phrases: Street Menu and Carte de Venue (“Your ticket to somewhere”). It’s the beginning of a street theater spectacle put on by a gangster performing troupe who call themselves the Diggers. The theme on this occasion is “The Death of Money and the Birth of Free.” A bizarre funeral cortege is making its way up LSD Avenue. Leading the procession is a group of women mourners dressed in black singing “Get out my life why don’t you babe . . .” to the tune of Chopin’s
Funeral March
. They are followed by three hooded figures hoisting a silver dollar sign on a stick and a half-dozen pallbearers carrying a black-diaped coffin. Even stranger are the huge animal masks—at least five feet high—worn by the pallbearers.

There won’t be any reruns of this event, no encores or applause—in fact, there aren’t even any spectators. Everyone’s part of the show. The entire neighborhood becomes the stage as twenty death-walkers at the rear of the funeral march give away flutes, flowers, pennywhistles, and lollipops in preparation for the next “act,” so to speak, a cacophonous orchestration mocking the law against being a public nuisance. Public nuisance equals public “new sense,” get it? Hundreds of hippies line both sides of the street with instruments in hand, goofing and spoofing, and so it goes, one scene after another for hours at a time.

As twilight approaches, a few hundred rearview car mirrors procured from a junkyard are distributed to the mischievous masses, who are encouraged to climb atop the buildings and reflect the setting sun down onto the street. Meanwhile a chorus of women in silver bell-bottom pants, bolero tops, and tie-dye outfits raises a
banner of marbleized paper inscribed with a poem and chants back and forth to some other women perched on the rooftops. Thousands pick up the cue and chant poetry, and soon the police arrive to clear the mob scene—a rather formidable task, considering that the crowd has swelled to unmanageable proportions. The spontaneous interaction between cops and hippies (call it a riot) becomes part of the performance. It’s all for free—a free-for-all: anarchist antics scripted to make something wide-open happen. “Street events are rituals of release. Re-claiming of territory (sundown, traffic, public joy) through spirit,” proclaimed a Digger manifesto. “No one can control the single circuit-breaking moment that charges games with critical reality. If the glass is cut, if the cushioned distance of the media is removed, the patients may never respond as normals again. They will become life actors. . . a cast of freed beings.”

The Diggers burst upon the scene in the summer of 1966, when a number of actors broke away from the San Francisco Mime Troupe and formed their own loose-knit collective. They felt that the Mime Troupe’s political satire was too formal, a predictable rehash of left-wing ideas that failed to appreciate the Haight’s unique potential for a new kind of social theater—“a poetry of festivals and crowds, with people pouring into the streets,” as Artaud put it. The debate over dropping out versus political engagement was a moot point to the Diggers. Their imaginative pageants were beyond codification, challenging the assumptions of the New Left as well as the psychedelic religious fringe.

The Diggers took their name from a seventeenth-century English farming group that preached and practiced a form of revolutionary communism. Convinced that money and private property were the work of the Devil, the original Diggers claimed squatters’ rights for the people and gave free food to the needy. When Lord Protector Cromwell announced the Enclosure Act, which allowed landowners to cordon off public lands for their own use, the Diggers responded by digging the soil (hence their name) and planting a garden in the Commons Area. Their defiance provoked the wrath of Cromwell and his Roundheads, who charged the upstarts with “encouraging the looser and disordered sort of people into greater boldness.” The ministers began exhorting their congregations to go out and give the troublemakers hell, and a wave of bloody repression ensued.

Like their British forebears, the San Francisco Diggers believed that the world was run by a cabal of greedy liars and thieves. It was
downright foolish to expect the perpetrators to redress the ills they had created, for to deal with a system that was rotten to the core—either by fighting it or joining it—could only lead to further corruption. The Diggers never protested for or against anything, refusing to be seduced by the romantic pretensions of the New Left, whose faith in the efficacy of telling Truth to Power betrayed its own naiveté. That was how the Diggers saw it, and they had no intention of squandering their energy on angry leftist protest that would end up filling a twenty-second slot on the TV news. Peace marches and demonstrations might provide an outlet for private frustrations—a dose of solidarity for temporary relief of alienation—but it seemed doubtful to the Diggers that all the word-slinging and finger-pointing would amount to much in terms of real change.

If you wanted a better world, the Diggers maintained, then it was up to you to make it happen, because no one else—least of all the fraudulent politicians—would hand it over on a silver platter. To take back what was rightfully theirs, people had to assume their own freedom in the here and now: “No frozen moments for tomorrow’s fantasy revolution!” The Diggers went about their business as if utopia were already a social fact and everyone were free. They chided other lefties for being stodgy, dull, and fixated on social models (Cuba, China, Vietnam) that had little relevance to the situation in the United States. The goal of revolution, as far as the Diggers were concerned, was not merely to seize the wealth hoarded by a handful of the filthy rich and spread it among the hapless masses. A simple transference of power, a redistribution of things already valued, constituted only a degree of liberation. At best it was a prelude to an overall transformation of values culminating in a revolt against the very concepts of power, property, and hierarchy.

The Diggers sensed a tremendous opportunity in the mid-1960s to experiment with what postindustrial society might look like assuming the human species survived its next cataclysmic moment. Although the precise features of this new social order were never consistently articulated, one could begin by postulating the abolition of the division between labor and leisure, so that the logic of the game once again took precedence in human affairs. It was a game they played for keeps. “Western society has destroyed itself,” stated the
Digger Papers
. “The culture is extinct. Politics are as dead as the culture they supported. Ours is the first skirmish of an enormous struggle, infinite in its implications.”

Tough, charismatic, and streetwise, the Diggers illuminated the Haight with wild strokes of artistic genius. In acting out their version of an alternative society, they emerged as the avant-garde of American anarchism, a homespun tradition that went back to the previous century and had recently taken a detour through psychedelics. For the Diggers LSD was “hard kicks,” a way of extending oneself to the perimeters of existence where something spectacular and awesome might occur. Acid imbued their eyes with a visionary gleam and provided the distance that enabled them to see how they matched up against the grand scheme of life. But the Diggers never copped to the notion that everything would be groovy if everyone turned on. The
Oracle
’s transcendental twaddle struck them as vapid and elitist. They scoffed at those who took drugs to discover the hidden truth and mystery of being.

The Diggers viewed acid in terms of personal fulfillment, but always within a social context. They were more activist-oriented than revelatory; things were real when people did them, and what they did had to relate to the basics: food, clothing, shelter, creativity. As a counterpoint to the vague love ethic of the flower children, they promoted the no-nonsense ethic of “FREE!” When they began serving free meals in the Panhandle in the autumn of 1966, it wasn’t a one-shot publicity stunt. This Robin Hood routine actually continued on a daily basis for more than a year. Any hippie—or straight, for that matter—who was hungry merely had to show up at the park at 4:00
P.M.
, walk through a large orange scaffold (a “Free Frame of Reference”), and chow down. The Diggers also set up a Free Store, which distributed a wide range of “liberated goods” (most of which had been donated by local shopkeepers). There was even a basket with “free money” in it, if anyone was short on cash. The Diggers were dead set against profiteering of any kind, whether it involved dope dealing or HIP merchants hawking psychedelic souvenirs during tourist season. They insisted that any hippie worth his salt had to drop out of America’s true national pastime—the money game. “The US standard of living is a bourgeois baby blanket for executives who scream in their sleep. . . . Our fight is with those who would kill us through dumb work, insane wars, dull money morality.”