DROWNING THE BABY, SAVING THE BATHWATER

The warships gather, as do the rationales. The table is groaning with options. A word rarely mentioned is oil.

The Wall St Journal has called for the U.S. and Europe to "help Libyans overthrow the Gadhafi regime." (Insufficiently compliant.) Obama and Hilary have expressed "outrage" in their zeal to save innocent lives.

The Senate, condemning Gadhafi's "violence against civilians" (as opposed to our own, or Israel's), with unanimous consent quickly passed a resolution which "calls on the United Nations Security Council to impose a no-fly zone over the territory of Libya."

Some pols have not been as politic. Michigan Rep. Mike Rogers, for instance, Chair of the House Intelligence Committee has noted that a no-fly zone could deter Kadafi from striking rebels with his chemical weapons and offers the U.S. a way "to project power without getting engaged on the ground."

I seem to remember something about a western Coalition of the Willing liberating the people of Iraq from Saddam, and the tribes of Afghanistan from warlords and  the Taliban.

In short, you don't need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows, and you don't need a fisherman to smell something fishy. The details are changing hour by hour; the exact storyline is hard to predict. But that the babe of freedom is life-threatened by its bath of oil, power struggles, and violence -- that we know. Some things are transparent.

The Bread & Puppet Theater has a devastating little play called "The King Story." Peter Schumann's narrator speaks as follows:

Once there was a Good King.  And the King had a Priest, and the King had a Red Man, and the King had a Blue Man and his Son, and the King had  Good People.

One day, a Great Warrior came into the King's country and offered his services to the King.  But the King refused to accept his services and he sent him away.

Then a terrible Dragon appeared in the King's country, and the People were afraid, and the King was afraid.  And he called for the Great Warrior.  But the Priest implored the King not to ask the Great Warrior for help, and the Blue Man and his Son implored the King not to ask the Great Warrior for help.
 
But the King was afraid and the People were afraid.  And the King called for the Great Warrior, and the Great Warrior fought the Dragon.  And the Great Warrior killed the Dragon.

And then the Great Warrior killed the King, and then the Great Warrior killed the Priest, and then the Great Warrior killed the Red Man, and then the Great Warrior killed the Blue Man and his Son, and then the Great Warrior killed the People.

And then the Great Warrior was alone.
   
And Death came.

And Death killed him.

"And Death killed him."  I'll tell you how. 

A smiling skull walks quietly out from behind a curtain, dressed in tux and white gloves, blowing softly on a bosun's whistle.  The Great Warrior's head is huge, metallic silver, topped with lethal spikes.  In each gigantic fist he holds an enormous sword which strikes mechanically, with deadly force. 

A smallish Death stands face to face with Immensity.

The Great Warrior raises his right sword, and brings it fiercely down.  But Death catches the sword, and slowly twists it, breaking the puppet arm. Inside, the puppeteer releases the handle, and the sword hand drops limply, flapping from its sleeve.  It is an astounding moment when the integrity of the puppet is broken.  For all the horror of the character, how pathetic to see the sword just dangle.

The same move is repeated with the left hand, and now, both swords swing helplessly from the Great Warrior's outstretched arms.  Then, in a move of high gymnastic, the puppeteer inside slowly arcs his body backward, so that the spikes of the Great Warrior's head touch the ground behind him.  He whips forward, and brings the spikes crashing down on Death. 

But his head is caught and twisted, his neck snaps, and his head dangles down, knocking against limp swords. 

Death walks around behind the Great Warrior, and pushes his carcass down to the ground, a mere blue mass now, with arms and head akimbo.  He blows his whistle softly, and walks off stage.

***************

This, Bread & Puppet's vision of Hope and Change.

SPEAKING HALF-TRUTHS TO POWER

The action

In the midst of cries for freedom in the Middle East and Africa, Ian McEwan claimed the Jerusalem Prize for Literature, in a sumptuous convention center in a city officially described as the eternal and undivided capital of Israel.

In his acceptance speech he addressed president of Israel, the minister of culture, the mayor of Jerusalem, and the "Israeli and Palestinian citizens of this beautiful city", and thanked them for honoring him with a prize which "promotes the idea of the freedom of the individual in society." He then proceeded to schmooze with the literary celebrities and political and military enforcers that gather at such events.

http://www.ianmcewan.com/

His speech was gracefully written, a short lecture on the history and purpose of the novel as an exploration of the individual, along with some ruminations concerning the political "situation", and his acceptance of the prize. Haaretz headlined the speech as courageously "slamming" Israeli policies, http://www.haaretz.com/print-edition/news/accepting-jerusalem-prize-mcewan-slams-israeli-policies-1.344695, while Britain's First Post described him as "hitting out" at Israel's "great injustice." http://www.thefirstpost.co.uk/75406,people,news,ian-mcewan-hits-out-at-israels-great-injustice-

While I acknowledge McEwan's accurate listing of major Israeli crimes, and admire his courage in enumerating them to such an audience, I found the speech on the whole to be intellectually, and perhaps psychologically dishonest, calling up many frequent zionist tropes to mask and distort the reality on the ground -- and in the hearts and minds of many of his listeners.

The words

First, in spite of his claiming disinterest in "arguments of equivalence", he repeatedly denounces "both sides", as if they were equivalent players in the ongoing tragedy.

He speaks of Hamas' "nihilism", which "has embraced the suicide bomber" -- though such appalling practices began only after intolerable Israeli provocations, and lasted for only a few years. They are not a current tactic, though McEwan describes them as if they are. Meantime, the Israelis have killed more than 3,000 Palestinians, bombing them from the skies, and shooting them from guard towers -- without committing suicide.

He goes on to speak of the nihilism of "rockets fired blindly into towns". These home-made explosives, fired in the general direction of towns over the border, land mostly in empty fields without injury to person or place -- hardly equivalent to the high-tech weaponry targeted and used against the Palestinians.

He claims that Hamas has "embraced the nihilism of an extinctionist policy toward Israel" with no nod to its many-times offered long-term truce proposals, or the clear and oft-stated purposes of the Zionists to possess the land "between the river and the sea" by dispossessing its Palestinian inhabitants.

And while he fearlessly mentions Israeli killings in the occupied territories, evictions and demolitions, the "tsunami of concrete" poured in the West Bank, the "relentless purchases of Palestinian homes in East Jerusalem, and the right of return granted to Jews but not Arabs, I stand back from these "equivalent" listings of evil, and think they are not equivalent at all -- quantitatively or qualitatively, or with regard to their motivations. One side is the oppressor, one the oppressed. Would McEwan dispute which is which?

A second common trope for Israel apologists often surfaces in their descriptions of the Israeli project. McEwan contextualizes his evaluation in the rhetoric of the occasion:

"Everybody knows this simple fact: once you've instituted a prize for philosophers and creative writers, you have embraced freedom of thought and open discourse, and I take the continued existence of the Jerusalem Prize as a tribute to the precious tradition of a democracy of ideas in Israel."
(These words, by the way, uttered in the same week as the Knesset passed a bill which calls for heavy fines to be imposed on Israeli citizens who initiate or incite boycotts against Israeli individuals, companies, factories, and organizations.)

This is shoddy, dishonest thinking, considering the history and rhetoric of zionist thought. Even McEwan recognizes this, noting that while the Jerusalem prize "recognizes writing which promotes the idea of the freedom of the individual in society", that idea "sits so awkwardly" with the situation in Jerusalem. Part for the whole, perhaps, a writer's gambit, but it sits awkwardly in the West Bank and Gaza as well, the ganze geschichte. 

And again, a false equivalence: "A great and self-evident injustice hangs in the air, people have been and are being displaced. On the other hand, a valuable democracy is threatened by unfriendly neighbours, even to the point of extinction by a state that could soon possess a nuclear bomb."

Actual displacements and killings taking place as he speaks -- versus some theoretical threat "even to the point of extinction", by I suppose Iran. Does he know the real translation of Amadinejad's "threat"? Is he aware of any Iranian nuclear arms program? Would Iran use a nuclear weapon against Israel even if it had one?  These are all right-wing canards, embarrassing in the mouth of an informed, presumably progressive, person.

The final, show-stopping, conversation and thought-ending zionist trope in McEwan's speech is the invocation of the, THE, Holocaust, "that industrialised cruelty which will remain always the ultimate measure of human depravity, of how far we can fall." Are there not other holocausts afoot, a main one planned and executed by the people in that very room? Are the billions spent, and the technological plans made for ever greater use of joystick drone and space warfare not a competitor on the human depravity scale?

The place

Granted, the ability to speak truth to power rides on getting access to that power.  I don't know why the elite ever granted a ticket to Lewis Lapham to anything. And the politicos and their sycophant press were clearly blindsided by Stephen Colbert's still remarkable 2006 roast of George Bush at the Washington Press Club.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6MoGi4AHpn0
Once bitten, twice shy: anything like that will never happen again.

And so, by being "nice" and "balanced", Ian McEwan earned himself some reluctant ears to fleetingly assault with some nasty truths. But having been awarded the prize, would he not have had those same ears -- and more -- by turning the prize down? I understand his rationalization about art promoting freedom. But contrast his route to access, voice and freedom, with that of the people in the squares of North Africa. Is there not something more genuine about these which do not end in wine and cheese?

The effect

As McEwan traced the tradition of the novel, imagine a bulldozer audibly demolishing the building next door, the cries of the inhabitants leaking through the convention center windows. Oh, but that's on the other side of town.

This great writer admits that "whatever I believed about literature, its nobility and reach, I couldn't escape the politics of my decision. Reluctantly, sadly, I must concede that this is the case." Why reluctantly, and above all, why sadly? Is not the polis of politics a collection of those individuals he writes so sensitively about? Does collecting a prize concerned with "the freedom of the individual in society" annul its social aspects?

If there were any doubt, McEwan had only to listen to Mayor Nir Barkat's speech, asserting that while Jerusalem "has conflict, big-time," he could nevertheless boast of the city's "pluralism" and "openness," and of his conviction that the "renaissance of arts" taking place in the capital is acting to "mediate tensions."

Tell it to the Palestinians.

OUR FUNNY VALENTINES

I hope you had a fine day celebrating your sweetie with non-fattening, non-aspartamic sweets, and fair-trade flowers, in honor of fourteen or so martyred saints of ancient Rome.

A legend about one of them has him restoring the sight of his jailer's daughter, and then writing her a note on the eve of his execution and signing it "From your Valentine." Hmmm.  But I suppose "Be my Valentine" might be just as bad, in mytho-historical perspective.

Touching as this is, it is not as heart-warming as the message we and our British friends sent to our allies, the Russians, on February 14, 1945 -- via the thousand bomber firebombing and destruction of Dresden. Around 40,000 innocent civilians lost their lives delivering this message, and example of "killing the messenger".

I'm sure many of you have read Kurt Vonnegut's masterpiece, Slaughterhouse Five. If not, grab a copy right away. You won't forget it. It's a riot.

But even Kurt -- who was there at Dresden -- didn't really understand why all those people were getting burned and suffocated to death. He hadn't had available this excellent article backgrounding the affair: http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=17515

It seems by February, 1945 there was no military necessity for this enormous operation. Rather, the barbarous wiping out of the population was directed at our Cyrillic allies to warn them not to get too uppity with their post-war victor claims. The Russkis needed to witness this kind of air-strike by the US and Britain -- one which could just as easily be turned on them.

Seven months later, the US alone would put on a similar show at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The cover story would be the same -- we need to do this to end the war. But the real story (victims aside) was to intimidate our Soviet friends with our love-power and solidarity.

Speaking of February and ancient Rome, I'll bet not many of you know where this month gets its name. After finding out, you may not want to know, but by then it will be too late. In the really old days, there was a major Roman festival called Lupercalia. That's right: lupus = wolf. It was a party in honor of the wolf who mothered Romulus and Remus, the brothers who founded the eternal city.

At the high point of the festivities, two boys were chosen to go to the cave where R&R had been nursed. There, they were anointed with the blood of sacrificed goats, and would spend the rest of the day running through the streets whipping people with strips of goatskin. These strips were called februa, from the Latin februum, a religious purification. There was also a lot of drinking.

Hearts and flowers, hearts and minds. May our beloveds beware.

ACROMEGALY

Acronyms, I think, bring out the worst in people. For example, the
USAPATRIOT act is not an act for American Patriots as it would appear,
but rather the U.S.A.P.A.T.R.I.O.T. Act — Uniting and Strengthening
America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and
Obstruct Terrorists. Act. Imagine the wordsmithing over that one.
Imagine how many taxpayer dollars went into the choice of those
acronymic wonders. And the marvellous mendacities therein — “uniting”,
“strengthening”, “appropriate”, “required” — all hidden behind the mask.
Truly a work of the devil. There are masks that hide, like that one, and
masks that reveal. It’s important to distinguish them.

Acromegaly is a disease resulting from a pituitary tumor overproducing growth hormone. In children it produces giants, and in adults, overgrown jaws, thick skulls and thick skin. You can see an acromegalic giant in action in Kurosawa's great film, Yojimbo. He wields a mean sledge hammer against his enemies.

Big jaw, thick skull, thick skin. Could this syndrome describe the US approach to the world?

Our president is about to pull a Joshua (10:8-14), to try to stop the sun from setting. During one campaign in an early Operation Cast Lead, while the children of Israel were smiting the Amorites, man, woman, and child, Joshua, in a fit of chutzpah, bade the sun stand still so smiting time might be longer and smiting more complete.

And behold,
the sun stood still,
and the moon  stayed,
until the people had avenged themselves upon their enemies.
The sun stood still in the midst of heaven,
and hasted not to go down about a whole day.
And there was no day that like that before it or after it,
that the LORD hearkened unto the voice of a man:
for the LORD fought for Israel.

The 342-page USA PATRIOT ACT -- clearly already prepared and lying in wait -- was passed by Congress (357-66 in the House, and 98-1 in the Senate), and signed by George W. Bush on October 26, 2001. Many legislators admitted to not having read it through before voting. Most of the bill's provisions were due to sunset after December 31, 2005, four years after passage, and safely after the 2004 election. But by March 2006, Congress had voted to reauthorize the bill so as not to tie the president's hands in his Global War on Terror.

Sunset now 6 years late.

Though having campaigned for greater oversight, the White House is now out-republicing the Republicans by asking to further delay its sunset until  December, 2013, giving the new Republican majority, and perhaps a new Republican president plenty of time to authorize permanent status. http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2011/02/obama-seeks-longer-patriot-act-extension-republicans/

The Children of Israel no doubt approve.

And it's not as if the abuses of the bill have disappeared as GWOT has aged and mellowed. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/03/13/AR2008031302277.html

Rather, the jawbone and skin continue to thicken, and the skull grows ever more dense as we Patriots resist and punish those on the side of freedom.

HELP WANTED

Our front porch faces a small, but heavily travelled street in downtown Burlington, Vermont. For the last eight years we have been tracking US military, and civilian deaths in Iraq and Afghanistan using scoreboard-type signs with slots for the changing numbers.

Someone stole our first large, canvas, handpainted version of the sign -- twice. We figured it was a war of attrition we couldn’t win, so we switched over to the style above, on cardboard, then on foamboard, with computerized numbers, so all could be easily and cheaply replaced. Since then, no one has vandalized the “National Bad News Service” advertised on front porch flag.

Initially, the public information was shocking to the neighborhood. During good weather, when we were out front, many people would stop to shake their heads about and discuss with us the implications of those ever-rising numbers.

Over the years, two local newspapers have done several stories on our porch -- with photographs -- and we were surprisingly well-known to strangers as the owners of “the house with the numbers of the dead on it”.

But the shock value of the numbers had begun to fade, and even the information value was lessening: 4,436 US soldiers dead in Iraq did not seem much different (except to the families!) from 4,428, and the number of “excess” Iraqi civilian deaths was an unchanging, guesswork extrapolation from the 2007 Lancet study. Not exactly boring, but no longer the object of community discussion.

We added a paragraph from Gravity’s Rainbow below the explanation of the numbers:

Don’t forget the real business of the War is buying and selling. The murdering and the violence are self-policing, and can be entrusted to nonprofessionals. The mass nature of wartime death is useful in many ways. It serves as spectacle, as diversion from the real movements of the War. It provides raw material to be recorded into History, so that children may be taught History as sequences of violence, battle after battle, and be more prepared for the adult world. Best of all, mass death is a stimulus to just ordinary folks, little fellows, to try ’n’ grab a piece of that Pie while they’re still here to gobble it up. The true war is a celebration of markets.

This brought new readers occasionally stopping by, but now even that is getting old.

It’s time for some new use for our well-placed interface with the neighborhood, something interesting enough to be studied by passing pedestrians, but with an aspect large enough to be seen by cars going by.

We’ve taken the numbers down for now, and have put up a new, placeholder, flag of the nation of Tizofthee. The explanatory sign reads:

ABOVE, RIGHT
The national flag of the country Tizofthee, once sweet land of Liberty.

The front porch looks sadly empty. What best to do with the stage space? Suggestions welcome. Email me at mestrin@mac.com.

Thanks.

THE ETHICS OF INFILTRATION

brainstuck.com

We began two weeks ago with Hallelujah in the mall, and last week contrasted that with theatrical infiltrations less in service to consumer capitalism.

When I began publishing these in various theater journals, I was met with a storm of protesting letters concerning my unethical “manipulation” of the poor bystanders. I wrote a piece in response describing what I thought to be a continuum of manipulations, from those which decreased understanding and degrees of freedom to those which increased them.

It might be good to look at such a continuum in the light of what is going on today. Let's start with the bad news:

A recent article by George Monbiot (http://www.opednews.com/populum/linkframe.php?linkid=124808) reports a training session organized by the right wing libertarian group, American Majority on "How to Manipulate the Medium":

“Here’s what I do. I get on Amazon; I type in “Liberal Books”. I go through and I say 'one star, one star, one star'. The flipside is you go to a conservative/ libertarian whatever, go to their products and give them five stars. … This is where your kids get information: Rotten Tomatoes, Flixster. These are places where you can rate movies. So when you type in “Movies on Healthcare”, I don’t want Michael Moore’s to come up, so I always give it bad ratings. I spend about 30 minutes a day, just click, click, click, click. … If there’s a place to comment, a place to rate, a place to share information, you have to do it. That’s how you control the online dialogue and give our ideas a fighting chance.”

On a wider scale, we have the current Israeli government support for a special undercover team of workers paid to surf the internet and spread positive news about Israel. http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=14465
The deputy director of the Foreign Ministry's hasbara ("public diplomacy", aka propaganda) department has admitted the team will be working undercover:

“Our people will not say: ‘Hello, I am from the hasbara department of the Israeli Foreign Ministry and I want to tell you the following.’ Nor will they necessarily identify themselves as Israelis,' he said. 'They will speak as net-surfers and as citizens, and will write responses that will look personal but will be based on a prepared list of messages that the foreign ministry developed.”

The new team is expected to increase the ministry’s close coordination with a private advocacy group, giyus.org (Give Israel Your United Support). About 50,000 activists are reported to have downloaded a programme called Megaphone that sends an alert to their computers when an article critical of Israel is published. They are then supposed to bombard the site with comments supporting Israel.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Megaphone_desktop_tool

A justification for much of this was shamefully enunciated by our own government's Cass Sunstein – Obama's Harvard Law School bud, and recently appointed Administrator of the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs. Writing in a scholarly journal, (J. Political Philosophy, 7 (2009), 202-227), Sunstein proposes the following:

"[W]e suggest a distinctive tactic for breaking up the hard core of extremists who supply conspiracy theories: cognitive infiltration of extremist groups, whereby government agents or their allies (acting either virtually or in real space, and either openly or anonymously) will undermine the crippled epistemology of believers by planting doubts about the theories and stylized facts that circulate within such groups, thereby introducing beneficial cognitive diversity."

From cognitive infiltration of websites, groups and meetings, it is a short enough step to the entrapments by agents provocateur we read about so commonly today. The missteps of suckered individuals have enormous life consequences -- for them, and for all of us -- in the age of Patriot Act paranoia and power.

If these kind of infiltrations populate one end of the continuum, what is the other end – the “good” end?

The most obvious current example lies in the operation of Wikileaks and the brave individuals that feed it sequestered material. A person working in a dishonest, destructive organization has every right to transform him or herself into an infiltrator, making available to Wikileaks or other publicity groups secret material the organization would otherwise have hidden.

As Julian Assange wrote on the Wikileaks homepage, “The goal is justice; the method is transparency.” It is paradoxical that it takes invisible infiltration to create public transparency, but there it is, and the effectiveness of this tactic can no longer be in question. Nor can the public good resulting.

While the theatrical infiltrations I described last week may be trivial compared to these larger examples, both good and bad, they do raise the question of whether all arts – Art itself – does not function as an infiltration.

One innocently goes to a bookstore to buy a book. But the contents of that book, if it be a good one, will infiltrate and infect one's heartmind. The infiltrating virus will lie within, creating biopsychical response, spiritual molecules unlabeled, unacknowledged, perhaps unknown, but potentially agents provocateur for new thinking and action.

It is with this infiltrating image in mind that my wife, Donna, and I have recently begun a new publication project called Fomite. A fomite is a medium capable of transmitting infectious organisms from one individual to another.

“The activity of art is based on the capacity of people to be infected by the feelings of others.” Tolstoy, What is Art?

Art, writing, music are the kinds of infiltrations which -- if ethically and mindfully done -- have the capacity to increase, not decrease, degrees of freedom.

INFILTRATIONS

R. Crumb

Last week, I wrote about what I consider politically unearned infiltrations supporting rampant consumerism. I will not sing Hallelujah in the mall.

Infiltrations, however, do have real potential for thought-provoking events.

When I was in theater grad school in the 60s, everybody was all hot for Artaud's Theater of Cruelty, in which the audience was made to shit in its pants, and paradoxically for Brecht's teaching plays which asked the audience to think cooly and carefully about society's givens. We young directors were concerned with breaking down barriers between audience and actors -- new kinds of staging, new kinds of scripts.

But for me, the prior problem was one of "audience" itself -- that there should be people who buy (usually high-priced) tickets, sit comfortably in chairs, applaud, then go out for a meal or a drink to socialize, and perhaps, perhaps, "discuss the play".

Too compartmentalized, too boxed in, too unengaged with reality.

So I gathered a group interested in practicing Infiltrations -- theater pieces which would not be perceived as such, but which would just be reported at home as "something interesting that happened to me today."

Here are two such Infiltrations to give you an idea of what we were up to, one in an emporium, and one in a smaller store. Next week I will discuss the ethics involved.

************************************

COST PLUS AND AMERICAN IMPERIALISM

Cost Plus is a mammoth import store on the San Francisco waterfront which caters to tourists and Bay Area bobos by supplying them with hand-wrought goods from around the world – from inexpensive mass-produced trinkets to costly one-of-a-kind curiosities. It is self-help, with no sales personnel on the floor. We began to wonder about the flow of goods that went through the store, and after getting some information from one of the buyers we came up with the following piece.

Five of us, looking as straight as possible, dispersed throughout the store as customer aides. We approach people who were inspecting possible purchases. A typical dialog went like this:

US: may I help you?

CUSTOMER, generally unsuspicious: No, thank you.

US, waiting a bit, watching over customer's shoulder: Isn't it amazing how we can bring you such an intricately carved box for only $4.99?

CUSTOMER: Why, yes it is.

US: Do you know how we can do it?

CUSTOMER: No.

US: Well, the man who carves this box –he's very good at it, he can do two a day–gets 25¢ a day for his work.

CUSTOMER: Oh?

US: Yes. You see, there's a lot of famine and disease in India, and he has to work for whatever he can get.

CUSTOMER: Oh.

US: He has no choice.

CUSTOMER: Uh-huh.

US: And since we control the world economy, more or less, we can decide on the right price.

Silence.

Yes, and you have to realize that what you pay includes the markup for the buyer, the warehouse, the shipper, the import duty, and our own small overhead–so it's really an incredible bargain.

Thoughtful, nonhostile silence. This was usually a turning point: either the customer began reacting to what we were saying or else we carried it further.

I think it's right–don't you–that we in this country should be able to benefit from people's work around the world? After all, we give them a market. They'd starve without it. And we can have these really nice things. I mean Americans work really hard, right? We have to put up with so much–like the war and everything–we deserve these kind of beautiful things. People who work hard should be rewarded. Don't you think so? And the natives? They're hard workers too, but I mean 25¢ a day is a lot for them, right? Did you know that although we're only 6% of the world's population, we consume 60% of its natural resources? That just shows–were sort of 10 times ahead of everybody else because were willing to work hard and bring home the bacon.

Etc., etc. Eventually these customers drifted away with an embarrassed “Thank you.” But none of them bought the items they had been looking at.

After an agreed upon two hours, we all met outside the store to trade stories. We were never caught, and the customers, too, would have their stories to tell.

*************************

CITY LIGHTS RIPOFF

Lawrence Ferlinghetti started the City Lights Bookstore on $500 in the early fifties; it has since become one of the most complete paperback shops in the Bay Area. The store has been busted several times for selling radical or obscene material, and has an open door policy toward its customers: the police are never called. Once, City Lights was ripped off for $8,000 worth of books and went that much in the hole. This seemed to me like a typical example of Movement bullshit -- brothers undoing each other in the name of "liberation" or conflicting ideologies -- so we decided to explore our own and the customers’ attitudes toward ripping off City Lights.

During rehearsal, the group rejected playing "roles" in favor of exploring each member's own position. We lined up pretty heavily for the legitimacy of ripping-off. I was one of the few spokesmen against. But the balance worked out in performance, since most of the customers at least started off by defending the store. The piece took an hour to an hour and a half to develop (we did it three times) and was done with the cooperation of the management and, as it turned out, at their expense. It's hard to record the complexities and meanderings of the performances, but the salient points are as follows:

Beat 1

One of us, previously agreed, steals a book, and hides it in his pants. Very quietly, a young woman (one of us) goes up to him and says she doesn't think he ought to do that here. His very quiet response is "Mind your own business, lady." Totally private so far.

Beat 2

The woman retreats but keeps her eye on the guy. Some minutes later, he attempts to stash another book, and the exchange begins again, just as quietly. This time the guy is a little more pissed off, and the exchange ends with a little louder than necessary "Fuck off!" For the first time, real customers are aware of tension somewhere in the store.

Beat 3

I wander over and ask the woman what's happening. She reluctantly and quietly informs me that some guy is trying to rip off books. I approach him very quietly and ask him why doesn't he do that at Doubleday's or Brentano's. He begins to get uneasy and tries to terminate our encounter as quickly as possible, until another one of us, overhearing, supports the thief by asking me,

"Hey, what are you, a cop or something? Let the guy do his thing."

Beat 4

By now it's apparent to the thief that things aren't working out as planned. But on the other hand, he has support, so he doesn't split. For the first time I chastise the thief publicly.

"Hey man, look, why don't you go down to Doubleday's and rip off the book if you need it? Why rip off your brothers?"

"Brothers, my ass! This place is the fucking pig establishment."

This is the first theme to be taken up -- it generally called up a lot of customer support for the store. Other topics for discussion we planted among the ten to twenty customers are:

1. Who are brothers; who is the enemy?

2. Are there alternatives to a retail bookstore?

3. Are "liberals" like Ferlinghetti and City Lights just greasing the capitalist machine?

Our group, more vocal now than at first, pushes the balance way over to the thief's side. This helps justify his sticking around. He's not an outlaw but is acting within the mores of the local population -- and this brings an emotional response from the customers. Each time, someone offers to buy him the book or take up a collection. We follow their trips wherever they go.

Beat 5

I get more and more pissed off with what I consider poor analysis. I station myself on the steps so I can be heard by everyone, wait for a lull, and say to the thief,

"All right, that's all."

"What do you mean?"

"You're not taking those books."

"Oh yeah? Why not?"

“'Cause I'm going upstairs with you and tell Shig [the guy at the desk] you've got them."

A new uproar! Even the customers don't like it. (There are a few who come over to quietly tell me they agree with me and think I should do it, but no one defends my action publicly.) I am accused of being a pig, of laying my trip on other people, of exceeding my rights.

"What is this, the second grade, you're gonna tell the teacher?"

I argue briefly that when this man rips off City Lights, he's ripping me off (I need the store), and that I intend to defend myself. From that time on, I am generally silent, stubbornly waiting for the thief's exit.

Beat 6

One of us calls for a "rip-in," and tries to get customers to liberate books together. So far, only our own group has done this publicly, although it's hard to tell what walks out when we do.

Beat 7

Confrontation at the desk. The first time we did it the day clerk got completely flustered. He had been told what was happening and was asked to act in any way he wanted. He couldn't get it together, and three people walked out with books. That evening we confronted Shig who, with some kind of invisible karate approach, retrieved two books. A third was grabbed by a customer at the door. The next night we had a big argument at the desk. Shig surprised us by saying, "Take the books," and several people did so -- to a lot of customers' anger. Shig just felt that that was his prerogative. That really set off some of the people who had been defending the store for the last hour downstairs.

We still haven't resolved for ourselves the implications of our positions and actions. We know the piece is credible and sets a lot of people thinking and talking (and stealing?). But when someone in our group presented me with the complete Beethoven string quartets as a present, I had to send Shig a check before I could enjoy it.