Notes From the Journal of a Gentle Revolutionary

by James S. Kunen

Sunday, July 14 — Relating events becomes difficult when there are no events to relate.

Monday, July 15 — I went downtown to try to get my tape recorder repaired, trying not to get a parking ticket while I was at it. I failed in both endeavors.
“This is a pretty old machine,” said the man in the service department.
The thing’s six years old. If it were a kid it’d be in the first grade. But you’re not supposed to have bought a tape recorder that long ago, and if you did, you’re not supposed to have kept it.
So the man couldn’t fix the microphone, but he sold me a plug for $1.50. One dollar and fifty cents. I would have been able to go to the movies six times for that when I was a kid.
July 15, 1972 — The young man walks into a restaurant. “I’ll have a cheeseburger,” he says. “How much?”
Says the counterman: “That’s $8.00 and $1.60 tax makes $9.60.”
“How do you sell them so cheap?”
“Volume.”
“Well, here’s a 500-dollar bill and let’s see if I have the 60 cents. Nope, all my change rusted again.”
Back at the apartment I read a mimeographed paper by Tony Papert called The Mass Strike. It began:
“The coincidence of Columbia and Paris should dispel the dominant illusion of the left in this country — that our radicalism is derived mainly from the particular issues of the Vietnam War and racism. In fact, our Vietnam and racism issues are only particular manifestations of far deeper forces simultaneously energizing mass actions in diverse parts of the advanced capitalist sector.”
That may not be terribly surprising, but it hit me kind of hard. Like it dispelled my dominant illusion.
(We youths say “like” all the time because we mistrust reality. It takes a certain commitment to say something is. Inserting “like” gives you a bit more running room.)
I’ve never been much of a political comprehension man. I’m more of an issue man. I don’t know much about the capitalist sector, but I know what I like, and I don’t like the Nam War or racism. Papers like The Mass Strike just don’t speak to me right now.
But I thought that Papert might, so I went to see him in the evening. We went to a bar and talked over the bourgeois blare of a Jerry Lewis movie on the decadent color TV on the wall.
Papert is head of the S.D.S. Labor Committee, sometimes referred to as the thought faction, as opposed to the action faction, of S.D.S. I thought I might pick up a few thoughts.
I asked him, with some embarrassment over the incredible simplicity of my political consciousness, what difference it makes who the Trustees are.
He said it’s not important who they are; it’s what they do. What they do is use the university to shape, train, and funnel manpower for the needs of the American capitalist empire.
I asked him if he thought we’d made any mistakes in the strike.
He thought we’d taken a political step backward by organizing on a constituency basis. Students should play an important role in the revolutionary process, yet we have students concentrating on student gripes, letting blacks worry about blacks, women take care of women, laborers labor, and so on.
Essentially what he said was that everybody’s got to be together in a big thing. Local organizing around parochial issues is not the way. The first proper step is to educate everybody to the fact that what’s putting them down is the capitalist system. The Labor Committee was currently leafletting garment workers.
I asked him whom he wanted to be the next President of the country. I wanted to know if it was possible for me to be a decent radical and still root for Clean.
He said liberals like McCarthy are concerned with co-opting militants, especially black nationalists. That’s what local control is about: the classic fascist method of destroying a movement by isolating little groups to deal with the top. That way you give them the traffic light or the textbook they want, but never freedom. Therefore, it would be better for the movement if “one of the flunkies.” Tricky or the Humper, were elected. Then there wouldn’t be any co-opting sops thrown to the people, and the revolution could go on developing.
It seemed to me that he was essentially saying that people should be kept unhappy so that they will know they’re unhappy. They mustn’t be fooled by improvement of things. I agree that Clean tries to co-opt people with little things, but if they’re a little happier for it. I’m for it. Let the liberals do their little reforms and if they’re really meaningless sops, the people will decide that and keep pushing.
I asked Tony if he would do anything to build the Revolution, and he said that he would.
Then we talked about gun-control laws.
He, like all the real radicals, was against guncontrol legislation. He pointed out, correctly, that with the new laws, 80 percent of blacks would not be able to get guns. Also leftists couldn’t get them, whereas all the flaming Birchers and suburban reactionaries would be armed to the teeth. He said the Constitution guaranteed the right to bear arms in order to counterpose an armed populace to the armed state. That’s true. And he said real gun control isn’t possible until you disarm the police. I agree, but the police aren’t about to be disarmed, certainly not while other people have guns. He said the real point of the legislation is to prevent the blacks from defending themselves against the cops who shoot them every day. I wonder, if that’s true, why Southern senators are against gun control? Anyway, if the blacks get armed, the police will just use it as an excuse for more shooting, and in shoot-outs the state always wins. They’ll bomb out blocks in Harlem if they want to.
I just don’t like guns. I don’t want anybody to have them. People who talk about this or that group being better armed than another are talking as if they were playing some sort of game where you move gun pieces around to best advantage. They couldn’t realize that in real life you don’t draw a card that says “dead,” you feel bullets tearing into you and breaking your bones and leaving holes that all your blood runs out of as you lie in the gutter dying. I don’t want that to happen to any person, including persons who for good or bad or no reason are cops. There must be better ways to fight guns than with guns, and if there aren’t we ought to think up some. If we get guns we’re just like them and have no right or reason to fight them and everybody would be better off without us.

July 17 — I was reading the Manhattan phone book this morning. Sometimes I read the phone book when I get tired of listening to the correcttime tape going through its ticks and tones routine. Reading the directory is more interesting, but listening to the recording is easier. They’re both pretty good diversions.
Anyway, on page 1200 is an ad for New York Karate Academy. Kung-fu. Karate, Jiu-Jitsu, Judo, Boxing, “a must for city living.”
I’m living in the city. I don’t know karate. It remains to be seen if it’s really “a must.”
A girl I knew used to assure her mother that I’d be all right walking through the city at night because I was a crew jock. I don’t know what good that was supposed to do me. Maybe I was supposed to hit muggers over the head with an oar or row away from them or something.
This afternoon I fled the city for home to try to get some work done on the Book. Fifty miles from home I calculated that I had to buy 50 cents’ worth of gas to make it. Counting my change, I had precisely 50 cents, not counting the gray penny. Counting my change. I dropped a quarter on the car floor and never saw it again. If they want to get you, you’re going to get got. No use fighting it.
I told the gas man my story and he gave me 50 cents’ worth. Not everyone from Samaria is bad.

July 18 — Coming into my home, I saw a red ant and a black ant struggling on the walk. I thought I might arbitrate the issue by stepping on both of them. That would be an object lesson for them in the uselessness of fighting, but then, it wouldn’t do them any good because they’d both be dead. My front walk is the constant theater of such meaningless little wars. It’s a lot like the world, huh?
In the evening I went to the airport to see Short off on his flight to Paris. I went to the observation deck and watched in amazement as people waved and shouted good-bye to various screams and flashes in the sky. I thought that was a pretty good example of twentieth-century depersonalization, but I found a much better one when I tried to return to my car in the airport garage. I found it in thirty-five minutes flat.

July 19 — Reading over the Book, I fear I’m giving the impression that I’m hanging pretty loose and bemused and don’t overly care about anything. Well, how’s this:
Leave me and my friends alone, bastards. Get somebody else to fight your __ wars. You’re up against something here because we’re young and won’t bend and we’re against you. Think twice before you build your next huge __ __ turnpike and try to throw people out of their homes because we won’t let you. Think twice before you pour your stinking bloody money into more weapons because people are hungry and we won’t let you. We need good schools and houses for people to live in and it could be done and we’re going to make this country do it. We’ve had it up to here with you and you don’t have much time left, man. We don’t even know who you are but we’re going to find out. You’re playing with fire and fire burns baby. I mean this. I mean it well. Hear me: you’re going to get human or your stinking bodies are going up against the wall. I don’t get mad easily but I’m mad now and I’m going to stay mad until things change. You change them, or we change them. I don’t care. But the choice isn’t going to be yours much longer.
Sorry about that. I’m not apologizing; I mean I’m sorry that that’s the way things are. Anger and hatred is a place I go to sometimes. Don’t make me live there.

July 23 — In the evening Laura and her friend and I went to picket Humper downtown. Old Tri-H (I saw a sign “Hypocrit Honkie Humphrey”) was addressing some Biggees at the Waldorf. Another sign pretty well expressed the theme of the rally: “Keep America Hump-free.” Now I know, I know, old Hubie was quite the civil rights trailblazer and all. He’s ten years ahead of his time. Unfortunately, his time was 1948. I have lots of rational political disagreements with the man. but basically, he makes me sick.
The red-helmeted looney who was impugning our virility that time in the Low Library had somehow landed the position of MC at their rally. Introducing Jerry Rubin, he said “. . . we care more about his [cop] broken disc than about all the broken bones, dead or alive, in Robert Kennedy.” I was amazed. The police were appalled. The crowd was absolutely silent. If someone had cheered, I would either have punched him or thrown up on him.
Rubin, nonplussed, got up to speak. Waving near him was a very graphic-artsy black and red Resistance flag and an American Revolution ‘76 flag. Which reminds me. In this city, at least, you see tons of cars, myriad autos, more and more every day, with American flag decals on the windows. The squad cars all have them. And everytime I see one I think, God there goes another war freak, another support-our-boys-on-their-way-to-the-grave nut, and I go down inside. I think it’s too bad that I should be in a position where I demand that cops remove flags from their cars because cops aren’t supposed to be political. It’s a real down when you get bad vibrations from your own flag. I don’t want orgasmic joy from Old Gory, either. I just want it to wave up there and I’ll live around down here, content to have it above us. So what I would suggest — and this is the only concrete suggestion in the Book—is that all the leftists put flags on their cars too, to defactionalize the flag, thus depriving the right of one symbol, and also assert our potential for patriotism, our desire to have a country to be patriotic about.
So there’s Rubin, standing behind these flags, and he says, “There is more freedom for a Cuban in one day than most Americans find in a lifetime.” Rubin has been to Cuba and you and I haven’t, so let’s not pass that off too lightly. He went on to say, “Americans find happiness in other people’s unhappiness,” and I think that’s true.
There were about fifty-sixty McCarthy people picketing Humper on their own, and Rubin said for them that Clean’s role is to put us in the system, cool the rebellion in the streets.
It seems to me that unless rebellion in the streets is an end in itself, and if Clean can make the system work, then we shouldn’t mind coming in off the streets. The thing is, though, that Clean can’t make the system work, and if he could, he probably wouldn’t unless the rebellion was pushing him. I really don’t know.
“Open the jails,” he said, “let everybody out, and then put the pigs in jail.”
I figure there are, no doubt, many pigs who should be in jail, but not all of them. I hate to hear anybody talk about all or anybody that way. Perhaps if every pig precinct had a different color uniform — pink, pastel blue, white — then people wouldn’t lump them altogether in the same pen. I’m no cop lover, but saying pigs are all this or pigs are all that reminds me of sentiments like “The only good Indian is a dead Indian,” a phrase which produced far too many “good Indians.”
“America the great power is over,” he said, looking very tiny against the skyscrapers.
“The $500-a-plate dinners are over,” he said as he stood outside one. “Come out with your hands up!”
“Up against the wall!” said the crowd.
“Up against the wall!” said the crowd.
“Up against the wall!” said the crowd.
The next speaker was one of your standard strikers from Columbia. (Saw fifteen Columbia kids I knew.) He said there’s going to be a revolution, and it’
“Victory is not around the corner. It’s gonna be twenty, thirty, forty, fifty years. It’s gonna be our lives. That’s what it’s gotta be.
“The ballot or the bullet . . . We know which way we’ve got to go. There is no democracy in America, not for black people or white people either.” But can you institute a free society with guns? Means and ends. Do means shape ends?
Then the black teacher Poynter spoke: “We’re going to do unto others as they’ve been doing unto us. We’re going to even things out a little, start taking care of business in the proper way.”
Then the official permitted rally ended, and the leader said we should all go home now, but that there are various ways to go home, which is code for now we’re going to march in the streets but we’re not going to say so because we don’t want to get busted for inciting to riot.
Laura and I marched, but her friend went home because she said the whole thing made her sick, all the hatred, which was a very honest thing to say as, if you want to make it with the activists, hatred is supposed to be all right with you.
Hatred isn’t all right with me, but I’ve seen things such that a little ranting against pigs and Biggees doesn’t upset me too much. As a matter of principle, though, I don’t think we should return hatred for hatred — people have been doing that too long. I think we should shower the pigs and the candidates and the Biggees with gifts. We should love them for hating us; we should thank them for caring.
We marched all over the place, screwing up traffic some, and me all the time wondering how this was going to end any wars or feed anybody.
Someone suggested, “It’s a Jewish race riot,” which you can add to the list of the many unfunny things I’ve laughed at.

Then the time came as it always does when the cops decide they’ve had enough and bust people and beat some. I was amazed at how scared I was of the cops. At Columbia I had no fear. Now I had to be brave because all kinds of fright chemicals were coursing around inside me.
Laura and I stood on the corner and watched very calmly as the cops grabbed people and twisted their arms behind them and slugged them in the stomach and hit them on the head and also took the flags and tore them and walked on them for some reason. People all around us were getting it, but we made as if we were strolling or something. You can fade into the woodwork that way.
Then we went home. Nothing like a little danger to cement a relationship.

Wednesday, July 24 — I was outside this morning and it was pouring water all over the place and I couldn’t help remarking my absolute inability to make it stop.
I ducked into a restaurant, and as I was ordering a cheeseburger, a young woman beside me turned and started talking to me. She must have known you’re not supposed to do that, but she didn’t seem to care.
She asked me what month I was born, September. She wanted to know what day. I said the twenty-third. “That’s Libra,” I said, if that was what she was thinking about.
“You’re a cusp,” she said.
“A what?” (Teeth?)
“A cusp. Do you know what that is? It means you were born on the day the sign changes.”
“What does that make me?”
“You’re both.”
She asked me if I went to school. I told her Columbia, and she asked me how I felt about the demonstrations. I told her I was in them. She asked me if I saw one side or two sides. I said I saw two sides, in fact, I said, that’s why I can’t be too close with the radicals sometimes. I just don’t feel as sure of myself as they seem to.
Then she asked me if I thought progress was fast or slow. I said scientific progress is fast, because it builds on itself. The curve goes like this, 1 said, tracing a hyperbole in the air. Acceleration of history. Social progress is slow. It’s practically nonexistent. We’re about where we were 10,000 years ago. But you have to try to make it go fast so that it will go slow, if at all.
Do you think evolution is going on? she asked next. I said, sure, evolution is always going on. Civilization hasn’t stopped evolution. But she meant evolution of minds. Oh, I said, yes. Because today incomparably greater than ever before numbers of people don’t have to worry about food or clothing or shelter, so they’re free to think. Also, a vastly greater number of kids are in college now. What’s important is not so much what they learn, but just that they’re all together in a community to develop their ideas, instead of being all spread around. So I do expect changes.
She agreed but wanted to know what I thought the year 2030 would be like. I said I’d be dead then. You don’t give yourself much time, she said — about seventy-five years—oh, that’s from statistics. No, from what I feel like. I wouldn’t want to live too long as a vegetable. But wouldn’t I be curious to see what happens. I said that’s irrelevant because no matter how long you live, you’re not going to live to the year after that and you can’t really see anything, because the vast preponderance of time will transpire after you’ve died.
Well, what did I think it would be like.
It would be very different from now. Just by 2000 people will be working a six-hour week. Also they’ll shop by dialing computer, and not have to move around, and wear plastic shoes. We’re the last generation to share in the human heritage. We have to work and move. We’re closer to the people of 100 A.D. than to those of 2030.
“The Last of the Mohegans,” she said. I thought that was a good way of putting it.
We’re the bridge generation, I continued. We’re the product of all the past, and we’ll determine all the future.
Depressing or what?
No, it’s exciting. It’s a challenge. It’s up to us to keep future people human, assuming that’s desirable.
Is it?
I don’t know. I mean in Brave New World the people were all always happy. They were dehumanized and low, but the fact remains they were happy. It was repugnant to the observers, but they couldn’t step outside their system to see. They were just happy. That seems all right.
Do people ever step back from their systems and look? No, I don’t think so. Not most of them. If they did, they wouldn’t do what they do.
Are you enjoying your life?
Am I enjoying my life? (Nobody ever asked me that before. I’m not sure, what it means.) Yeah, I’d say so. I wasn’t last fall. I was completely uninterested in anything. I went around smashing things all the time.
What made you change?
I changed all my courses. The new courses weren’t important, it was the changing them. I could start all over. Also, it stopped being winter eventually and the days got longer. Now things are kind of exciting. My star seems to have risen, I said, knowing she’d be pleased by the use of astrological metaphor.
But sometimes I wish I didn’t have to write the Book (I told her about the Book), because I don’t know anything.
“I know,” she said, and I believe she did know.
I look up in my head and there’s this great emptiness, a void, there’s nothing there, I don’t know anything.
“I know.”
“And I was reading Erich Fromm, and I thought it was good, but it made me despair of ever knowing anything, because he knows so much. He knows everything, I swear.”
“Erich Fromm,” she said, “tells how. He describes how. But he doesn’t tell why.”
I asked her how she happened to start talking to me. Does she always talk to whoever is sitting beside her?
No. She saw something in my eyes. A certain look.
Oh, I said.
“You’ve been chewed up and spit out,” she said. “A couple of times.”
“I know that,” I said. I’ve been through some of the big chomping machines.
“That’s why,” she said.
“That’s why?” I asked.
“That’s why.” she explained.
I went home and looked in the mirror at my eyes.