notes from Rubin, Jerry. Do It. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1970.
20--Then Che jolted us out of our dream of the Sierra Madre. He said to us:
You North Amerikans are very lucky. You live in the middle of the beast.
You are fighting the most important fight of all, in the center of the battle.
If I had my wish, I would go back with you to North Amerika to fight there.
I envy you.
24--The Free Speech Movement invited young kids to come to Berkeley for the action. So thousands of refugees from New York and the Midwest flocked to live on the streets of Berkeley.
It was an easy life. The weather was warm and the seasons hardly changed, so you didn't need to buy winter clothing. You could always get by selling dope ... A whole new culture burst forth just outside the biggest university in the history of the world ... Dig the straight student who came out of a Los Angeles suburb to get an education at Berkeley. Heading for his dormitory or apartment after a hard day at school, he passed down Telegraph Avenue: like walking through the revolution on the way home. (25) He would pass a record shop and catch a couple of lines of Dylan.
A middle-class suburban kid just like himself, except looking like a barefoot Jesus Christ, would walk up and ask him, "Any spare change?"
Gradually the thought entered the consciousness of the straight student:
"Here I am burdened by assignments, responsibilities, guilts, no time on my own. And here are these hippies on the streets; they can do whatever they want to. They can get high all day. They can stay in the sun all day, while I have to spend my time in a stuffy classroom, listening to boring professors and taking exams that make me a nervous wreck."
24--The university is a place for makin git, a high-pressured rat race. Competition for grades, degrees, books, recommendations, getting into graduate school and getting a good job.
The academic world is a hierarchy, and everybody's always kissing the ass of the guy on top of him.
But all the students saw the living example of thousands of young kids who had given up on the straight world and who were free even though they hadn't reached the retirement age. They were real students in the classical sense of education as self-growth. And since many of the hippies were ex-students, they had the zealous mission of reformed sinners.
Students started hanging around nonstudent tables, and forgetting to go to their classes.
As their hair lengthened, their interest in schoolwork shortened.
As they smoked more and more dope, they found their exams and research papers more and more absurd.
They started dropping out of school--in droves.
26--The wildest teacher at the University of California was Stew Albert. Stew sat behind the table of the Vietnam Day Committee and attracted massive crowds because he was the first revolutionary anyone ever saw with flowing blond hair and devilish blue eyes. But soon as they looked, they got hooked by Stew into ferocious controversy about pot, Vietnam, God, the university, sex, and Communism. It must have outraged the university professors. They had to force people to attend their classes through threats--rewards and punishments.
But here was Stew, holding everyone's attention just because they dug rapping freely. Stew was teaching under the sun, instead of in a stale classroom. But he had no right to teach. He hadn't gone through the Credentials Factory like everyone else. He was a dropout.
The university became a fortress surrounded by our foreign culbure, longhaired, dopesmoking, barefooted freeks who were using state-owned university property as a playground. It threatened the integrity of the university. It freaked out the politicians of the state.
30--I dug it. The university's attempt to cast us as guerilla fighters and the students as "dupes" built the nonstudent myth to gargantuan proportions. It insulted the students and increased their desire to drop out.
When you become a nonstudent, sex is better and more plentiful, you smoke more grass, you're healthier and happeir and you grow 100 feet tall.
45--Could we get Dylan to come and sing at the march? Ginsberg pondered for a second and said, "Dylan might come if the march says nothing about the war. Like if everyone carries a placard with a picture of a different kind of fruit."
Nobody knew how to handle Ginsberg's pre-yippie, acid ideas.
47--Any Fool Can Run for Mayor
Any fool with 25 signatures and $25 can run for mayor of Berkeley.
So I decided to run.
What better way to make fun of the political system than to run for public office?
We'll hold a marajuana teach-in in front of the police station and give joints to the cops as the campaign's main action.
We'll lead a march of 10-year-olds to the ballot box demanding the right to vote.
If elected I will not serve. We'll have a rotating mayorship, with everyone taking turns as mayor for a day.
We'll take over City Hall the Castro took over the Havana Hilton.
I ran around Telegraph Avenue asking people what they thought of the idea.
"You mayor? Hah, hah, hah!" Everyone just started laughing.
That was exactly the reaction I wanted.
I'd just been arrested for being a public nuisance on the Berkeley campus, and I proclaimed that if elected I would pardon myself--and everybody else--in a public celebration.
...
49--Maybe I could win?
The only other candidates in the race were a Trotskyite and a John Bircher. The Democrats were supporting Johnson.
I began to put together plans for victory--my winning combination. I'd get the votes of the students and non-students, if they'd register to vote. The black community--in opposition to racism at Johnson's factory. Then, finally, all those middle-class liberals who live high in the Berkeley hills. They want to see the Vietnam war end, but they also want to keep their nice view of the world. Who would they vote for--a prowar businessman or an antiwar public nuisance?
The campaign began to send people door-to-door throughout the whole fucking city, talking to people about the mayoralty election...
50--Stew and I slaved for a week writing a program with proposals on every issue. We scraped up $5,000 and printed 40,000 beautiful, psychedelic 25-page booklets--probably the most elaborate political program any candidate for office in Amerika has ever distributed.
I spent every day at the supermarkets handing them out and saying to people, "My name's Jerry Rubin. I'm running for mayor of Berkeley. Hope you'll vote for me."
A meeting of campaign workers voted down the idea of the rotating mayor because "nobody will vote for a candidate who says he's not going to serve if elected."
The marajuana teach-in was dropped.
I bought a vest and a gold suit.
I got a haircut and trimmed my mustache.
I lay awake nights asking myself whether I was serious.
"My name's Jerry Rubin. I'm running for mayor. Hope you'll vote for me."
"My name's Jerry Rubin. I'm running for mayor. Hope you'll vote for me."
I almost had it down to a tune.
I'll never forget the look of total disappointment and amusement on Stew's face when he saw me for the first time in my suit, three weeks before eleciton day. He crumbled up a piece of paper and threw it at me in disgust.
Relations between Stew and me became strained.
Nancy and I almost broke up because I kept pushing everybody to work so hard.
"Every minute is a lost vote."
I woke up at 6 a.m. and worked until 2 a.m. I wanted everybody to do the same. I saw relaxing as a personal attack on the campaign.
I started saying to people: "You're not serious."
(51)
I started kissing babies and shaking every hand I could catch. I had no time to get stoned.
I began to look at people as "votes."
The people who were voting for me were the finest people who ever walked the earth.
The people who weren't voting for me were enemies.
People were either pro-Rubin or anti-Rubin.
I was never seen without my white shirt, long tie and new suit.
On election night I was super-confident. Then the votes started pouring in:
Johnson. Johnson. Johnson.
My heart sank. Johnson. Rubin. Johnson. Johnson.
My heart sank deeper.
There was a "Rubin" here and there. But I was getting creamed.
I finished second, 7385 votes, 22 percent and won four precicts, all in the campus community. I got slaughtered in the hills and got a few votes in the black community.
I learned the hard way that you can't build a new society while scrounging for votes in elections.
I tried to get votes from parents of kids I had been telling to drop out of school, smoke pot and fuck each other.
To succeed in electoral politics you must be dishonest. Our new society is honest.
Elections are built around individual candidates. Our new society is collective.
I repudiated my life-style to get straight votes.
I will never put on a gold suit and vest again.
Fuck electoral politics.
Live the revolution.
(52-53 is a two-page spread, about 30 naked people smiling in a posed group photo, with "One Vote" written over each of their bodies)
54--One day some Berkeley radicals were invited over to the Buddhist temple of some San Francisco hippies. We got high and decided to get the tribes of Haight-Ashbury together.
A Gathering of the Tribes. Golden Gate Park. Free music by all the rock bands in the city.
The hippies were calling it a Human "Be-in."
Nobody knew what the fuck a Be-in was.
We got stoned on some outasight grass. One Berkeley radical asked: "What are going to be the demands of this demonstration?"
The hippies patiently explained to him that it wasn't a "demonstration" and that we were just going to "be" there.
"People will turn each other on."
"Only good vibes."
"But no demands."
The Berkely radical kept demanding that there be demands. So somebody gave him a pencil and paper and told him to write some.
It got to be so heavy that one S.F. hippie jumped up and said, "There's got to be more love in this room: Roll some more joints."
People in the street knew something was up. They seemed to catch on right away. If it had been a political demonstration they would have asked, "What are the issues? What are the demands? Why should we go?"
But this time everybody knew.
The purpose was just to be.
(55)
Golden Gate Park:
Rock music.
Grass.(me: what kind?)br>
Sun. Beautiful bodies.
Paint.
Ecstasy. Rainbows. No strangers!
Everybody smiling. No picket signs or political banners.
Our nakedness was our picket sign.
56--The Be-in: a new medium of human relations. A magnet drawing together all the freaky, hip, unhappy, young, happy, curious, criminal, gentle, alienated, weird, frustrated, far-out, artistic, lonely, lovely people to the same place at the same time. We could see one another, touch one another and realize that we were not alone.
All of our rebellion was reaffirmed.
It was a new consciousness.
Instead of talking about communism, people were beginning to live communism.
The fragmented life of capitalist Amerika--the separation between work and play, school and fun, property and freedom--was reconstituted by the joyous celebrants.
Neither the civil rights movement, the Free Speech movement or the antiwar movement achieved its stated goals. They led to deeper discoveries--that revolution did not mean the end of the war or the end of racism. Revolution meant the creation of new men and women.
Revolution meant a new life.
On earth.
Today.
Life is the act of living.
Revolution is the act of revolution.
We are all human be-ins.
(compare this with the ideas you get when you give up christianity. heaven is here, now.)
86--(describing Yippies) The left demands full employment for all--we demand full unemployment for all. The world owes us a living!
87--Amerika says: Don't.
The yippies say: Do It!
Everything the yippies do is aimed at three-to-seven-year-olds.
We're child molesters.
Our message: Don't grow up. Growing up means giving up your dreams.
Our parents are waging a genocidal war against their own kids. The economy has no use or need for youth. Everything is already built. Our existence is a crime.
The logical next step is to kill us. So Amerika drafts her young niggers and sends us to die in Vietnam.
The function of school is to keep white middle-class youth off the streets. High schools and colleges are fancy baby-sitting agencies.
Vietnam and the school system are the two main fronts in Amerika's genocidal campaign against the youth. Jails and mental hospitals follow closely.
Amerika says: History is over. Fit in. The best system in the history of man has been discovered--it's yours.
Nothing else is possible because man is selfish, greedy, tainted by Original Sin. If we don't fit in, they lock us up.
But for the masses of people throughout the world, history is just beginning. We want to start again, too, rebuilding from scratch.
We want to be heroes, like those we read about in the history books. We missed the First Amerikan Revolution. We missed World War II. We missed the Chinese and Cuban Revolutions. Are we supposed to spend our futures grinning and watching TV all the time?
88--A society which suppresses adventure makes the only adventure the repression of that society.
98--Marijuana makes each person God.
Get high and you want to turn on the world. It's never "my dope"--it's always "our dope." Everything for everybody. The Communist drug.
Pot transforms environments. All the barriers we build to protect ourselves from one another disappear.
Grass travels around the room like a continually moving kiss. Smoke grass in the morning. Stay high all day.
The eight-hour day is the enemy.
When you're high on pot you enjoy only one thing--the moment. A minute feels like an hour; an hour can be a minute. "Damn it, I missed that appointment." All appointments and schedules, times and deadlines disappear. Man can do what he wants whenever he wants to do it.
Marijuana is the street theater of the mind.
Marijuana is destroying the schools. Education is conditioning. Pot deconditions. School makes us cynics. Pot makes us dreamers.
Education polarizes our brains into subjects, categories, divisions, concepts. Pot scrambles up our brains and presents everything as one perfect mess.
We fall off chairs roaring with laughter when we hear our professors, teachers, experts--the people we're supposed to learn from--discussing us, our culture, grass. We feel like those primitive African tribes must have felt when Margaret Mead came popping in with her pencil and paper.
Hearing someone who has not smoked grass talk about it is like hearing a nun talk about sex.
The only expert is the person who does it.
99--The New Left said: I protest.
The hippies said: I am.
Grass destroyed the left as a minority movement and created in its place a youth culture.
103--(Jerry Rubin went to Canada) I wore my Viet Kong flag amidst cheers and boos. "The ground we're standing on is liberated territory!" I screamed. "Whenever we see a rule, we must break it. Society has turned us into cops, taught us to police ourselves. Only by breaking rules do we discover who we are.
"We got to destroy the universities, tear down this building, break out of jail, write fuck on the walls. School teaches us to be critics of life. Fuck critics. Fuck criticism. Stop being critics and start living."
"Don't sit out there thinking, 'I agree with him on this point and disagree with him on that one.' Fuck whether you agree or disagree with me. That's an academic bullshit trip. I don't want your agreement or your disagreement. I don't care whether you approve or diapprove. I want your life. The revolution wants your body."
The crowd was getting warmed up.
"Is there any place on this campus that needs liberating?" I asked.
Someone shouted, "The Faculty Club!"
A few people turned in that direction. Then everybody, all 2,000 people spontaneously started marching toward the club.
We barged right into the exclusive little lounge. The professors freaked out, spilled soup all over their suits and ran for cover. We began liberating the place.
The first thing liberated was the liquor; drinks were passed out free to everybody. Within an hour, grass was being smoked everywhere. Some people were rolling joints in five- and ten-dollar bills.
Some people took off their clothes and jumped into the faculty pool. An Amerikan student climbed to a chair and burned his draft card. Somebody took my Viet Kong flag. Soon it was flying over the building.
TV cameras arrived to interview the liberators.
(104)
People kept asking each other, "Why are we doing this?" Nobody understood what he was doing. Fraternity boys, business students, academic types, hippies, radicals, clean faces, shorthairs, longhairs, moustaches. Every campus "type" was there. We had touched a common but nameless emotion.
The head of the Faculty Club, a commerce professor, tried to co-opt the orgy. He stood on top of a chair and thanked everyone for coming. He invited people to stay for the afternoon.
"You never invited us before!" someone shouted. The room responded with catcalls, and the professor lost his temper. "You're stealing the liquor. We could call the police and prosecute. But as long as you don't burn anything (me: money? marijuana?), you can stay."
The orgy continued for thirty-six hours. Its impact on Canada was traumatic. The staid Canadian press couldn't understand what had happened; why did usually well-behaved Canadian students spontaneously burst forth in childish rebellion?
105--Political commtators in Amerika are always looking for the causes behind campus disruptions. They blame the Vietnam war. "As soon as the war is over, the campuses will get back to normal," they think.
The October 24 liberation of the British Columbia Faculty Club reveals the forbidden truth. The act of liberation included no list of "demands." It had no "political" purpose. It was a spontaneous event. The truth was contained in the act.
We are not protesting "issues;" we are protesting Western civilization. We are not hassling over shit so that we can go back to "normal" lives: our "normal" lives are fucked up!
The Revolution is nonverbal and knows no confines or borders.
If there had been no Vietnam war, we would have invented one.
If the Vietnam war ends, we'll find another war.
Uncle Ho is a yippie agent.
106--Walter Cronkite is SDS's best organizer. Uncle Walter brings out the map of the U.S. with circles around the campuses that blew up todaoy. The battle reports.
Every kid out there is thinking, "Wow! I wanna see my campus on that map!"
Television proves the domino theory: one campus falls and they all fall.
The first "student demonstration" flashed across the TV tubes of the nation as a myth in 1964. That year the first generation being raised from birth on TV was 9, 10 and 11 years old. "First chance I get," they thought, "I wanna do that too."
The first chance they ever got was when they got to junior high and high school five years later--1969! And that was the year Amerika's junior high and high schools exploded! A government survey shows that three out of every five high schools in the country had "some form of active protest" in 1969.
TV is raising generations of kids who want to grow up and become demonstrators.
Have you ever seen a boring demonstration on TV? Just being on TV makes it exciting. Even picket lines look breathtaking. Television creates myths bigger than reality.
Demonstrations last hours, and most of that time nothing happens. After the demonstration we rush home for the six o'clock news. The drama review. TV packs all the action into two minutes--a commercial for the revolution.
The mere idea of a "story" is revolutionary because a "story" implies disruption of normal life. Every reporter is a dramatist, creating a theater out of life.
(107) Crime in the streets is news; law and order is not. A revolution is news; the status quo ain't.
The media does not report "news," it creates it. An event happens when it goes on TV and becomes myth.
The media is not "neutral." The presence of a camera transforms a demonstration, turning us into heroes. We take more chances when the press is there because we know whatever happens will be known to the entire world within hours.
Television keeps us escalating our tactics; a tactic becomes ineffective when it stops generating gossip or interest--"news."
109--A dying culture destroys everything it touches.
Language is one of the first things to go.
Nobody really communicates with words anymore. Words have lost their emotional impact, intimacy, ability to shock and make love.
Language prevents communication. (me: he sounds like John Zerzan)
Cars love Shell.
How can I say
"I love you"
after hearing:
"CARS LOVE SHELL."
Does anyone understand what I mean?
Nigger control is called "law and order." Stealing is called "capitalism."
A "REVOLUTION" IN TOILET PAPER.
A "REVOLUTION" IN COMBATING MOUTH ODOR!
A "REVOLUTIONARY" HOLLYWOOD MOVIE!
Have the capitalists no respect?
But there's one word which Amerika hasn't destroyed.
One word which has maintained its emotional power and purity.
Amerika cannot destroy it
