This has been the
story of the world. The shysters come in
and they convince the
rubes that something is a good deal. Once they’ve cleaned
the rubes out, they move
on, and the rubes are left scratching their heads, and
saying ‘What happened MAAAW?!
Well I don’t know Cyrus, I think that, uh, well,
they gave us 5 dollars, uhh, and we
bought all that flour, but err, the flour’s
gone!!
We are ‘God’s own rubes.’
They come in, they fleece us, and we
cackle and laugh!
Then we do something else and wait for the next band of
shysters to come in and fleece us again!
We grin when we see those
guys. We clap them on the back and
say, ‘Maan! You so crazy!
You so crazy, I think that I might even knock you on
the head!’ No, no, no, we’re not that bad!
We just go along with it. Besides,
you know what? ‘I think I just might outlive you.’
The sad thing about it, the realistic thing about it, is that there are a whoooole new crop of shysters growing--
Zen Cwen
by ken babbs
She
was a Cwen. The club of the queens. The campus queens.
Cwen meant queen
in Olde English. Only the prettiest and brightest could be
Cwens, and service to others was mandatory.
Professor Clagmont was
chortling at the head of the long
table in the English grad room.
The Oxford English Dictionary filled the
shelves, floor to ceiling, all the way around.
“Cwen,”
he guffawed. “A queen, for sure, but a kitchen queen. That’s what Cwen
really
means in Old English. And the kitchen queens were the scullery queens,
the dish
washers. Our
darling campus queens are dish washers.”
The
first
hipsters
got
their
name
from
the
opium
junkies
who
lay
on
their
hips
while
smoking the pipe. To be hip
meant to know what was in the know, both above and below the
flow of the
squares' desires to rise to the crop, for hipsters knew that shit rises
but
cream floats.
Hippies
didn't
happen
as
a
"thing"
(like
the
beats
in
the
fifties)
until
1967,
the
summer
of
love.
Kesey and I were forty years old. We were never longhairs or wore
tiedye.
By then we had gone
"under the asphalt" to mean back to the earth,
for Kesey, through his dad and brother, bought a
sixty eight acre farm in rural
Pleasant Hill Oregon and the pranksters moved there en masse and
lived on the
farm for a couple of years until everyone got their own places.
Cassady
bridged
the
gap
between
the
beats
and
the
hippies.
We
were
too
young
for
one
and
too old for the other, and
so exist as a phenom as our own thing, so the timeline goes: the beats
the
pranksters the hippies.
Hippies
are
more
than
potheads,
music
freaks
and
bohemians,
for
there
is
an
underlying
philosophy of
self-sufficiency and ongoing efforts to restore the planet, one small
plot of
land at a
time. Don't forget sharing food and shelter and the spiritual side of
being in tune with creation and
restoration; helping one another out, and most
important, being kind, not only to those you know
and love, but also strangers who
live in pain and misery.
--Ken Babbs
The
Revolution
Test
by Ken Babbs
Bus
to
the
Tower
of
Babbel
via the Colossus of Roads
not stepping on toads
medicate meditate
two grapes in the head
trump one in the bush
job prospects are nil
stay high until
another pitcher's lob
hits the bat on the knob
a turn in the barrel
is part of the job
lighten your loads
follow the Joads
we're not dumbsters
we know what to do
we bust ass fully
enjoy life wooly
we don't struggle
when we snuggle
we run our asses off
following the donkey feet
of the massah hisself
bray at the pool
splash through space
everything in place
nose full of water
mouth blowing bubbles
message is gargled
what's the rush
there's always more
is profess'd in jest
it's the revolution test
with better kool aid
than all the rest
pipe that in your put
and hie to the fest,
The beautiful thing about the Vietnam expcrience was the way the American people rose up in outrage over a war we had no business fighting and put a halt to it. The parents and relatives and friends of all the people killed and wounded had the stongest voices.
It seemed to mark the end of something. Now we could get on with the business of grooving out the new millenium. But turned out, it's not over yet. War and threats of war are still with us; must be a fixed condition of the world experience after all.
If so, what becomes interesttng is the way we come through the experience, be it Ulyssess trying to beat it home after the Trojan war or Robert Jordan making Ingrid Bergman's earth move, Prewitt preferring the bugle to the boxing ring, or Yossarian taking a raft to Sweden.
Young people today might wonder why anyone used to go into the military at all. What they don't realize is that for a long time there was a thing celled UMT, Universal Military Training, a highblown phrase, much like the way the word assistance has replaced welfare, but in this case the ugly word was the draft and in those days unless you secured a deferment, you served. The problern then became how to best serve.
"If you don't learn from your past mistakes you're doomed to repeat them agean," George McGovern parroted from someone else, when McGovern was running for president the second time. Nicarauga. Beirut. Panama. Grenada. Gulf War. Iraq. We thought Vietnam settled all this. But no, here it comes again. So how do we play it? How do we carefully tread the narrow path between total disaster and maddening victory?
The best clue is one all followers of MASH will recognize. If you're in an insane situation a good way to keep your sanity is to act like you're insane. Do the things that in a sane scene would render you mad, in the eyes of the beholders.
Vietnam was a tremendouls trauma, particularly for those who couldn’t see it as a triumphant note in American history. Big Munitions and big military and big government were anxious to try out their toys and Vietnam seemed like a good playground. After all, foreign nations had been working over its soil for centuries.
But the people of the United States rose up and said, “Back off. We’ve got no business over there.” And this was the triumph: that government of the people, by the people, and for the people again asserted itself. Rightly so. One of the sad outcomes was the way the soldiers were treated when they got home. Even if you are against the war you aren’t against the solders.
Enormous damage had
been inflicted. Not just to the bodies and the pride but the psyches as
well.
Take one man’s example. He was a Navy corpsman in Vietnam. He saw
terrible
things. Bulldozing bodies into ditches. Pieces of bodies. Heads. Arms.
Legs. Awful memories. They were tearing
him
to pieces.
Then one night he had a dream.
He was on a troop plane flying with a group of militlry men. They landed on a dirt jungle landing strip. They got out and were marched in columns betweeen two rows of quonset huts. As they marched along, the men peeled out of the columns and went into the quonset huts.
When it was his turn he went through an open door. It was dark inside and crowded with bamboo cages. So crowded he had to crawl on hands and knees and fight to get through.
The cages were full of
the remains of men killed in vietnam. Some were rotten. Some were
skeletons. Some were only parts of bodies.
Finally he got to the end of the quonset hut and went out the back door. He was in another building that had long corridors with rooms and alcoves going off to the sides. In one of the alcoves were the guys from his outfit still living. They wore old-style, beat-up camouflage fatigues. They were eating crackers and drinking pop. Then he heard something.
He went down the hall and around the corner and down a long corridor. At the end of the corridor was a screen door that led outside. Standing in front of the door was a group of elite military men: Special Forces, Seals. Green Berets, Rangers. Someone was knocking on the door.
One of the men opened the door and let in a little, brown-skinned, Asian-looking boy. He was a shoeshine boy wanting to shine their boots. They laughed at him. Their boots were already gleaming. Outside, a low rumbling started and began to pulsate and grow. The soldiers snapped to attention. A call for assembly came over the loudspeakers.
The men from the Corpsman's outfit formed up along the walls at attention. A General marched down the hallway with his Adjutant alongside. The General shook hands with everyone. He had a big smile on his face.
"Good luck," he said. "I know you will do your best. The country is depending an you."
The Adjutant’s face was tough and impassive. He had on a pair of reflective sunglasses so you couldn't see his eyes. He and the General approached the Corpsman. The rumbling outside got louder. The Adjutant cupped his ear to hear better. He smiled.
"It's starting up again," he told the corpsman.
The wheels of war were grinding and rumbling. The men marched out of the building and down to a boat parked alongside the dock. On the other side of the river was a long line of 19-20-year-olds. Fresh. Green. Raw. FGNs.
The men from the Corpsman’s outfit stood and looked at the recruits. The Rangers and Seals and Special Forces moved in a group toward the boat. They got in and it imnediately pulled away from the dock, heading for the other side. A big black hand fell on the Corpsman's shoulder. One of his old pals.
"It's all right," the pal said. "Everything is okay."
The Corpsman realized he didn't have to feel bad about not getting on the boat. He didn't have to feel bad about not having bought it in the Nam..
He woke up from his dream and realized he was free of the guilt. He didn’t have to feel bad about it. No one who lived through Vietnbam has to feel bad about it.
After all, when all’s said and done, there’s two sides all right. But they’re not the winners and the losers. They’re the living and the dead.