Who's to Say What's Obscene?

by Paul Krassner

  In a foreword to a collection of my satire, The Winner of the Slow Bicycle Race, Kurt Vonnegut wrote: “Paul Krassner in 1963 created a miracle of compressed intelligence nearly as admirable for potent simplicity, in my opinion, as Einstein’s e=mc2. With the Vietnam War going on, and its critics discounted and scorned by the government and the mass media, Krassner put on sale a red, white and blue poster that said FUCK COMMUNISM.

  “At the beginning of the 1960s, FUCK was believed to be so full of bad magic as to be unprintable. In the most humanely influential American novel of this half-century, The Catcher in the Rye, Holden Caulfield, it will be remembered, was shocked to see that word on a subway-station wall. He wondered what seeing it might do to the mind of a little kid. COMMUNISM was to millions the name of the most loathsome evil imaginable. To call an American a communist was like calling somebody a Jew in Nazi Germany. By having FUCK and COMMUNISM fight it out in a single sentence, Krassner wasn’t merely being funny as heck. He was demonstrating how preposterous it was for so many people to be responding to both words with such cockamamie Pavlovian fear and alarm.”

  On the evening of March 14, 2007, at about 8:15 p.m., Vonnegut was sitting on the stoop in front of his house—smoking a cigarette, of course. When he stood up, he lost his balance and fell. Although he was supposedly brain dead at the precise moment his head hit the steps, he was kept on life support for the next few weeks. When it became clear that he could never be revived, the decision was made to remove life support, as he had requested.

  The news of his actual death on April 11, our mutual friend Robert Weide (who directed the film version of Vonnegut’s novel Mother Night) told me, “was merely a postscript—a relief, actually—which is not to say it was so easy to process. I’d equate it to losing a family member, albeit one who had a long, incredible life—one who changed the lives and worldview of countless people who had never met him, and who remained entirely lucid and kept his miraculous sense of humor to the very end.”

  The obituaries all seemed to stress how depressed Vonnegut was, never failing to mention his failed attempt at committing suicide. So naturally I had been pleasantly surprised when this professional pessimist told me that my satire made him feel hopeful.

  “You made supposedly serious matters seem ridiculous,” he explained, “and this inspired many of your readers to decide for themselves what was ridiculous and what was not. Knowing that people were doing that, better late than never, made me optimistic.”

  Nonetheless, he once summed up his concern over the environment in a bumper sticker he sent me: “Your Planet’s Immune System Is Trying to Get Rid of You.”

  A couple of years before George Bush finally admitted in his State of the Union address that the United States is addicted to oil, Vonnegut stated, “Our government is conducting a war against drugs, is it? Let them go after petroleum. Talk about a destructive high! You put some of this stuff in your car and you can go a hundred miles an hour, run over the neighbor’s dog and tear the atmosphere to smithereens.”

  In his book A Man Without a Country, he continued on with that conundrum: “Our government’s got a war on drugs. That’s certainly a lot better than no drugs at all. That’s what was said about prohibition. Do you realize that from 1919 to 1933 it was absolutely against the law to manufacture, transport or sell alcoholic beverages, and an Indiana newspaper humorist said, ‘Prohibition is better than no liquor at all.’ ”

  Vonnegut himself was a mass of contradictions.

  He was a Luddite who hated newfangled contraptions—though he often used a fax, he refused to use e-mail—he also said, “I think that novels that leave out technology misrepresent life as badly as Victorians misrepresented life by leaving out sex.” He advised young would-be writers to “never use semi-colons—all they do is suggest you’ve been to college,” but he also wrote, “When Ernest Hemingway killed himself he put a period at the end of his life; old age is more like a semi-colon.” He was the honorary president of the American Humanist Association—“We humanists try to behave as decently, as fairly and as honorably as we can without any expectation of rewards or punishments in an afterlife”—but he also wanted his epitaph to read, “The Only Proof He Needed for the Existence of God Was Music.”

  Vonnegut was really a closet optimist. That’s revealed by his response to a fan who had sent him a letter in which she wrote, “I’d love to know your thoughts for a woman of 43 who is finally going to have a child but is wary of bringing a new life into such a frightening world.”

  Vonnegut wanted to tell her, “Don’t do it! It could be another George Bush. The kid would be lucky to be born into a society where even the poor people are overweight but unlucky to be in one without a national health plan or decent public education for most, where lethal injection and warfare are forms of entertainment, so either go on practicing safe sex or emigrate.”

  Instead, he replied, “What made being alive almost worthwhile for me was all the saints I’ve met, who could be anywhere.” He explained that, “By saints, I meant people who behaved decently in a strikingly indecent society.”

  The first time I met Vonnegut was at a memorial for Abbie Hoffman, whom he referred to as “the holy antiwar clown.” The last time I saw him was at a panel on humor and satire at the Ethical Culture Society of New York. The panelists were Vonnegut, the late columnist Art Buchwald, stand-up comic Barry Crimmins and myself. All four of us had written books published by Seven Stories Press, but when the panel concluded, the longest line waiting to have those books signed was overwhelmingly for Vonnegut.

  He loved to make people laugh at his own despair over the way the American Dream has morphed into an American nightmare. During the panel, he talked about the hellishness of living on earth. So, later that evening, Nancy handed him a parody of a Monopoly card showing the rich-guy logo jumping away from flames, with this caption: “Get Out of Hell Free.”

  A year and a half later, Vonnegut finally accomplished that goal.

  “Life,” he once wrote, “is my avocation. Death is my vocation.”

  PETER STAFFORD MEETS TOM SNYDER

  A couple of old acquaintances died recently.

  One was Peter Stafford, co-author of the classic Psychedelics Encyclopedia. In an early issue of High Times, he co-authored an article titled “Who Turned On Whom.” That’s the way LSD use got spread around, by word of mouth. Timothy Leary once told me about the use of LSD by Herman Kahn, director of the Hudson Institute, a conservative think tank, and author of On Thermonuclear War. I argued that despite taking acid, Kahn still continued his game of war planning for the Pentagon.

  “Herman is often misunderstood,” Leary replied. “He is not a war planner, he’s a civil defense planner. Herman’s claim is that he is one of the few highly placed Americans who’s willing to gaze with naked eyes upon the possibilities of atomic warfare and come up with solutions to this horrible possibility. Perhaps his LSD sessions have given him this revelation and courage. And even his phrase ‘spasm war,’ which to the intellectual liberal sounds gruesome, is a powerful, cellular metaphor describing an event which the very phrase itself, ‘spasm war,’ might prevent.”

  Herman Kahn had a request. He wanted me to guide him on a tour of the Lower East Side. When we met, his assistant, Anthony Wiener, was there. (He was the conduit for CIA funding of the MK-ULTRA project, which used LSD in behavior-modification experiments with unaware subjects.) Wiener was recommending a film, The War Game, to Kahn.

  “How does it scan?” asked Kahn.

  “It scans beautiful. But you really ought to see it, Herman. You’re in it.”

  “Why? I saw Dr. Strangelove. I was in that.”

  Wiener went on his way, and I led Kahn to the Underground Head Shop, where he bought a poster that warned, “Chicken Little Was Right!” Then I brought him to Tompkins Square Park and told him about the police attack on hippies there. Kahn’s point of view was that of one who attempts to create an objective scenario by extrapolating from
the past and present as the basis for his predictions of the future.

  “The hippie dropout syndrome is delaying the guaranteed annual wage,” he said.

  I told him that the CIA was running opium dens around Cambodia. He wasn’t surprised, he said, because they smoke dope and show affection with equal openness. Kahn was present when a Laotian general was briefing John Kennedy in the White House.

  “The trouble with your people,” the exasperated president complained, “is that they’d rather fuck than fight.”

  “Wouldn’t you?” the general responded.

  Kahn and I stopped at a bookstore on St. Marks Place.

  “I’ll show you the books I bought,” I said, “if you’ll show me the books you bought.”

  “You know,” he confessed, “when I was three years old, I said to a little girl, ‘I’ll show you mine if you’ll show me yours’—and she wouldn’t do it—now you’ll print that because I was frustrated as a child, I want to blow up the world.”

  Among the books he purchased was LSD—The Problem-Solving Psychedelic, co-authored by Peter Stafford. That’s Peter’s legacy—he was so far ahead of the curve he served as a guide for a professional think-tanker.

  ◆ ◆ ◆

  The other death was TV personality Tom Snyder. On his late-night show, Tomorrow, his guests ranged from Jimmy Hoffa to John Lennon, from Ayn Rand to Muhammad Ali, from Charles Manson to Jerry Garcia. For the first ten minutes of his interview with musician Meat Loaf, he kept calling him Meatball. In 1978, when I was a guest on his show in Los Angeles, I ingested magic mushrooms in order to enhance the experience.

  I lived in San Francisco, where an ex-cop had just assassinated Mayor George Moscone and Supervisor Harvey Milk, only a week after the poisoned Kool-Aid massacre in Jonestown by San Francisco cult leader Jim Jones. Snyder mentioned it, and I brought up the possibility that the CIA was involved with mind-control experimentation.

  “Aha,” he said, “so you’re paranoid, huh?”

  “Well, Tom, conspiracy and paranoia are not synonymous. Listen, I’ll tell you about a real conspiracy theory.”

  “Okay,” he said, “what?”

  “Remember that horse, Ruffian, who broke her leg in a race, and then they shot her?”

  “Yeah, what about it?”

  “Well, you wanna know why they shot her?”

  “Why?” he asked, furrowing his brow.

  “Because she knew too much.”

  Snyder looked at his producer as if to say, “Who booked this flake?” Then he realized that I was putting him on, and he started laughing. To me, secretly peaking on mushrooms, it looked as though Tom Snyder was doing Dan Aykroyd doing Tom Snyder on Saturday Night Live, and his laughter sounded like a string of eerie musical notes.

  At the time, Abbie Hoffman was on the lam, but this was November 30, and I had promised to wish him a happy birthday on the air, which I did.

  “Where is he?” Snyder asked. “Maybe we can get him on the show.”

  “He’s right there under your chair.”

  Back in my hotel room that night, still feeling very sensual from the mushrooms, I made love with a former girlfriend who was a masseuse, and later I asked her for a massage.

  “Sure,” she said, “but I’ll have to charge you for that.”

  ALBERT ELLIS MEETS LENNY BRUCE

  The recent death of groundbreaking psychologist Albert Ellis brought to mind his strong opposition to the censorship of pornography in general and of Deep Throat in particular.

  “We all fantasize having an enjoyable meal at times,” he said, “and that hardly interferes with our actual enjoyment of eating.”

  I first met Dr. Ellis in 1953, when I was managing editor of The Independent. One of my early tasks had been to write ads for the books we offered, including a couple by Ellis, The Folklore of Sex and The American Sexual Tragedy. His point of view was so against the grain of mainstream culture that I assumed he must have written articles that he couldn’t get published. I contacted him, and he sent me seven such articles.

  Ellis became a monthly columnist for The Independent. Editor Lyle Stuart had also become a book publisher, and he published a collection of columns by Ellis titled Sex Without Guilt. I wrote a parody called “Guilt Without Sex”—a sex manual for adolescents—for Mad magazine, but it was rejected because of its subject matter. I sold it to Playboy instead.

  At the time Mad had already reached circulation of 1.25 million, mostly teens, and I said to publisher Bill Gaines, “I guess you don’t want to change horses in midstream.” He replied, “Not when the horse has a rocket up its ass.” There was no satire magazine for adults in those days—this was in the late 1950s, before National Lampoon and Spy—so with the encouragement and mentoring of Stuart I launched my own publication, The Realist, and in 1959 Robert Anton Wilson and I interviewed Albert Ellis. At one point we got onto a tangent about the semantics of profanity.

  “Take, for example,” he said, “the campaign which I have been waging, with remarkable lack of success, for many years, in favor of the proper usage of the word fuck. My premise is that sexual intercourse, copulation, fucking or whatever you wish to call it, is normally, under almost all circumstances, a damned good thing. Therefore, we should rarely use it in a negative, condemnatory manner. Instead of denouncing someone by calling him “a fucking bastard,” we should say, of course, that he is “an unfucking villain” (since bastard, too, is not necessarily a negative state and should not only be used pejoratively).”

  “How about the famous Army saying, ‘Fuck all of them but six and save them for the pallbearers.’ There, fuck means kill.”

  “Yes, and it is wrongly used. It should be ‘Unfuck all of them but six.’ Lots of times these words are used correctly, as when you say, ‘I had a fucking good time.’ That’s quite accurate, since fucking, as I said before, is a good thing, and a good thing leads to a good time. But by the same token you should say, ‘I had an unfucking bad time.’”

  “I can see this scrawled on subway posters: Unfuck You!”

  “Why not? It’s fuckingly more logical that way, isn’t it?”

  Not that Ellis practiced what he preached. In keeping with his confrontational approach to patients, he asked one, “Do you know why your family is trying to control you? Because they’re out of their fucking minds!”

  Just when the issue of The Realist with the Ellis interview was published, Lenny Bruce—whom I had interviewed the previous month—came to New York for a midnight show at Town Hall. He called me that afternoon, and we met at the Hotel America in Times Square. At this point in Lenny’s career, he was still using the euphemism frig on stage. Although the mass media were already translating his irreverence as that of a “sick comic,” he had not yet been branded “filthy.” I handed him the new issue of The Realist with the Albert Ellis interview. He was amazed that I could get away with publishing it.

  “Are you telling me,” he asked, “this is legal to sell on the newsstands?”

  “Absolutely. The Supreme Court’s definition of obscenity is that it has to be material which appeals to your prurient interest.”

  Lenny magically produced an unabridged dictionary from the suitcase on his bed, and he looked up the word prurient.

  “Itching,” he mused. “What does that mean—that they can bust a novelty-store owner for selling itching powder along with the dribble glass and the whoopie cushion?”

  “It’s just their way of saying that something gets you horny.”

  Lenny closed the dictionary, clenching his jaw and nodding his head in affirmation of a new discovery. “So,” he said, “it’s against the law to get you horny.” He asked me to give out copies of that issue of The Realist in front of Town Hall before his concert that night. Lenny brought a copy on stage and proceeded to talk about it. As a result, he was barred from performing there again. Down Beat magazine editorialized:

  “What was Town Hall’s objection to Bruce’s recent midnight show there? Evidently
it boiled down to embarrassment at the presence outside the doors of a group giving out free copies of a Greenwich Village magazine called The Realist. The magazine contained an interview with a psychologist on the semantics of a well-known four-letter word. Town Hall deemed the contents pornographic. Bruce is no longer welcome, though he had nothing to do with the magazine or the group giving it away.”

  “They’ll book me again,” Lenny said. “They made too much money on that concert. I’d have more respect for them if they didn’t ever book me again. At least, it’d show they were keeping their word.”

  And he was right. They did book him again.

  Ironically, the New York Times obituary of Albert Ellis stated that “he was called the Lenny Bruce of psychotherapy.”

  NORMAN MAILER’S FORESKIN

  When Norman Mailer wrote his first novel, The Naked and the Dead, he used a euphemism—“fug”—for fuck, which of course is where The Fugs got their name. The first time I encountered Mailer, I asked if it was true that when he met actress Tallulah Bankhead, she said, “So you’re the young man who doesn’t know how to spell fuck.” With a twinkle in his eye, he told me that he replied, “Yes, and you’re the young woman who doesn’t know how to.”

  I saw Mailer again at City Hall Park in New York at the height of the Cold War. We were both among a thousand citizens committing civil disobedience against the law that required us to seek shelter during an air raid drill. Umbrellas bearing the legend PORTABLE FALLOUT SHELTER were held up while the crowd sang “America the Beautiful.”