“No, we kept the park open. We felt that Mr. Disney would have wanted it that way.”
“Well, wasn’t there any official recognition of his passing?”
“We did fly the flag at half-mast for the rest of the month.”
Disney’s death occurred the same year as Time magazine’s famous “Is God Dead?” cover, and it occurred to me that Disney had indeed served as the Creator of that whole stable of imaginary characters who were now mourning in a state of suspended animation. Disney had been their Intelligent Designer, and he had repressed all their baser instincts, but now that he had departed, they could finally shed their cumulative inhibitions and participate together in an unspeakable Roman binge, to signify the crumbling of an empire.
I contacted Wally Wood and, without mentioning any specific details, I told him my general notion of a memorial orgy at Disneyland. He accepted the assignment and presented me with a magnificently degenerate montage.
Pluto is pissing on a portrait of Mickey Mouse, while the real, bedraggled Mickey is shooting up heroin with a hypodermic needle. His nephews are jerking off as they watch a combination bed and cash register where Minnie Mouse is fucking Goofy. The beams shining out from the Magic Castle are actually dollar signs. Dumbo the elephant is simultaneously flying and shitting on an infuriated Donald Duck. Huey, Dewey, and Louie are peeking at Daisy Duck’s asshole as she watches the Seven Dwarfs groping Snow White. The prince is snatching a peek at Cinderella’s snatch while trying a glass slipper on her foot. The three little pigs are humping each other in a daisy chain. Jiminy Cricket leers as Tinker Bell does a striptease and Pinocchio’s nose gets longer.
In real fake life, Mickey Mouse was a convict in a chain gang when he met Pluto. In World War II, his name was the password for the D-Day invasion. Snow White warned military personnel about the dangers of venereal disease. And although Wally Wood revealed no genitalia, he nonetheless unleashed the characters’ collective libido and demystified an entire genre in the process, and the Disneyland Memorial Orgy served as a centerspread in the issue featuring “The Parts Left Out of the Kennedy Book.”
The black-and-white centerspread became so popular that I decided to publish it as a poster. The Disney Corporation considered a lawsuit but realized that The Realist was published on a proverbial shoestring, and besides, why bother causing themselves further public embarrassment? They took no action against me, and the statute of limitations finally ran out. Meanwhile, the poster was pirated—painted in black-light Day-Glo colors, supposedly copyrighted in my name (spelled wrong) and widely distributed—without paying Wally Wood any royalties. I didn’t sue the pirated poster, but the Disney people did, and that case was settled out of court.
(In 2005, a new, copyrighted, digitally colored edition of the original poster by a former Disney employee, became available at paulkrassner.com.)
In Baltimore, the Sherman News Agency distributed that issue with the Disneyland Memorial Orgy removed. One employee said that the Maryland Board of Censors had ordered this—that it was the only way The Realist could be sold in that state but there was no such Maryland Board of Censors. Sherman’s had merely taken what they considered to be a precaution. I was able to secure the missing pages, and offered them free to any Baltimore reader who had bought a partial magazine.
In Oakland, an anonymous group published a flyer with The Realist logo on top, reproducing the last few paragraphs of “The Parts Left Out of the Kennedy Book,” along with a few sections of the Disneyland spread—adding, Now on sale at DeLauer’s Book Store, Your East Bay Family News and Book Store. The flyer was distributed in churches and elsewhere. The police would have moved in for an arrest had it not been for my West Coast distributor, Lou Swift, who asked them not to act until they got a complete issue of The Realist and could see the material in context.
In Chicago, a bookstore owner and my distributor—Chuck Olin, who actually ran an ice cream company—were charged with selling and distributing obscene material. Specifically, the complaint was about the Disneyland Memorial Orgy, but local reporters told me that the charge was actually a smoke screen to attack The Realist for publishing the Kennedy piece. Theoretically the charges couldn’t stick.
The centerspread certainly didn’t arouse prurient interest. I tried to imagine a prosecutor telling a jury how they might get horny because look what Goofy and Minnie Mouse were doing, but even if it did arouse prurient interest, the rest of The Realist was certainly not utterly without redeeming social value. However, a judge there found the issue “to be obscene.”
The charge against the distributor was dismissed, based on his lack of knowledge of the contents. The ACLU sought a federal injunction restraining authorities from interfering in any way with local distribution of The Realist. Other dealers were afraid to sell that issue, and in fact were warned by police not to sell it. I went on a late night Chicago radio program, inviting the police to arrest me. Unlike the bookseller and distributor, I would plead not guilty. Nothing happened, except that a woman who was listening to her car radio had pulled over to the side of the road, and a police officer questioned her.
“I thought you were a prostitute,” he explained, “here for the Furniture Show.”
The circulation of that issue of The Realist reached 100,000, plus an estimated two or three million in pass-on readership. In the next issue, I revealed details of the hoax, and concluded: The ultimate target of satire should be its own audience.
Analogy: Several years ago, there was a French-&-Italian film, Seven Deadly Sins, consisting of seven vignettes, one for each sin—greed, lust, avarice, pride, Dopey, Sneezy, Bashful—and at the end of the seventh sin, the narrator told us that we were going to see the eighth sin. On the screen were all the images that we have been conditioned to associate with the intimations of sin—sailors, girls, an opium den—and then the narrator explained that the eighth sin was the desire to see sin.
The audience groaned its disappointment with a spontaneity that served only to underscore the narrator’s point.
So, a reader sees the headline on that issue of The Realist and says: “The parts left out of the Kennedy book. Oh, boy!” Then reads it. Voluntarily. And says: “The parts left out of the Kennedy book. Arrrggh!”
What did you expect? What did you want?
Whether my motivation—to share this outrageous apocrypha with you—stemmed from hostility or affection, is as much a matter of subjective interpretation as was Jackie Kennedy’s projection of what Lyndon Johnson did to her husband’s corpse on that flight from Dallas. For all we know, it might have been an act of love.
In 1980, David Lifton wrote in Best Evidence: Disguise and Deception in the Assassination of John F. Kennedy: “Here was evidence that someone had altered the President’s body prior to the autopsy; evidence that the autopsy report, the source of crucial information about the number and direction of shots, actually described a body no longer in the same condition as it had been immediately after the shooting. If this FBI report were true, the conclusions of the Warren Commission were erected on sand.”
The thrust of his thesis was that there had been an actual surgical alteration of President Kennedy’s neck wound.
In 1992, Charles Crenshaw—one of the doctors who treated Kennedy’s gunshot wounds at the Parkland Hospital in Dallas in 1963—wrote in JFK: Conspiracy of Silence, that “there was no doubt” that the president was shot, not from the back by one “magic bullet,” but from the front by two bullets, one entering the neck and the other the right side of his head. Although Dr. Crenshaw had personally supervised the placement of Kennedy’s body in a casket, it arrived at Bethesda Naval Hospital “zippered in a gray body bag inside a different coffin,” and the condition of the cranium “had substantially changed during a period of six hours and over a distance of 1500 miles. Great effort had been made to reconstruct the back of the president’s head, and the tracheotomy (an incision at the front of the throat) had been enlarged and mangled . . .”
But we know what really happened, don’t we?
My favorite response to “The Parts Left Out of the Kennedy Book” came from Merriman Smith, the UPI correspondent who always ended White House press conferences with the traditional “Thank you, Mr. President.” He wrote in his syndicated column:One of the filthiest printed attacks ever made on a President of the United States is now for sale on Washington newsstands. The target: President Johnson. This is the May edition of a so-called magazine which says it is entered as second class mail. One newsstand owner says sales of this particular issue have been “quite active.”
This reporter is not embarked here on any defense of Johnson politically or personally, nor, for that matter, is this to suggest the need for greater respect for the presidency. These are matters that have been dealt with extensively in other forums.
Certain unadorned facts, however, do stand out in the open circulation, mailing and other forms of distribution of this sort of slime: If a magazine of major national standing tries to use the same sort of language, federal action to stop it would be almost certain. The language referred to is not conventional hell or damn profanity—it is filth attributed to someone of national stature supposedly describing something Johnson allegedly did. The incident, of course, never took place . . .
So, not only did a sheriff deny that he had fucked a pig, but now there was an official denial that Lyndon Johnson had fucked the corpse of John F. Kennedy in the throat wound in order to fool the Warren Commission. LBJ’s favorite joke had come home to roost.
CHAPTER 7
THE RISE AND FALL OF THE YIPPIE EMPIRE
Two days after Lyndon Johnson was sworn in as president, the war in Vietnam began to escalate, and there developed a horrible ritual that was broadcast throughout America every Thursday on the evening news. It was the body count: so many “American dead”; so many “Vietnamese dead”; so many “enemy dead.” Just abstract numbers.
I was invited to speak at antiwar demonstrations on campuses around the country, where students could be heard chanting: “Hey, hey, LBJ! How many kids did you kill today?”
Blacks were getting involved in the antiwar movement—“No Vietnamese ever called me nigger!”—and so was organized labor—“No Vietnamese ever froze my wages!” The United States was spending $2 million every day, and all they had to show for it was that lousy body count. Our language was becoming perverted in order to mask our behavior. Dead Vietnamese children were called collateral damage. Concentration camps were called strategic hamlets. Torturers were called counterinsurgency experts. Today, they indulge in enhanced interrogation techniques, a euphemism for a euphemism.
In May 1965, Jerry Rubin helped organize the first Vietnam Day Teach-In at the Berkeley campus of the University of California. He invited me to emcee. It was an outdoor rally, the largest such protest in American history, with a peak audience of thirty thousand. Simultaneous rallies were being held in London and Tokyo. The press called it a “carnival” and a “picnic.” Berkeley professor Eugene Burdick described it as an “ideological circus” in a letter to the San Francisco Examiner. He wrote that there would be “comedians, folksingers, ministers, serious commentators, and silly commentators.”
“Now I’m one of your silly commentators,” I announced, “and I thought I’d have a little audience participation here because Burdick said there will be ‘thrills of horror, gasps of partisan shock, laughter, and the low bellow of the true believer.’ Now, if you’d join in with me in a few of these, I’ll read them off, okay? Let’s have first some thrills of horror. Let’s hear it up here now.” The audience bellowed out a bizarre sound that represented thrills of horror. “That ’s the way. Now let ’s have a gasp of partisan shock.” The audience took its cue and let out a mass gasp. “That ’s good, that’s good. Very good. All right, now let’s see if you can come up with some extremist laughter.” They did. “That’s good. All right now, this one is a real challenge. I want the low bellow of the true believer.” The audience came through with the lowest bellow I’d ever heard.
Shocking facts, from speaker after speaker, boomed over the public address system that afternoon. Normal Mailer took a different approach. He concluded his speech:They will print up little pictures of you, Lyndon Johnson, the size of postcards, the size of stamps, and some will glue these pictures to walls and posters and telephone booths and billboards—I do not advise it, I would tell these students not to do it to you, but they will. They will find places to put these pictures—upside down. Silently, without a word, the photograph of you, Lyndon Johnson, will start appearing everywhere, upside down. Your head will speak out—even to the peasant in Asia; it will say that not all Americans are unaware of your monstrous vanity, overweening piety, and doubtful motive. It will tell them that we trust our president so little, and think so little of him, that we see his picture everywhere upside down.
The crowd gave Mailer a standing ovation, but the next day the San Francisco Chronicle stated that he had received “light applause.” It was this very difference between what people were experiencing on the street and the way it was being reported in the mainstream media, that nurtured the growth of the underground press. Mailer handed me the manuscript he had just read and said, “You want this for The Realist?”
The next month I published his complete speech with a photo of Lyndon Johnson upside down on the cover. There had just been a water shortage in New York, and immediately above that photo, in place of The Realist logo, I reprinted a Department of Water Supply, Gas, and Electricity poster, which read: don’t flush for everything. The magazine’s name was in small print at the bottom of the page. If I had been living in China and published a picture of Mao Tse-tung upside down, even accidentally, I would have been executed. This was the paradox of America—that we had the freedom to criticize so openly those unspeakable horrors being committed by the government in the name of the people.
The post office held up the mailing of that issue, but it was for purely bureaucratic reasons. They thought that I had changed the name of the magazine from The Realist to Don’t Flush for Everything without filing a proper application form first.
At another outdoor rally at the Berkeley campus in October, Ken Kesey walked up to me and continued a conversation that we had never begun. There was a rumor that the Merry Pranksters were going to invite the Hell’s Angels to a big bash in La Honda, so a group of these bikers showed up, they were befriended, and started hanging around. It was a strange alliance. Who could have predicted Day-Glo swastikas? So, when the Vietnam Day Committee invited Kesey to speak, the Pranksters and the Angels painted a bus together and made toy ack-ack guns to shoot at the enemy aircraft flying over the rally.
Kesey was the penultimate speaker. I introduced him, he took the stage, played a few bars on his harmonica between his words, which consisted essentially of warning the crowd that we should love our neighbors, that the march following the teach-in wasn’t going to change anything, and that wars had been fought for ten thousand years.
“Just look at the war,” he advised, “turn your backs and say ‘Fuck it!’”
Ironically, this was the antithesis of the message of all the previous speakers, and fifteen thousand marchers were chafing at Kesey’s bit. The next evening, at an indoor event, I borrowed a harmonica and did a parody of his talk. He stood up in the audience and shouted, “I object,” then walked to the front of the auditorium, jumped onto the stage, and proceeded to defend his position.
There was a rumor that yellow submarine was an underground name in England for the capsule that LSD came in, but when a reporter asked the Beatles if “Yellow Submarine” was a drug song, the answer was, “You have a dirty mind.” The reporter might also have asked if it was a political song, because a revolutionary change in the style of protest was brought about in the fall of 1966, when a few hundred individuals marched across New York City on a sunny Saturday afternoon, from Tompkins Square Park to the Gansevoort Pier, and launched a six-foot yellow submarin
e in the Hudson River. It was filled with bread, balloons, wine, and “messages of love, desperation, peace, and hope to all the people in the world from us.”
The Workshop in Non-Violence built their yellow submarine for $51.73, as opposed to the cost of a Polaris submarine, $108,284,620—but the Polaris could obliterate sixteen major cities with nuclear missiles carrying more explosive power than was fired by both sides in all of World War II. So now the very nature of antiwar rallies was evolving into something else.
The influence of flower children was brightening up the movement. Demonstrations were becoming more playful. And yet there were those in the Old Left who looked disdainfully at this parade of folks trying to spread joy as an alternative to horror: “You’re not offering any alternatives. You’re just being positive.”
By 1967, the seasons began to be measured by antiwar demonstrations—Spring Mobilization, Vietnam Summer—but the peace movement was still hung up on respectability. At a coalition conference in Washington, a motion to go on record as encouraging draft resistance was voted down, but a resolution was passed to support the antidraft movement in Puerto Rico. At a rally in San Francisco, demonstrators were warned to keep off the grass on the same field where football was played.
In New York, a hippie was wandering around the Sheep Meadow in Central Park, where an antiwar rally was in progress. He had a loaf of whole grain bread, and was looking for others to share it with, when he was approached by somebody with an American flag in one hand and a can of lighter fluid in the other. “Would you hold this?” The hippie held the flag while the stranger set it on fire.
Confessions of a Raving, Unconfined Nut Page 21
