by Osha Neumann
Ben was short, wiry, and intense. He spoke in little thrusts and jabs that mirrored his physical mannerisms. His walk had a slight swagger and he had a way of cocking his head to one side and hitching himself up when preparing for a confrontation that might have seemed ridiculous in someone else.
But Ben was not ridiculous. Ben’s strength lay in the fact that, in a non-trivial sense, he was true to his word. A lot of words flew around recklessly in the Sixties, but the gap between rhetoric and reality seemed smaller with him than with anybody else I knew at the time. He did what he said he would do. This was his code of honor, the code of the street, to which he adhered with the discipline of a martial artist. He was calm and focused in battle, able to calibrate his actions in moments of tension, while all around him, less hardened street fighters like me panicked and struggled not to flee from danger. In those moments of confrontation, with the police charging down on us, I was acutely aware of the limits of my courage. The little bird of my being, silent, private, separate, would become frantic to protect itself. I could no more force myself to take risks than a drowning man could keep from struggling for breath.
At the time I thought of Ben as possessing street intelligence that was the equivalent and polar opposite of Herbert’s book intelligence. Ben’s code of honor challenged all the training of my childhood in the relation of word to deed. As a child, listening to the grownups talk, I concluded that thought must be isolated from action. My fathers’ minds floated from thought to thought in a thought-world separate from the world of doing and making. Ben’s thought flowed naturally and directly into action. Before joining the Motherfuckers, I had lived isolated in a whirl of words and guilty fantasies. My encounter with Ben hurled me from my isolation with awful suddenness. I felt I could only imitate, posture, make tentative steps to follow where he led, and hope that no one would notice my cowardice, my fear, my innocence.
Very quickly, or so it seems to me now, the Motherfuckers was transformed under Ben’s leadership from a group which met to plan activities into something quite different—an identity. Involvement stopped being a matter of merely attending meetings. It became a question of “being” a Motherfucker. We lived to throw ourselves into the fray. We gave up attachments to the past. We abandoned our family names in favor of “Motherfucker.” Tom Neumann died and Tom Motherfucker was born.
At the core of the Motherfuckers were ten to fifteen fully committed regulars around whom gathered a group of fellow travelers whose commitment varied, and who preferred to keep some level of safe distance. College students were drawn to us by the possibility of living the total revolution. Drop out kids hanging on the street found in us a family of fellow seekers, slightly older than themselves, to substitute for the one they left behind. We were adopted by a group of Puerto Rican street kids. They came to our events, ate at our community feasts, and hung out in our crash pads. The winos with whom we shared the streets organized themselves into the “Wine Group for Freedom” a.k.a. “The Wine Nation.” Ben folded them under our wing. Except for our core group, it was never entirely clear who was and was not a Motherfucker. We didn’t have membership cards. If you spent enough time with us, and you wished to be a Motherfucker, and participated in our actions, you became part of the family.
The vicissitudes of male emotional life dominated the Motherfuckers. Women played a distinctly ancillary role in all matters. Their most acceptable role was to be someone’s girlfriend or “old lady.” If the relationship ended, they tended to drift away. They did the traditional women’s work of cooking for the group, helping to prepare the community feasts we organized, nursing babies, and tending to the bruised egos of the men. But they also hawked our fliers, got arrested (rarely) at our demonstrations, yelled at the cops, and stole credit cards to finance various nefarious adventures. Once, when Deputy Inspector Fink, the commander of the Lower East Side’s Ninth Precinct, was scheduled to speak at a community meeting, they organized their own women’s demonstration. They dressed up in their most colorful skirts and scarves and jangly jewelry. Carole Motherfucker strapped her baby Chacha to her back and when Fink’s turn came to speak they swirled, hooting and hollering, down the aisles of Cooper Union, and drove him off the stage.
No matter how often women took part in our activities, they rarely participated in our long tense political arguments. Among the men this was expected, acceptable and went without comment. Occasionally women would demand attention, raise their voice and challenge the men. Some were more outspoken than others. But political argument was men’s work. As our arguments went on, hour after hour, the stakes would gradually rise to the point where the issue was no longer a disagreement about strategy or tactics, but about our strength of character and commitment. Ben was always vigilant in his search for weakness, and insistent in his demands for loyalty. The commitment he demanded, and that we were quick to demand of each other, knew no boundaries. We concealed our vulnerability. Ben rewarded us with the promise to protect us with his life. He would be withering about our weaknesses and taunt us for our timidity. But when we did well in his eyes, he would reward us with a look of intense affection that became the most valued currency of the group.
We knew each other through the daily life we shared. We did not engage in long conversations about where we came from and how we got to where we were. We shed our anchors to the past in private. The Marines take in new recruits and systematically strip them of the traces of their former identities. They are given crew cuts and handed a uniform. The Motherfuckers took in recruits for a quite different army, a long-haired army of urban guerillas. The new identities we adopted did not, of course, obliterate the old. Little as we cared to dwell on our differences, the mix of self-doubt and assurance with which we entered into our new life depended in part on whether we were men or women, middle class or working class, college educated or not, in our teens or twenties. It mattered whether we were raised in the country or the city, and whether we were white—almost all of us were, at least in the core group—or a person of color. It’s hard to find a common thread in our various backgrounds or in the paths that led us to the Motherfuckers. We were like the cast of characters in a Hollywood disaster movie, thrown together by circumstances, forced to depend upon each other, and bringing to our predicament a range of strengths and weaknesses.
The disaster that threw us together was America. We left homes, jobs, high schools and colleges driven by a diversity of dissatisfactions. Vietnam was a big part of the problem. The war was immoral, pointless, and obscene. Each invitation to come to our local draft board for a physical was a stepping-stone into a gaping maw that would chew us up and turn us into bloody chowder. But Vietnam, awful as it might be, was only a symptom of a larger problem. We were repelled by the world our parents had learned to accept. And we were attracted by the promise of a better world awaiting.
For those of us who grew up with parents who espoused some form of radical politics, becoming a Motherfucker was our way to strike out on our own path, and re-imagine a revolutionary tradition. For others whose parents were Goldwater Republicans, the Motherfuckers was a parallel universe. But in all cases the choice to join the Motherfuckers was a rejection of our families of origin. No one joined the Motherfuckers with the blessing of their parents, be they Goldwater Republicans or card-carrying Communists.
What were we? A political organization? A commune? Ben used the term “affinity group,” a translation of “groupa affinidad” used by Spanish anarchists to describe the cellular structures of their underground movement. He was introduced to the term in discussions with Murray Bookchin. In a manifesto printed in the form of a flier, Ben wrote:The affinity group is the seed/term/essence of organization. It is coming together out of mutual Need or Desire: cohesive historical groups unite out of the shared necessities of the struggle for survival, while dreaming of the possibility of love.
In the pre-revolutionary period affinity groups must assemble to project a revolutionary consciousness to develop forms
for particular struggles. In the revolutionary period itself they will emerge as armed cadres at the centers of conflict, and in the post-revolutionary period suggest forms for the new everyday life.
Some people described us as a “street gang with an analysis.” In retrospect, I think we had some of the characteristics of a cult. But for Ben—the Italian street kid who grew up, as he says, “pretty much on his own”; who did not know his father; who, even when he was sitting in jail in Boston and facing twenty-five years for stabbing a man, did not want to tell his mother he was a Motherfucker because he did not want to disappoint her—we were first and foremost, and remain to this day, “the family.” Family. Not a word that connotes politics, or the organizations which “do” politics. The same word the Manson clan used. The same word the Mafia uses. A word that implies fierce commitment and ties as thick as blood.
Page created by the Motherfuckers for “The Rat,” underground newspaper with an office on the Lower East Side.
ARMED LOVE
The first Motherfucker action in which we claimed our unspeakable name took place on February 12, 1968, a little over a year after my arrest in St. Patrick’s Cathedral. Continuing the attack on cultural icons that had been part of the strategy of Angry Arts week, we chose as our target Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts.
The Lower East Side was in the grip of a garbage strike. The streets were ripe. Mountains of plastic bags filled with uncollected refuse piled up on the sidewalks. Rats grew fat and numerous. Meanwhile, on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, Lincoln Center sparkled, with every one of its windows washed and every marble step swept. Our action was simple. We collected bags of garbage and loaded them into a car. One person drove them to our prearranged meeting place. The rest of us marched through the streets to the subway and boarded the uptown train, pounding on pots, shaking tambourines, humming into kazoos and blowing on pennywhistles the entire way. Ben carried a black flag on a pole and handed out fliers to our fellow subway riders, who did their best to pretend we didn’t exist. At 66th Street and Broadway, we dashed onto the platform, ran up the stairs, met the car that was carrying the garbage, loaded it into a wheeled canvas post office cart, and marched off to the Center. A phalanx of security guards blocked our entrance to the buildings. We deposited the mess on the marble steps in front of them and handed out the remainder of our fliers. Uniformed police arrived and formed a cordon between the building and us. As we marched back to the subway, plainclothes police followed us. When we stopped for coffee at a cafeteria, they eyed us from an adjoining table. One cop, more undercover than the rest, sat down with us and tried uncomfortably to strike up a conversation. Ben reached over and gave him a friendly pat on his shoulder as if to say: “Nice try buddy.” Then it was back to the ghetto for fierce and energetic discussions about the meaning of what we had just done.c
The text of the flier we handed out was my first Motherfucker manifesto.
WE PROPOSE A CULTURE EXCHANGE
(garbage for garbage)
AMERICA TURNS THE WORLD INTO GARBAGE
IT TURNS ITS GHETTOES INTO GARBAGE
IT TURNS VIETNAM INTO GARBAGE
IN THE NAME OF UNIVERSAL PRINCIPLES
(DEMOCRACY HUMAN RIGHTS)
IN THE NAME OF THE FATHERLAND
(COLLIE DOGS NEW ENGLAND CHURCHES)
IN THE NAME OF MAN IN THE NAME OF ART
AMERICA TAKES
ALL THAT IS EDIBLE, EXCHANGEABLE, INVESTABLE
AND LEAVES THE REST
THE WORLD IS OUR GARBAGE, WE SHALL NOT WANT. WE
LIE DOWN IN
GREEN PASTURES—THE REST LIE IN GARBAGE
AND WE PLAY AS WE MAKE OUR GARBAGE
BEETHOVEN, BACH, MOZART, SHAKESPEARE
TO COVER THE SOUND OF OUR GARBAGE MAKING
AND WE EXCLUDE THE GARBAGE FROM OUR PALACES OF
CULTURE
AND WE SHALL NOT ALLOW IT TO MARRY OUR
DAUGHTERS
AND WE WILL NOT NEGOTIATE WITH IT OR LET IT TAKE
OUR SHIPS
BUT WE ARE FACED WITH A REVOLT OF THE GARBAGE
A CULTURAL REVOLUTION
GARBAGE FERTILIZES
DISCOVERS ITSELF
AND WE OF THE LOWER EAST SIDE HAVE DECIDED TO
BRING THIS CULTURAL REVOLUTION TO LINCOLN
CENTER—IN BAGS
IS NOT LINCOLN CENTER WHERE IT BELONGS.
Below the manifesto we told people where to assemble and signed off with:UP AGAINST THE WALL MOTHER*FUCKER
and into the trashcan
Like the disruption of St. Patrick’s Cathedral, our Lincoln Center action inspired a pornographic fantasy that I recorded in my journal. I compared the Lincoln Center to Jacqueline Kennedy’s panties, into which modern art fit like “the hand of her hairdresser.” It needed to be “scum cleansed by violent intrusions.”
The production of art for consumption by a leisured audience is a bankrupt activity. That had been a premise of Angry Arts week. But the Motherfuckers, under Ben’s leadership, quickly developed a vision in which the emphasis shifted from war on cultural institutions to total war on The System. By “The System,” we meant more than the economic and political institutions by which the rich wage unequal war against the poor, stealing the fruits of their labors, and despoiling the earth in the process. We meant the totality of reality as shaped by, dependent upon, and supportive of those institutions. We meant presidents and penises, the Pentagon and our parents, desires and disaffections, torturers and toothpaste.
We set out to organize our base within the counter-culture. If we were “a street gang with an analysis” our analysis was simple: The dropouts flooding into the ghetto were vulnerable. Their naive faith in love and good vibes did not prepare them for survival on the mean streets. They needed protection. Love needed to arm itself. We advocated a politics of rage and tribal bonding, “flower power” as one of our fliers put it, “with thorns.” The hippies who were getting most of the media attention extolled an amorphous all-inclusive being, a soft swooning dissolution of the ego. They called it “love.” “Love, love, love,” they chanted at Be-ins in Central Park, swaying dreamily like seaweed floating in the warm currents of an ethereal sea. They thrust flowers into gun barrels of the soldiers protecting the Pentagon from anti-war protestors. They told the cops they loved them as batons descended on their heads. They proclaimed this love to be the true alternative to all the warring and unhappiness of the dominant culture. They danced its praise with loose, long hair and flowing garments. They invited all those straight square folks with button-down personalities to join the dance. We Motherfuckers liked the dance, but worried that the dancers were weak and didn’t know it. We prowled the sidelines and talked of rage—its reality in us and the dangerous rage of society against us.
The crisis of the Sixties was experienced differently in different sectors of society. For white America it took the form of a children’s revolt that tore the culture apart along generational lines.
Adolescence is a time of aching awareness of the gulf between the self and society’s expectations. Societies depend for their continued stability on limiting the arc of adolescent discontent. In the Sixties that arc became abnormally extended. Children saw the family as the modular cell out of which the whole oppressive body politic was constructed.
Adolescents rebelled in droves. America offered them a limited menu of acceptable adult roles: they could join the army and become cannon fodder; they could be housewives, office drones, or flunkies in some menial depressing job. None of them looked appetizing. The Sixties was not a time of economic scarcity. Fear of poverty was an insufficient whip to keep young people on the path. Chanting “Hell no! We won’t go!” they would change what it meant to grow up or they would not grow up at all.
The traditional rhetoric of the left did not recognize the categories of experience that had driven young people to drop out, and it could not name the goal of their journey The System had produced a murderous war in Vietnam, whic
h gobbled up young people and spit out corpses at a terrifying rate. But it had also produced a slew of seemingly trivial indignities, which, for the dropouts of the Lower East Side, had simply become intolerable.
Communists believe that the working class will be the vanguard of revolution once workers realize they are being exploited and that the exploitation of their labor is the root of all other forms of oppression. The civil rights movement forced the white left to recognize that racism cut across divisions of class, and had burrowed deep into the psyche of the nation. But how was the left to understand the oppression of the privileged white children of America? What “ism” applied to them? They got stoned on acid, listened to rock and roll, came from various classes of society. They revolted against The System—not the “capitalist” system, or the “racist” system, but simply “The System.” All of it. The whole kit and caboodle. They could not define their exploitation primarily in terms of their work life. What work? They scrounged and panhandled for a living. They had “white skin privilege.” And still they wanted out—out of their families; their schools; their jobs; out of the blond, bovine stupidity of truck stop, Doggie Diner America.
