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Up Against the Wall Motherf**er

Page 7

by Osha Neumann


  Sometime later, word came down that a bust was imminent. Many students jumped out windows to escape. When the police did arrive, they marched in, took custody of Kirk’s Rembrandt, locked his inner offices and left a rump group of about twelve protestors sitting in a circle holding a meeting. 12

  Mark, who had left and then returned recalls:We [Johnny, Steve, and Mark Motherfucker] got there and they were having this discussion. They were in the Secretary’s area of the president’s office and the door was locked to the president’s office and there was a discussion at the time “do we take over the president’s office.” And it was like a long drawn out discussion and went on and on for hours. Johnny goes “I think we can get in there,” and we start looking around and it turns out there was this coffee pot with a hot plate and there was a little door so the president didn’t have to leave his office and could reach out to get his coffee and they slid me through, I being the skinniest one and I opened the door next to it and Johnny and Steve and I now occupied the president’s office. So we go to the other door, the one that leads to the Secretary’s office, which is where they’re having this meeting and Johnny opens the door and sticks his head out and goes “hi” and they go we just had a vote not to take over that office. No problem says Johnny this is a separate occupation. He said only women are allowed to use the bathroom. So about 10 minutes later there is a knock on the door. “We voted to take over this office.”13

  From Low, Ben and the majority of the Motherfuckers moved on to the Mathematics Building, which was quickly transformed into a reasonable facsimile of a Lower East Side crash pad. Lecture halls became communal living spaces strewn with piles of clothing, remnants of meals, backpacks, and bedding. Blackboards that had been covered with equations now sprouted slogans—Up Against the Wall prominent among them—and drafts for manifestoes. Wooden partitions between toilet stalls were torn down to build barricades. Those who needed privacy were having problems.

  Men and women used the same bathrooms, slept in their clothing, and stopped caring how they smelled. And of course there were endless meetings to discuss strategy and tactics.

  Tom Hayden chaired most of the meetings. We Motherfuckers were impatient with all the talk, although film footage taken during the occupation shows John Motherfucker getting himself elected to some position or other that I can no longer remember.

  When word reached us that athletes and fraternity boys had formed a ring around Low Library and were refusing to let anyone in or out of the building we climbed out of the windows of Math and marched to Low carrying boxes of groceries. The blockaders were clean cut, shorthaired, and beefy. They didn’t look like us. One might have thought that, separated by oceans of ideology, long hairs and short hairs were evolving into different species. We called them “jocks.” They called us “pukes.” We marched a few times outside their perimeter and then suddenly, Ben in the lead, made a rush to break through their line. Fights broke out. We were pushed back. Terrified as usual, I lagged behind, and managed to avoid the worst of it.

  Ben was primarily concerned with organizing our defense against the inevitable assault by the police. Every floor was barricaded with furniture. He remembers piling heavy desks in the stairwell, with wedges under them so they could easily be tipped down the steps onto police coming from below. We ran soapy water down seven flights of polished concrete steps so the cops would lose their footing.

  The cops moved in after midnight. They moved from building to building, saving Math for last. When word reached us that our time was approaching, John recalls thinking the cops might try a sneak attack through a tunnel in the basement that connected Math to adjacent buildings. He remembers “shoving desks, chairs, garbage cans and a lone Coke machine into the tunnel’s entrance,” to create a blockade, followed, when we realized it wasn’t enough, by the marble partitions that separated the stalls of what had once been the basement men’s room.

  For John Motherfucker, the tearing down of the partitions carried the symbolism of the struggle, which ultimately was about the breaking down of all restraints and barriers. He wrote:We ripped out the partitions that created the stalls that separated the shittees who had always come down from the classrooms above and defined the divisions between all the Math syntheses and formulations and logarithms and the graphs of generations of conceptual scholars seeking privacy for a moment between the stall-walls of these individual retreat bowls where the functions of life could be integrated with the abstractions. . . . Those stall walls came down. And the cries rang out,

  “WE ARE ALL ANTI-PARTITIONALISTS”

  “DOWN WITH THE WALLS”

  “LIBERATE THE STALLS.”

  And on that night, while all of us were getting busted and beaten, Freedom reigned among the toilets of Math. 14

  For the Motherfuckers the “issues” that had sparked the takeover were secondary. We were the vanguard of the new order, vandals of liberation, sworn enemies of all hierarchical institutions. We were contemptuous of all those who accepted roles within those institutions, students and faculty alike. We distrusted all intellectual activity that was not devoted to revolution, all thought divorced from action, all rationality that shut itself off from the surrealism of the unconscious. We had no respect for institutions of “higher” learning that shelter those within them from the “lower” learning of the street. We came to tear down the walls, not to repair them.

  Math had a reputation for militancy, partly because of our presence there. Many expected we would get the worst of it. Memories of how the bust actually came down vary. Ben recalls that the cops couldn’t get through our barricades and we negotiated our surrender. A woman on the fourth floor recalls hearing the cops shout and curse and an ax crashing through the door of the fourth floor room in which she and about twenty other protestors were huddled. She saw blood on the steps as she was being hauled away. I remember little except that I emerged unscathed. Perhaps the police had saved Math for last partly because of our reputation for militancy and had already vented most, but not all, of their fury on protestors in other buildings by the time they got to us. Some of us got beat. I was just lucky.

  My brother Michael was a student at Columbia. He had been one of the founding members of Columbia SDS. Mark Rudd was his roommate. Michael dropped in at Low Library twice, but otherwise did not participate in the occupations. He agreed with Herbert that universities, whatever their shortcomings, were realms of comparative freedom, and therefore disrupting them was counter-productive. The university had not been a realm of freedom for me. I was done with academia. I returned to Columbia not to follow in Franz’s footsteps, but to disrupt the institution where he had taught so brilliantly. First his home, now his university: Once again, I was contaminating the refuge of reason.

  Michael and I had never been close as children. He was eight years younger than I. He had observed my fearsome battles with my mother and decided to keep his distance. After Columbia, we went our separate ways and remained estranged for most of the Sixties. Sometime after Columbia he wrote me a scathing letter:You know what I have to say. It is that when all your motherfuckering is gone, when new language that is fake, new community that is not community, human liberation that is not liberation, new life that is not life, fighting that is not fighting, when all that is gone, I will remain, and with me will remain people who never pretended to be more whole than they were, or to give more than they could give, and who knew that courage and free spirit come at the end of the line, not the beginning . . . These people, not you, will be the revolutionaries . . . They will not pretend that they hate the cops or the corporations, they will not be transfigured into your images. They will be transfigured and still remain ordinary—they won’t live in orgasm. Neither will you. We don’t live in such a world.

  He was merciless on what he saw as the distorted psychological origins of my politics:Twenty-years of sniveling and humiliation everywhere, in school, in stores, groveling and full of hate . . . at your father and your mother and your
stepfather, persecuted all the time, pathetic . . . hurt, clinging to sexuality, torturing yourself and other people—but never with satisfaction! You think that you are big enough to tear all that apart and remake the world, that suddenly it is you alone who knows how to live and fuck, that we are all castrated party hacks! WHO is arrogant?

  Nor did he have patience with my conflicted relation to rationality, a legacy I could never completely disown or embrace:Take the specter of rationality and kick it around some more first until you are not afraid of it, until you realize it isn’t what you thought it was . . . Reason isn’t to whip people with, neither is what you do. Reason isn’t a thing at all, forget it. It means doing things right.

  Years later, Michael later wrote a book, What’s Left? in which my Motherfuckeresque life style politics is blamed for the demise of a genuinely effective radical movement. Perhaps he’s more right than I could admit at the time. Perhaps we did get a bit carried away. But I suspect that revolutionary periods, and particularly aborted revolutions, are always messy affairs, combining sense and non-sense, the heroic and ridiculous, in unequal measure.

  At its founding convention in 1962, Students for a Democratic Society ratified a declaration of principles that became known as the Port Huron Statement.15 The Statement was “an effort in understanding and changing the conditions of humanity in the late twentieth century, an effort rooted in the ancient, still unfulfilled conception of man attaining determining influence over his circumstances of life.” It marked the birth of a “new left” intent on remaking the language and practice of politics. “Our work,” it proclaimed “is guided by the sense that we may be the last generation in the experiment with living.” It acknowledged that many white college students had grown up comfortably in the richest nation on earth. It listed the factors that were undermining that comfortable existence:As we grew . . . our comfort was penetrated by events too troubling to dismiss. First, the permeating and victimizing fact of human degradation, symbolized by the Southern struggle against racial bigotry, compelled most of us from silence to activism. Second, the enclosing fact of the Cold War, symbolized by the presence of the Bomb, brought awareness that we ourselves, and our friends, and millions of abstract “others” we knew more directly because of our common peril, might die at any time.

  The apparent apathy of most Americans was a “glaze over deeply felt anxieties.” The problem that would have to be addressed in awakening Americans to the urgent peril was that “[a] shell of moral callus separates the citizen from sensitivity to the common peril: this is the result of a lifetime saturation with horror.”

  Despite his disdain for the compromises of student activism, Ben decided that the Motherfuckers should become an official SDS chapter. We believed ourselves well-situated to break “the moral callus”—including the vestiges of that moral callus which restrained the militancy of the movement. Into the sedate halls of the academy we would bring the disruptive style of the streets.

  As an SDS chapter we took every opportunity to chastise students for their lack of daring. On one occasion we went to a SDS meeting in the basement of the psychology building at Columbia University. The students talked on and on and we became impatient. I drifted away from the discussion. Exploring the corridors, I discovered a hall lined with cages full of pigeons that were used in behavioral experiments. Grabbing hold of a cage I carried it back to the room where the meeting was taking place. Propaganda of the deed! I released the pigeons from their little prisons, shouting something appropriate. As I ran out of the meeting the puzzled birds, wheeled about the room, banged into windows, and flapped down the corridors. I learned later that I had destroyed months of some professor’s research. Did I care? There was only one task worthy of my devotion—total liberation. There was only one experiment worthy of respect—the complete transformation of the System.

  In 1968 we traveled to a SDS national convention in Michigan. I seized the microphone during an interminable debate between non-ideological new lefties and the Maoist Progressive Labor Party faction. Dropping my pants, with my penis flapping in the wind, I condemned intellectual masturbation. Our role as apostles from the street to the student movement was not to argue ideology, but to instill into the movement’s moribund theoretical discussions the urgency and anarchy of the streets. Our “Chapter Report” on the convention was a succinct expression of our point.

  A MOLOTOV COCKTAIL

  IS A BOTTLE FILLED WITH

  THREE PARTS KEROSENE

  AND ONE PART MOTOR OIL

  IT IS CAPPED

  AND WRAPPED

  WITH COTTON

  SOAKED WITH GASOLINE

  TO USE—

  LIGHT COTTON

  THROW BOTTLE

  FIRE AND EXPLOSION OCCUR

  ON IMPACT WITH TARGET

  A “WHITE RADICAL”

  IS THREE PARTS BULLSHIT

  AND ONE PART HESITATION.

  IT IS NOT REVOLUTIONARY

  AND SHOULD NOT BE

  STOCKPILED

  AT THIS TIME

  respectfully submitted

  UP AGAINST THE WALL

  MOTHERFUCKER

  The students whose timidity we condemned were often suitably impressed by our militancy. The vanguard of the movement belonged to those who were willing to take life and death risks. SDS organizers made pilgrimages to our crashpads. Some of them later joined the Weathermen, which went through its own distinctly Motherfuckeresque stage before it disappeared underground. At one Weathermen gathering Bernadine Dorn saluted the crowd with three raised fingers symbolizing the carving fork the Manson gang stuck in the belly of the victims in the Tate/LaBianca murder spree. When Susan Atkins, one of his gang, was sitting in jail, she blithely confessed to one of her cellmates that she had murdered Sharon Tate. The cellmate was horrified and asked why she’d done it. She replied, “We wanted to do a crime that would shock the world, that the world would have to stand up and take notice.”16 The desire to shock the world, to make it stand up and take notice was widespread at the time.

  THE LIBERATION OF FANTASY

  At 89 East 10th Street on March 21 [1967] from about 5 pm the UAWMF [Up Against the Wall Motherfuckers] held a 24-hour Spring Feast. Leaflets advertising this event had been circulated throughout the East Village area for some two weeks and at about 9 pm there were about 100 people at the four-floor derelict apartment house.

  Our source states that the place was filthy, there were no lights, illumination being provided by candles and by battery operated lanterns.

  Entrance to the building was made either from a store front, slightly below street level, or on the first floor which is some eight steps above street level. On entering by the store front our source went through into the “kitchen” and found a mess of food, a flooded sink and an exit to an enclosed back yard which was filled with rubbish and garbage. Source reported a m/f couple on the floor in the passageway, covered by a blanket having sexual intercourse.

  On the first floor a “band” had been formed using bottles, garbage can lids, a broken chair, and various noise makers as instruments. People were milling around and several m/f’s (male/females) were asleep on the floor, indicating drug abuse—

  On the second floor the scene was repeated, with the exception that the band was missing, replaced by a simple “light show.” During the period 10- 12, several acts of sexual intercourse were observed and acts of sexual perversion.

  Of the 100 people in the building our source estimates that seventy were males, equally divided between Negro and Caucasian races; of the thirty or so girls, only three were Negro.

  —Surveillance report of an undercover New York City police officer17

  As a longhaired, dirty Motherfucker I looked in the mirror and saw, with some satisfaction, my mother’s worst nightmare.

  The Motherfuckers allowed me to rant and rave as I never had before. My anger at The System—its war, its racism, its total vile hypocrisy—was real. My motherfuckering wasn’t just psychodrama
even if the anger I expressed was fueled by pent up frustrations of my childhood. I found release from my painful introversion in action. I was finally clawing through to something real. I wanted to feast on the flesh of life. I was tired of bloodless abstractions. I was a Motherfucker. Our task was to cut through facades, to unveil, to rend, to penetrate.

  My mother never appeared in my masturbatory sadomasochistic fantasies, or if she did, it was in deep disguise. But here I was a Motherfucker. The System was our mother and in the revolution we fucked her.

  Parental authority is writ large in the coercive authority of the state. In challenging the state it’s easy to fall into the role of rebellious child. If society is the parent, and specifically the mother, and we fuck her in anger, or in love, or in some inextricable mix of the two, do we desire to merge with her, to destroy her, or to be destroyed by her?

  On the surface our angry, anarchistic counter-cultural take-no-prisoners motherfuckerism was all rage and rejection. But did there lie at its secret core an acceptance of our childishness, a longing for our abusive parent as intense as our rejection of her? Did our politics, despite all our utopian yearnings, betray an inability to imagine taking power from our parent, and ending the subordination of childhood? We could always rely on the state to play the role of dominatrix and beat up on her disobedient children. Our politics was a passion play in which the bad parent proved her meanness, over and over again to our masochistic satisfaction. Did we secretly identify with the hand that beat us?

 

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