Up Against the Wall Motherf**er

by Osha Neumann

  And no, I am not completely cured. I have retained from my childhood a sense of shame about the body, which takes the form of obsessions that well up suddenly and without warning, interrupting my colloquial relations with the world like an unwelcome creditor come to collect on a past due debt. Just as alcoholics in recovery never say that they are free of the disease, but begin every meeting by identifying themselves as alcoholics, so I must identify as a recovering . . . what? Selfflagellator? Misogynist? Perhaps a dual diagnosis is in order.

  To a large extent the story of the Motherfuckers is the traditional story of men playing their dangerous, oh so important games, oblivious to women. Yeshi had been involved in civil rights and organizing years before I became actively political, and continued her organizing while I was Motherfuckering. She enters the story only as an appendage. After Rachel’s birth at home she was inspired to become a midwife, and since then has assisted thousands of women to give birth. In her story the vagina is a not the focus of a hostile or lecherous gaze, but an opening to life and an inspiration for a vagina monologue—no, a vagina aria, a vagina chorus of massed voices singing hallelujah.

  Motherfucker flier. “Henry” was our code name for a demonstration.

  TODD GITLIN AND I—A SIXTIES FLASHBACK

  From 1963 to 1965, Todd Gitlin was president of Students for a Democratic Society. In 1987 he published an ambitious history of the Sixties, The Sixties, Years of Hope, Days of Rage. His effort at capturing that decade is comprehensive, moderate in tone without being pedantic, and well written throughout. The book concludes with an eloquent attempt to honor what we achieved during that period of upheaval, while acknowledging our limitations. I particularly like the next to last sentence:On the one side, there remains the perennial trap of thinking old dilemmas can be outmuscled by the luck of youth; on the other, the trap of thinking the future is doomed to be nothing more than the past; between them possibly, the space to invent.

  In 1985 Todd was teaching at the University of California in Berkeley. That year the campus was in turmoil, rocked by the largest and most militant demonstrations it had seen since the end of the Vietnam War. The goal of the demonstrations was to force the University to divest its holdings in companies that did business in South Africa. Demonstrators renamed Sproul Plaza, in the center of the campus, Biko Plaza, in honor of Stephen Biko, the martyred South African leader of the Black Consciousness movement. There were constant sit-ins in front of the system-wide administration building on Oxford Avenue. A group of primarily white activists broke away from the crowd at the end of a rally sponsored by the United People of Color and established an encampment on the steps of Sproul Hall, the campus administration building.

  The wave of demonstrations was organized by a number of quite distinct groups. The divestment movement divided along fault lines of race and class. The encampment on the steps of Sproul Hall was primarily white. Student and non-student activists from the community mingled together, their numbers augmented by a shifting group of homeless street people. The organization of the encampment, if indeed it could be said to be organized at all, was tenuous at its best. Decision-making was an interminable process of reaching “consensus.” The dysfunction of the street invaded the meetings. Some homeless person would invariably fall asleep, in the center of the circle, only to wake up agitated, ready to make a speech. African-American students who had organized separately were suspicious of the sometimes violently confrontational tone of the steps, and upset with the refusal by leaders of the vigil to acknowledge that African-American students had a right to lead a struggle that involved African liberation. Professors marched with dignity in support of the students, passed resolutions, and expressed solidarity.

  I gravitated to the scene on the steps. I found the openness and craziness refreshing. I liked the disrespect, the push for confrontation, the breaking of rules. I liked the inclusion of the homeless, the drunk, and disorderly. I was also aware of the limitations.

  As the year progressed there were hundreds of arrests as students and their supporters staged sit-ins blocking access to buildings. Ministers prayed as they were carted away. At one point the entire School Board of the City of Berkeley was arrested for blocking the entrance to the University-wide administration building. The rallies grew larger and larger. In the early morning hours of April 16, the police surrounded the encampment on the Sproul Hall steps and carted all 141 of us off to jail. The next day an enormous rally protesting the arrests filled Biko Plaza. Willie Brown, then speaker of the California State assembly, spoke in support of the demonstrators.

  The movement was progressing in a classic pattern—the issue of divestment had broad appeal. Therefore those committed to the most aggressively confrontational tactics could push the entire process without alienating the more moderate sectors. Unfortunately, campus agitation is limited by the boundaries of the school year, and the end of the year was approaching. But an opportunity arose for one last hurrah before vacation. The Regents of the University of California had scheduled their June meeting to take place at the Lawrence Hall of Science, which is located in the Berkeley hills overlooking the campus. The subject of divestment was on their agenda.

  The Lawrence Hall of Science is a squat domed structure of cement slabs that looks like a World War I bunker half buried in the hill. From the broad plaza that surrounds it, one is afforded a magnificent view of San Francisco bay. As the Regents met in the lecture hall in the basement, demonstrations swirled outside. The police were predictably brutal and out of hand—as they had been consistently throughout the year. There was a lot of shoving and pushing on both sides, but if you got tired of the battle you could present yourself at the police lines, and the police would let you through to go inside to observe the meeting. Which I did towards the beginning of the afternoon.

  The audience was confined to a balcony overlooking the stage of the auditorium on which the Regents were seated behind a long rectangular table. Before I arrived there had been substantive presentations on the situation in South Africa and the need for divestment, including an appeal from Pedro Noguera, student body president, and one of the leaders of the divestment movement. But by the time I took my seat the Regents were droning on and on, slouching toward the close of a meeting at which, predictably, they would do nothing.h A few of us, our adrenaline still pumping, began some mild heckling. As the meeting dribbled towards its inevitable conclusion, some of us stood up and yelled. We weren’t loud enough or persistent enough to prevent the deliberations, but we did succeed, I thought, in introducing a little sense of risk and insecurity among the potentates. I was standing up in mid-heckle when, to my surprise, I felt a hand on my shoulder exerting a firm downward pressure to force me back into my seat. At the same time I heard the person behind me say in the voice of a vexed junior high school teacher: “Oh Tom [surely he knew I had changed my name to Osha years ago], cut it out.” or something to that effect. I turned around and there was Todd Gitlin, frowning at me disapprovingly. I instantly reverted to my Motherfucker persona and hissed back at him: “Get your fucking hands off me,” or something, I hoped, equally menacing. He didn’t touch me again. I yelled a few more times, just to show I wasn’t intimidated. The meeting ended. We filed out. Todd and I studiously avoiding looking at each other.

  Which brings me back to Todd’s penultimate sentence. “On the one side, there remains the perennial trap of thinking old dilemmas can be outmuscled by the luck of youth; on the other, the trap of thinking the future is doomed to be nothing more than the past; between them possibly, the space to invent.”

  That sentence has such a fine balance: “On the one side,” and “on the other,” and then the suggestion of a synthesis “between them possibly [emphasis added] the space to invent.” I can imagine Todd got up from his desk after writing that sentence feeling very satisfied with himself, as well he should have. The tone is tentative, wise, careful. The voice is that of one no longer prey to enthusiasms, but still committed.

&n
bsp; Many of us would like to think of ourselves that way. But the truth is more complicated. We are uneasy. We feel that despite our best efforts we have been trapped, accepting the unacceptable, compromising with the intolerable. I suspect that Todd saw in the gray-haired figure that rose in front of him at the Regents meeting, blocking his view of the proceedings, the embodiment of the mindless juvenile narcissistic anarchism, narrow and irrational, which he blamed in part for the Left’s inability to create a broad movement of opposition. And I, turning back towards him, saw the comfortably positioned professor. While I felt some pleasure in the thought that I had retained (better than he) the basic instinct of disrespect, I wondered if I lacked his ability to grow up, and whether I would remain constantly trapped in infantile exhibitions of anger at authority.

  In truth, I could never write a book like Todd’s. There are some activities which I have found almost impossible to perform without appearing ridiculous: rushing around airports with heavy luggage is one; finding a place to pee in a strange city is another. And writing about the Sixties is yet another. The project requires me to look at the trajectory of life that had a period of revolutionary exaltation (or so I remember it) at the beginning, and something far more ambiguous, and in some ways less satisfactory, in the present. The person whom I was then looks back at me now and defies me to justify my current compromised life, and the person I am now looks back on the infantile grandiosity of the period and is embarrassed. Stalemate.

  The Sixties were marked by an unrelenting urgency. The very act of reflecting sometimes feels like a betrayal. To reflect is to step back. To step back is to disengage. By ceasing to battle even for a moment, the project to which we were committed is defeated. It lies by the side of the historical road, picked over by scavengers, eaten by scholastic ants, parceled out and dissected, an occasion for sentimental soliloquies, the inspiration for collections of memorabilia, a commodity.

  Back then we were intolerant of bystanders. We had a slogan: “If you’re not part of the solution, your part of the problem.” The slogan was coined by Eldridge Cleaver, a convicted rapist and Minister of Information for the Black Panther Party, who died after becoming at various times a dope addict, a Mooney, and a small time hustler for various right-wing causes. I remember seeing him on the weekends selling odd junk at the Berkeley Flea Market. An American flag and a California flag flanked his stall. Whether he thought of himself as part of the problem or part of the solution no one cared to ask.

  The historian comfortably ensconced in academia was not, I used to think, part of the solution. Now, somewhat mellowed—despite my interaction with Todd—I am more accepting, and wouldn’t mind a comfortable academic job myself. I’m a little jealous of him. Many of my friends have become, like me, hyphenated radicals: radical-doctors, radical-lawyers, radical-therapists. The hyphen does not result in excommunication from the congregation of solutions. There are not always such clear distinctions between problems and solutions. They intertwine like lovers.

  MY SIXTIES PROBLEM

  My Sixties problem is simply stated. I was a Motherfucker. I have to come to grips with all the strengths and terrible weaknesses of the Motherfuckers. I can’t glorify or discount what we did back then. I have to write without nostalgia or disdain.

  The hippie counter-culture of the Sixties has melted away. What’s left is a residue of trivial curiosities: tie-dyed shirts, psychedelic posters, aging rock stars—hardly an impressive legacy. The flower children we sought to politicize bloomed for a brief season then faded and dropped their petals. They were not perennials. The Motherfucker strain of the counterculture did not outlive them, though perhaps remnants of it, largely depoliticized, survived in punk. We quickly self-destructed, a victim of our own rhetoric. We were hurtling towards death with such obvious relish that all but the most suicidal potential converts kept their distance.

  I did not become a Motherfucker because I lacked privilege. I had more than enough privilege. Nor had I experienced material deprivation. Never in my life had I gone hungry. I experienced my oppression as an inability to touch reality. Endless introspection only separated me further from the world. I felt everything outside myself to be without substance, denatured, unreal. Nothing held together: Thought existed in isolation from experience, intellect from emotion, reason from reality. Living with these separations contributed to a diminished sense of the reality of my own being, which in turn sucked the substance from things, desiccating the apple on the bough, bleaching the sunset, turning rivers into trickles of dust. The face life turned to me was a lie. I was lost in a labyrinth of thin disguises.

  . In revolt against the experience of unreality, I joined the swelling tide of rebels and drop outs. We would bring the war home. We were determined to provoke the system to shed all its disguises and expose its true nature. It would reveal itself as the policeman’s club, the steel bars of a cell, perhaps ultimately a bullet heading our way. I wrote in my journal:We live in an unreproducable zero, surrounded by husks of representation. The unreality is held together by its images. The less substantial it becomes in itself, the more images are required to hold it together.

  The essence of America is that it is zero. It has already been wiped out. The war is over. By going into the streets and fighting cops we create our enemy. We make something to fight against. We call it into existence. As long as America doesn’t exist it is invincible. We will have won when we have fully created our enemy, when we have forced him into a body. And we seem to be able to do this only by totally encircling him with violence. And the same with us. Violence gives us for the first time a body. And that body fills in the present by being beaten. Experience must be attached to a body that is being beaten or feels itself as potentially beaten.

  As a child I had fantasized a strong father who would beat me if I was bad. I imagined his whippings as pleasure compared with the psychological torture of my relation to my mother. As a Motherfucker, I imagined violence as redemptive and necessary for personal and political transformation.

  The Russian, Chinese, and Cuban revolutions, along with the struggles against colonial domination in Africa and Latin America, shaped our imagery of revolution. They were revolutions of the exploited and disenfranchised. They were nationalist movements against foreign domination. Often led by the educated children of the middle class, they mobilized peasants and workers whose revolt was fueled by material scarcity. But in the Sixties, the privileged children of white America revolted as much against “having” as against “not having.” The scarcity we revolted against was not a material scarcity. Our hunger for nourishment differed from the hunger of Ethiopians, but was hunger nevertheless. It was an emptiness in the midst of material abundance, a starvation of the spirit.

  I imagined that people who are materially oppressed did not experience identity crises. For Blacks in the diamond mines of South Africa, Vietnamese in their rice paddies, Cubans in their sugar cane fields, identity was not a problem because the source of their oppression was clearly external. They did not experience themselves as struggling towards “the real.” The reality of the world was inescapable. But for me, revolt was a continual process of trying to rid myself of an inner emptiness, to cough it up, to get it out of my system, to become “real” so that I could “be in touch with reality.” If I succeeded in becoming part of the revolution it would become clear who and what I was. I would become whole. Revolution as therapy.

  The politicized counterculture that developed in the youth ghettoes of the Sixties was built on a set of correlations. That portion of our selves which society sought to repress, we identified with those whom society oppressed. The violence of our rages against our parents we identified with the violent rage of the colonized against the colonizer. But despite our assertions of solidarity with the oppressed around the world, the qualitative differences in our struggles remained. We gagged on our piece of pie while others still struggled to get to the table. We dropped out; others were never offered the opportunity to drop i
n. Our commitment to revolution seemed a matter of choice; theirs, a necessity.

  No one would say of the Blacks or the Vietnamese, or the bearded Cubans in the Sierra Meistra that their struggle was “only a stage.” But that charge was continually leveled against us. We were immature. Our colorful motley was the peach fuzz of adolescence, which we would sooner or later exchange for the drab conformist plumage of the adult of the species. We vehemently denied that our revolt was any bit less authentic than that of the colonized peoples with whom we declared our solidarity, but how could we refute that accusation? Only time would tell to what extent age would dim our enthusiasm for revolution. And I’m not sure time has come to our defense.

  The poor and the dispossessed struggle against hunger and disease. They are famished. It is not for them to elaborate a critique of the cuisine that is not on their plates. That critique, the critique of the misuse of abundance, was our job. Or so we thought. But the commodity culture we detested has spread across the globe. It penetrates everywhere and everywhere generates resistance. Mud huts are turned into internet cafés. Satellite dishes sprout from corrugated tin roofs in the favelas, ghettoes and refugee camps of Asia and Africa and Latin America. Inside, in the gloom, the TV glows and the poor peer, as through a window, at an ever-changing tableau of the richest, and purportedly most sexually attractive, athletic, talented and famous people in the world. On display are all the accoutrements of a life worth living—designer jeans with prestigious labels on the butt, sneakers endorsed by the best athletes, cars that purr like kittens, beers that melt away inhibitions, deodorants that mask life’s unpleasant odors, entertaining breakfast cereals, rejuvenating soft drinks.