One Hand Jerking

by Paul Krassner

  When Kennedy won, Meader seized the opportunity. He bagan to comb his hair with a flamboyant pompadour dipping across his forehead. He consciously regressed to the Boston accent he had previously tried so hard to lose. And he made a comedy album, The First Family, which broke sales records and turned him into a star. As for David Frye, he would have to depend on his impressions of Kirk Douglas and Robert Mitchum.

  After Kennedy’s assassination, Meader dropped out of comedy, moved to San Francisco and became a late-blooming flower child. He returned to New York in 1968, and attended a few Yippie meetings. We invited him to play Bobby Kennedy at our counter-convention that summer in Chicago. But then, in mid-March, Kennedy announced that he was going to run for president.

  On March 31, Meader asked me for a tab of LSD. That evening, President Johnson went on TV and announced that he would not seek re-election. My phone rang immediately. It was Vaughn Meader. In the middle of tripping, he had just seen LBJ, and wasn’t sure if this was an acid hallucination or an April Fool’s Eve joke. But it was true—LBJ was out of the race.

  “Whew,” Lenny Bruce whistled from the grave, “David Frye is screwed. . . .”

  Frye’s luck returned when Richard Nixon was elected that November. But in August 1974 Nixon became the first president in American history to resign from office.

  “Whew,” Lenny whistled, “David Frye is screwed again. . . .”

  THE RAPTURE PRESIDENT

  I asked David Shaw, media critic for the Los Angeles Times, if he knew of any reporter who had asked George W. Bush what that three-dimensional rectangular thing was under the back of his jacket during the first debate. Shaw said he didn’t know of any.

  Then, at a presidential press conference, Mark Slackman posed this question: “Sir, we still haven’t heard a plausible explanation for the bulge under your suit in the first debate. Sir, were you being prompted by a hidden transmitter?”

  Slackman is, of course, a reporter in the comic strip Doonesbury.

  Bush gave his answer the next day, on ABC’s Good Morning America. “I don’t know what that is,” he said. “I mean, it is—I’m embarrassed to say it’s a poorly tailored shirt.”

  Yeah, right, and Saddam Hussein married Osama bin Laden in Massachusetts and they adopted a Chinese baby.

  But Bush wasn’t being prompted by his senior adviser, Karen Hughes, whose job it had been to advise him not to refer to terrorists as “folks.” No, Bush was being prompted by God Him-or-Herself. You know, God, the One who Bush says he is on a mission from. God, the One who Jerry Falwell says is pro-war. God, the One who told Pat Robertson that Bush would be re-elected, and then Robertson went ahead and defied God’s will by revealing that Bush wasn’t concerned about American casualties in Iraq.

  Bush once proclaimed, “God is not neutral,” which is the antithesis of of my own spiritual path, my own peculiar relationship with the universe—based on the notion that God is totally neutral—but I’ve learned that whatever people believe in, works for them.

  Barry Lynn, director of Americans United for the Separation of Church and State, believes that the “God supports Bush” theme holds great currency among Bush’s base because Bush wants it to. “It is a belief the president encouraged, and that Karl Rove has encouraged,” says Lynn. “It is, I think, extremely dangerous for people to believe that God is a Republican or a Democrat or a Naderite or even a Libertarian.”

  I’m writing this five days before the election. I predict that either there will be a relatively landslide victory for Kerry, indicating that the polls were skewed—bypassing cell phones, Vote or Die campaigns, disillusioned Christians—or the results will be so close that 50,000 Democratic lawyers will end up battling back and forth in the courts with 50,000 Republican lawyers—dragging out, appealing again and again, stalling around—for, oh, say, at least four years, until finally John Edwards, his pompadour prematurely grey, argues the case unsuccessfully before the U.S. Supreme Court, which by then will be packed with Bush’s reactionary appointees. Is that the way the world will end, with neither a bang nor a whimper, but with a bloodless bi-partisan coup?

  SILKEN TWINE

  Now that George Bush has been elected to a second term, the arrogance of his administration will undoubtedly increase suffering in this country and around the world. Yet, in the words of William Blake: “Under every grief and pine/ Runs a joy with silken twine.” Not to mention Monty Python: “Always look on the bright side of life.”

  So, in terms of the cultural divide, even though The Passion of the Christ—which finally made Jesus more popular than the Beatles—has supposedly defeated Farhenheit 9/11, Michael Moore has written “17 reasons not to slit your wrists” for his choir. A few examples:

  “Admit it: We like the Bush twins and we don’t want them to go away.”

  “The only age group in which the majority voted for Kerry was young adults (Kerry: 54%, Bush: 44%), proving once again that your parents are always wrong and you should never listen to them.”

  “Gays, thanks to the ballot measures passed on Tuesday, cannot get married in 11 new states. Thank God. Just think of all those wedding gifts we won’t have to buy now.”

  “It is against the law for George W. Bush to run for president again.”

  Of course, it wouldn’t be illegal for Dick Cheney to run for president. Oops, I take that back. It would be illegal. Cheney has already served two terms as president, in the guise of vice-president. Moreover, Karl Rove is no longer the clandestine flasher who pops out from behind a tree in the park. Now he’s in the middle of the street and all over TV, opening his raincoat and shouting, “Hey, lady, take a look at this!”

  Ironic Times, the satirical online weekly produced by three former writers for Not Necessarily the News, has published “Top reasons why Democrats should not commit suicide: Iraq slides into endless, bloody chaos; U.S. standing in world plummets; Economy sinks into another recession; Terrorist attacks; New TV shows stink”—all these “will be blamed on Bush.”

  That same point was made by syndicated columnist Robert Scheer, who stated that now Bush won’t be able to blame Democrats and liberals for whatever happens domestically and abroad.

  It’s always been my nature to seek blessings in disguise, a real challenge in these insane times, but at least I won’t have to watch John Kerry shooting a goose again while wearing a camouflage outfit apparently to fool the geese. If elected, he promised to send 40,000 additional troops to Iraq. As president, it would’ve been his fate to watch a member of Iraq Veterans Against the War testify before Congress: “How do you ask a man to be the last man to die in Iraq? How do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake?”

  At a Republican victory party, a reporter asked an 11-year-old boy why he wanted to be president. “I would like to be president of the United States,” he replied, “so that I can lead the country to war.” Four more years of trickle-down barbarism.

  But, even as I find myself singing that popular ’60s favorite, “Eve of Destruction,” I remember an old maxim which insists that things need to get worse before they can get better. Some consolation, huh?

  DOUBLE AGENT

  Guerrilla: The Taking of Patty Hearst has been playing in movie theaters. I covered her trial for two publications at opposite ends of the cultural spectrum—the Berkeley Barb and Playboy. Patty was on trial for robbing a bank with her kidnappers. Here’s an angle that wasn’t in the documentary.

  Patty’s parents sat in the courtroom, listening to a communique from their princess, abdicating her right to the throne: “I have been given the choice of, one, being released in a safe area or, two, joining the forces of the Symbionese Liberation Army. . . . I have chosen to stay and fight. . . .”

  At the end of the tape, SLA leader Donald “Cinque” DeFreeze issued a triple death threat, especially to Colston Westbrook, calling him “a government agent now working for Military Intelligence while giving assistance to the FBI.” This communique was originally sent to San F
rancsco radio station KSAN. News director David McQueen checked with a Justice Department source, who confirmed Westbrook’s employment by the CIA.

  Researcher Mae Brussell traced his activities from 1962, when he was CIA advisor to the South Korean CIA, through 1969, when he provided logistical support in Vietnam for the CIA’s Phoenix Program. His job was the indoctrination of assassination and terrorist cadres. After seven years in Asia, he was brought home in 1970 and assigned to run the Black Cultural Association at Vacaville Prison, where he bacame the control officer for DeFreeze, who had worked as a police informer from 1967 to 1969 for the Public Disorder Intelligence Unit of the Los Angeles Police Department.

  If DeFreeze, who conveniently escaped from prison, was actually a double agent, then the SLA was a Frankenstein monster, turning against its creator by becoming in reality what had been orchestrated only as a media image. When he threatened his keepers, he signed the death warrant of the SLA. They were burned alive in a Los Angeles safe-house during a shootout with police. When DeFreeze’s charred remains were sent to his family in Cleveland, they couldn’t help but notice that he had been decapitated.

  Consider the revelations of Wayne Lewis. He claimed to have been an undercover agent for the FBI, a fact verified by FBI director Clarence Kelley. Surfacing at a press conference in Los Angeles, Lewis spewed forth a conveyor belt of conspiratorial charges: DeFreeze was an FBI informer; he was killed not by the SWAT team but by an FBI agent because he had been “uncontrollable”; the FBI then wanted Lewis to infiltrate the SLA; the FBI had undercover agents in other underground guerrilla groups; the FBI knew where Patty Hearst was but let her remain free so it could build up its files of potential subversives.

  At one point, the FBI declared itself to have made 27,000 checks into the whereabouts of Patty Hearst. It was simultaneously proclaimed by the FDA that there were 25,000 brands of laxative on the market. That meant one gastrointestinal catharsis for each FBI investigation, with a couple of thousand loose shits remaining for the ghost of J. Edgar Hoover to smear across “No Left Turn” signs. Patty Hearst had become a vehicle for repressive action on the right and wishful thinking on the left.

  The prosecutor asked her, “Were you acting the part of a bank robber?”

  “I was doing exactly what I had to do,” she replied. “I just wanted to get out of that bank. I was just supposed to be in there to get my picture taken, mostly.”

  Ulysses Hall testified that after the robbery, he managed to speak on the phone with his former prison mate, DeFreeze, who told him that the SLA didn’t trust Patty’s decision to join them. Conversely, she didn’t trust their offer of a “choice,” since they realized she’d be able to identify them if she went free—and so they made her prove herself by “fronting her off ” at the bank with DeFreeze’s gun pointed at her head.

  In 1969, Charles Bates was Special Agent at the Chicago office of the FBI when police killed Black Panthers Fred Hampton and Mark Clark while they were sleeping. Ex-FBI informer Maria Fischer told the Chicago Daily News that then-chief of the FBI’s Chicago office Marlon Johnson personally asked her to slip a drug to Hampton; she had infiltrated the Panther Party at the FBI’s request a month before. The drug was a tasteless, colorless liquid that would put him to sleep. She refused. Hampton was killed a week later. An autopsy indicated “a near fatal dose” of secobarbital in his system.

  In 1971, Bates was transferred to Washington, D.C. According to Watergate burglar James McCord’s book, A Piece of Tape, on June 21, 1972, White House attorney John Dean checked with acting FBI director L. Patrick Gray as to who was in charge of handling the Watergate investigation. The answer: Charles Bates—the same FBI official who in 1974 would be in charge of handling the SLA investigation and the search for Patty Hearst. When she was arrested, Bates became instantly ubiquitous on radio and TV, boasting of her capture.

  In the middle of Patty’s trial—on a Saturday afternoon, when reporters and technicians were hoping to be off duty—Bates called a press conference. At 5 o’clock that morning, they had raided the New Dawn collective, the aboveground support group of the Berkeley underground Emiliano Zapata Unit. Was there a search warrant? No, but the FBI had a “consent to search” signed by the owner of the house, who later admitted to being a paid FBI informant. Accompanying a press release about the evidence seized at the raid were photographs still wet with developing fluid. Bates posed with the photos.

  Six weeks later, I received a letter by registered mail on Department of Justice stationery, signed by Charles Bates, advising me that I was on an Emiliano Zapata Unit “hit list” seized during a search. The information “is furnished for your personal use and it is requested it be kept confidential. At your discretion, you may desire to contact the local police department responsible for the area of your residence.”

  But I was more logically a target of the government than of the Emiliano Zapata Unit—unless, of course, they were the same. Was the right wing of the FBI warning me about the left wing of the FBI? Did the handwriting on the wall read Cointelpro Lives? Questions about the authenticity of the Zapata Unit had been raised by its first public statement, which included an unprecedented threat of violence against the left. A communique from the central command of the bomb-leaving New World Liberation Front charged that “the pigs led and organized” the Zapata Unit. “We were reasonably sure that it was a set-up from the beginning, and we never sent one communique to New Dawn because of our suspicions.”

  Jacques Rogiers, aboveground courier for the NWLF, told me that the reason I was on their hit list was because I reported that Donald DeFreeze had been a police informer.

  “But that was true,” I said. “It’s a matter of record. Doesn’t that make any difference?”

  “If the NWLF asked me to kill you,” Rogiers replied, “I would.”

  “Jacques,” I said, “I think this puts a slight damper on our relationship.”

  And I found another place to live.

  CHILLING EFFECTS

  “The forces of chastity are amassing once again,” says sex researcher Alfred Kinsey in the film biography, Kinsey.

  As if to prove that statement still applies, a couple of days before the movie opened, conservative groups announced plans to protest the glorification of a man they blame for the sexual revolution and, consequently, AIDS. The director of Concerned Women for America’s Culture and Family Institute even compared Kinsey to Nazi madman Dr. Josef Mengele.

  Which is all fine with me. That’s the risk of free speech. Let them picket theaters and hand out leaflets until pigs fly, the cows come home and Hell freezes over, as long as the government isn’t involved. Or, for that matter, the fear of government interference.

  How chilling the effect must be when the latest fine by the FCC against a TV network—a record $1.2 million against Fox for its “sexually suggestive” Married By America—resulted from letters of complaint by only three individuals.

  Jack Thompson, an attorney in Coral Gables with a reputation as an obsessive crusader against indecency, has filed a dozen complaints with the FCC about the Howard Stern Show, most recently concerning “The Howard Stern Amputee Beauty Contest.” (I’d give my right arm to see that.) Thompson says that “this was so far over the line that the content constitutes not just ‘indecency’ but also ‘profanity’ as that legal term of art is used in such regulatory matters.”

  And now lawyer Thompson is indulging in quasi-extortion. In a letter to Sumner Redstone, chairman of Viacom, he states that he intends “to bring a civil action arising from the negligent supervision of the Viacom board in its failure to assure that the Howard Stern Show not libel people, not incite death threats against people and, most importantly, not air indecent material.” But then comes his demand:

  “I have only one requirement, and it must be done quickly. Fire Howard Stern. Terminate him now, and I go away. You know you can terminate him right now for his ongoing promotion, on the air, of his upcoming Sirius program. What he did in th
at regard yesterday on your air is beyond belief. You can dump him right now for that alone. Everyone knows he’s been warned not to do that. Pull the trigger. Fire him. That gives you a 2-for-1 deal. You get rid of Stern and you get rid of Jack Thompson. I’ll be much more of a pain than Howard Stern ever was. It’s my job.”

  Meanwhile, Daily Variety reported, “Here are some late election returns: Local stations are running scared on program content. . . . The scheduled preemptions [of Saving Private Ryan] come even though most, if not all, of the stations now balking at running Ryan have aired it in the past. Pic, which contains more than three dozen utterances of the word ‘fuck,’ must air in its unedited form, as per ABC’s license agreement with DreamWorks.”

  In 2002, responding to a complaint from censorship advocate Donald Wildmon, the FCC ruled that Saving Private Ryan was not indecent. But that was before religious fanatics committed the worst of sins—pride—false pride in thinking that they’ve taken over the country.

  Heathens of the world, unite! You have nothing to lose but your faith! Oops, never mind. . . .

  SAVE THE TOMATO CHILDREN

  Say what you will about Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, you have to give him credit for signing a bill to forbid necrophilia. Under the new law, sex with a corpse is a felony punishable by up to eight years in prison. Claiming that the act was consensual will not be considered as a legal defense. Necrophiliacs have been getting away with it all this time, but district attorneys will no longer be stymied by the lack of an official ban.

  According to Tyler Ochoa, a professor at Santa Clara University of Law who has studied California cases involving allegations of necrophilia, “Prosecutors didn’t have anything to charge these people with other than breaking and entering. But if they worked in a mortuary in the first place, prosecutors couldn’t even charge them with that.”