“Baby, you been took—your idealism slobbered all over your common sense, and you didn’t even notice. No wonder you are anti-dope—people who get as high on hope as you do don’t need grass.”
I got that last week in a letter from Pauline Burton in Long Beach.
“Where do you suppose all the crud from inside those dirty engines goes during the six-tankful treatment with F-310? Into the air, you idiot. I hope you haven’t as many readers with as little sense about this as you.”
I got that one—sincerely—from Richard K. Koch in Beverly Hills.
Kitty Vallacher from the Freep called me the day after the column two weeks ago, the column I wrote on Standard’s Chevron F-310 gasoline, and she chewed my ear about how I’d been duped. A man from the People’s Lobby called me the day after and sent me reeling with facts, statistics, data, condemnations, and rhetoric. Most of it sounded valid. He said he’d prepare some information to refute the F-310 claims.
A friend told me, “Sure, you did it because you thought you were right, but you were had, friend. You’re a good guy, but even good guys can be gullible sometimes.”
I spoke at UC Irvine and an audience of three hundred students pinned me to a blackboard with what a tout I’d become for Standard, one of the biggest polluters in Southern California.
Word was passed that the Federal consumer fraud division, the FTC, and the FCC had been turned loose on Standard for their tv commercials and their claims.
Mark Brenizer in Tarzana sent me The Writer’s Cramp, a newsletter out of Woodland Hills devoted to straightening out our ecology, and its front-page lead story was headlined unethical and misleading advertising by standard oil. how good is f-310?
It has been a hellish two weeks for me, readers.
I don’t mind Mr. Koch’s gratuitous rudeness. That’s just his way, I suppose. He has to live with it, not me. I don’t even mind the half-dozen unsigned letters I received that insulted me, my beliefs, my genealogy, and my sexual practices. Anyone without the guts to sign his hate mail obviously hasn’t the guts to go find out the truth anyway. What I do mind are the letters from people like Michael Boyles and Ms. P.D.W. (who requested I not use her name if I referred to her letter) who obviously like me, like what I write, and think I’m an honest man. They are fans of this column, and they were disappointed in my “having been taken in.”
It is very possible I made a stupid mistake. It is also possible I recommended something out of misguided faith and a desire to do “a good thing” that is detrimental to the very cause I was espousing.
I don’t know that yet.
I do know, however, that I put my word behind something that seemed to be what it said it was, and I’ve gotten more feedback and static on it than anything I’ve ever written in these pages. I don’t know that I’m wrong…yet. But I’m damn well going to find out. And when I do, I’ll let you know.
I urge those of you who have facts, who know, for sure, to write me, care of the Free Press. Though I try to keep this column tied in with television (however flimsily at times), having put myself on the line on this one, I guess I’ll have to follow it through. At this point I need to know, and I need those of you who can help me (and by extension other readers of this column) to send me the various information that can answer the question once and for all. Let’s not fuck around with whether or not Chevron used guy wires to hold up that goddamned balloon in their commercials so it could be seen better, or whether they phonied up the plastic bag with the car inside it. Let’s deal strictly with the bottom line on this caper: does F-310 help stop pollution or does it do other things that make it a pollutant, or is it a straight fraud?
Because if it does any good at all, without side effects that are worse than what it’s supposed to be cleaning up, then what I said was ethically and morally correct. If it does nothing, or if it increases, say, the nitrogen oxides in the air, then I was stupid and incorrect and I deserve to get my face slapped for commending it to you from a pinnacle of self-righteousness.
This column isn’t a forum for debate on the merits of consumer items, but in this case I’ve maybe stuck my foot in it, so as the next weeks pass I’ll be coming back to this, and passing along everything I learn. I ask your patience and indulgence and attention till we know.
Additionally, I would appreciate your writing to Mr. William J. Murphy (Public Relations Counsel, Standard Oil Co. of California, 605 West Olympic Blvd., Los Angeles) and suggesting to him, politely if you can manage it, Mr. Koch, that he spend a little time providing this columnist with irrefutable proof that what I was doing for Chevron was helping people breathe cleaner air, and not touting just another boondoggle.
Let us reason together, as another potential jerk once said.
Sunday night I watched The Ed Sullivan Show for the first time in maybe five years. I find it the kind of program totally beneath my notice, like the Jackie Gleason hours (which, happily, will no longer consume an hour of Saturday primetime, Mr. Gleason having been put out to pasture, though I find it amusing that, the moment his cancellation was announced, he was phoned up by Nixon, who wanted him to work for the Administration in some nitwit capacity or other). But I watched Sunday because they were doing an hour tribute to The Beatles.
I should have known better.
This seems to be my stage of development wherein I’m easily flummoxed. But then, I believe in the Easter bunny, so what the hell better can you expect?
It was an hour of bastardization of fine music that I suppose delighted the folks in Cedar Rapids and Buffalo. It made me wanna fwow up.
They took the completely original and madly compelling music of four damn-near-nonpareils and turned it into second-rate Muzak. They didn’t make love or show affection or decently fuck, they had sexless sex. Faceless fornication. A thoroughly loveless act, because it was performed without soul or gut or understanding.
One can’t blame Sullivan. He’s an old man who can barely remember his lines, who calls Dionne Warwick Diane Warwick because he just doesn’t know; he goes through his paces like a solemn fire horse; I saw him once out near Palm Desert, in killing heat, filming a segment for the show, with his shirt off, and he’s more scar tissue than healthy flesh. It’s a wonder to me the old guy can still walk, much less do a turn each Sunday. So don’t blame him.
In fact, don’t blame anyone. But consider this:
Even the music can be corrupted. They can take even something as pure as the sounds and turn them into shit for the monkeymass. And if they can do that, how much easier it must be to take political theory, revolutionary activity, dissent, all of the paraphernalia of the barricades and corrupt them, turn them against their own people, use them to keep us in line.
Watching that Sullivan potpourri—with Eydie Gormé and Steve Lawrence generically, systematically, and artistically incapable of even approximating what The Beatles had put down, thereby causing wonder what all the Beatle shouting was about, because there sure as hell wasn’t anything happening there—I was reminded of the Stones concert at Altamont, in a strange way. Like this:
There is an important new magazine just published, which I recommend to you without reservation (unless my F-310 position has put me in question). It is called Scanlan’s Monthly and the dude behind it is Warren Hinckle iii, formerly of Ramparts. It is the complete muckraking journal, and it is so filled with good stuff you’ll gladly tote up the buck to buy it. Anyhow, in the first issue, there is a mightily heavy piece on Altamont and the concert, by Sol Stern. In talking about the horrors that went down at that drag-strip purgatory, he spoke of the Hell’s Angels and the murder of Meredith Hunter and the music in these terms:
“We hated them, hated them and envied them all at the same time. For all of their brutality and ugliness they had a definition of themselves and their purpose that showed us up. We had all talked about a counter-community for years—and now, with that community massed in one place, we couldn’t relate to anything. In their primitive way, and without talking much about it, the Angels were so together that less than 100 of them were able to take over and intimidate a crowd of close to a half-million people. We had talked about solidarity, but they, not us, were willing to go down for each other in a showdown. We had the music but they had a purpose, and everyone in that atomized, alienated mass in front of the stage knew it, and that was their incredible power over us.”
The italics in that last sentence are mine. One more quote, from Frank Bardacke, one of the Oakland Seven and a leader of the People’s Park Struggle, then I’ll make my point. “I think the killing of Meredith Hunter was to our community what the Kitty Genovese murder was to the straight community.
“It showed that if you’re going to have a new nation in which you make up new rules, then you have to have more than shared needs. You need to have shared values. Out there [at Altamont] we didn’t have those shared moral values and so we didn’t have the courage to stop the violence that led to the murder of a black man.”
Shared needs. The music. A weapon used against us.
Why didn’t the Woodstock Nation of half a million people rise up against the Visigoths in their midst and stop the Angels? Why did everyone stay on, even after the beating and the stomping grew omnipresent? Answer: to hear the Stones. To get their needs fulfilled by the music.
Easy enough, I guess, to burn down a Bank of America (and while I dig it, I can’t really say it was the smartest attack maneuver of the dissent generation), but not so easy in company with multitudes of others to put the arm on just one hundred thugs. What does that say about us?
What does it say about the music being used to lull so many of us, to keep us sated but ineffectual?
I’ve heard at least half a dozen big rock stars in the past year say they weren’t interested in politics, just in the music; that the music would pull us all together. That, obviously now, is bullshit. The music keeps the kids in a state of happy…but sure as hell isn’t getting the message of solidarity across. It’s one thing to hear some dude singing about loving one another, and really loving a strange black man enough. to risk your ass by grabbing the pool cue being used to stave in his head.
No, the music isn’t enough. It is a tool that can be used to draw us into one nation, but—as the Sullivan show demonstrates—it is a double-edged sword that can be turned to the purpose of anyone smart enough to alter it.
Altamont, the Angels, Meredith Hunter, the Bank of America, the Chicago 7 convictions, repression, solidarity, and Ed Sullivan. Does anyone else out there see the horrifying connections? Or are we so used to holding those little transistor radios up to our ears as we walk the Strip that the noise level has grown too high for us to detect the wail of ourselves, dying along with our dying culture?