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LESLIE A. FIEDLER
line into violence, so do the new passive protestors-leaving us to
confront (or resign to the courts) such homey female questions as:
Did Mario Savio really bite that cop
in
the leg as he sagged limply
toward the ground?
The second social movement is the drug cult, more widespread
among youth, from its squarest limits to its most beat, than anyone
seems prepared to admit in public; and at its beat limit at least
inextricably involved with the civil rights movement, as the recent
arrests of Peter DeLissovoy and Susan Ryerson revealed even to the
ordinary newspaper reader. "Police said that most of the recipients
[of marijuana] were college students," the
V.P.
story runs. "They
quoted Miss Ryerson and DeLissovoy
as
saying that many of the
letter packets were sent to civil rights workers." Only fiction and
verse, however, has dealt with the conjunction of homosexuality,
drugs and civil rights, eschewing the general piety of the press which
has been unwilling to compromise "good works" on behalf of the
Negro by associating
it
with the deep radicalism of a way of life
based on the ritual consumption of "pot."
The widespread use of such hallucinogens
as
peyote, marijuana,
the "mexican mushroom," LSD, etc., as well as pep pills, goof balls,
airplane glue, certain kinds of cough syrups and even, though in
many fewer cases, heroin, is not merely a matter of a changing taste
in stimulants but of the programmatic espousal of an anti-puritanical
mode of existence-hedonistic and detached-one more strategy in
the war on time and work. But it
is
also (to pursue my analogy once
more) an attempt to arrogate to the male certain traditional privileges
of the female. What could be more womanly,
as
Elemire Zolla was
already pointing out some years ago, than permitting the penetration
of the body by a foreign object which not only stirs delight but even
(possibly) creates new life?
In any case, with drugs we have come to the crux of the futurist
revolt, the hinge of everything else, as the young tell us over and over
in their writing. When the movement was first finding a voice, Allen
Ginsberg set this aspect of it in proper context in an immensely
comic, utterly serious poem called "America," in which "pot" is
associated with earlier forms of rebellion, a commitment to catatonia,
and a rejection of conventional male potency:
