30
PAUL JACOBS
all of us to "Think White! Get White! Stay White!" as they plug the
chemicals which will make our clothes whiter and therefore better.
Years ago, in a flight of fantasy, I conjured up the notion of getting
rich by glamorizing the rectal goods industry. I wanted to do for rectal
ailments what the Modess company had done for sanitary napkins so
that the millions of people now suffering from hemorrhoids would no
longer need to slink into drugstores and whisper, out of the corner of
their mouths, that they wanted to buy some product called "Prepara–
tion H." My product was going to be called "Gallant" and for the truck
driver market, a sizable one in this area, I was going to sell the same
ointment under the name "Thug."
But today, reality is wilder than my fantasy. A product is being
manufactured called "Cornhusker, the hand lotion for men whose hands
are as rough as the work they do." "Cornhusker," I'm assured, "isn't a
sissy smelling lotion" but one for "real men."
Yes, America has an extraordinary capacity to absorb, vulgarize
and corrupt everything, including its political and psychic opposition.
The newscast denouncing the "professional rebel," Mario Savio, is spon–
sored by one auto company advertising its latest model, "The Rebel," or
another company, featuring a pretty girl shouting, "Join The Dodge
Rebellion !"
And "Take A Trip! Buy a Psychedelic Dress! " proclaims the depart–
ment store just as no deb party today can be counted a success without
a quota of leatherjacket hippies brought in to entertain the guests with
their queer antics. Indeed, no hippy affair is a success today without its
quota of straights, standing on the fringes and imitating genteelly what
is done in the center of the stage. So, the Frug moves up to the top from
the bottom and then seeps down through the middle, and the whole
country is caught up in the new mode within days. Tim Leary is a success
everywhere, a socko in the Village and in Brookings, South Dakota, too.
Thus, New York tries to follow San Francisco where men queue
up to get their shoes shined by girls with bare breasts and in a nightclub
women queue up to bare their breasts in the nightly "Amateur
Topless Contest." And when in San Francisco, the Mayor tried to
crack down on the topless craze, it was the businessmen of the city
who put the pressure on him to let the clubs alone ; for the good
people, the Rotarians, Lions and conventions of doctors, real-estate sales–
men and bankers, were flocking to the city from all over America to have
weak drinks served them by girls with tiny pasties on their nipples.
The madness of the country is reflected, too, in its President, who
exhorts the soldiers in Vietnam to bring home the coonskin to put on the
country's wall while piously speaking of peace. Violence in our cities
