PARTISAN REVIEW
305
tion between the masses and the police. Cause I still think that one
of the necessary things is to bring the police over to our side, and
I think the whole pig
mantra
is an inefficient way of transforming
the consciousness of the police. The pig
mantra
creates what it calls
for or fortifies what it calls for. So it calls for that violence; it calls
for that piggishness, just like the freak
mantra,
which is overused,
too, calls for freakishness from citizens just trying to get their
rights, and government murder. So the whole pig-freak contest should
be abandoned, and get the grandmas and the babies out. I don't
know, now, because everybody is so hysterical and frightened, and
world doom is so apparent, whether people can contain themselves
and get themselves together steadily and resolutely and calmly enough
for community action on a large scale like that, that would be im–
pervious to government subversion and attack. The problem is that
a large-scale public assembly can always be broken up by somebody
tossing bottles and stones to get the police to toss tear gas, to make
the place where everybody is assembled relatively uninhabitable. And
that may be a consequence of simple overpopulation.
(Laughs)
It
may be that everything is so gigantic-sized now that it really is like
New York City's garbage system - out of control- partly as a re–
sult of mechanical size, partly as a result of greed capitalism, also
partly as a result of mechanical size. It's like a dinosaur where the
brain doesn't get the message back to the tail fast enough, and you
have to develop an independent brain in the tail- and the head
brain and the tail brain don't cooperate when the glaciers come
down, so that the dinosaur founders in some frozen ... swamp?
INT: Have you done very much work with the Gay Activist movement
that's come up recently?
GINSBERG: I did a little. I went around the day after I heard about
the Stonewall battle. I went down the next night and spent the
evening in the Stonewall, drinking and dancing. I went to the first
college Gay Liberation dance in Normal, Illinois.
INT: Normal?
GINSBERG: Yes, there really is a place called Normal, Illinois. It's the
state university - it's big - twenty thousand people there. Presum–
ably, with twenty or thirty thousand people there should have been two
or three thousand gay, but only like two hundred showed up. But
what was interesting - the door was manned by the SDS, the Wom–
en's Lib came with their babies and boy friends, the Black Liberation
Front provided the music and the ritual dancing, so it was like a big
coalition.
INT: That hasn't happened so much in New York.
