Up Against the Wall Motherf**er Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  PREFACE

  EXILES

  SECRETS AND CATASTROPHES

  THE LOWER EAST SIDE

  TAKING THE PLUNGE

  SACRILEGE

  BEN MOREA AND THE FOUNDING OF THE MOTHERFUCKERS

  ARMED LOVE

  BREAKING THE MORAL CALLUS

  THE LIBERATION OF FANTASY

  CHICAGO AND THE FILLMORE EAST

  ENDGAME

  NEW MEXICO

  AFTER THE REVOLUTION THAT DIDN’T HAPPEN, LIFE GOES ON

  TODD GITLIN AND I—A SIXTIES FLASHBACK

  MY SIXTIES PROBLEM

  THE PURSUIT OF TRUTH AS AN UNVEILING

  THE PROMISE OF HAPPINESS

  A HIDEOUS RATIONALITY

  TRUTH WITH A CAPITAL T

  THE COLOR OF REASON

  AND THE MINOTAUR MOOED

  NOTES

  Copyright Page

  PREFACE

  In 1967, I became a founding member of an anarchist street gang called Up Against the Wall Motherfuckers, an unexpected career move for a nice Jewish boy with an MA in history from Yale.

  We called ourselves the Motherfuckers. We saw ourselves as urban guerrillas swimming in the countercultural sea of freaks and dropouts (we didn’t like the media term “hippies”) who had swarmed to the cheap-rent tenements of the Lower East Side of New York. Those young dropouts were our base, and we attempted to organize them for total revolution through rallies, free feasts, raucous community meetings, and a steady stream of mimeographed flyers. Against the vapid spaciness of “flower power” we proclaimed the need for “Armed Love.” Our rhetoric was inflammatory and often violent.

  We gave speeches and wrote manifestos, but above all we believed in propaganda of the deed. We engaged in constant confrontations with the police. We would start riots, get arrested, start another one to protest our arrests, and get arrested again. After one of my arrests I appeared before a judge who called me “a cross between Rap Brown and Hitler.” I greeted his summation of my character with a mixture of pride and shame. I felt like a kid whose scary Halloween costume has been more successful than he intended.

  As a child I’d imagined I was destined to become a professor and write books. My parents were German Jewish refugees from the Nazis. My father was Franz Neumann, the author of Behemoth, a seminal study of fascist Germany. His best friend was Herbert Marcuse. Herbert’s most famous books, Eros and Civilization and One-Dimensional Man, are philosophical critiques of civilization and its discontents that rejected the rigid analytic framework of dogmatic Marxism. His writing and speeches provided theoretical legitimization to the unorthodox countercultural movements of the Sixties and made him something of a father figure to a generation that generally distrusted anyone over thirty.

  Herbert moved into our house after his wife Sophie died of cancer in 1951. While living with us he continued a secret affair with my mother that had begun sometime earlier. Inge, my mother, was a brilliant woman, who sacrificed her own ambitions in order to do what was expected at the time of a mother and faculty wife. Her marriage to Franz was not a happy one. I suspect that in her unhappiness, she vented her frustration on me. We fought endlessly.

  I grew up in a Manichean world. Fascism was the expression of the irrational; reason was its opposite. The distinction was clear and unambiguous. By the time I reached junior high school I had already reached the conclusion that our home was the clean well-lighted citadel of reason and I was an irrational foul-smelling insect befouling it. I became obsessive and introverted.

  In becoming a Motherfucker I renounced my commitment to ordered discourse, the traffic in abstractions, respect for explanations, the demand for coherence, and the subordination of impulse and emotion—all of which I thought of as characteristic of a life committed to reason. I grew fierce in my scorn for theory. I felt most alive when running in the streets with no thoughts in my head but where the cops were and how to avoid them. But my apostasy was never complete. As the Mafia don longs for respectability, as the dealer in prostitutes and drugs can be the staunchest proponent of family values, so I, the rebellious child of reason, longed for the respectable cloak of rationality and pledged allegiance to reason even as I plunged headlong into the irrational.

  I’m no longer a Motherfucker and childhood is a distant memory, but I still think of reason somewhat vaguely as a universally applicable method for determining truth and validating judgments. I have never been really sure what it is, but I appeal to it anyway.

  Reason or revelation. How else do we decide what’s right and wrong? Some of us appeal to the one, some of us to the other. But both have their problems. God has too many spokespeople, each certain he’s the chosen mouthpiece, none making a credible argument in the age of cell phones, black holes, concentration camps, weapons of mass destruction, mad cow disease, and reality television. Reason has got some of the same problems God has: too many people appealing to it for too many different purposes. Far too often the powers that be who ask us to be reasonable and not rock the boat act as if they were stark raving mad, hell bent on incinerating their enemies, polluting nature, promoting inequality, and grabbing as much loot for themselves as possible. What they call progress is destruction. What they call democracy is subjugation. The tools for the alleviation of want are turned into the means for its perpetuation.

  “Reason has always existed, but not always in a rational form,” wrote a twenty-year-old Karl Marx.1 I would like to think that the Motherfuckers represented reason “but not in a rational form.” Although I have written the confession of a Motherfucker, I am the least motherfuckery of Motherfuckers. I have been quite tamed by time, and to tell the truth I was probably not much of a motherfucker even back then, though I put on a pretty good show. What I have to confess are mainly bad thoughts and crimes of the imagination.

  Long gone are the Sixties, in whose rollicking tumult I found for a while meaning and purpose. We were children then and now we are grown, though there are those of us who remain, even today, somewhat puzzled by the process. Some of us have not wanted to look back, and some of us have looked back compulsively. I have been more in the former camp than the latter. But forgetting is neither an option nor desirable. In 1973, Elinor Langer wrote a reflection on her experiences in the Sixties called Notes for Next Time. It’s a good title, clearly implying the intent to sight a firm pragmatic course towards the future based on a charting of past coordinates. But it’s now been over thirty years since she wrote her notes and “next time” hasn’t happened. Rather than experiencing another out-pouring of revolutionary enthusiasm, we are locked in a dogged fight against reaction. Things are going from bad to worse. The world is not a better place for all our efforts.

  What went wrong? Why now this regression? Why do the most atavistic forms of consciousness flourish in the midst of modernity? Why does reason appear powerless in the face of unreason? What should we have done differently? What is to be done now? In the Thirties, my parents fled the Nazis and spent much of their subsequent lives thinking about these questions. In the Sixties I fled my parents, plunged into Motherfuckering, and emerged from the aborted revolution of the Sixties with the same questions still unanswered. They remain unanswered today. And they remain just as urgent.

  Memory is a leaky vessel. Cargo falls overboard, and sinks into the sea of forgetfulness. What remains is contaminated. The bilge water of false memories seeps through the packaging. Rats gnaw through the ropes that bind together moments of time. Ordered sequences of events, neatly packaged at the onset of the journey, break open and scatter helter-skelter about the hold of the ship. Disparate moments of our public and private lives are jumbled
together. The original bill of lading is lost. Salvage is incomplete at best.

  My salvage effort has been aided by conversations with surviving Motherfuckers. I am grateful to them for taking the time to talk to me, and would acknowledge them by name, but some do and some do not want to be associated with our nefarious past. They have gone on to make lives for themselves as lawyers, shamans, poets, midwives, farmers, jewelers, wilderness guides and environmental activists. I thank them all anonymously. Although we were a small group, we did not all share the same experience. I’ve pieced together our story as best I can. Where our memories differ, I’ve said so.

  Thanks also to all who participated in and organized the 2008 gathering to commemorate the fortieth anniversary of the takeover of Columbia University. Out of our extended hash and rehash of the events of 1968 emerged a picture, which, though not entirely coherent or without contradiction, is infinitely better than any we could have painted on our own with the frayed brush of our failing memory.

  There have been many who have helped and encouraged me along the way. Nore Lee first encouraged me to take on the arduous task of seeking a publisher. Kosta Bagakis and Barbara Epstein were constantly encouraging, as have been Elinor Langer, John McMillian, and Clayton Patterson. I thank my daughters, Rachel and Emma, for inspiring me with hope and continuing to love me despite my propensity to embarrass them with TMI [too much information]. Thanks also to Yeshi Neumann and Alan Steinbach.

  Finally I thank my wife, Arisika Razak. Some of what I have written she finds deeply disturbing. When she first read the manuscript of his book she considered divorcing me because of my insistence on sharing the perverse sexual fantasies that accompanied me through my days of rage as a Motherfucker. She asked me, “Why would a woman who has been raped or molested want to read that stuff? What are you trying to prove?” She is convinced that no moat is wide enough to prevent the fantasy of sexual violence from fulfilling itself on the bodies of women. I answered that something of the energy that went into my fantasies also went into my politics. That’s important to know and say. She’s not persuaded. Nor can I persuade her to value the proclamations of human rights by white men, who treated her ancestors as less than human. “Do you think the slaves were waiting for Jefferson to explain to them the value of freedom?” she asks. Arisika has continued to love me through our arguments. She’s been patient as I slowly awaken to the realization that unconsciously I had been imagining a reader for my writing who was white and male. She’s given me time to make the required adjustments. Her love has been a precious gift for which I am enormously grateful.

  EXILES

  I was born in New York in 1939. Inge and Franz named me Thomas after Thomas Mann and Thomas Jefferson, a twentieth century German novelist and an eighteenth century American slaveholder who, despite the contradictions of their lives, articulated Enlightenment values that were antithetical to fascism. In 1969 when I was living in New Mexico with the remnants of the Motherfuckers, I changed my name to “Osha,” after an inconspicuous herb that grows in the rocky cut backs of the roads that run through the Sangre de Christo Mountains. It has a long pungent taproot and is sacred to the Pueblo and Apache Indians of the area. They smoke it and wear it about their necks to ward off rattlesnakes. Boiled, it makes a tea that clears the mind and sinuses and helps induce abortions.

  My parents emigrated to the United States three years before my birth. They were part of a Great Migration of intellectuals and artists who fled Germany with the rise of fascism. Settling into their new homeland with various degrees of ease and enthusiasm, they formed loose communities of exiles centered in New York and Los Angeles. They included the writers Thomas Mann and Bertolt Brecht; musicians Kurt Weill and Arnold Schoenberg; scientists Albert Einstein and Edward Teller; psychoanalysts Erik Erikson, Bruno Bettelheim, and Wilhelm Reich; and social theorists such as my fathers, and their colleagues from the Frankfurt Institute for Social Research, Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer. Today the Institute would probably be called a “think tank.” The intellectuals connected with it were, by and large, independent of party affiliation. Pessimistic about the ability of the left to prevent the rise of fascism in the waning days of the Weimar Republic, they strove to rethink Marxism and develop a critical theory that would survive the collapse of Europe into barbarism. They read Freud and reread Hegel. They wrote about music and literature as well as economics, sociology, and philosophy.

  A year after I was born the Neumanns and the Marcuses moved to Washington, where Franz and Herbert worked for the Office of Strategic Services, the predecessor of the CIA, doing intelligence on Germany. After the war, Franz got a job as a professor of political science at Columbia University and Herbert went to work at the Russian Research Center. Franz and Inge bought a comfortable two-story house on Arlington Avenue in Riverdale, the upscale part of the Bronx that borders the Hudson River. On the opposite side of the street was the Nip Nichen Tennis club, which was rumored to exclude Jews and Blacks.

  I have a childhood memory of sitting, curled up on a comfortable sofa in the corner of the living room of my parents’ home on Arlington Avenue. Through the door to the dining room, I can see my father and his friends, Herbert among them, sitting at the dinner table. They are engaged in an intense discussion about the state of the world. Silverware clatters on the china. Odors of the roast my mother prepared for dinner drift over to my nest of pillows, accompanied by the sound of the grownups’ conversation. They argue in the heavily accented English of newly exiled German Jews. Herbert lights his pipe. A dispute breaks out over the meaning of a word or the date of some historical event. Herbert gets up, goes to the bookcase and pulls out a volume of the 13th edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica , or perhaps William Langer’s one volume Encyclopedia of World History. He returns to the dinner table loudly proclaiming he will prove his point. The conversation continues. This person is a “Dumkopf (literally a dumbhead); that one is an “Arschloch” (an asshole). Politicians are invariably “fascist beasts.” Herbert quotes Shakespeare, whom, he is fond of saying, is “much better in the original German.” Laughter and demands to pass the coffee and the bottle of Schnapps punctuate the argument. I curl deeper into the sofa, reassured by the sound of the grownups’ voices, that knowing is possible and therefore the world could be made safe. I had no doubt that my parents had escaped the Holocaust because they correctly analyzed the situation in which they lived, and so did not fall prey to dangerous illusions. The ability to think had saved their lives.

  At a very early age I came to the conclusion that my parents understood everything. From their dinner table conversations, I acquired my fundamental commitment to antifascism. I concluded that my birthright was an all encompassing theory, Marxism, which sought to determine, in each historical period, the forces which represent humanity’s hope for liberation and a just ordering of human affairs. Fascism was a mighty upsurge of irrationality, a release of corrupt desires from the bounds of moderation and reason, the triumph of stupidity and conformity over intelligence and independent thought. The struggle against fascism was the struggle of the oppressed against the oppressor, and of reason against irrationality. Auschwitz was the embodiment of irrationality. The embodiment of rationality was the scholarly community of exiled Marxist Jewish intellectuals who were my parents’ friends and colleagues.

  To be antifascist was to be committed to reason. Passion, chaos, muscularity were all suspect. Reason took sides in the battleground of history. It was the guiding thread linking each succeeding generation of rebels who struggled to birth a world in which the few would no longer benefit from the misery of the many. Reason had no country but the truth, no allegiance but to equality and justice. The universality of reason, its refusal of parochial boundaries, provided the surest basis for the solidarity of the many who must unite if the struggle to make a better world was to succeed.

  In my parents’ record cabinet, below the Mozart, the Schubert and the Beethoven, was a half empty shelf with a few stray re
cords of folk music—Burl Ives and John Jacob Niles, Paul Robeson of course, and a small LP with a red cover, Songs of the Spanish Civil War. Those songs, sung primarily in German and Spanish, enthralled me. I learned them by heart, bellowing out “Viva la Quince Brigada rum dada rum dada rumdadda rum,” imitating the accents of the singers as I imitated to the best of my ability Paul Robeson’s deep baritone and John Jacob Niles high counter tenor. Through those songs I caught a glimpse of a passionate and worthy time, of deeds that captured the imagination. Our side had lost, but from the trenches dug deep into Spanish soil by the singers of those songs, hope rose like a rush of startled birds into the night sky. I imagined sweaty exhausted men, resting on the hard earth beneath a night sky full of stars. Their rifles cradled in their arms, they inhaled air perfumed with the odor of wine and olives. Drifting off to sleep, they listened to the sound of a guitar and a singer softly singing:And just because he’s human

  He doesn’t want a pistol in his back.

  He wants no servants under him

  And no lord over his head

  So left one two, so left one two

  To the workers we must go

  March on march on in the United Front

  For you are a worker too.2

  In my fantasy, a bridge of theory connected the bloody battle for Spain and the academic life of my parents. Men went to fight in Spain because of a set of beliefs about the world derived from the work of thinkers, like my parents, deeply devoted to making sense of the world. With such fantasies I struggled, not entirely successfully, to reconcile reason’s strict demand to prioritize thinking over doing with the unruly energies of my corrupt, insistent body.

  I had always thought of my home as an enclave of intellect. My parents’ life was for me the model of a life of reason. That model included a clean, comfortable, well ordered home; wives who cooked well and took care of the children; and teaching positions for the men in prestigious universities.