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Rexroth’s San Francisco
January-September 1966
The Subculture Facing Armageddon
Environmental Blitzkrieg
Urban Alienation Renewal
Marijuana
Lively Arts versus TV Culture
Marxism and the Persistence of Alienation
The International Cultural Revolution
What Is Immoral?
Camouflaging the Rape of the Environment
[...] Living as I do in the Haight-Ashbury, which seems to have become the
headquarters for the New Youth, the New Left, the New Student, the New Bohemia,
the New Negro, and several other New Categories, I am constantly reminded of “what’s happening,” and though Mr. Smith may not know what it is, I think I have
a pretty fair idea.
The other evening I read with great interest a new book, All Things
Common: The Hutterian Way of Life by Victor Peters, published by the
University of Minnesota Press.
The Hutterians are a German-speaking pietist, communal and pacifist sect
whose origins date back to the very beginnings of the Reformation.
They are now mostly settled in Canada, but some of their colonies are again
in the Dakotas and Montana. They fled the United States during the persecutions
of War I.
Today they are meeting a certain amount of persecution from other Canadians,
not because of their communism or their pacifism, but because they are so much
more successful farmers than most of their neighbors.
The next day I was in a supermarket buying New Year’s dinner. Ahead of me was
a young couple, more or less typical of Haight-Ashbury. I suddenly realized that
the girl had on a characteristic Hutterian jumper or overall apron.
The only difference was the length of the skirt. Then it dawned on me that
there was no essential difference at all — the husband was not in a Beat
uniform, but “dressed plain” in work clothes, with a beard and long hair. The
girl wore no makeup and her hair was unaltered.
They were very young, yet obviously, from the pile of groceries, they had
several children. They were extraordinarily polite to others and to one another.
Their voices were low and gentle. They were discussing with great interest
serious general ideas.
It might have been a supermarket in an Alberta market town.
Think of the little girls that show up at your door on Sunday morning with a
record player and ask, “Are you ready for Armageddon? Armageddon’s coming.”
Are they wrong? Are you ready? Always before it has been necessary to have
strong supernatural sanctions to sustain a subculture which chose to cut loose
from the dominant society, to opt out of the immorality of Things As They Are.
Today thousands and thousands are doing so on a largely secular and
uninstitutionalized basis.
In the words of Dostoevsky, they are respectfully handing back their tickets.
As they strive for a new community, honest morality, sane goals in life, and
their passing fads and follies drop away, the youth who are seceding from our
crazy, lethal social order are converging with those predecessors — Mennonites,
Brethren, Amish, Hutterites, Quakers — who withdrew from the madness and horror
of the Wars of Religion and the collapse of the society of the Middle Ages.
The record of 400 years of persecution suffered by these pious, inoffensive
groups passes belief — pogroms, burnings alive, looting, rape, total
destruction of most of the communities, wanderings over the face of the earth.
I wonder if that is what the future has in store for their modern successors?
It is a needless worry. This time there won’t be a future. “Are you ready for
Armageddon?” [...]
[9 January 1966]
NOTE: Rexroth later wrote a whole book on the
history of the Hutterites and other communalist and utopian movements:
Communalism: From Its Origins to the Twentieth
Century.
[...] With ever-increasing frequency, for the past few years, in San Francisco,
in the Bay Area, in California, and all over the country, the small and
embattled forces trying to stave off the destruction of a decently habitable
environment have been faced with the technique of the massive, irreversible
accomplished fact, with blitzkrieg, schrecklichkeit and efficient and plausible
third column takeover.
Ecology, the relations of living species to one another and their
environment, is precisely the field that lends itself best to irreversible
processes — except maybe chemistry. The redwood forests of coast and sierra can
no more be restored, for instance, than can the firecrackers of Chinatown’s New
Year celebration be uncracked.
The rapidity with which we are creating an environment in which the human
species as we know it can no longer thrive is astonishing. We have passed, in
California, a critical point. The resilience of the environment is exhausted, it
can no longer recuperate from large-scale destruction in less than many
centuries.
The forces that stand to profit from destruction now know this and they have
learned to move quickly, on the largest possible scale, and if it can be
managed, with an elaborate public relations camouflage which disguises them as
“conservationists.”
Once the forest cover of the Northern California streams is destroyed, flood,
fire and erosion quickly create an irreversible situation. The top soil is out
in the Pacific Ocean or clogging the larger streams and we are not all that
technologically advanced that we can put it back.
The Walt Disney development of Mineral King — far in excess of the Forest
Service specifications — will be like a nuclear explosion in the heart of the
finest mountain wilderness in California. Disney anticipates two and a half
million visitors by 1976.
It was possible to put Nagasaki and Hiroshima back together again — give or
take a few dead humans. Once gone, the wilderness is gone forever. Once polluted
by the Highway Commission, San Francisco’s water supply, once famous for its
purity, will stay polluted.
For years now I have advocated an act of the Legislature or an initiative
measure to abolish the Highway Commission and constitute a new authority
governed by human considerations and not by parabolas, gradients and slide
rules.
Since the present fellows have become such experts at modern strategy and
tactics against a diffused body of opponents, I suggest they be retired to the
General Staff in Vietnam where their expertise should perk things up
considerably.
[24 January 1966]
[...] An ever growing sector of our society finds no meaning in life; and when
the conventional goals are made available to them, looks on them not as goals at
all, but as frustrations.
One of the main reasons for the objections to urban renewal by almost all
qualified “urbanists” is that it builds hopelessness, namelessness. High-rise
subsidized housing means ready-made moral and spiritual slums.
Nowadays with the fantastic increase in building costs, it means physical
slums as well. The reason for the struggle going on in every city of any size in
the country to preserve the older residential districts and encourage
deslummification is that these neighborhoods have still the potential, if
rehabilitated, of being natural communities.
Civic and federal money has been spent in the millions to try to achieve
community in high-rise housing projects, both rich and poor. The result has been
total failure.
The leading urbanists today have come to the conclusion that our ancestors
knew best. When urban population density exceeds three or four families to a
single lot, community begins to break down and the humane values of city life
decay.
Furthermore, the older sections of our cities were built in a time of
abundant natural resources, cheap labor, architectural exuberance, and, most
important, strong emphasis on family life.
San Francisco’s bay window flats, duplexes and single-family homes, built
around the end of the last century, are better built, of better materials, than
even the best condominiums, and in addition, they are far more functional than
the fraudulently named “functionalist” modern domestic architecture.
And, built into them is not namelessness, but family life. They do not look
like any suite in any here-today-and-gone-tomorrow motel — as do all but the
most expensive new homes today.
By building what are really big city imitations of Indian reservations we are
building social disaster. The demoralization of the American Indian by the
reservation system could be swept under the rug. There aren’t all that many
Indians and the reservations are, by definition, places nobody else wants, and a
long way away.
How many millions now live in low rent, high-rise, brand new slums, in the
heart of our cities? How many of these people are entering the third generation
on relief? The pseudo jet set in the almost identical apartments that rent for
$600 to $1200 a month or are sold as expensive condominiums are no better off.
The “anomie,” the namelessness, the lovelessness, the loneliness, the
frustration, are just the same — to an observer from another civilization, the
ways of life differ only in expense and perhaps cleanliness.
The girl Fridays who haunt the financial district cocktail bars looking for
love, and the junior executives who haunt them looking for a quick one differ
very little from the lost people in the pool halls and shoeshine parlors or
hustling the streets in the Fillmore District. They are just lonelier.
[...]
The upwardly mobile, technical, professional and employee classes are coming
to adopt precisely the same patterns of behavior as those at the very bottom of
the social ant heap.[...]
[5 June 1966]
I have been getting a lot of mail lately asking my opinion about LSD and the
current craze for pharmaceutical religion. Off and on since I have been doing
this column I have stated my position, but time passes and I have to do it
again.
First marijuana. The scientific work, both medical and sociological, as well
as criminological, on the use of the milder, New World, species or subspecies of
Cannabis Indica, or Mexicana has long been done.
There is no evidence that smoking it is physiologically any more harmful than
smoking any other weed. It is certainly much less harmful physiologically than
tobacco. It is not addictive in the strict sense. That is, it does not set up a
biochemical condition in the body that results in physical craving and sickness
if it is withdrawn, as do the opiates like morphine and heroin, or, to a lesser
degree, and in a different way, tobacco.
It does not turn people into killers or sex maniacs. On the contrary, it
lessens all physical activity, quiets aggressive behavior, and reduces sexual
drive and potency. However, it does make the subject highly suggestible and
autosuggestible, subject to strong and easy influence by others and by his own
imagination.
It also usually greatly lowers all inhibitions unless there is definite
suggestion to the contrary. It usually produces a state of mild euphoria,
elation and carefreeness.
The intoxication can be turned off by eating a big meal, taking a nap,
drinking large quantities of water, taking a hot bath, or by autosuggestion —
“effort of will.”
The principal objection to marijuana always has been that it is illegal, sold
through underworld channels, tied into organized crime, and is therefore used as
a
“high school” to introduce young customers to the idea of narcotics, and then
to turn them on to “hard” — that is, heroin.
A heroin habit, of course, is a true addiction. Withdrawal results in at
least three days of agony and sickness of a sort few people will endure unless
restrained. It is frightfully expensive so that only the very rich person can
support a well-developed habit without becoming a criminal. Also, it wears out,
the addict needs more and more as time goes on, until at last he has to submit
himself to withdrawal with all its horrors and start over afresh to obtain the
effects of the drug.
Heroin, like opium, but unlike morphine which is now a rare drug amongst
addicts, does seem to have slowly accumulating deleterious effects.
Marijuana also, in the “drug taking culture” in which it flourishes, is
usually accompanied with habitual overdosage with a variety of pep pills and
hallucinogens and hypnotics which do have bad physiological effects and which
are often addicting in the true sense.
If marijuana could be legalized and lifted out of the context of criminal
activity and made a social drug like alcohol, it probably would do a great deal
less harm both to individuals and society than either alcohol or nicotine.
However, three things stand in the way. One, both the underworld and the
agents of the law have built up a vested interest in things as they are in the
field of narcotics control. Two, billions of dollars, which course through the
life veins of both business and politics, flow like corpuscles in a plasma of
alcohol. Liquor is one of the biggest businesses. What cheap marijuana, which
you can grow in a window box, would do to this torrent of gold beggars
imagination. Government, of course, at all levels, obtains a big share of its
revenue from alcohol.
This is the strongest and conclusive argument against legalizing marijuana as
far as the state is concerned. Nobody can figure out how to tax it.
Meanwhile, people who do not use it have no conception of how widespread and
ever growing its use is. I doubt if there is a reputable criminologist who
believes it can be stopped. Given the prevailing attitudes of the majority, I
simply do not know the answer.
[28 June 1966]
To continue the discussion of San Francisco’s cultural problems I’ve been
busy with the last few Sundays in this column: The major problem facing the big
cities of the world for the rest of this century is the improvement of the
quality and meaning of life for the general population, but especially for the
previously deprived sectors at the bottom of the social ladder, or off the
ladder altogether. If we do not do this, our society will inevitably sink deeper
and deeper into demoralization and finally destroy itself.
This has absolutely nothing to do with 19th-century notions like capitalism
or socialism, it is a universal problem. Communist Moscow, Social Democratic
Stockholm, capitalist New York all have the same troubles, and Peking will, too,
as soon as the people are permitted to take a breath and relax ever so little.
Probably behind the current Chinese purges is the inability of the bureaucracy
even now to cope with the very small measure of “postmodern” society they have
already created. [...]
We need, as a first step, to open up to the widest, most varied, most
intensive use the public facilities we now have which can enable us to stimulate
and foster cultural activities at the grass roots, or rather, pavement and
street corner level.
Those parks which the commission closed to public performances are the ones
where such things are needed most. All the parks paralleling Fillmore street,
from Pacific Heights to Buena Vista Park, should be used for something every
weekend. It is self-evident that the Mission, Hunters Point and Potrero Hill
districts are precisely the areas where we should encourage neighborhood
cultural activities.
Furthermore, the stipulation that all public performances should take out
expensive insurance and hire a private policeman automatically rules out all but
commercial exploitation. The mobsters can stage publicity stunts with their
topless girls from the North Beach dives, but a local teenage rock group can’t
possibly perform.
Both as to membership personnel and function, all our city commissions
dealing with cultural questions are obsolete. The committee members are all
living in a bygone age and the only power they have is to make mischief, to halt
and hamper creative action.
We should have art exhibitions in all our schools, all the time. We should
have something going on evenings in our school auditoriums. We should have, not
one art fair or festival in a central location, but neighborhood fairs in every
district in the city. Groups not dependent on private facilities should be not
just petted, but sought out and encouraged to perform in the parks and schools.
Let the Park Commission face up honestly to the problem of the content of the
Mime Troupe’s plays and either censor or not censor. Meanwhile, what about the
Aldridge Players? The Performing Arts Workshop? Dozens of dance groups and
little theaters? Why not the Opera Ring? Dozens of amateur music groups, folk,
rock, jazz, and classical? Why not the Poetry Center every week in the little
outdoor meeting hall in the redwood grove in Golden Gate Park? Is this ever
used? Hardly anyone even knows it exists.
If Jack Shelley or the Board of Supervisors, or both, wanted to be remembered
gratefully in history, they’d appoint a working committee, not to “study”
(which is modern political jargon for “waste time and money”) but to put in
operation just such a program, right now. Eleven dedicated people could start so
much action right this summer that they’d make history.
There is another problem, maybe the biggest, in “bringing culture to the
people.” Most of the American people are not out in the parks on sunny weekends
nor are they going to walk a few blocks to a school or recreation center of an
evening. They are home watching television.
Some way or other we are going to have to overcome all the obstacles of
expense, union rules, time, sponsorship, and open up the air waves to the same
kind of popular, noncommercialized, locally originated cultural activity. And we
are going to have to figure out how we can use such programs to encourage the
spectators to turn off the television set and turn themselves on to live
participation.
The difficulties in this whole field stagger the imagination. But there are
no real difficulties in developing the use of the city’s present recreational
and educational facilities. There are only bureaucratic ones, and the always
abiding human ones of sloth, greed and vulgarity.
[3 July 1966]
Last week, giving the Bolshoi Ballet a going over I mentioned that its
tastelessness raised questions of very deep social import, the questions being
raised by radical Marxist criticism on both sides of the Iron Curtain today.
It would have looked silly to introduce such heavy considerations into the
review of the Bolshoi. I decided however to devote a column to them, because
these are the questions with which, fundamentally, I have been dealing in
several recent columns on San Francisco’s culture, on the problems of the
quality of life in modern society.
The question worrying the present generation of young Marxists, and the more
astute of the surviving older generation as well, is phrased by them: “Does
state ownership of the means of production and distribution do away with what
Marx called ‘alienation’? Does it have any necessary connection at all?” What
do they mean by this? Is it just Bolshevik jargon, ideology, designed to
obliterate real ideas? Indeed it is not. It is the sixty-four thousand ruble
question and threatens to hang all the law and the prophets of Marxism.
As a young man Marx shared with most other intellectuals of the period, most
intelligent and sensitive people of all political persuasions, the realization
that something was going very wrong with life. The Liberty, Equality, Fraternity
of the French Revolution had turned into a sterile system of contract
relationships which governed all society. Men were bound together by
abstractions.
The products of their industry were more powerful than themselves and
conspired behind their backs to defeat the human ends of production. The worker
produced an empty product, a commodity in which he had no personal interest. The
capitalist struggled with his peers for profit and reinvestment as ends in
themselves, regardless of the social effects of his activity, and with no
personal satisfaction except the satisfaction of greed.
The resulting dehumanization Marx, following Hegel, called “alienation.”
Man was divorced from his humanness. In his early philosophical manuscripts
Marx’s criticism of society is essentially moral and his remedy is abstract.
He believed that the ending of the “exploitation of man by man,” an
abstraction, would result in the liberation of Man (an abstraction) into perfect
Freedom (an abstraction) and the universalization and democratization of human
creative potentiality, a whole congeries of abstractions.
When he and Engels wrote the Communist Manifesto on the eve of the
1848 wave of revolutions in Europe he had come to identify “alienation” with
the destructive effects of the “cash nexus,” wages, prices, profits, sterile
money relationships which obliterated all humane connections between man and
man. He had spent three years studying economics, and he believed that he had
discovered contradictions within the capitalist system which would infallibly
destroy it, and that within a very short time. Then the most alienated of all
classes, the proletarians who have nothing to lose but their chains, would take
over and banish alienation forever by socializing the processes of production
and distribution.
The rest of Marx’s life was devoted to finding ever more certain guarantees
of the doom of the economic system and to ensuring the control of himself and
his followers over the most radical section of the revolutionary movement.
By the time he had come to the third volume of Capital — which he
never finished — he believed he had found a built-in, entirely automatic flaw
in the necessary production relationship of wage labor, profit and reinvestment
which would bring the whole system down. As capital investment increased and investment in labor declined in
proportion, the rate of profit fell to the vanishing point, and the system
became unworkable — whatever the degree of impoverishment of the working class,
whatever the market, or distribution, relationships.
There are two flaws in this dramatic vision. The first, historical. Things
simply did not work out that way. The second, an initial unprovable assumption.
There is no necessary reason why socialism would make the slightest
difference, why social ownership would solve the contradictions of production,
or why human self-alienation should vanish just because men were workers in
State industries or heads of State Trusts.
Next year the Russian Revolution will be 50 years old and the Peoples’
Democracies will, most of them, be 21, and the Chinese Revolution will be the
same age — or 40 years old if you count from the first bid for power.
Even “African Socialism” has now matured enough to be a recognizable social
form. Some of these systems have worked well enough, after the initial great
social costs had been paid, others are still foundering.
But the astonishing thing is that the human problem that first came to the
attention of thoughtful men 150 years ago is still the same problem and it is
still not solved on either side of the Iron Curtain.
Men still feel themselves dehumanized by the society in which they live, in
Moscow or New York. The creative potential of each man is far from being
realized.
Human relations are still abstract and destructive and masked by hypocrisy
and rhetoric. Most labor is unsatisfying to the laborer. Leisure has increased
enormously but leisure activities are, most of them, as alienating as labor. The
quality of life does not satisfy the instinctive demand. Something is still
going wrong.
Nineteenth-century thinkers believed that most, perhaps all, problems, in
mathematics, physics, astronomy, or in human affairs, were soluble. Is it true
that none of them are, in any final sense, and human problems least of all? Is
alienation as characteristic of man as trunks are of elephants? Can we improve
the quality of life only within very narrow limits?
[17 July 1966]
NOTE:
Rexroth discusses Marx in more detail in Classics
Revisited.
San Francisco may be in a permanent tizzy about its culture crisis, but we
needn’t feel lonesome. They’ve got one in Peking, too. In Russia, Komsomolska
Pravda, the organ of Official Youth, pleads for more “youth recreation
cafés” in one issue and raves about the hooliganism, blue jeans, sandals and
miniskirts that prevail in the ones that already exist, for three issues
thereafter.
A couple weeks ago they had a fit about the adolescent custom of wearing
Maltese or German Iron crosses which has managed to cross the barbed wire
no-man’s-land of the borders of the Workers’ Fatherland in a matter of just a
few months.
Leading Polish, Hungarian, Yugoslav writers visit me and plaintively ask me
for a good sound theoretical explanation of what to them is the incomprehensible
behavior of their sons.
The San Francisco establishment fails the Actors’ Workshop for the
same reason. They find it incomprehensible. They suspect it of being subversive,
maybe even anti-free enterprise, just as their like numbers in the People’s
Democracies suspect the same plays, produced in the same fashion, of being
subversive, that is, anti-Communist.
The more obstreperous exponents of disaffiliated art, like the Mime Troupe,
the Black Arts Repertory, the psychedelic hard rock boys and girls, fill the
nice people with terror. Over there on the other side of the electrified barbed
wire fence such types exist only in a private underground culture, but they do
exist.
Both establishments are perfectly right in their judgment. There is a
cultural revolution, and it is subversive. On the more superficial level, there
is a drastic, wholesale change of the forms of expression. The revolution in the
arts that took place during the past hundred years was an elitist movement.
Each new change was at first accepted only by a small circle of artists
themselves, then spread to the few patrons with whom they were personally
associated, and then to the small international community of “advanced”
intellectuals, and then, very slowly indeed, to the better educated sections of
the general public.
The revolution in the sensibility which we call modernism still has a long
way to go. I would doubt very much if 30 percent of the patrons, the more
cultivated members of the Power Structure, the highly civilized Forty Families
of San Francisco, like Stravinsky, Schoenberg, Picasso, James Joyce, T.S. Eliot,
attend concerts where their music is played, or buy their books or even
reproductions of their paintings. Yet this is a generation which came to
maturity around the First War or earlier — 50 to 60 years ago.
What is happening today is a different thing altogether. It is a mass
movement, confined largely to people under 35, recruited from all levels of
education and economic class. It is self-sustaining where it is not persecuted
out of existence, and its creative expression is diffused — democratized. It is
not a change in style of painting like cubism, or composing, like 12-tone music,
or writing, like Joyce’s stream of consciousness or Eliot’s dissociation and
recombination of the elements of a poem. It is a fundamental change in life
attitude.
All you have to do is look at them — these people live differently. Art is a
kind of life. True, the quality of junk sculpture, coffee shop poetry readings,
found music seems to the previous generation to represent a drastic
deterioration in quality, and there is certainly a sameness about it all.
But that is just the point. If you are going to democratize art, you have got
to reduce it technically to a level where anybody can do it. The point about the
street poets’ movement in San Francisco (now spreading to the high schools) is
not that it is modernistic — that is, technically unconventional — but that it
is recited in innumerable pads and coffee shops, peddled on the streets, and
mimeographed sheets of poems by poets who live around the corner are given away
free in the corner grocery. “Take a free poem. It’s better than bingo.”
To return to last Sunday’s column. This is a mass demand, devoid of ideology
or political program in the old sense, to do something about that alienation
Marx’s revolution was supposed to do away with. What Marx did not realize,
writing in 1844, was that the divorce of man from his work and of man from man
had become the outstanding issue of the European intellectuals after the
Napoleonic Wars because they were not oppressed, but comparatively free and able
to afford fundamental moral judgments of the society about them.
The great moral issues that concern youth today — civil rights, war and
peace, sexual honesty — have assumed such vast dimensions of mass action simply
because today people can afford to concern themselves with the things that are
wrong with our sick society, and most important, they can afford to act, to do
something drastic.
In an economy of abundance everybody can afford his conscience — suppose you
do get thrown out of college — so what? You won’t starve. The serf hoeing his
field, the artist painting at the whim of a despot could so little afford a
conscience that sometimes he didn’t even know he had one.
We can all be Voltaires today, or even Dantons, and cry, “Dare! Dare! And
dare again!” and nobody will cut off our heads or even make us go hungry.
All over the world younger people, and some older ones, are saying, “I am
going to simply start living a life in which man is no longer wolf to man.
Mister, or Comrade, your economic system can afford it, and you’d better fix it
so it can without a lot of fuss. I don’t like fuss. I just like to do nice
things.”
This is essentially a religious movement, a demand that we, as humans, live up
to our spiritual possibilities. Which is why, I suppose, that the people who
seem to understand it best are a few Jesuit theologians.
[24 July 1966]
The rumpus over Mike McClure’s The Beard reveals so clearly the schism
which divides our society and divides it specially along the line of age.
Young people, and a lot of old ones, think the ancient words for the
processes of elimination, procreation and recreation, what Aristotle called
“coming to be and passing away,” are clean, and n—r applied commonly to black
people, and w—p to Italians, and J—p to Japanese, and k—e to Jews are filthy
words.
They believe that a great deal of modern advertising is pornography, hard
core pornography in the strict sense of the word. They believe that the typical
behavior of Southern deputies or Chicago mobs is actionable as an obscene public
performance and an incitement to obscenity. They believe that innumerable TV
shows glorifying brutality and murder are demonstrably contributing to the
delinquency of minors.
They cannot understand the mind of authority that sends Ralph Ginsburg to
jail for five years for putting out a handsome magazine (incidentally at a price
only very affluent adults could afford) devoted to glorifying a joyous and
eminently normal sexuality, and allows the most pernicious and perverse racist
and rabble rousing reactionary publications to circulate unmolested, and even
have articles from them mailed broadcast under Congressional frank.
The rest of the world is turning away from America, not because they think it
is “capitalist” but because they feel it is immoral. The immorality they
object to is not the publication of girlie magazines or the performance of shows
of a sort that have been commonplace in Paris for a hundred or more years.
It is immoral to deliberately destroy a redwood forest to prevent it becoming
a National Park — and don’t think for a minute that people aren’t reading about
that in their papers from New Delhi to Montevideo to Hammerfest.
It is immoral to spend millions to corrupt politicians and to influence votes
to keep automobiles unsafe, to preserve the God-given right to pollute the air
and water, or the right to sell, at enormous prices, dubious drugs, still in the
experimental state, to the unsuspecting public.
It is immoral to package commodities in lots of “7/9th of a pound and .09
ounces,” or other quantities that demand that the shopping housewife be an
expert on the slide rule before she can tell what she’s buying.
It is immoral to hate people because they are younger than yourself, wear
different clothes, have beards or black skins, and like music you can’t
understand. It is, in fact, immoral to hate people who like plays like The
Beard which you can’t understand, and lock up actors who think it is
beautiful. After all — you don’t have to go nor is it being performed in the
public parks where you might see it unwittingly.
Who is obscene? McClure and his actors and audiences think the play is art.
The authorities think it is lewd. Honi soit qui mal y pense. What
constitutes authority in this case?
[30 August 1966]
The Sierra Club certainly came up with a great advertising slogan: “Shall we
also flood the Sistine Chapel so the tourists can get nearer the ceiling?” They
put the finger on the spurious propaganda of the organized onslaught on all and
every conservation force and tradition.
The proponents of the Grand Canyon dams say they will not injure the canyon
in the least, but will improve it. They will improve it, open it up for
recreational use for the common people, at the expense of only a few feet of
out-of-date fossils.
What are our National Parks for, a few Sierra Club kooks who enjoy climbing
El Capitan and shooting Niagara Falls in a barrel, or for healthy happy families
who can dash around the lakes that will appear on the floor of the Grand Canyon
in power boats and get a close-up view of the wonders of its geology?
What is more important, petrified cuttle fish, or human beings? True
conservation is conservation of people, not rocks.
There are arguments like this for every single attack on what remains of our
wilderness and our natural beauties. The anti-conservation organizations pay
good money to PR people to think them up. Soon the lumber companies will have
logged off all the virgin stands of redwood except for the small state parks and
a few roadside strip groves.
They will be left for automobile tourists to photograph. That’s all the
tourists want anyway.
But, say “scientists” hired by the advocates of total logging, after the
appallingly destructive floods of last year, “The redwood forest is not a true
climax formation. It springs up best on burnt over land, gullied hillsides, and
the sandbars left by massive floods. Redwood is a rapidly growing tree and the
new forest will reach true maturity, which is the size sufficient to make it
valuable once again as lumber, in less than 50 years.”
Or: “The lands being filled along the shores of San Francisco Bay are
useless mudflats at present, many of which, at low tide, are unsightly swamps.
The only people who get anything from them are the salt manufacturers and the
duck hunters. The Bay will be greatly improved if it is lined with lovely
housing developments for the small boat set, in imitation of Venice, California
or Italy. It will be a far greater tourist attraction and recreational asset
than it is at present. What are we conserving, ducks, shrimps or human beings?”
Or: “If we flood an area in Alaska larger than Lake Erie we will create a
wonderful recreation area, open to easy access by ordinary people, in what is
now a useless wilderness, and we will be giving the people of Alaska badly
needed electric power, and besides, the land is mostly free. What are we
conserving, wolverines or men?”
Or: “The Park Service admits that it cannot operate the National Parks
efficiently. Their policy of limited use has broken down. What we need are more
roads, opening up the country to the common people, who are not kooky
foot-burners who like to hike, but good robust Americans in portable homes. We
need more, not less, recreation facilities, dance halls, bars, restaurants, ski
lifts, funiculars, camp grounds in easy walking distance of the beauty spots,
bear feedings at the garbage pits to entertain the kiddies. People go to the
National Parks for vacations — for relaxation, for a good time. If free
enterprise is permitted to meet this demand, the National Parks can be put on a
sound financial basis.”
We are of course conserving men, not chipmunks or glaciers. But we are trying
to conserve them by preserving for future generations what little is left of the
natural environment, in which the species man came into existence in the first
place, and flourished for a million years.
Our radical destruction of that environment is, in the American West, a
matter of only two generations. Two generations out of at least 350,000. Think
of that line of people going back in a series of begats like the genealogies in
the Bible to the Ice Age.
And yet we seldom think of that inheritance when we hear someone say, “When
my grandfather came to California there were grizzly bears where Skyline
Boulevard is now.”
Or: “I’ve seen the bunch grass go and the Spanish oat take over in that land
since I was a boy. You can’t raise beef on it anymore unless you feed all year
round.”
Or: “Let me show you a series of pictures. It took just 10 years for
Williams Meadows to turn into a rocky gully a hundred feet wide.”
We have reached the tipover point. The man-made environment is so vast that
nature survives only in small islands, threatened constantly by biological
changes from outside even under ideal conditions of protection.
We hold this land in trust for the 350,000 generations still, D.V., to come,
barring our own passion for self-destruction.
Contact with the environment from which he came is strong medicine for the
preservation of the species of man, it recreates him in the true sense, and it
may well be essential to his survival.
We may discover that once we are all living in Megalopolis under a Dymaxion
roof, we simply will start to die off.
Certainly the urban civilizations of the past, far less artificial, have
never replenished themselves except by immigration from the countryside.
A virgin redwood forest, an unpolluted Lake Baikal, may be like hormones,
tiny particles of the face of the globe, without which we cannot go on living.
[11 September 1966]
Rexroth’s San Francisco (columns from the San
Francisco Examiner and San Francisco Magazine). Copyright 1960-1975 Kenneth Rexroth. Reproduced by permission of
the Kenneth Rexroth Trust.
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