November 4, 2006

• Confrontational Theater

  A moment ago, Doug stuck his head around the corner and said, “It
  should be possible to rent a megaphone somewhere, shouldn’t it?”

  Immediately, I got the image of the open cone shape of an old megaphone
  like Rudy Vallee sang through and cheerleaders of a past century
  utilized to enable their voices to be heard at the back of the
  stands.  Realizing that wasn’t what Doug wanted to rent, I shook
  off the image and asked, “You mean the electronic bullhorn, don’t you?”

  After he acknowledged my surmise, I asked him what use he might have
  for a bullhorn.  He said he was thinking about calling, “slogans
  from rooftops and introducing some randomness into people’s
  lives.”  Just now he wandered over and read over my shoulder,
  explaining, “It wouldn’t be anything objectionable;  just
  something to make people think.”  Then he laughed and said that to
  some people thinking would be objectionable.

  Earlier, after he had made that “randomness” remark, I had thought for
  a moment before saying, “Confrontational theater… When I was about
  your age, I was doing that.  Riding with the bikers, when we got
  off the bikes and walked the streets, we were doing confrontational
  theater.  We called it ‘freaking the straights,’ or ‘bugging the
  citizens.’”

  That concept of confrontational theater has been occuring to my mind at intervals ever since icepickphil mentioned it to me in an email in connection with the old sTp
  family.  Phil  had found my Xanga through a websearch. 
  Sadly, my reference to the revolutionary communes, the “families” of
  the ‘sixties and early ‘seventies, such as sTp and the Assholes I met
  in Boulder, is one of very few to be found on the web.  It’s a
  part of history that deserves to be more widely known.

  The idea, on those occasions when the “theater” was premeditated and
  not just our spontaneous drug-fueled craziness, was to wake up Joe
  Citizen by putting strangeness right in his face where he couldn’t
  ignore it.  The Merry Pranksters did it to extremes with a
  paisley-painted bus and electric Kool-Aid. 

  The grody young biker “Grace” and I did it in Denny’s, traipsing among
  the tables in black leather as our cohort headed in a pack for the big
  booth in back.  His style was to stop, gain eye contact with a
  diner, point to a half-eaten steak or a pristine pork chop, and ask
  politely, “Are you going to eat that?” as he picked it up.  I
  wouldn’t ask.  I’d just slide by a table and snag a piece of toast
  or handful of fries.  If a half-eaten slice of pie tempted me, I’d
  snag it and pick up a fork from the next table, sometimes right from
  the fingers of the diner there.

  The great beauty of these events was their spontaneity.  The first
  Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test just happened.  Its success engendered
  all the rest.  The first time Grace and Gross (yeah, that’s me)
  grossed out the breakfast crowd at Denny’s, we were on our way home from
  a weekend run and were hungry.  None but the two of us had the
  blood-sugar sensitivity that rendered us incapable of waiting for the
  waitress to take our orders and bring our food.  Walking through
  that restaurant, stoned and starving, he and I picked up a few items
  that had been left behind by departed diners.

  The stunned looks from other patrons and the approbation of our peers
  motivated us not only to repeat the performance, but to embroider on
  it, taking it to ever greater heights of chutzpah.  Within a year
  or so, when a pack of Hells Angels pulled into a Denny’s parking lot,
  the manager would lock the door and call the cops. 

  Accustomed to being rousted wherever we went, it was rare for anyone to
  be carrying contraband substances or armament.  We’d be milling
  around innocently by the door and windows, shading our eyes as we
  peered in at the bewildered customers and anxious staff.  One time
  the cops compelled a couple of bikers to tear decorative patches from
  their clothing because their messages were obscene, but to the best of
  my recollection that’s the most severe penalty any of us ever suffered
  for our misdemeanors. Eventually, we’d stop at Denny’s for effect, even
  if we didn’t want to eat.  Everyone I knew thought that the
  entertainment value made it worth the inconvenience.  We’d pile
  back on the bikes, roar out of the parking lot, and if we were hungry
  we’d pull in at the next available eatery.

  Our subculture in that Vietnam war era was as fragmented and disparate
  as the mainstream culture then and now. Some hippies were facing down
  National Guard troops with flowers, while other kids with the same
  clothing and hairstyles were building bombs to blow up the National
  Guard armories.   The “official” Hells Angels position was
  adamantly anti-drug (except for alcohol), and some Angels I knew were
  making weekend runs to Mexico to bring back commercial quantities of
  big fat white-cross benzedrine tabs.  But one thing that the
  flower children, bikers, speed-freaks and violent revolutionaries had
  in common was their theatricality, putting on a show for the bystanding
  citizens and the media.

  This idea of confrontational theater had been percolating through my
  brain for weeks when it caromed off some other memories from that era
  and met up with something I’d absorbed from recent events.  
  That other stray memory from the late sixties was a chance meeting, in
  the course of a drug deal, with some student militants.  It came
  up in the course of conversation that they were planning an assault on
  the ROTC building on campus.  It went like this:

  student:  Yeah, this is pretty good stuff.  How much you got?
  my companion:  [irrelevant commercial details]
  Then after a pause in the conversation for further appreciation of the quality of the drugs,
  student:  Hey, man, we’ve been having this argument, see. 
  Whadda you think, is terrorism a legitimate tool for social change?

  The discussion was a common one at the time.  Ulrike Meinhof
  was a cultural icon to most of those in our subculture who had heard of
  her, and just a common criminal, a smart girl gone bad, to most of the
  mainstream who had heard of her.  There were more people in both
  camps who had never heard of her than you might think.  Terrorism
  was something that happened in Europe, Asia and Africa, not here. 
  Thus, we could sit around, get stoned, and discuss whether it was worth
  taking a few innocent lives to get the attention of the entrenched
  power structure and bring about a more egalitarian setup.

  Finally, it has occurred to me that terrorism is a form of
  confrontational theater.  I thought briefly about calling it the
  ultimate form of confrontational theater but, sure enough, if I say
  that, some newer and bigger form would come along and prove me wrong.

   
   
  

  • 2:16 pm
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