Maybe we’re really in trouble
“I discovered something in New York,” Lenny Bruce, who is currently delivering his devastating attacks on pomposity, hypocrisy and the general paradoxes of our society at Basin Street West, said in a show the other night. “I found out that I was judged by people who never saw my show!”
The D.A. submitted information to the Grand Jury. A cop was assigned to go to the show and take notes. And every time he started to spell out one of THOSE words, Lenny points out he skipped another 50.
Then, Lenny says, they reduced his show to paper and read it to the Grand Jury. “My art is public speaking and the cop did my act and he’s not a good comic!”
That’s the kind of thing that performers and artists and creative people are beginning to encounter more and more in this society. It’s Catch-22 applied to art. In Lenny’s New York case, the people who saw the show such as Dorothy Kilgallen, said it was great. Those who had not seen the show but had read the so-called transcript of it, such as Marya Mannes, said it was nonsense.
Bruce is continuing his battle for artistic freedom and his current shows (he’s been off stage for almost four months as a result of his accident last time he was here) are getting better every night, which is to say that the finest satirical performer in the history of the American stage is right now appearing on Broadway.
But the point goes beyond Lenny Bruce to something that is rising in intensity in our society. In New York the cops finally put The Living Theater out of business by harassment, and jailed the operator.
Around the country, bookstores get busted for selling Henry Miller, in Toronto the police panic as the sight of a nude painting (now there’s a clear and present danger if ever I heard of one). The syndrome is the same. As Lenny pointed out one night at Basin Street West, the dozens of people who watched the Genovese girl killed in Long Island without interfering would have interfered in a minute if it had been a couple making love in public.
San Francisco is ambivalent; some good and some bad. The attempt to suppress art, which has been defeated here in the HOWL case, and in the Ron Boise case and in the Lenny Bruce case, is not dead at all. Look at the idiotic harassment of the San Francisco Mime Troupe this weekend. If you saw it on TV, what could be more ludicrous? In Berkeley a columnist attempted to have the same thing happen by vilifying the Mime Troupe’s Minstrel Show without having seen it (the time honored pattern of the prude). And down the Peninsula the cops, losing their attempt to stifle Ken Kesey, put up a road block at his party to shake everybody down.
There is a uniform field theory present here which says that the law enforcement arm of society is more sensitive to the pressure from the reactionary than from the liberal and something ought to be done about it.
If this society is so fragile that attacks on it by implication from artists and writers are such a threat, then we’re really in trouble. Nothing could have been more harmless than Facino walking the streets and writing his poems for people. Yet he gets busted while some maniac in a crew cut burns rubber at every corner, menacing life. In the East Bay critic’s charge against the Minstrel show, he said it included an attack on President Johnson. Why not? This is a free democracy and attacks on President Johnson go on in the editorial columns of the press and in Congress and the United Nations.
But the thing goes deeper than this, much deeper. It really is a fear of making waves. Don’t start trouble. Never argue about religion or politics. Keep things as they are (meaning keep me as I am) and don’t let anyone challenge anything. Yet if democracy is worth its salt, it not only will survive criticism but also must encourage it.
The vendetta against the arts is a drive to suppress criticism in exactly the way that the Nazis suppressed it in Germany, and, as Ira Sandperl pointed out in an interview, the Nazis were good citizens.
What’s needed, it seems to me, is an American Artistic and Cultural Liberties Union to fight this on every front, if the present ACLU can’t do it.
A basic freedom in this society is the freedom to criticize and the freedom to satirize and the freedom to create. The real fear is of creativity, which, in essence, is the fear of the unknown.
Brendan Behan once remarked that it was the duty of the artist to overthrow his government. Cast in the terms of British and Irish parliamentary democracy, that means that the artist heads the loyal opposition.
To stifle the Mime Troupe by the judgment of a commission to rescind its permit is petty bureaucracy, the kind we abhor when practiced by Stalin against poets.
No society worth its praise can afford such restrictive actions. It happens I not only desire to live in this society above all others but in this particular geographical location and one of the reasons for it is that San Francisco has more adult behav-