Main Lines, Blood Feasts, and Bad Taste - Lester Bangs [7]
earthquake-sized convulsions, choking, spitting up blood, reeling dizzily into some crumpling limp falldown of terminal disease, weaving back and forth on its knees moaning and clutching itself tightly in one wounded area after another, raving like a wood-grain-alcoholic crashing in the Bowery on his Last Go-Round, and I don’t have any answers, or even very many opinions right now, seems like all the factions in the brawl are starting to look like the very thing they’re opposing so desperately, so that even semilucid and halfway rational New Leftists who can see in reasonably complete clarity the disastrous turn their politics and political organizations down to the last one have taken, must still sit tight keep their chops gritted and be ready for the impending fight, no matter what the consequences, perhaps because they’ve never really conceived of America falling into a continent of burning junk piles and primitive local control by brute force, meaning that perhaps they’re just bored with the same old scene, day after day, month after month, everything secure, bolted down, in order, safe for the cowering rodent-citizenry of elm-lined tract homes, maybe these cats just wanta see the entire structure fall or at least get shaken to its quick for once simply because it's never happened before and, you know, man, like with their Che caps and half-ass homemade Mollies, why, they’re a Revolutionary Insurgent Liberation Army, can-you-dig-it?, ready to get out there by God and do some fucking Liberating! No matter if the cat's never seen blood in his life before outside the movies, man, he will fight with the strength of twenty flabby imperialist racist middle-class WASP head of human cattle because he has the pure true Fire in his heart, and not only that he's taken lots of acid! He's strong! No, man, he sure ain’t gonna turn tail and run when he charges toward hand-grenade blasts which blow small bits of the flesh and blood and entrails of a woman and her three small children his way, what the fuck, what's a little splatter of blood and guts on your sleeve?; and he won’t run when the cops come in with their guns blazing or even machine guns turning slowly in that street storefront wall to storefront wall; but he MAY run when he walks up to some big Jimmy Brown Quarterback-type Black Militant spade boppin’ down the street of smoke and fire and death and he sez, “Hey, man, whaddya say, ain’t the revolution outasight, how about, hey you want some grass?” and that big spade just slowly swivels his pumpkin-size head to take in this stupid eager-faced Honkey Hippy coming on like such a White Tom and pretty soon the spade sez: “Split, what boh, fo’ ah bus’ yo’ haid.” Real calm but real obvious in his sincerity too, just kinda standin’ there all lordly and amused hands on his hips legs spread and smilin’ easy but radiating a blistering solid blast of white hot hate out from his red eyes through those impenetrable shades designed to tell the person confronted nothing at all. Now if you think that white ex-Love neo-Political Longhair cat is gonna stand there and try to reason that thing out with that big spade, you’re just plain stupid, as stupid as ninety percent of the Hip and New Left Community (and I mean those that’ve been around long enough that they should know better, not these little high school punks just picked up on grass & acid last month) has gotten right now. And anybody lets themselves get that stupid is doubly dangerous: dangerous first to themselves, because they’re liable to get their heads busted, and dangerous to every single one of the rest of us, as dangerous as Lyndon Johnson or (yes, perhaps this is no time to say it but it was true) Bobby Kennedy before he was shot or General Her-shey or J. Edgar Hoover. They are dangerous to every one of us precisely because they are at this very moment playing with fire, I mean insurrection, when they don’t have the slightest idea how to control it or what it means or even that they are exacerbating the probability that a great many of us, certainly including them, are going