How Shall We Survive?
by Tuli Kupferberg

At a recent anti-war rally at LIU I heard Paul Goodman say that we were all headed for nuclear destruction & death within 10 years unless 10-20,000 American students (at one time?) stood up publicly & announced that they were refusing to be drafted.

He said it calmly & stated that he’d said it before & would say it again but he didn’t know quite how to put it any otherwise: whether to sing it or scream it or whatever, so he was just simply stating it.

That statement has haunted me & this essay is an attempt to come to some grips with that problem.

I thot (fool) that after the Cuban missile crisis we would at least have “peace in our time.”

But instead (unbelievably) we now have the incredible Vietnam War. This war may end tomorrow. (I remember how the Korean War started: it started completely unexpectedly in a newspaper headline: “US Orders Troops Across the 38th Parallel.”) The “US” being that simpleminded haberdasher in the White House: Harry Truman (years ago I remember reading in a college Poli Sci book how ward heeler HST had really wanted only a local judgeship but had been forced into Senate seat by K.C politicos) & had ended just as unexpectedly after years of “negotiations” just like that snap-crackly-pop also by fiat-by-whim—but not yours nor mine. Well good anyway that it ended. & good when this war ends however.
But will this be the last war? We really need a strong China to provide a spit of reality for our paranoia. But I guess if even Cuba can give us a hard on maybe Tanzania or The Trucial States can be developed as a threat to “our way of life.”

I.
The country is splitting in two.
On one side the hawks, most of the millionaires, the old line politicos, the grey haired mothers, the sex-starved (old) judges, the retired army officers, the Spellmans of the ecclesia castrata, the sadistic police, the poor stupid soldiers, the rednecks, the frustrated, the Madison Avenued alcoholics, the suicidal marines, the robot-teachers, the
fundamentalist Boonedockers—what we used to call “reaction.”
On the other side the youth, the doves, the beatniks, the poets & artists, the protesting students, the minorities claiming their life, the singers, the rock & rollers, the psychedelics, the young parents crying for the fullness of their lives, the lifely professors—whatever remains of the old humanism & classic liberalism, idealism & socialism of America.
& that old socialism has failed. It has failed for 100 years. It has had its chance & been superceded—so that the problems it concerned itself with no longer exist. The Marxist & the anarchist ways have failed (altho the anarchist ideas survive much better into the present & the future).
Marxism was too mechanical. It became hypnotized by the machine. It was formed in the era of steam & coal. It was pre-psychologic, pre-anthropologic, pre-electric, & prepsychedelic.
It was a good theory of society…for the 19th Century. Marx always postponed the essential human problems for “…after the revolution.” But it is now after the revolution.
The revolution (or revolutions) that have already occurred are as follows:
1) the sexual revolution: basic because it liberated the bound-in personal energies of entire generations, of entire nations
2) the automation revolution: in 20 years it made all previous economic thot obsolete
3) the artistic revolution: it brought art into life with such force that the two are now inseparable
4) the psychedelic revolution: it built on the sexual & scientific revolutions to create new universes

2.
What are the obstacles to the successful completion & functioning of these revolutions?
a) the sexual revolution: the obstacles are simply: most people over 40. To those under 20 this revolution is a fact. Nothing even to talk about. The revolution is proceeding so fast that 6-yr. old works by Mailer & Selby (for example) now seem old fashioned. The obstacles are Catholic (& Jewish) district attorneys, frustrated judges, sadistic cops, vengeful (half-lived) parents. This is however the strongest sector of the revolutionary front. (Stuck in a damned
military analogy!) There will be defeats: Ginzburg decision, Reagan prosecs in Calif. but nothing can stop the pill! When sex rears its lovely head? Variety is the spice of wife.
New-old combinations your grandmother never even fantasized are here and more are coming…(mostly) filled with joy. We call this a “sexual” revolution but it is really a revolution of love.
b) the automation revolution: a mixed” (up) front. It was already possible at the turn of the century (if production were rationally organized) to have an advanced (not a primitive which was always possible) & even (I think desirable) communism. Now automation makes it so simple one wants to weep. Cut out irrational & war production & every American could have an incredible (material) standard of living immediately, for a few hours of work per week. In 5 to 10 years this standard could be exported to every spot on earth.
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Meantime people starve all over the world & kill each other in various subtle & unsubtle
ways in competitive games in the great US of A.
Only the youth really know this is the age of affluence. I used to worry about how careless
young people were in returning small loans I had made to them. In my (para depression)
youth $1-10 was a huge sum. Money was hard to come by. Today it’s all over. When there
are a million apples who’ cares what happens to a few? This has given the youth great
courage. They are independent, they don’t lick asses. They say fuck you to “careers,” a jail
sentence is a badge of honor not a leper’s label. The establishment (including the economic
establishment) is a farce to them���not to be taken seriously. Somehow the means to
survive will always turn up.
The idea of the commune is reappearing: the East Side anarchists, the SF Diggers, the
Proves of LA, Kerista, the Living Theater, USCO, Millbrook & the League for Spiritual Discovery. An important new journal devoted to utopian-intentional community and its parameters has just begun to publish (The Modern Utopian, Box 144, Tufts University, Medford, Mass.).
The contrast between the affluence of some & poverty of others however, both in our
country & abroad, is one of the most serious threats to the survival of all of us. Unless this
problem is solved & quickly, it alone may be enough to bring us all down to spiritual &
bodily death.
Here some of the traditional socialist ideas are of most value �Ķ but they must be used in
new & imaginative ways & combined organically with the new technology. SDS & the
militant Black organizations are trying to come to grips with the ideological & practical
solutions to these emergency problems. Affluence now!
We must have dramatic demonstrations of the (economic) brotherhood of man. This country
must give with no strings attached vast quantities of its super-abundance to the poorer
nations. One first step might be immediately to disarm & give 1/2 of our war budget to
China, 1/4 to our internal poor, 1/4 to the rest of the world. Such “Utopian” solutions must
be taken seriously or we may face “realistic” annihilation at the hands of those who want or
those who want to keep, or a mutually destructive symbiosis of both.
Apocalypse!
For those who can���a total redistribution of their personal goods a la Vinaba Bhave or Danilo
Doici may be personally saving & a spiritual catalyst to all others. (This is not the social
revolution but it is a way of dramatizing it.) Certainly there are those among us (myself?)
who would benefit by a living total demonstration of the revolution. Those who are rich in
their souls can give more can they not?���without losing that which is most precious? Maybe
now only some vast new “movement” of primitive communism & community & sharing & a
living together physically of the most disparate: say like Jacqueline Kennedy & a Bowery
“bum” can save us. If Joan Baez or Bob Dylan were to give their entire fortunes to the
causes���what a final mockery it would make of America���of capitalism���of greed���of man
being the prey of man.
It is of course easy for me to speak so. (O hypocrite lecteurmon semable man frere!) I have
not done it, have I? Only the spiritually richest can do this. This is the real revolution.
c) the artistic revolution: great subverter of the hollow society. Mass your media���you are
helpless before our skills. You don’t know if we are parodying you or you are parodying us
anymore. Beatles, Dylan, happenings, pop. Rock & roll great continent! The Box will destroy
you! Our bodies are opening. A thousand penises will bloom. Cunts too! We will force you to
support us���to support the artists who are digging your dark grave. Join us before it is too
late. Do not die! There is life enough for everyone!
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“When the mode of the music changes the walls of the city shake.”
d) the psychedelic revolution: this is our magic. With this we break open heads & new
worlds emerge.

Would you believe?
Break the patterns. Shatter the images! Down ikons!
Tune In Turn On Drop Out.
Fake games! Your games are fake, boring.
Man was made.
Man was made to change. No single thing abides. Plow
with me. Fast flows the abiding tide.
God in a bottle?
But Lord they said you were everywhere.
3.
Out of my enthusiasm, out of my love I have spoken a poem. Only sometimes do poems
change the world. Sometimes the world changes poems. Is this the call of the siren? Have I
minimized difficulties? Many will die between the time I write this & the time you read this.

I only did what I had to.
I will not express fear & death. I will express life & hope.
Someday some youth’s vision will spring us full blown into
Paradise.
Either that or we die.
Come dance with me in Johnson’s land!

The East Village Other (New York)
February 15, 1967