Up

The Digger Papers (August, 1968)

Page Twelve

Rushes

The boy said the killer looked a lot like himself.

naked in violent death, they were sprawled in the nude, 10 feet apart, face down on the dirty concrete floor, their heads bashed in, their blood splashed . . . mixed with wine bottles, the old newspapers, the moth-eaten sweaters, broken light bulb, the dog food.

Then the cops came.

and so, on the surface of daily life, consciousness forms beings and bodies that one can see gathering and colliding in the atmosphere, to distinguish their personalities. and these bodies from hideous cabals where every eventuality comes into the world to argue against what is beyond appeal. i am not andre breton and i did not go to baltimore but this is what i saw on the banks of the hudson. the residents of the area were overcome with an insatiable curiosity, wondering whether the hippies were at it again over in tompkins square park.

The morgue attendents brought the first body bag out of 169 Ave. A. And the neighbors knew what happened. A body bag has a sobering effect on people. Two body bags have twice that elfect.

a stout elderly black woman said, "When I works, I works hard. When I thinks, I goes to sleep."

Even the police didn't know.

There is a computer in the attorney general's offlce which is said to be able to predict when and where riots are going to break out . . .

Death to intelligence! Hurrah for death!

How to make a fire bomb: Fill a glass bottle about one-fifth to one-fourth full with sulphuric acid. Fill the remainder with gasoline, kerosene, or a combination of both. Add water to potassium chlorate and sugar mix, and soak rags in the mix. Wrap the rags around the bottle, tie in place, and allow to dry. When thrown the bottle will break, the acid will ignite the chlorate sugar saturated rags, which in turn will ignite the fuel. Caution!!! Improvised explosives are much more dangerous to handle than conventional explosives. Such mixtures as above can be ignited or detonated by a single spark, excessive heat, or merely by friction generated by stirring or mixing ingredients together. Danger in handling these items cannot be overemphasized.

In New York in 1966 there was not one record of a Puerto Rican suicide, but in the Tombs prison 15 young Puerto Rican men supposedly committed suicide in their cells.

We don't talk very much of Marxism anymore. Our goal is a Free Society, a genuine democracy in which all the people are integrated through their own constant, active participation in the continuing struggle required for a man to feel free and be free.

To achieve the basis of that kind of society, man must first defeat his exploiter. To do so, in view of the reality that the exploiter is always richer, stronger, bigger, each man must particularize the struggle into his personal commitment; if he can, he can defeat any exploiter whose motivation is greed and possession.

That is why the Vietnamese cannot be defeated by the armed technological might of the United States. Each Vietnamese fights for his revolution. His own and all of theirs together. He fights for himself, for his country, and for his vision of a just world. That combination is undefeatable. We, too, in the Americas, are gaining such a combination.

The detectives investigating the double killing were beginning to fashion a portrait of the dead couple in all the sordid surroundings and the slovenly way of life in which they had existed. Reporters asked Inspector McLaughlin if the murder victims were hippies. "Well," he responded, "they were found in the environment of it, and in the area of it . . . and they were young people . . . Yes, you could classify them as being in that category."

the issue is no longer the status of an american minority, but the status of america.

. . . I'm not for wanton violence . . . I'm for truth, no matter who tells it, I'm for justice, no matter who it is for or against . . . I'm a human being first and foremost, and as such I'm for whoever and whatever benefits humanity as a whole . . .

The recidivist problem . . . the rebirth of the hopelessly homicidal mind.

They are the fringe whites . . . outcasts . . . worse than being a Negro or Puerto Rican. Assistant Chief Inspector Joseph McLaughlin, boss of Manhattan South detectives, is tempted to send all these freaks to Hell.

after you get inside, all your fear more or less is gone. and you concentrate on the safe, and you can look at it and . . . of course you always know what kind of safe it is before you make your entrance and everything. You go in, you got your tools and everything, and you can estimate what's in the safe.

if it's a place that has delivery trucks you can figure 500 dollars per truck for every truck they got and they'll have that much in the safe. i mean that's the average for any kind of business whether it be beer trucks or a dry cleaning place.

but still in all, that jewel might be the one. it just might be the guy that's beating the income tax, or it might be the guy that's booking all the big football payoff or layoff or something.

and there's no charge in the world like when you see that smoke . . . and when you're punching it and you hear that pin hit the back of the safe: clinggg! you know you're home free. or if you're peeling it you see that smoke come out . . .

whenever you pop that door and see the smoke you know that you've cracked the rivets and it's all yours. and when you see that safe door open, man, it's sweet times and the hell with death!

when it is no longer bought with money, commodities lie open to criticism and modification . . . the cops' job is to ensure that a commodity maintains the magical property of having to be paid for instead of becoming a mute, passive, insensible, submissive thing.

A child was found beaten today and they report that the President has gone mad.

. . . Each hour here in the Holy Land enables me to have greater spiritual insights into what is happening in America between black and white. The black American never can be blamed for his racial animosities -- he is only reacting to 400 years of the conscious racism of the American whites.

But as racism leads America up the suicide path, I do believe, from the experiences that I have had with them, that the whites of the younger generation, in the cities and universities, wlll see the handwriting on the wall and many of then will turn to the spiritual path of truth -- the only way left to America to ward off the disaster that racism inevitably must lead to.

He was 5 feet 11 and his body weighed no more than 140 pounds when police found him sprawled on that basement concrete floor in goddamn death. The girl's clothes were in a neat little pile . . . they were not the clothes the daughter of a wealthy Greenwich, Conn. company president would wear around the Baronial 30-room mansion she was raised in.

no brassiere was found at the murder scene.

The girl didn't want any more culture, any more classes . . . she simply wanted to paint. Her mother wanted her to be a dancer when she was young.

how do men make history, starting from the pre-established conditions to persuade them not to take a hand in it? ? ? Watts! Drop-outs! Black Panthers! Niggers! and the revolutionist and communal gangs of every area.

Are you aware that some Protestant theologians, in their writings are using the phrase "post-Christian era" --- and they mean now? Pagan energy.

Affluence is by no means natural or human; it is simply an abundance of goods.

even if the murderer hadn't betrayed any strange behavior, the green carboard sticker on his apartment door was enough to make the cops ask questions. it bore the insignia of one of the country's most militant forces -- the Black Panther and the legend "Black Power."

. . . Oh, Sir, get a doll a roofing. You can play jacks and girls do that with a softball and do tricks with it. I take all events into consideration. No, no and it is no! It is confused and it says no. A boy has never wept nor bashed a thousand kin for nothing. Did you hear me? . . .

[end]

<previous> <next>

Back Up Next
 
 
The Digger Archives is published under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. Cite As: The Digger Archives (www.diggers.org) / CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 / All other uses must receive permission. Contact: curator at diggers dot org.