Draft Letter from Peter Berg (?) to an Underground Newspaper, n.d.,
ca. 1967.
[Located in the Digger Archives, Catalog No. DP009.]
The diggers send you best wishes for failure. If the number of your
printings escalate; if you join UPS & add additional colors to yr.
layout; if you attract more advertisers & get more per column inch you
will succeed. If you really turn people on to something other than
selling, to something other than fraudulent "now" you will fail
because people that know don't need to read how. Will you commit conscientious
suicide or not? Mimic Fullbright or the Yellow Monk? NBCBSLIFETIMELOOK are
the outlines; ORACLEVOBARB are the inlines; different styles &
markets, identical functions: the merchandising of a particular
world-view. Oracle is Time magazine of the hippies - a collage of
consciousness-expansion; psychedelic advice to the love-worn, love-lorn,
love-torn. Joanie Baez merchandised as a peace-love symbol - participate
in her purity for $3.98. She can say what she likes - no millionaire can
be all bad - it's profit that sends Marines to Vietnam. Bobby, Joanie et
al. agents of the dream they think they dispel: actors on sets w/ no
doors.
Any man who claims to sell the truth is a false-poet. False poets turn
others onto selling. Psychedelic merchants are merchants are false poets:
dropping out does not mean changing clothes. Things on earth are there for
those who inhabit it. People who derive profit from those things
disenfranchise themselves from man & the natural order. The frame of
reference of profit is always exclusive & competitive. It is one-half
of a dichotomy bound on the other side by loss. Free has no perimeter.
Enclosed are some broadsides by the Communications Co. who print the truth
free for any fool in the street. Fed & housed by brothers they pass
out their words/acts from hand to hand, like dropping social acid, for no
profit, interest or money - life acts of free men.
The Diggers |
