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immediately got his fur up. He should have simply left, but he didn't. Instead he sat there and listened as the panel and the audience had a thoroughly good time patting themselves on the back for their unswerving radicalism, and at the same time condemning the "liberals" as the enemy because of their fearful acquiescence to the establishment political party system. He listened to that kind of selfcongratulatory rap for nearly three quarters of an hour before it and the stuffiness of the room and the people who were in it caused him to stand up and accuse the assembled themselves of being the "real enemy," while the liberal was just a patsy and anybody's pawn. "You're the real enemy because you extend the present system of American society, deluding yourselves with words while paying tribute to the state with taxes, and making believe you're in solidarity with the blacks in Harlem and the peasants in Vietnam from the top-floor windows of your deluxe apartments and East Hampton estates! Who the fuck are you kidding? You're the real enemy! The liberal will always follow whoever's winning, because he usually knows no better or is too frightened! But you people know better, don't you! You know which side you're on in some cocktail conversation like this, sure you do! But when you're in your stockbroker's office, whose side are you on then, huh? Certainly not mine--not for all the crumbs you could ever feed me from your tables! To talk about the liberal as being the enemy is like kicking a dead dog! Talk about yourselves as being the enemy to all those people whose side you claim, you insist, is the same side you're on. Talk about it because you're not on the same side. Talk about it because you're the real enemy, and not the liberal ! " The audience immediately burst out with someone shouting that "the Diggers were merely the Salvation Army in disguise!" and someone else charging that Emmett "was just creating rest camps for teenagers!" Warren Hinckle III jumped in and described Grogan as a "visionary who has the cunning of an Army Supply Sergeant in a B movie." It all added up to "what right does that scraggy hippie social worker have putting us down! Where does he get off, anyway, knocking radicals like us around!" Then came the clincher that was supposed to prophesy Emmett's co-option by the society he claimed to have dropped out of. Paul Jacobs, who led those Berkeley "Community for New Politics" radicals in that demonstration months before to protest the HaightAshbury curfew during the "San Francisco Riot," started screaming from in back of the audience that "like it or not, Grogan, you and [end page 359] |
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