Commie Days

I was a delegate representing the Noe Valley to the founding of the Peace and Freedom Party at the Richmond Auditorium in 1968. For the three days that strange assembly had gathered to organize opposition from the left of the dependably collaborationist Democrats to the liberals’ war on Vietnam. I commuted from the city to the convention with a black maniac named George, no last name. We’d pick him up on Broadway and we’d drop him off on Broadway.

George was very pleasant, funny even, on the trips back and forth over the Bay Bridge. But one day at the convention, as a kind of warm-up act for Bobby Seale of the Black Panthers, George was transformed. Literally spitting into the mike, George said he hoped to see “every single one of you white motherfuckers strangled in your motherfucking sleep.” Then he said he wanted to cut our motherfucking throats and thin-slice our mothers, fathers, grandparents, and children unto the tenth generation.

As an organizing tool, a rallying cry, George’s position would be a tough sell, but George received a standing ovation from the white liberals he’d just said he hoped to murder.

I hadn’t realized George was black. I’d thought he was one of those guilt-ridden white guys who’d spent a lot of time organizing his hair into an afro in solidarity with the black struggle. And I’d thought we were commute buddies. On the ride back to the city that night I made sure I was the first guy into the back seat. No way George was getting the drop on me.

I still wonder if George told us his name was George to test us, to see if any of his fellow commuters, all of us white, knew that ‘George’ was the traditional racist shorthand for all black men working as porters on trains. If that’s what George was doing, we flunked the test, not that he was likely to have spared any of us even if we had passed.

I never saw George after the convention, but I thought about him a few years later when the Zebra killers began snatching random white people off Frisco’s streets and murdering them to qualify as Killer Angels for the Black Muslims. The Zodiac killer was also doing his part to keep up the body count, announcing that he too was racking up white slaves for the next life.

It was an unhappy time, kids. Don’t you think it wasn’t just because the music was cool and your granddad smoked Mexican ditch weed.

Back at the Richmond Auditorium, Seale, the star attraction that day, announced for openers that he hated us all “as the white liberal racist dog-pigs” that we obviously were. He went on to say that although we were racist dog-pigs we must, nevertheless, “free Huey by any means necessary.” Seale demanded, “What’s wrong with picking up the gun?”

Well, for one motherfucking thing the white racist dog-pigs on the motherfucking government side have a lot more motherfucking guns, big ones, too, and they outnumber lunatics like us about 500,000 to motherfucking one.

Seale closed by assuring us that he had “hate in his heart.” He, too, received a standing ovation from the suicidal throng.

Eldridge Cleaver was next. The Black Panther “Minister of Information” also wanted Huey freed by any means necessary. “You’re either for us or against us, Cleaver said, adding, “And we don’t care if you’re with us or not.”

The Roberts Rules of Order Boys — and wouldn’t you know we all had laminated name tags? — representing various com cults, quickly introduced a couple of clarifying resolutions. One was simply to free Huey, the other was to free Huey by any means necessary.

Mario Savio got up to point out that “by any means necessary” could be interpreted as burning down Oakland to free one man. A couple of hundred maniacs leaped to their feet to cheer that one.

Robert Avakian, aka Chairman Bob of the Revolutionary Communist Party, said Huey had to be freed, and whatever it took was fine with him. Chairman Bob compared Huey to a man being held by a lynch mob, and you wouldn’t stop at killing a lynch mob to free an innocent man, would you?

The any means necessary resolution lost 227-223, but when it was amended to read, “Free Huey Newton by any means necessary which would further the black liberation movement,” it passed by a 3-1 margin.

The motherfucking white liberal dog-pigs had prevailed!

I was still pondering what I could do to free Huey which would also advance the black liberation movement when Huey was freed to await a new trial on cop-hunting charges. The liberals the Panthers said they wanted to garrote had put up the $50,000 bond to get Huey out of jail. Then I read that Huey was living in neo-socialist luxury overlooking Lake Merritt, had hired a bodyguard, and had beaten up his elderly tailor. Freed Huey went on to murder a black prostitute and, strung out on crack, was finally shot to death by a drug dealer. The whole pathetic show of that time, romanticized to this day by the amnesiacs at places like KPFA, was added confirmation that the decision of thousands of disillusioned radlib hippies to move to the country was the right one. The Bay Area had become a violent hellhole.

By 1970, the hardcore nuts were rolling, many of them commuting back and forth between their city bomb factories and sympathetic communal hideouts in Mendocino, Humboldt, Trinity, and Siskiyou counties. There were 56 bombings in the Greater Bay Area in 1968; 236 in 1969; 546 in 1970 before the revolution ended in 1975 when the Vietnamese, all by themselves, won the war.

There are lots of people in Northern California who’ve put their felonious revolutionary selves in brand new packaging as Democrats. They’re everywhere, these little red book cadres of 1970, running schools, practicing law, sitting as judges, one even serving as spokesperson for Jerry Brown when Brown was governor.

Today’s murderous concoction of imperialism and prisons has no more loyal servants than the revolutionaries of 1968.

An anonymous poet called Ares posted a summarizing ode in the Bay Area neighborhoods where it had all gone the wrongest:

ruling guru greybeard bards

having new fun in yr. rolling rock renaissance

have you passed thru the Haight

have you seen yr. turned-on kids?

u promised them Visions & Love & Sharing

clap, hepatitis, fleas, begging and the gang bang

sure, you didn't want to see the scene go that way

but that's how the shit went down

& i do not hear yr howl

i do not hear exorcising demons

u told the congress that yr. acid

had taught us how to love

even that blood-soaked thieving swine of a cowboy

The Others call their president.

is there nothing left over for the kids

sleeping on the sidewalks

waiting to be carried off by the bikers

of yr. children's crusade?

yr. disciples are dying in the streets, gurus,

u have been among the philistines too long

u have become their Spectacle.

heal the sores upon thine own bodies, prophets

yr. word has brought them as far as the Haight

can you not carry them to the seashore?

or is it your power and not theirs which has failed?

can it be we warrior poets were right all along?

can it be all the buddhas r hollow & like the Dalai Lama

u have been sipping butter tea upon a peacock throne

as Tibetans perished in the snow?

is it not time to admit that hate as well as love redeems the world

there is no outside w/out inside

no revolution w/out blood

---

PS. John Ross, frequent (former) AVA contributor and well-known journalist, was prominent at the convention as the main man for Progressive Labor, a Maoist grouplet. He was badly beaten by the Panthers for, I think, arguing tactics with them. John was also regularly worked over by the San Francisco Police Department who seemed to view him then as the city’s Public Enemy Number One.

PPS. You’ll never read this in the Santa Rosa Press Democrat, but the famous cartoonist of the Rose City, Charles Schultz, supported the Peace and Freedom Party’s ‘72 presidential candidate, Doctor Benjamin Spock.