The Digger Papers

The magazine, The Realist, made its name ten years ago (didn't know it was going that long did you?) as a scurrilous irreverent underground rag. In its latest issue though, Paul Krassner, the organization's guiding light, has turned to the more elevated purpose of spreading the hippies good word. The diggers, that nimble group of modern-day saints, were allowed to share their thing with those outside--40,000 copies worth.

The tone of the issue thus is more somber than usual but it is laced with flashes of the most exalted wit, tender and crafty outbursts from the blue depths of the underground sea that these people inhabit. The prose-poetic style is the one we have come to expect of all hippie writing. Only, here it is better than usual--controlled wild lurching from fancy to dirt, with logic running like a deep undercurrent, that occasionally surfaces but more often is just stubbornly felt.

The theme is one of rejection of the life that has been arranged for them--and it is clear that in this the hippies' actions speak louder than their words--and a defiant optimism about their chances in the task of shifting everybody else's allegiances too.

So surely I hunt the white-man down in my heart.

The crew-cutted Seattle boy

The Portland boy who worked for U.P. that was me

I won't let him live.

To bring back America, the grass and the streams,

To trample your throat in your dreams

This magic I work, this loving I give

That my children may flourish

And yours won't live.

This resurrection in America is to come about under the irresistable force of the example of the new breed whose revolutionary value system is judged so inherently attractive (it is) that it will subvert traditional morality.

Thus there is great emphasis in the first article entitled "Trip without a ticket' (all of them are unsigned) on the importance of demonstrations of the hippie life style. The diggers' term for themselves is life-actors and their means of communication is Guerilla Theater which "intends to bring audiences to liberated territory to create life-actors.", and whose plays "are glass-cutters for empire windows".

In particular, acting out Theater means, say, establishing free stores where everything belongs to everybody or nobody. "A store or goods or clinic or restaurant that is free becomes a social art form." Behind this heady jargon is the undeniable enchantment of a description of a free store,

Someone asked how much a book cost. How much did he think it was worth? 75 cents. The money was taken and held out for anyone. "Who wants 75 cents?" A girl who had just walked in came over and took it. A basket labelled 'free money'.

The diggers have great faith that the implications of the free store are not impossible for society to embrace.

Let theories of economics follow social facts. Once a free store is assumed, human wanting and giving, needing and taking become wide open to improvisation.

Again and again they make it clear that the problem lies not in the technological facts or structure of the United States but in the attitudes people hold towards these means of production.

But the tools (that's all factories are) remain innocent and the ethics of greed aren't necessary. Computers render the principles of wage-labor obsolete by incorporating them.

There is a quite remarkable attitude of benevolence towards machines, the more big and complex the better, since these are hailed as the potential liberators of all drudgery. If the "economic crisis" is how to "distribute the garbage" and the "political crisis" no more than "who's going to collect the garbage and why should anyone want the job" then is not the answer simply to make a machine that takes care of all the garbage?

Nevertheless all this belief in a machine-age utopia is predicated on the existence of the proper relationships between people. A long jolting brilliant piece called "Dialectics of Liberation" explores the meaning of such transcendent consciousness and its possibility.

The writer suggest that what is needed is a mystical trust between all humans, a willingness to interact with others "on that one level where you do address others to their eyes, directly without fear, and with the realization that they are there."

But that trust has to be such a calm thing and such an assured thing. But the wierd thing is that--tearfully so almost--many younger kids have that trust.

This joyous fellow feeling does come about, it comes in a flash, a feeling of unity not just with flowers and trees and animals (that's easy to achieve) but with other self-sustaining human egos as well.

Because its conditioning, and conditioning can be de-conditioned. How is a miracle. It happens naturally sometimes; somebody wakes up on top of Fern Hill, or hears Blake, or however you first got laid, or whatever the catalyst is: it opens up the realization.

It is out of such honest mutual recognition that the kind of political and social activity that the diggers would like to see begins. Because it is not till everyone is converted to the creed and everyone gripped by the same spirit of selflessness that institutions like the free stores and free living can flourish. Without trust nothing survives--without the trust of all nothing endures.

This is why the diggers believe in teaching by example, believing as they do that the spark exists within each person and only needs to be re-kindled. That can only happen by a blinding event generated by the sort of shared experience that is provided by the guerrilla theater of the life actors, music, dance.

So read The Realist. It is necessary and important to know that there are other potentialities and possibilities from those one tends to automatically veer towards, and even if one were to not rush out to set up a free community one could perhaps be moved in the mystical manner of the diggers. It is difficult to curb the fluttering feeling induced by phrase-segments like, "Free Time! Free Time? What was time before it was bought?"