NOW What?
To Sonny Tufts, Wonder Woman, the Detroit Auto Dealers Association, and all the imbeciles who revere the article “Propagandada Discovered in Detroit,” (F.E. March 1976):
Besides applauding your own impotence and illusory liveliness, propagandada, etc., a kind of mechanical senility, only demonstrates the seemingly unlimited powers of the spectacle–the continuing vanguard of the banal.
You have tried using DADA to make a virtue of your emptiness, NOW WHAT?
Dorthea Ruskin
Palo Alto, California
Spaced In
Dear FE,
I had been riding around in my taxicab for a time thinking about spatial awareness. Thinking about how all of this structural garbage will be gone someday. Absorbing its ugliness. Was delighted to run across your article on “Space” (April FE).
I have related to space mostly in terms of the earth’s surface, resource utilization of it, spatial patterns of settlement and human activity. We are conditioned to operate via tunnels. We see with tunnel vision.
There are ways to raise spatial awareness. On a clear dark moon night, observe the sky. The closest stars surround you. See how they coalesce with distance to form a cross-sectional view of the galaxial spiral (the milky way). See yourself embedded in the galaxy! Close your eyes and listen to the intensity of activity surrounding your eyes and listen to the intensity of activity surrounding you.
Go to the top of the General Motors Building and scan the landscape. The pattern resembles a feudal estate. Drive a taxicab (part time is plenty). Get to know the layout. Gain access to all sorts of places, from tank plants to prisons. Carry injured workers to the high priests of medicine. Practice the latest in Guatemalan guerrilla technique.
May the trees grow tall once again,
J. Garst
Be Creative
Dear People:
In an editorial by the Free Press (they should have been tailors) some protesters were heavily criticized for spitting on presidential candidate Henry (“don’t ask me”) Jackson. The same editorial attacked protesters who greeted Wallace in Milwaukee in wheelchairs and Arthur Bremmer masks early this month. The Free Press tried to claim that such protests are illegitimate and lack taste. The FP bureaucrats fail to realize that to most young people, George Wallace is not worth the dirty sheet that Bremmer sleeps on in his dingy cell. Wallace had the good taste, of course, to advocate the dropping of atomic bombs on North Vietnam and the running over of protesters in his car. Jackson needed to be spit on, as well as all prospective officeholders (from local politics on up) for pretending to have the qualifications to run people’s lives for them.
We challenge the Free Press, the News, the Sun and all of the commercial media to think of more appropriate ways to insult personalities who would degrade life by attempting to supersede it!
J.Q.P.
Greetings
Dear Fifth Estate People,
Enclosed are copies of my latest Poems. There is also a money order. I want a subscription to the FE and I want a copy of the March issue so I can finish reading it. I was impressed by the satirical rejection of the Gurunoid movement.
God is dead,
Let the good times roll,
Brad Evans
Brookline, Mass.