THE DAILY BARBARIAN supplement
FIFTH ESTATE, #298, June 19, 1979
Note: In early May, or late March, local “alternative people” sponsored a “World Symposium on Humanity” on the University of Detroit campus. It was an event where various religious sects, community organisations, and rag-heads got together to compete for each others Consciousness. The following is a compilation of sketches made of the event by our religious consultant Rama Lama Ding Dong.
…The exalted seer and vending machine magnate from Tibet, Dung Crapjar, gave a stirring lecture, Sunday afternoon, on “Modern Acquiescence in the New Age” in which he urged sweeping economic reforms. Crapjar urged the building of a new society within the shell of the old based upon such financial concepts as wading in public fountains for coins, and begging. Dung also urged a thoroughgoing policy of non-violence. “They may stamp on your mother, spill boiling lead over your entrails, sick dogs on you, urinate in your nasal passages, remember, that’s Karma,” said Dung to an enraptured crowd.
…Ayatollah Khomeini was scheduled a year in advance to speak at the Symposium but events in Iran caused the sponsors to cancel his appearance. The Ayatollah, renowned for card tricks and his handling of snakes, was to provide entertainment but his involvement in the revolution made Symposium sponsors fear a negative crowd reaction and a loss of t-shirt revenues.
…Marvin Surrogate, one of the organizers of the Symposium said that the arrangement of booths and exhibits was conducted to be a veritable “garage sale of consciousness.” “Every possible sect we could think of—Krishnas, Yogis, astrologers, Good Humor truck drivers—anything at all associated with consciousness was given a chance to hawk at our event,” Surrogate said. “We even had Mr. Belvedere come to extol his vision which he manifested while meditating; he saw a future where everyone on Earth would be destroyed except those who had ashrams built into their recreation rooms.”
…Banana Johnson of the Whole Earth Catalogue lectured Saturday on raising corn in Urinals and hogs in Volkswagen vans. “As a gesture of our faith in nature, we should sleep in pens on the ground or in furrowed fields,” extolled Johnson, “send away for our new back-to-nature kit. For fifteen hundred dollars you get mosquitoes, weeds, tent stakes, a shovel and toilet paper, it works, even in the city!” Johnson also demonstrated his “environmental hovel”— a house made out of materials found in the immediate environment. “As you go through the doorway,” he said, “which is constructed of cigarette butts, and pass over the riveted floor of beer cans, you come to the commode which is a stained bicycle seat which permits the transport of waste as the sitter pedals below. It comes in ten-speed, or the hose/ hot-water bottle variety for those who want to coast.”