Nicholas Johnson commencement speech, "Love, Life, and Other Stuff," at American University, Washington, D.C., November 17, 1970
Nick: ... Cambodia but with regard to life in general, in a corporate state, under the title of Life and Love and Other Stuff. Now, actually, it's about life and love and bicycles and applesauce, but I didn't think that that kind of flowed as nicely as a Life and Love and Other Stuff. So I left out the bicycles and the applesauce and I decided I just bring that up later and explain how it relates.
Several of you before this speech were inquiring about the mustache, and so perhaps I should explain the reason for that. Most government officials, as you know, act like bandits but try to look like public officials. I decided that just for fun, there ought to be one of us that acts like a public official and looks like a bandit.
I was going to come out here in my clothes that I normally wear, my bicycling clothes. But Richard explained to me that that would not be good idea, that it would put some people off, and besides, they'd be curious to know what a commissioner uniform looks like. I wore my commissioner uniform today, it's just your normal commissioner uniform, basically. It's a 1950s commissioner uniform from Sears and Roebuck I think, and that's about all there is to it. Not much to say about the uniform, but that's the way they look. Commissioners do mostly.
We've had a lot of support in my office from American University and I appreciate that. [Laura Laurent] who teaches a course out here was one of the first to bring me out to this campus and to learn from you during one of his seminars. A gentleman who you know not only writes for The Washington Post, but is a considerable student of mass media as well as a professor here.
Then as a result of that encounter, I met a student here named [Janine Chabane], who subsequently came to work for us in our office. Now Sharon Perry who's here, who's working on the next major project. We have continuing ties with your school and we're grateful for that.
Actually, what I want to share with you today are some thoughts about, well, as I said, about Life and Love and Other Stuff and the role of government in that, and how that kind of gets in the way. What the corporations have to do with it, and how they all combine together with television to make it more difficult for all of us.
I think there are a lot of people throughout our society not just sort of the academic community and the college students, who are asking themselves some very fundamental questions about their own lives and how they lead them. What's come to be characterized as quality of life in our society generally, and what public officials are doing to make it worse or make it better.
I think that in spite of the effort of many politicians to preach class hate and divisiveness. Try to turn the people of our society against each other, which is one of the oldest political [inaudible] in the world. That I think gradually through the music and through our conversations with each other, we're coming to discover that there's some pretty strong underlying themes. Things that all Americans are complaining about, regardless of age, regardless of where they live. Regardless of their educational level, regardless of their politics.
One of the themes, I think, that runs throughout much of the comment that I've heard, is the impact of institutionalism in general. Large institutions and big business in particular, impact upon human values and life itself.
Former secretary of Health Education and Welfare, Robert Finch said and I quote, "Make no mistake about it, the current wave of discontent that pervades the land extends far beyond a handful of young radicals."
You know the literature of rock music well I suspect, and I won't quote those lyrics, but you might not be familiar with this country and western song called Where It's At. "You can have your concrete cities, you can have your poison air, you can have your smoke rolling from the stack. Don't offer me your pity and don't you call me square, just because I see where things have jumped the track."
I think there's some significance to the fact that the country and western music as well as the rock music is making essentially the same complaint. That the music that comes from and is pumped back to the truck drivers and the waitresses is saying very much the same thing that the music is that you all are making and listening to.
What I am trying to do, basically what I am trying, what I am about is trying to encourage the kinds of changes that I see as necessary in our society in an orderly, in a constructive way. I think that destructive change can come about, violence can come about equally from the abstinence of those who adhere blindly to the status quo. As well as from those who encourage violent action.
That in fact, the, those who stand so firmly behind the status quo are the ones that are contributing more to the disorder and the destructive influences in our society. Than those who are prepared to recognize the changes are necessary.
I think we're aware that all industrialized societies, highly urbanized societies, take their toll on the human beings who live there. We're aware of this just by feel, in terms of the impact on our own lives and what's wrong with it. We're aware of it from our conversations with other people.
Those who collect statistics on these things back us up. The rising rates of alcoholism in the United States are now variously estimated somewhere between four and nine million alcoholics in the United States. Clearly the number one drug problem, well, the one that's been very largely overlooked by this administration.
There're more alcoholics in San Francisco alone than there are narcotics addicts in the entire United States. Rates of suicide are increased, it's now the fifth leading cause of death among the age group from 15 to 25. The past 10 years there's been a 52% increase in number of narcotics addicts, the divorce rate is up 50%, crimes against the person have doubled.
Venereal disease is up, as some of you may have seen a report recently, syphilis is up some 26% this year alone over the last year. Number of patients in mental hospitals are up 50%. Now, whether you fall into one of these statistical groups or not, the fact is you're subject to the same kinds of pressures within our society as those who do show up in the statistics. We all feel it one way or another. All I'm saying is that there's a statistical documentation there that to borrow from the country and western song, Something's Jumped The Track.
The general semanticist Alfred [Krowsibski] made a distinction between what he called people who are sane, people who are insane and people who are what he characterized as unsane. He said that most of us fall in the category of the unsane.
We are not really so seriously in difficulty that we are fit for institutions, but we clearly are not functioning as full, whole persons. I think you might just ask yourself, how many people do you know, in your own range of acquaintance who you would think of as fully functioning personalities? People in whose daily life there is, every day, a measure of beauty, of artistic creativity, of some attention to religion or philosophy or whatever you want to call it. Love, a healthy sexual relationship, self fulfilling productivity, physical well-being, joy. A sense of evolution and self development, growth of individuality. There're not many people like that around.
Now those are the sane people, and they're not very many of them. Arnold Kaufman had said, "The gap between rhetoric and reality is so wide. The values actually [inaudible] so unrelated to biological, intellectual and spiritual development in its fullest sense, that an authentically human existence for most Americans is an impossibility."
They're great, many psychiatrists and sociologists, and other social commentators, who have described the forces within our society that tend to discourage the growth and development of the human potential, that each of you possesses. That all of us possess. I think simply to slap the label, "A sick society" on doesn't help very much by itself. I think it is perhaps our every useful summary of what it is these people are talking about.
They're saying that there're pressures within our society that you feel and you must respond to in some way, and will probably respond to in a destructive way. Over which really you have very little control, and that are equally applicable to everybody. Regardless of where he lives, regardless of how much money he's got, regardless of how much education he has, regardless of what political party belongs to.
I think these forces are often first felt by the artists, the creative people in any society. Their antenna, their sensitivity is just orders of magnitude greater than the rest of us. That's why if you want to find out what's going on in almost any age or is about to go on 10 or 20 years down the road, you're more likely to find it in the art than you are in the journalism or in the serious social comment.
Leonard Cohen has said, "I don't believe the radio stations of Russia and America, but I like the music." Which is one way of summarizing what I've been saying about the role of art. I want to emphasize again the tremendous significance I think, from the fact that this discontent and awareness of these pressures is not something that's limited to a small group of liberal, intellectual elite. This is something that every American is talking about in his own way.
Newsweek did a piece about a year ago on Middle America, and quoted a machine tool operator in Milwaukee, describing his life. He said, "Day after day, year after year, climbing those same steps, punching that time card, standing in that same goddamn spot, grinding those same goddamn holes."
That sums it up for an awful lot of people, whether they're drilling holes or whether they're processing forms. Sterile office buildings or sterile factories, it makes a little difference. The fact that some of this expression is not very articulate, the rhetoric is often kind of hard to translate, some of the thinking is kind of muddle-headed, is really beside the point. I think the significant thing is that a good many Americans are coming to share the same concerns at about the same time.
Now, let me say a word about government, because I think it's unfortunate but true that while people have been saying for a good many years that the government isn't working. There's nothing particularly unique about that or anything very partisan about it. But I think it may be a little new, the extent to which people now feel that government is not only not helping with the solutions, but government is actually a very significant part of the problem.
As Lawrence [Florengeti] has written, "Well, the world is a beautiful place to be born into, if you don't mind a few dead minds in the higher places." From a poet to a cabinet officer, "I believe this administration finds itself today embracing a philosophy which appears to lack appropriate concern for the attitude of a great mass of Americans, our young people." That was the letter from Secretary Heckle to President Nixon.
Marshall [McLuhan], "We're approaching the condition of King Oedipus of Thebes. Thebes was a tribal society, and when the king set out about investigating the responsibility for misery and disorder, he found out he was the criminal." Somewhat similar to Pogo's observation, "We have found the enemy and he is us."
Republican Mayor Lindsey, "Either out of ignorance or out of calculated political cynicism. Our citizens are being told that crime will stop if we erase the Bill of Rights, that unity will come if we suppress [inaudible]. That racial conflict will end if we ignore racial justice, and that protest will cease if we intimidate the people who report it."
Finally, [inaudible] monster that some of you may know, "Once the religious, the haunted and weary, chasing the promise of freedom and hope, came to this country to build a new vision, far from the reaches of kingdom and Pope. The spirit it was freedom and justice, its keepers seemed generous and kind. Its leaders were supposed to serve the country, but now they don't pay it no mind."
I could go on with these quotes, but I hope this makes the point. Songwriters reaching diverse audiences, poets, cabinet officers, politicians of the Republican Party, as well as the Democratic Party are reporting that government is simply not doing the job.
Arnold [Toinbee], "Mighty nations that do not respond to the needs of their own people, have traditionally tried to solve problems and overcome frustrations through violence abroad and repression at home. In the process, they have hastened their own exit from center stage. The greatest security problems for a nation are the hostility and frustration of its own citizens." He's read a good deal more history, or perhaps I should say he has written a good deal more history than most of us have read.
Now, how has this come about? I wouldn't argue that the government has no power anymore, that's not true. It makes decisions that affect billions of dollars that flow from the people as consumers and taxpayers, to the largest corporations in the country.
This is in the form of defense contracts, the form of subsidy payments, agricultural, maritime subsidies, others. Oil import quotas contribute some $6 billion a year to the impoverished oil companies of America. Natural gas rates, airline routes, and so forth. When you analyze the federal budget, take all of the expenses of the judicial branch, all of the expenses of the legislative branch, all of the expenses of all the regulatory commissions put together. All the salaries associated with the executive branch agencies in Washington, and total it, you know what that total is? Is a percentage of the federal budget of $200 billion, it's one half of 1%.
One half of 1%, you could become an anarchist and abolish the whole government and you wouldn't notice it on your income tax return. Now, where's all that money going? To the people basically who are funding the elections, who are the same people who are buying the time on television. Who are the same people at fortune list every year as the 500 largest corporations.
Corporations do funny things to people, like institutions generally but corporations in particular, I think. I wrote a poem once about what corporations do to people. I was on an airplane, I was looking at the stewardess, and I was thinking about this stewardess. For that reason I suppose, I called the little poem, Stewardess. It goes as follows, "Business does to its women's bodies what it does to its men's minds. It binds them tightly, snuffing out the free, covering with a uniform, painting any parts that stick out with the company colors and a smile. Making replaceable people with replaceable parts, wigs and brains Inc."
Now, corporations, we find when we start investigating pollution problems, seem to be behind most of the despoiling of the air, and the water, and the land. They tend to be like war, unhealthy for children and other living things. Indeed they are more than like war, they are war. Because profit knows no ideology, you can make as much money bombing people as you can subsequently make burying them.
You can make as much money giving them poison gas as giving them anesthesia [inaudible]. Whenever morality is measured only in dollars, no appeal to human values is ever going to make much sense. There seems to be almost no way of reaching the consciousness of a corporate executive, which makes one wonder whether it exists at all.
Which prompted Paddy Chayefsky the author of Marty to write in a delightful play called The Latent Heterosexual. The following comment from Dr. Klein who plays a role in that play, and he's talking about a corporate official who's his patient, who was not responding to a visitor, and the doctor explains, "He responds, as I have explained only to stimuli affecting his corporation. That's the thing you see is, he's totally identified with his corporation, and I'm sure if you talk to him about his corporation, he'll hear and understand you and might even talk to you. But otherwise he has no sensory faculties at all."
Now, that brings us to the matter of television, because basically the same people who own the corporations, own the government, own the television. Let me say by way of disclaimer at this point that I don't think there's anything wrong with having a few men in institutions, in our society are hell bent on increasing profit year after year. We have some useful things that have come about as a result of that. The problem as I see it is that we've turned everything over to the corporations.
Time owns life. Our colleges, our churches, our foundations, our public broadcasting stations tend to be presided over by the same guys who decide what automobiles we're going to drive, and what breakfast cereals our children are going to eat. They publish our school books, then they own most of the artistic talent. And they have little hesitation in censoring the copy of both.
But I think that its corporate domination of television that is perhaps our nation's single greatest tragedy. Lest you doubt the tie, let me read to you from the Procter and Gamble editorial policy, and I quote, "There will be no material that may give offense either directly or by influence to any commercial organization of any sort. There will be no material on any of our programs which could in any way further the concept of businesses cold, ruthless and lacking all sentiment or spiritual motivation."
Which prompts Mason Williams to put the whole thing much more succinctly, "Television is a pimp for big business." [Fairfax Cone], an advertising executive upon leaving an agency, making great profit out of selling cigarettes to American people, contributing to 300,000 needless deaths a year. As he walked out the door and asked why he was leaving, said simply, "I guess I just don't think it's right to make a profit out of killing people." But how about the fellers that stayed?
Now, if all of you could say about corporate television was just that there are a small group of men who are getting rich beyond their wildest dreams of avarice. By failing to provide the public service the use of public property requires as a matter of law, we can deal with the matter on those terms.
In point of fact however, it's much more serious situation than that. Here again, some quotes that may give you a bit of the idea, Mason Williams once again, "Network television wants to keep you stupid so that you'll watch it." Eric [Barnouw], in a sense, making the same kind of a point but in a somewhat heavier way. This is in The Image Empire, you, I presume all of us knew three-volume history of broadcasting. "The overwhelming absorption of tens of millions of mid 20th century Americans in football games and struggles against cattle rustlers was a political achievement."
"The overwhelming absorption of tens of millions of mid 20th century Americans in football games and struggles against cattle rustlers was a political achievement in a class with the imperial Roman policy of bread and circuses." The meaning of that's going to come through to you as we go on.
This is an open letter to CBS from George Clayton Johnson, "When censorship is exercised at the format level, no further censorship is required. It is not possible to write anything of burning importance on Gomer Pyle or Green Acres." Edward R. Murrow, "I invite your attention to the television schedules of all networks between the hours of 8:00 and 11:00 PM Eastern Time. Here you will find only fleeting and spasmodic reference to the fact that this nation is in mortal danger."
That was before Ed Murrow had died from lung cancer from smoking the cigarettes that CBS, I understand, advertised immediately following the announcement of his death on CBS Radio.
Censorship is just the most obvious and easily understood of television's effort to distort reality in our lives. I was recently censored on a station up the street as some of you may know. Two sentences cut out of the heart of an argument regarding television's unfortunate influence, and our perception about the role of women in our society. It was not simply the excising of what they claim to be an offensive phrase, one that I have uttered on the other two networks and numerous stations around the country without any seeming problem.
I think what is, censorship you can deal with, at least if you see it and you're aware of it. What's much more subtle and pervasive and invidious is the anesthetizing effective television. The mere act of television watching to begin with was a passive act, regardless of what's on the tube.
Now, if it is true as Eric [Froam] and [Rollo] May and others are telling us, that the sense of passivity, of alienation, sense of powerlessness, are among the most dangerous epidemics our society has ever known. Like the television set, you just simply must be suspect at the outset.
See, television could help us to lead more interesting, more informed, more fulfilling lives, it doesn't. Television could even say something like, "We interrupt this program to bring you a special announcement. The sun is now setting, it's a much more beautiful, colorful site than anything that we can offer you, and we urge you to turn off your set and go outdoors and watch it. We will temporarily suspend broadcasting until dark." Even that, you see, would be something.
(Silence).
Rollo May says, "There is such a thing as psychological suicide, and which one does not take his own life by a given act, but dies because he has chosen perhaps without being entirely aware of it, not to live." Has chosen not to live. That I would urge is what television is trying to get you to do, to die because you have chosen not to live. You've chosen to sit in passivity and watch the television screen.
Television gives us a fantasy world that's presented as reality, that is almost diabolically constructed to increase rather than decrease mental illness, frustration, anxiety, despair. Especially when on those rare occasions we leave our television sets and go out into that other world.
Eric [Sevaughrei] just said, "The biggest, big business in America is not steel, automobiles or television. It is the manufacture, refinement and distribution of anxiety. Logically extended, this process can only terminate in mass nervous breakdown or in a collective condition of resentment." Isn't that precisely what we're in today?
Mason Williams and his new book Flavors, excuse me, has a section called Autobiography, which is the story of his life and automobiles. Which he concludes by saying, "We are like a racehorse shot full of speed to make us run harder than is good for us, to win for the owners and lose for ourselves. To win the race only for the price of the chance to run."
Because what the commercials are selling us along with the products, is the sense that our worth as individuals is dependent upon the consumption, the acquisition of physical things, of products. We're being force fed a diet that is almost inevitably doomed, to make our self realization as human beings more difficult.
We're being sold models and ideals that are mass produced, and even if they fit us, which they don't, they still would not be our own. There're a lot of examples I could use, what television is doing to poor people, blacks, so forth. Let me just say a word about children, and about women, because I think we can conclude if television has little concern for either of those groups in our midst, it's not going to have much care for the rest of us.
Excuse me, listen to what this businessman has to say, his attitude about children. "It takes time conditioning the reflexes of children, yes, but if you expect to be in business for any length of time, think what it can mean to your firm in profits. If you can condition a million or 10 million children who will grow up into adults, trained to buy your product as soldiers are trained to advance when they hear the trigger words, "Forward march."
Joe [Selden], "Manipulation of children's minds in the fields of religion or politics, would touch off a parental storm of protest, a rash of congressional investigations. But in the world of commerce, children are fair game and legitimate prey."
When Casper [Weinberger] was chairman of the Federal Trade Commission, he reported that by the time the average American reaches the age of 18, he will have been exposed to 350,000 television commercial messages.
The networks help this along by permitting themselves, under their own code of good practices, to program twice as many commercials per hour to the kiddies on Saturday morning, as to their parents on Saturday night. Basically the commercials and the programs, I would contend, are training young children to continue an infantile withdrawal from the world, a dependence upon fantasy, and commitment to the hedonistic standards of conspicuous consumption. That are being preached to them by their corporate elders.
A woman who was president of an advertising agency in New York concedes, "No force has demeaned women more than advertising." This is a subject that's received increasing attention in recent months and I predict will continue to over the years to come, as the women's liberation organizations are focusing, appropriately I would say, more and more attention on the role of media. In creating the problems of employment, and of the perception and role of women generally in our society. The extent to which these problems derive almost entirely out of, the role of women as portrayed in commercials on television and in television programs.
What employer watching primetime television would consider employing a woman in any job other than a typical female role in our society? A stewardess, or a nurse, or a housewife, or something of that sort. That's all he ever sees on television, that's what television tells him constantly, "Mr. Employer, these are the kinds of jobs women do."
This is Dona Keek, from the book The Art of Maiming Women, "Many of us break our backs trying to realize the dream, the synthesis of housewife sex mate. Many of us fall along the way victims of nervous breakdowns, schizophrenia, and sheer exhaustion. But few realize the oppression of the system, which propels them unrelentlessly towards rotten goals."
I would contend, gentlemen, that men are robbed equally with women by this portrayal. Men and women can help each other to be each other better, only if each perceives the other as a whole person. Furthermore, of course, we've got our own problems, particularly in a society in which we are constantly pumped all this masculinity stuff, at the same time they're trying ... worth of cosmetic products.
Well, where's it all going? Where am I going? I'm about to end. Eric Froam has summed it up fairly well, I think, "There is a growing polarization occurring in the United States and in the whole world. There're those who are attracted to force, law and order, bureaucratic methods, and eventually to non-life. Those with a deep longing for life, for new attitudes rather than for ready made schemes and blueprints. This new front is a movement which combines the wish for a profound changes in our economic and social practice, with changes in our psychic and spiritual approach to life."
"In its most general form, its aim is the activation of the individual, the restoration of man's control over the social system, the humanization of technology. It is a movement in the name of life, and it has such a broad and common base, because the threat to life is today a threat not to one class or to one nation, but a threat to all."
Lawrence [Felengeti] has written, "I am waiting for someone to really discover America." I think there're a lot of us out on that search today. Paul Goodman, "Give people bread and let them make their own circuses." John Lennon, "We're going to send two acorns for peace to every world leader," from John and Yoko, "Perhaps if they plant them and watch them grow, they may get the idea into their heads."
Central to this is a new way of approaching what the corporations are trying to do to your heads. The role of possessions in your life, because if you're going to set out to find out who you really are, it can't be something that you buy in the non-conformists store. You can't walk in and buy all the latest non-conformists posters and records, and bell bottoms, see, and get it over with.
What you're really talking about is the rebirth of the human personality, sort of a blend of philosophy and psychiatry, and poetry, and politics. Something you have to personally experience and work through. Central to this is a self determination, and power and control over your life, and a simplicity that is really totally at odds with most of the products that you're being asked to buy.
I don't know how many of you here brush your teeth with baking soda, but let me tell you it's a whole lot cheaper than toothpaste and does a lot better job. If you ever do start brushing your teeth with baking soda, you're going to give up toothpaste because your mouth taste so lousy after you brush with toothpaste after you've been used to baking soda.
A baking soda comes in a little box, it sells for 14 cents if you buy it at a suburban supermarket, and if you buy it in the ghetto or in a small store, it's probably about 20 cents. But it's still a good buy. Because in addition to being able to brush your teeth with it, you can use it for sort of a kitchen cleanser, you can use it for a mouthwash. You can use it for bath salts, you can use it for room freshener. You can use it for burns, you make children's clay out of it. It's much better than Alka-Seltzer as stomach settler.
You don't need all them jars and bottles, and spray cans, and all that stuff, you really don't. See, you got your little box of baking soda and it does it all for 14 cents.
Audience: [inaudible].
Nick: ARM AND HAMMER, well, this is one of the few commercials in here, I have one other commercial. Well, I'll read it now, the other commercial, that was a commercial for ARM AND HAMMER baking soda, 14 cents. This is sort of a, since everything today is brought to us by somebody, you noticed that? History now is purchased by the large corporations, the walk on the moon, "Brought to you by the Gulf Oil Company."
No wonder 20% of the people polled who had watched the moonwalk thought it was all a hoax. They didn't believe it, they didn't think we'd ever been to the moon, it was just to show that Gulf Oil put on. Everything's brought to you by somebody now, so I decided that this speech should be brought to you by somebody too besides ARM AND HAMMER, because that's scarcely a product. Anytime you get a whole box of something for 14 cents, they're doing you a favor rather than the other way around, which is usually the case.
This is Mason Williams commercial, this is kind of a commercial for commercials, it kind of covers all products. This is out of his book called, The Mason Williams FCC Rapport, which he came in laid on us with a guitar and the whole bit last year. "At last, new from us, this amazing dramatic proof. There, see, you can it's easy, yes. You mean America's favorite modern families? Yes, because they use that other stuff [inaudible], but without the special ingredient of a magic formula, now available in two sizes, fresh and moist. And especially made so effectively light and lovely that the leading new word for all you ladies combined with their report is a timely message of less than a minute, and quick to fix from now on."
"So why not try big tough super flakes, a special interest for all you guys with twice the power and vitamins necessary for a high rate of saturated [inaudible] that is free for a limited time only with every, hey."
Well, you look around for other products, see, that you really need and you figure that out for yourself. But now there're other things you can do, take bicycle riding for example, that's a good example. Now, why do you ride a bicycle? Well, I don't know why you ride bicycle, if you ride a, you probably don't ride a bicycle, you have this Corvette car.
Once I was out in LA doing a show with Mason and after we finished we we're going up to his house, and I had this rented car. Because I don't my renting them, when I want to use them, I don't mind, I just don't want to keep them and water and feeding them all the time for them guys that are trying to sell them to me.
I had the Chevrolet and we went out to get in the car and I said, "Mason, I won't apologize to you because I got this red Chevrolet, see, and I know how you feel about Chevrolet." He went up, kind of knocked on it, and he said, "Nick," he says, "It's not the way I feel about Chevrolet," he says, "It's the way General Motors feels about me."
He said, "Anybody make a car like that and try to sell it to me would rape my mother in front of me and make me watch," see. That's what you got [inaudible] kind of get that feel for what it's all about. I don't ride a bicycle because I really think that I'd like to bomb a General Motors auto plant but I don't have the courage, see. I don't do it out of great personal sacrifice, I don't even necessarily do it because of a desire to protest politically, the fact that General Motors is responsible for most of the air pollution by tonnage in the United States.
It's like people describe giving up cigarettes, you just wake up one morning and suddenly you realize you just don't want to start the day with another automobile. It just got a bad feel to it. You finally realize that you don't need General Motors, they need you. They need you to drive their cars for them.
You're driving for Detroit, and they're not even paying you, you're paying them. It's not, don't think twice, it's all right, it's not you don't like cars necessarily, just part of your life it's all over with, that's all. You've moved on to something else. You ride a bicycle because it feels good, feels good.
I think riding a bicycle along the canal feels especially good. I have that brought home to me every once in a while when I've been riding in the streets and I get to feeling bad in my head. [inaudible] bad thoughts and I don't think right about life and everything, and I have to get kind of depressed and finally I get to analyze it, what's wrong? I say, "What's wrong man, is you haven't been riding on a canal."
So I went down the canal yesterday, man, it was so beautiful. The sun was out and the fish were jumping, and the birds were flying around, and there's all that water, and them trees. All that stuff just sitting there, see, that's really nice. But you got to experience it to understand it. The air feels good on you, even the rain feels good.
Pretty soon you're pumped and then your blood starts moving around your body, and your head starts feeling good. You don't need aspirin or any of that stuff, head starts feeling good. You start looking and you can really see things you didn't see before, and you hear things you didn't hear before.
Pretty soon, little original tunes to sort of suit the moment and the mood start coming along, you start whistling them out your mouth. The words get caught in that web of poetry inside your head, and you start thinking nice things. Furthermore, you've got the good feeling that comes from knowing you've got a little bit of your life back. You're handling your own transportation for yourself.
William James has observed, "Lives based on having are less free than lives based either on doing or on being." That's a very important concept. The Bhagavad Gita says, "The man who abandons all pride of possession reaches the goal of peace supreme."
All these objects are really a drag, they draw from you but they don't give anything back, they drain you. Charlie Reich has recently written about Consciousness III and The Greening of America and all that. I agree with much of what he's saying, the only place I guess I disagree is that I think that this is a great new political movement that's somehow going to change things. I think we're still going to need social action and legislative reform.
That's where you come in because you've got to make a choice about your life, not only for yourself, but for the rest of the country. Because whether you like it or not, you're a privileged few, and how you go, so goes an awful lot of other people in this country.
I'm afraid that most of us, the reason why I don't think Charlie Reich's [inaudible] hope is going to see realization in terms of political change. Is that most people I think would really rather continue to tell themselves that they really want to drive that car. They want to smoke those cigarettes, and they want to use that hairspray.
I think under it all or maybe in part, the fear that if they went out in search of themselves, they might just come back empty handed. But if you're interested in doing something about it, it seems to me the answer is to be found, in trying to find those places where you can break through, break out of the interlock system of corporate control over your life.
Maybe bicycle riding is totally impractical for you, getting your transportation back. Okay, do something else, I don't care, it's your choice. Make some food, make some of your own clothes, make some pottery, do whatever you enjoy.
The other night, I made some applesauce, first time I ever made applesauce. Applesauce came out all right. Canned it too, half gallon jar, made some apple butter too, and it came out all right. Lots of cinnamon and stuff in it. Tried some apple jelly and didn't work, didn't gel. Took it out of the jar, [inaudible] tried it again the next night, put in the Sure Jell, still didn't work. Using it for pancake syrup's pretty good.
You can't get all these bits and pieces of your life back. Because if you start living, leading your whole life all by yourself and not selling off little bits of it to other people to live for you, then you wouldn't have any time left over to write, read the poetry, see. That's one of the advantages of living in the city.
The point is you've got to get some of it back, it's got to be your life that you're leading. You've got to consume things because you need them, not because some corporation needs you to buy them. See, the whole thing is interlocked and that's what you got to understand, it all goes together.
The air conditioning and this uniform that I got on, and automobiles, and the restaurants, and the underarm deodorant. The cocktail parties, the suburban homes, the wall-to-wall carpeting, really, each is interlocked and interdependent on the other. It's breaking out of that thing, any little bit of piece of it that is so hard to do.
See, you can't very well ride a bicycle to work if you don't have a shower there, unless you can wear [inaudible] clothes. If some guy says, "You can't wear them clothes around here feller," then you either got to sit around all sweaty all day long in a business suit, see, or give up the bicycle.
Or you're living in a city where you're way out in the suburbs somewhere and it's 75 miles into work every day, which is kind of impractical to ride a bicycle. But that's not really your fault, and your problem is to try to figure out how you can beat that.
I remember one night, Mason and I were staying around his house deciding what we were going to do for dinner. We finally decided if we went out to eat, we'd have to get dressed up first, so we didn't want to get dressed up, so we'd stay at his house and make dinner. Almost anything that happens, prompts Mason to be reflective, and this did. He said, he concluded the reason why you have to dress up and go out to dinner, is that the same people that own the restaurants, own the clothing stores.
Well, I've taken up enough of your time, let me just say a little more of a way of wrapping this up. I think there're a lot of people in this country a whole lot smarter than I am. Who are professional students of psychiatry and sociology, and social problems of various kinds, who are telling us that we're in a lot of danger as a people, and as a society.
20 years ago, they predicted the incidence of social disintegration that we're now seeing in the statistics, we're now reading in our daily newspapers. They told us these things were going to happen, because they said, "You can't treat people that way, they're going to turn vicious and mean, they're going to become alienated, they're going to get violent. Their lives aren't going to make sense to them, and they're going to do a whole lot of weird, wacky things that are going to hurt the society as well as themselves. You just can't do people that way. You can't manipulate them with advertising and corporate demands for conspicuous consumption and expect this to go on happily ever after."
Quality of life in this country has been thought of as simply another way of talking about getting the smoke out of the air. The trouble with that is, it's not that it's not a good idea, but you're really talking not about the quality of human life, you're talking about the quality of animal life. Because pollution is bad for cows and citrus trees too, everybody's got to have fresh air.
When you're talking about quality of life for human beings, you're talking about the [inaudible] inside your head, and as you start looking around to find out why it all happened. You just, you find out that the same guys that are putting the garbage in the air, are putting the garbage in your head. The same people that are putting the smoke in the air for you to breathe, selling you the cigarettes to put their smoke in your lungs, have no more respect for your mind than they have for the rest of your body. You got to understand that, [inaudible] self defensive operation.
[Abbie] Hoffman's right when he says, "The revolution is inside your head." I think we've long past the time in our society when we can talk as if these things were just a matter of sort of romanticism, or idealism, or naive hopes. We've passed that time. Because concern for a society in which the human being can grow and develop the element of which he is capable, to experience joy and love and productivity and all the rest that goes with human existence. Is not only now an economic possibility, and therefore it ought to be done. It is not just a moral imperative, and therefore it ought to be done, it's essential if we're going to continue as a society.
We're not talking about luxury anymore, I see every day the contribution of television to this destruction. Much of my energy goes to trying to improve the contribution of television to our lives. That's what the little paperback kind of talk back to your television set is all about, on which I should mention I get no royalties, so that's not a commercial message.
I think we need to talk more about our personal lives, we who are in government. I think if a government official is incapable of experiencing love and talking about life, you're not very good at making laws either. And we're all doomed to have bad lives as well as bad laws. That's why I shared a little bit of this personal stuff with you.
But let me say obviously, I realize nobody's got the answer, I certainly don't. The answer is that the answer changes, the answer is a searching in large measure [inaudible] the process. If you find any of this helpful and comfortable to your own values and where your head's at now, you're welcome to it. If you don't, well, then I'd suggest you forget it, and you do it your way. Because you're going to have to and because it's best, but don't forget to write and tell me how it all turned out. Thank you.
Audience: [crosstalk]. I'll do [inaudible] you want, I just [crosstalk] a lot of people [crosstalk] leave.
Speaker 3: The commissioner has been nice enough to stay around to answer some questions, but you're all invited in 10 minutes ...