第10章 Marie, Marie, Hold On Tight

Henry Mackie, Edward Asher and Howard Ettle braved a rainstorm to demonstrate against the human condition on Wednesday, April 26 (and Marie, you should have used waterproof paint; the signs were a mess after half an hour). They began at St. John the Precursor on 69th Street at 1:30 pm picketing with signs bearing the slogans MAN DIES! / THE BODY IS DISGUST! / COGITO ERGO NOTHING! / ABANDON LOVE! and handing out announcements of Henry Mackies lecture at the Playmor Lanes the next evening. There was much interest among bystanders in the vicinity of the church. A man who said his name was William Rochester came up to give encouragement: "Thats the way!" he said. At about 1:50 a fat, richly dressed beadle emerged from the church to dispute our right to picket. He had dewlaps which shook unpleasantly and, I am sorry to say, did not look like a good man.

"All right," he said, "now move on, you have to move along, you cant picket us!" He said that the church had never been picketed, that it could not be picketed without its permission, that it owned the sidewalk, and that he was going to call the police. Henry Mackie, Edward Asher and Howard Ettle had already obtained police permission for the demonstration through a fortunate bit of foresight; and we confirmed this by showing him our slip that we had obtained at Police Headquarters. The beadle was intensely irritated at this and stormed back inside the church to report to someone higher up. Henry Mackie said, "Well, get ready for the lightning bolt," and Edward Asher and Howard Ettle laughed.

Interest in the demonstration among walkers on 69th Street increased and a number of people accepted our leaflet and began to ask the pickets questions such as "What do you mean?" and "Were you young men raised in the church?" The pickets replied to these questions quietly but firmly and in as much detail as casual passersby could be expected to be interested in. Some of the walkers made taunting remarks -- "Cogito ergo your ass" is one I remember -- but the demeanor of the pickets was exemplary at all times, even later when things began, as Henry Mackie put it, "to get a little rough." (Marie, you would have been proud of us.) People who care about the rights of pickets should realize that these rights are threatened mostly not by the police, who generally do not molest you if you go through the appropriate bureaucratic procedures such as getting a permit, but by individuals who come up to you and try to pull your sign out of your hands or, in one case, spit at you. The man who did th e latter was, surprisingly, very well dressed. What could be happening within an individual like that? He didnt even ask questions as to the nature or purpose of the demonstration, just spat and walked away. He didnt say a word. We wondered about him.

At about 2 PM a very high-up official in a black clerical suit emerged from the church and asked us if we had ever heard of Kierkegaard. It was raining on him just as it was on the pickets but he didnt seem to mind. "This demonstration displays a Kierkegaardian spirit which I understand," he said, and then requested that we transfer our operations to some other place. Henry Mackie had a very interesting discussion of about ten minutes duration with this official during which photographs were taken by the New York Post, Newsweek and CBS Television whom Henry Mackie had alerted prior to the demonstration. The photographers made the churchman a little nervous but you have to hand it to him, he maintained his phony attitude of polite interest almost to the last. He said several rather bromidic things like "The human condition is the given, its what we do with it that counts" and "The body is simply the temple wherein the soul dwells" which Henry Mackie countered with his famous question "W hy does it have to be that way?" which has dumbfounded so many orthodox religionists and thinkers and with which he first won us (the other pickets) to his banner in the first place.

"Why?" the churchman exclaimed. It was clear that he was radically taken aback. "Because it is that way. You have to deal with what is. With reality." "But why does it have to be that way?" Henry Mackie repeated, which is the technique of the question, which used in this way is unanswerable. A blush of anger and frustration crossed the churchmans features (it probably didnt register on your TV screen, Marie, but I was there, I saw it -- it was beautiful).

"The human condition is a fundamental datum," the cleric stated. "It is immutable, fixed and changeless. To say otherwise. . ." "Precisely," Henry Mackie said, "why it must be challenged." "But," the cleric said, "it is Gods will." "Yes," Henry Mackie said significantly.

The churchman then retired into his church, muttering and shaking his head. The rain had damaged our signs somewhat but the slogans were still legible and we had extra signs cached in Edward Ashers car anyway. A number of innocents crossed the picket line to worship including several who looked as if they might be from the FBI. The pickets had realized in laying their plans the danger that they might be taken for Communists. This eventuality was provided for by the mimeographed leaflets which carefully explained that the pickets were not Communists and cited Edward Ashers and Howard Ettles Army service including Ashers Commendation Ribbon. "We, as you, are law-abiding American citizens who support the Constitution and pay taxes," the leaflet says. "We are simply opposed to the ruthless way in which the human condition has been imposed on organisms which have done nothing to deserve it and are unable to escape it. Why does it have to be that way?" The leaflet goes on to discuss, in simp le language, the various unfortunate aspects of the human condition including death, unseemly and degrading bodily functions, limitations on human understanding, and the chimera of love. The leaflet concludes with the section headed "What Is To Be Done?" which Henry Mackie says is a famous revolutionary catchword and which outlines, in clear, simple language, Henry Mackies program for the reification of the human condition from the ground up.

A Negro lady came up, took one of the leaflets, read it carefully and then said: "They look like Communists to me!" Edward Asher commented that no matter how clearly things were explained to the people, the people always wanted to believe you were a Communist. He said that when he demonstrated once in Miami against vivisection of helpless animals he was accused of being a Nazi Communist which was, he explained, a contradiction in terms. He said ladies were usually the worst.

By then the large crowd that had gathered when the television men came had drifted away. The pickets therefore shifted the site of the demonstration to Rockefeller Plaza in Rockefeller Center via Edward Ashers car. Here were many people loafing, digesting lunch etc. and we used the spare signs which had new messages including

WHY ARE YOU STANDING WHERE YOU ARE STANDING? THE SOUL IS NOT! NO MORE ART CULTURE LOVE REMEMBER YOU ARE DUST! The rain had stopped and the flowers smelled marvelously fine. The pickets took up positions near a restaurant (I wish youd been there, Marie, because it reminded me of something, something you said that night we went to Bloomingdales and bought your new cerise-colored bathing suit: "The color a new baby has," you said, and the flowers were like that, some of them). People with cameras hanging around their necks took pictures of us as if they had never seen a demonstration before. The pickets remarked among themselves that it was funny to think of the tourists with pictures of us demonstrating in their scrapbooks in California, Iowa, Michigan, people we didnt know and who didnt know us or care anything about the demonstration or, for that matter, the human condition itself, in which they were so steeped that they couldnt stand off and look at it and know it for what it was. "Its a paradigmatic situation," Henry Mackie said, "exemplifying the distance between the potential knowers holdi ng a commonsense view of the world and what is to be known, which escapes them as they pursue their mundane existences."

At this time (2:45 PM) the demonstrators were approached by a group of youths between the ages I would say of sixteen and twenty-one. They were dressed in hood jackets, T-shirts, tight pants etc. and were very obviously delinquents from bad environments and broken homes where they had received no love. They ringed the pickets in a threatening manner. There were about seven of them. The leader (and Marie, he wasnt the oldest; he was younger than some of them, tall, with a peculiar face, blank and intelligent at the same time) walked around looking at our signs with exaggerated curiosity. "What are you guys," he said finally, "some kind of creeps or something?" Henry Mackie replied quietly that the pickets were American citizens pursuing their right to demonstrate peaceably under the Constitution. The leader looked at Henry Mackie. "Youre flits, you guys, huh?" he said. He then snatched a handful of leaflets out of Edward Ashers hands, and when Edward Asher attempted to recover them, danced away out of reach while two others stood in Ashers way. "What do you flits think youre doin?" he said. "What is this shit?" "You havent got any right. . ." Henry Mackie started to say, but the leader of the youths moved very close to him then. "What do you mean, you dont believe in God?" he said. The other ones moved in closer too. "That is not the question," Henry Mackie said. "Belief or nonbelief is not at issue. The situation remains the same whether you believe or not. The human condition is. . ." "Listen," the leader said, "I thought all you guys went to church every day. Now you tell me that flits dont believe in God. You putting me on?" Henry Mackie repeated that belief was not involved, and said that it was, rather, a question of man helpless in the grip of a definition of himself that he had not drawn, that could not be altered by human action, and that was in fundamental conflict with every human notion of what should obtain. The pickets were simply subjecting this state of affairs to a radical questioning, he said. "Youre putting me on," the youth said, and attempted to kick Henry Mackie in the groin, but Mackie turned away in time. However the other youths then jumped the pickets, right in the middle of Rockefeller Center. Henry Mackie was thrown to the pavement and kicked repeatedly in the head, Edward Ashers coat was ripped off his back and he sustained many blows in the kidneys and elsewhere, and Howard Ettle was given a broken rib by a youth called "Cutter" who shoved him against a wall and smashed him viciously even though bystanders tried to interfere (a few of them). All this happened in a very short space of time. The pickets signs were broken and smashed and their leaflets scattered everywhere. A policeman summoned by bystanders tried to catch the youths but they got away through the lobby of the Associated Press building and he returned empty-handed. Medical aid was summoned for the pickets. Photos were taken. "Senseless violence," Edward Asher said later. "They didnt understand that. . ." "On the contrary," Henry Mackie said, "they understand everything better than anybody." The next evening, at 8 PM Henry Mackie delivered his lecture in the upstairs meeting room at the Playmor Lanes, as had been announced in the leaflet. The crowd was very small but attentive and interested. Henry Mackie had his head bandaged in a white bandage. He delivered his lecture titled "What Is To Be Done?" with good diction and enunciation and in a strong voice. He was very eloquent. And eloquence, Henry Mackie says, is really all any of us can hope for.