Which was all pure crapperoo. Obviously, Hagbard had gone to court as a lawyer for the Indians, but that one touch of shame in him had kept him from admitting to Stella that he had once been a lawyer, so he made up that bit about being the engineer on the dam to explain how he got involved in the case.
"He helped them move when they were dispossessed." I could see bronze men and women moving in twilight, a hill in the background. "This was a long time ago, back in the '50s, I think. (Hagbard was a hell of a lot older than he looked.) One Indian was carrying a raccoon he said was his grandfather. He was a very old man himself. He said Grandfather could remember General Washington and how he changed after he became President. (He would be there tonight, that being who had once been George Washington and Adam Weishaupt: he of whom Hitler had said, "He is already among us. He is intrepid and terrible. I am afraid of him.") Hagbard says he kept thinking of Patrick Henry, the one man who saw what had happened at the Constitutional Convention. It was Henry who had looked at the Constitution and said right away, 'I smell a rat. It squints toward monarchy.' The Old Indian, whose name was Uncle John Feather, said that Grandfather, when he was a man, could speak to all animals. He said the Mohawk Nation was more than the living, it was the soul and the soil joined together. When the land was taken, some of the soul died. He said that was why he couldn't speak to all animals but only to those who had once been part of his family." The soul is in the blood, moving the blood. It is in the night especially. Nutley is a typical Catholic-dominated New Jersey town, and the Dorns are Baptists, so I was hemmed in two ways, but even as a boy I used to walk along the Passaic looking for Indian arrowheads, and the soul would move when I found one. Who was the anthropologist who thought the Ojibway believed all rocks were alive? A chief had straightened him out: "Open your eyes," he said, "and you'll see which rocks are alive." We haven't had our Frobenius yet, American anthropology is like virgins writing about sex.
"I know who the Martian is," Coin crooned in a singsong. "But I'm not telling. Not yet." That man who was either the most successful or the most unsuccessful assassin of the 20th century and who had raped me (which was supposed to destroy my manhood forever according to some idiots) was smashed out of his skull and he looked so happy that I was happy for him.
"Hagbard," Stella went on, "stood there like a tree. He was paralyzed. Finally, old Uncle John Feather asked what was the matter."
Stella leaned forward, her face more richly black against the golden octopus on the wall. "Hagbard had foreseen the ecological catastrophe. He had seen the rise of the Welfare State, Warrior Liberalism (as he calls it) and the spread of Marxism out of Russia across the world. He saw why it all had to happen, with or without the Illuminati helping it along. He understood the Snafu Principle."
He had worked all that night, after explaining to Uncle John Feather that he was troubled in his heart at the tragedy of the Mohawk (not mentioning the more enormous tragedy coming at the planet, the tragedy which the old man understood already in his own terms); hard work, carrying pitiful cheap furniture from cabins onto trucks, tying whole households' possessions with tough ropes; he was sweating and winded when they finished shortly before dawn. The next day, he had burned his naturalization papers and put the ashes in an envelope addressed to the President of the United States, with a brief note: "Everything relevant is ruled irrelevant. Everything material is ruled immaterial. An ex-citizen." The ashes of his Army Reserve discharge went to the Secretary of Defense with a briefer note: "Non serviam. An ex-slave." That year's income tax form went to the Secretary of the Treasury, after he wiped his ass on it; the note said: "Try robbing a poor box. Der Einziege." His fury still mounting, he grabbed his copy of Das Kapital off the bookshelf, smiling bitterly at the memory of his sarcastic marginal notes, scrawled "Without private property there is no private life" on the flyleaf, and mailed it to Josef Stalin in the Kremlin. Then he buzzed his secretary, gave her three months pay in lieu of notice of dismissal and walked out of his law office forever. He had declared war on all governments of the world.
His afternoon was spent giving away his savings, which at that time amounted to seventy thousand dollars. Some he gave to drunks on the street, some to little boys or little girls in parks; when the Stock Exchange closed, he was on Wall Street, handing out fat bundles of bills to the wealthiest-looking men he could spot, telling them, "Enjoy it. Before you die, it won't be worth shit." That night he slept on a bench hi Grand Central Terminal; in the morning, flat broke, he signed on as A.B.S. aboard a merchant ship to Norway.
That summer he tramped across Europe working as tourist guide, cook, tutor, any odd job that fell his way, but mostly talking and listening. About politics. He heard that the Marshall Plan was a sneaky way of robbing Europe under the pretense of helping it; that Stalin would have more trouble with Tito than he had had with Trotsky; that the Viet Minh would surrender soon and the French would retake Indo-China; that nobody in Germany was a Nazi anymore; that everybody in Germany was still a Nazi; that Dewey would unseat Truman easily.
During his last walking tour of Europe, in the 1930s, he had heard that Hitler only wanted Czechoslovakia and would do anything to avoid war with England; that Stalin's troubles with Trotsky would never end; that all Europe would go socialist after the next war; that America would certainly enter the war when it came; that America would certainly stay out of the war when it came.
One idea had remained fairly constant, however, and he heard it everywhere. That idea was that more government, tougher government, more honest government was the answer to all human problems.
Hagbard began making notes for the treatise that later became Never Whistle While You're Pissing. He began with a section that he later moved to the middle of the book:
It is now theoretically possible to link the human nervous system into a radio network so that, micro-miniaturized receivers being implanted in people's brains, the messages coming out of these radios would be indistinguishable to the subjects from the voice of their own thoughts. One central transmitter, located in the nation's capital, could broadcast all day long what the authorities wanted the people to believe. The average man on the receiving end of these broadcasts would not even know he was a robot; he would think it was his own voice he was listening to. The average woman could be treated similarly.
It is ironic that people will find such a concept both shocking and frightening. Like Orwell's 1984, this is not a fantasy of the future but a parable of the present. Every citizen in every authoritarian society already has such a "radio" built into his or her brain. This radio is the little voice that asks, each time a desire is formed, "Is it safe? Will my wife (my husband/my boss/my church/my community) approve? Will people ridicule and mock me? Will the police come and arrest me?" This little voice the Freudians call "The Superego," with Freud himself vividly characterized as "the ego's harsh master." With a more functional approach, Peris, Hefferline and Goodman, in Gestalt Therapy, describe this process as "a set of conditioned verbal habits."
This set, which is fairly uniform throughout any authoritarian society, determines the actions which will, and will not, occur there. Let us consider humanity a biogram {the basic DNA blueprint of the human organism and its potentials) united with a logogram (this set of "conditioned verbal habits"). The biogram has not changed in several hundred thousand years; the logogram is different in each society. When the logogram reinforces the biogram, we have a libertarian society, such as still can be found among some American Indian tribes. Like Confucianism before it became authoritarian and rigidified, American Indian ethics is based on speaking from the heart and acting from the heart-'that is, from the biogram.