March 15, 2008
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Tom Forçade's smuggling funds High Times
Tom's Phoenix was a mix of psychedelic pages like the San Francisco Oracle (produced as frequently as its zonked-out artists could get it together) and hard-headed assessments of the underground itself. It defined the enemy as "ourselves, our parents, our popularly elected government (Johnson got the greatest landslide in history)" and observed that instead of being under cover, the modern activist was often more publicity agent than street fighter. "The technique now", Phoenix declared, "is to work on minds as well as bodies, an extension of Thoreau-Gandhi's non-violent techniques for effecting change". As the magazine pointed out, the underground press was part of the scene rather than merely reporting on it, and despite having achieved what was then estimated to be several million readers it was still produced in basements and storefronts by armies of dedicated but usually unpaid believers. "When they stormed the Pentagon, the underground press people were literally in the forefront. When they took over Columbia, the Liberation News Service and Newsreel people were inside helping and reporting. When the police busted them, no one produced press cards. They went to jail, too. They were on the streets at Berkeley. They are in the communes, a part of rock groups, acting with street theatre groups, demonstrating, petitioning, secretly being. The strength of the underground press lies in the people who do not melt away when threatened.” Avatar printed a centerfold of four-letter words and were busted in Cambridge for obscenity. EVO just kept on liberating, functionally unaware of a Brooklyn obscenity bust. The underground press is flexible. The staff of Connections quit publishing for the summer to devote their time to war and draft resistance. The Oracle people dropped out to meditate. "The underground press is resilient. Practically all the papers can mount a street demonstration in a day, a benefit in a week, and a Supreme Court case in a month, without missing a single issue. Although these papers have been evicted from their offices and homes, harassed by the police, had their street sellers arrested en masse, had their benefit parties raided, been bombed, been burned, beaten, gypped, framed and lost printer after printer, the underground press continues to increase in size and number". But what the Underground Press Syndicate still needed, Tom and I agreed, was more coordination, and in our attempt to bring some semblance of order, we agreed to run it jointly with myself summarizing the mail in a monthly newsletter which Tom would then print and send out to member papers. Financing would come through the sale of "UPS subscriptions" which all member-papers would agree to fulfill to whoever paid for one (ie. Time magazine, libraries, wire services etc). It was also the responsibility of UPS papers to send issues to all fellow-members with the understanding that anybody could reprint anything without payment or credit. Not long after that, Tom came to New York, rented a basement on West 10th Street, gathered a tribe around him, put UPS on a sounder financial footing by selling Bell & Howell the rights to put all the papers on microfilm and started renting cylinders of nitrous oxide to keep the tribe relaxed and happy. What surprised people later was to discover that he had a business degree, but he first became notorious in underground circles for his daring exploits: flying in truckloads of Colombian marihuana, at least once crashing the heavily loaded plane into a hillside but escaping unhurt. One such shipment, as I narrated earlier, reputedly brought him the hundreds of thousands of dollars with which he founded the world's first dope magazine, High Times. Revolutionary for its time it was nevertheless--to everybody's surprise--pretty much left alone by the authorities. Maybe too many people in positions of power were already familiar with the benevolent herb. Certainly I had smoked with off-duty cops, museum directors and big names who might still be embarrassed if I dropped them. And my lawyer, David Barrett, assured me that down at the courthouse he was as familiar with pot-smoking judges as drug defendants.
The subject of pot always seemed to be coming up and even today, when I pretty much smoke only when somebody offers me some, there are occasions when I still feel the cause of common humanity needs warriors to keep fighting for it. It's not very charitable, for example, to be indifferent about somebody dying and certainly not very kind to let them die in pain when you could do something about it. And yet that is the callous attitude of the folk who continually try to deprive sick people of something to relieve their agony. You might almost feel that it was genuine retribution, even karma, cancer or something equally painful happened to them. Or their closest friends or relatives. Deliberately allowing people to die in pain is exactly what the (DEA, NIH etc) do every day, something the Supreme Court mandated for many more lifetimes. Even with medical marihuana legalized in many states, it is still ignored by these unfeeling barbarians. They're all in corrupt partnership with the smugglers, the prison structure, the police, the vast federal bureaucracies, the hypocritical paid-off pols. Their shared credo is economic not moral. They are willfully mindless about the consequences of their behavior. Then there have always been busts by self-serving liars who sought to enhance their careers. One such was the narc named Warner Stringfellow in Detroit who busted activist John Sinclair, of the White Panther Party for marihuana possession. Before going to jail, Sinclair wrote a poem about it
Sinclair’s arrest and 9 1/2 year sentence created a furor in the underground, and a massive rock concert at which John Lennon, Yoko Ono and Stevie Wonder starred got Sinclair released on bond. Plamondon, by then on the lam, was later rearrested, but the sentences of both were eventually negated after a Supreme Court ruling that the convictions had come about through unlawful warrant-less wire-tapping. (That was in the era when the Supremes were ruled by notions of justice and not politics). If “fighting for a clean planet…freeing political prisoners…abolishing capitalism” seemed fancifully unrealistic, and were an obvious challenge to the hidebound beliefs of a stagnant society, they were in tune with the alternative society’s realization that what had been the traditional liberal approach to solving problems no longer worked. It did no good to be reasonable with one’s adversaries and suggest, say, that a 50% improvement of something was needed. All that produced usually, was a pathetic, typically liberal compromise that resulted in settling for 25%. On the other hand, as the combativeness of over-the-top groups such as Up against the Wall, Motherfuckers proved, a demand for 125% was likely to result in much greater rewards. The message was: don’t back off, just step up the demands. At the beginning of the Seventies, I realized I had come full circle—from reporter to columnist to editor to publisher and now back to being a reporter once more. It’s true that my beat had become rather narrowly focused, based on the self-contained New York art colony, and I was even still publishing, if producing tiny newsletters could be regarded as that. Saturdays were being spent in Soho and environs, visiting the galleries, drinking in Fanelli’s bar on Spring Street discussing the ‘scene” with my friends, while the rest of the week I was involved in a full roster of poetry readings, ‘happenings’, openings, concerts and parties. At any one of these I would find at least a few people whom I thought of as part of the “art scene” with some of them, of course, involved like myself in two or three different aspects of it. When I sat down for a discussion about how I had spent the past few years, it was with my old friend Neil Hickey with whom I made the case for The Publisher As Revolutionary. What had become known as “the new journalism”—as practiced by the likes of Tom Wolfe, Jimmy Breslin and a host of New York magazine publisher Clay Felker’s protégés—was getting lots of ink but rarely did the laudatory essays about these ground-breaking new writers give tribute to the (mostly) younger scribes who were filling hundreds of pages of the underground papers every day. What effects do you think the underground press has had? Neil asked. Has it made a definite dent on the consciousness of the Establishment?
And there was the whole pot thing. What an influence that had been. The first time somebody got stoned was probably the first time they hadn’t been in control of their own thoughts, and what possibilities that opened up! How many millions had forthwith cast aside all the evil propaganda, sampled pot and never been quite the same afterwards? It was impossible to overestimate how important the benevolent herb had been as a unifying banner and rallying point. Because in those days I rarely met anybody who didn’t smoke. And if I met people who didn’t smoke, they were no longer folk who thought the demon weed was evil. Although such people still existed, I knew, because occasionally I read about them. Our discussion turned on whether the West Coast had become more revolutionary than the East: there were the hippies rioting on Sunset Strip and with the Artists Tower for Peace (i.e. anti-Vietnam war) built nearby. (This gesture was followed by Leon Golub and other artists in New York meeting to decide how to respond.) Neil: And there was the Free Speech movement in Berkeley. Was that the seed?
The example Mario Savio set at UC Berkeley with his Free Speech movement was echoed at scores of other campuses across the country, and that fabulous Be-In at Golden Gate Park was followed within weeks by “love-ins” not only in Los Angeles but elsewhere. Neil pointed out that even junior high schools were starting underground papers. College kids, protesting the way their school was being run created dark thoughts for the power structure. Younger kids took note and started to act the same way. Jerry Rubin used to claim it was the kindergarten who would be heard from next. It was certainly true in a cultural revolution that you emulated the people, the activists, who were a little older than you. These were the ones you admired, and all the time heroes were getting younger and younger. Neil said he thought that papers like Rat, and slightly to the left of Rat, the old guard papers like the Guardian and so forth, seemed to be for a revolution that came out of the end of a gun. Were they old-style Marxists, doctrinaire, orthodox socialists? I said it did seem that papers like the Guardian and England’s Peace News, were being run by old timers, but by young old-timers. It was all in their attitudes. Probably the SDS and similar bodies were the same way. People who revered discipline and those who believed in a kind of joyless equality, in which nobody had any advantage and there were no incentives, and that to smile and enjoy yourself was not taking the revolution seriously—well, that was the drawback of these old-line papers. We might all agree with their philosophy and sympathize with their attempts to propagate it, but they made no attempt to reach out to a new audience. If you didn’t totally believe what they believed there was nothing there to read. Preaching to the converted was never truer. Better to have a paper that tries hard to trick everybody into reading it and then sock the message to them. Get ‘em into the story, get ‘em into the story—that was what I was taught when I worked for London tabloids. But that was a view that appeared suspicious to the mainstream radical movement. Neil: What about campus papers? There are a lot of those.
Neil was always able to help me focus my thoughts in our lengthy conversations whether they were about the underground, about art and Andy Warhol and, oh everything. He’s a world-class interviewer, great at focusing and he had a great sympathy for the alternative society. Today things are far less radical. The “alternative” papers are pretty mainstream and the ways of the radical printed word seem to be over. The media frontrunner now is the cyber world with its potentially worldwide audiences. The irony is that we’ve gone from not having enough alternative voices to a place where there are too many. When you can read words from anywhere, at any time, by anybody, who knows what’s true anymore? Even though they were paying miniscule or non-existent salaries, the survival of most underground papers in the early days depended on rock music advertising and small ads of a frankly sexual nature that had never been allowed--even, or especially, by the Voice --until that time. An early ad in EVO which most people guessed had been planted by Bowart himself, read: "Keep me high and I'll ball you forever--Samantha". But this, at first, was petty stuff. What was really bringing in the moolah were the full page ads by the myriad record companies hoping to cash in on this apparently infinite young, free-spending audience. Concert Hall, the UPS advertising agency, reported the total circulation of underground papers to be 1.8 million with a "secondary circulation" of another five million readers. The biggest papers such as San Francisco's Black Panther and the Los Angeles Free Press were selling as many as 100,000 copies and even in a small place like Lexington, KY, the Blue Tail Fly claimed a circulation of 10,000. With several subsidiary labels Columbia Records, headed by Clive Davis, was spending hundreds of thousands a dollars each month to ensure the veracity of the claim that, "the music is the revolution, man", a statement that even the politically-minded skeptics preferred not to challenge. Enter the hippy capitalist and would-be tycoon Jann Wenner whose Rolling Stone resented the youthful activism whenever its attention strayed from the beat. All of a sudden an unholy alliance developed of which we only learned when Davis smugly announced that in future his companies' record advertising would be focused solely on "the music-oriented papers" of which--guess what--there was only one. At a single stroke, the record companies were able to defuse much of the revolution, shucking off these embarrassing papers that sought real change not merely a society filled with musical paper tigers. The social-climbing Wenner had always cravenly sought the approval of his affluent betters and disassociating himself from the radicals did wonders for his social life. Following the gradual collapse of the underground press as the record companies restricted their advertising to the less political papers. In the June 1976 issue of the radical Yipster Times, Mike Chance added another element to the story: Rolling Stone, he wrote, had been bought off in the spring of 1968 with a $100,000 payment by the Xerox Corporation "in return for a pledge not to support leftist demonstrations at the Chicago National Presidential Conventions that summer". Chance wrote that his information came from Susan Lydon who had been one of the five founders of Rolling Stone the year before. She had left the magazine after the sell-out for "personal and political disagreements with Jann Wenner" who, two months before the convention, had declared that "rock music and confrontation politics don't mix".
At any rate, by the beginning of the '70s the more politically outspoken underground papers had lost their music advertising and not long afterwards they lost the sex advertising, too. Erotic ads having proven a big draw, a bunch of papers sprung up dealing only with sex and siphoned off that part of the revenue. Why bother with all that troublesome political stuff, we could imagine these new publishers asking rhetorically, when we could sell just as many papers and get more advertising without it? As always the crowded apartment that served as our office (with Ambertype in a West 10th street basement) seemed be constantly in motion; no time to keep a diary. So recently I asked my assistant, Rona, for her recollections.
Is there anything new that could conceivably be said about Woodstock that hasn’t been said already? I was in the strange position of being there and yet not being there, as I had rented a nearby farmhouse for the event and although Amber and I saw a steady stream of visitors and guests for two or three days (most of them anxious to get a shower or some sleep) we never went over to the muddy site itself. Frankly, I’m not crazy about either rock music or crowds and so I didn’t miss it; Amber, being younger, probably did. The subsequent movie, contrary to the blissful remembrances of those who were there, was actually a lot better than the actual event in the opinion of some commentators. Irwin Silber, writing in Other Scenes, talked of the “incompetence and ineptitude” of the Festival promoters while complimenting Woodstock for “juxtaposing musician and audience, theme and reality, art and life in a marvelously visual counterpoint which is constantly inventive”. “Perhaps Woodstock does not show us all the dimensions of Woodstock” he continued. “Abbie Hoffman and the ill-fated ‘Movement City’ are nowhere to be seen in the film. The over whelming sense of communality in the face of mutual hardships which so many who were there talked about afterwards is only hinted at in some fleeting moments of a joint or bottle of wine being passed around." “But most everything else seems to be there—the grass, the love-making, the unabashed laying on of hands and taking off of clothes, the relaxation, the occasional bad trip, the perpetual high, the skinny-dipping, the self-conscious reports on the size of their ‘city’ and the various social announcements over the loudspeaker system, and of course and mostly the music.”
For a later music festival Abbie Hoffman asked for a free full page ad in Other Scenes, which of course I was willing to provide, happy to be able to have some papers distributed to a wider audience. When the print run was in, Abbie asked how much we charged wholesale for papers and when I told him 10c a copy (it was 25c on the newsstands) he handed over $10 for 100 copies to take to the festival. Then in a moment of sheer, arrogant chutzpah he proceeded to tear out his ad and—still in my presence— throw the discarded papers into the garbage. The loose radical alliance that has carried us so far seemed to be falling apart. Although Hakim Jamal had maintained that black power was not necessarily anti-white, just consistently pro-black he referred to the hippies as 'the creepies' and charged that "they are the best example of what white America has come to". And Black Panther leader Eldridge Cleaver was even gunning for black politicians such as Cleveland's Mayor Carl Stokes. "I don't think people like that have much future at all”, he declared. “ They will continue to be produced and they will continue to come up here and try to influence people but they will get more and more opposition from the community and the day is gonna be reached when they won't be able to walk down the streets of a black community even with security forces." As for white politicians, Cleaver had written them off completely as far back as the Chicago convention. "McCarthy? I think he is a good Democrat and as such a dangerous man. All Democrats are criminals and all Republicans are incorrigible criminals. They should be locked up".
What Tuli wrote was very much in line with my own thoughts. Factionalism, I realized, had done more harm to the unity of the 'movement' than anything else and maybe that had always been the case. How often had people played the role of agents provocateurs even when that had not been their intention? Not long after five thousand of us had marched down Fifth Avenue together to protest the Vietnam War, Martin Luther King, who up to that time had been identified solely with the black liberation movement, declared: "The war in Vietnam, an obscene incredible travesty on history and justice, is very closely related to my personal battle, which is for racial freedom". And yet this was greeted with incredulity not only by the black liberal power structure but even by some of his own supporters . In retrospect it seems hard to believe that anybody could disagree with him, but at the time he was crucified for making the connection. It undoubtedly led to J. Edgar Hoover's stepped-up interest in him and to his death. In 1966 Hoover had only to hear that somebody was protesting the war to conclude that he was part of the international communist conspiracy. But King's lesson should have penetrated people's consciousness more deeply: how can you live off one phase of injustice, illiberality and censorship from another? They're all related. All in all I was coming to feel that it was fruitless to believe, as we had for years, that protest about the way things were organized was going to make the slightest bit of difference as long as what former president Eisenhower had called the military-industrial complex remained in control and the profit motive was the be-all and end-all of existence. America at that stage of history seemed to have blown it. It was hard to see what was going to happen next. (I underestimated the country's astonishing ability to keep regenerating itself). Violent revolution--even if it came--didn't seem likely to solve anything and I had a strong suspicion that whoever the winners might be in such a confrontation, they were likely to be just as power-mad as anything they replaced. A dozen years of poverty-stricken catalytic social action had taught me a lot about how little difference there was in the authoritarianism of both Left and Right. A late Manhattan entry in the underground paper scene was the Rex Weiner’s New York ACE, edited by Bob Singer, which avowed to "expose intrepidly the oppressive machinations of the bosses, to cultivate vibrantly the revolutionary culture of the young and untamed, to create a fiery avatar of people's art, to gloriously fulfill the ebullient re-emergence of socially nurturing people's journalism." FROM LONDON, John Walker, reported in Other Scenes, May 1970, that John Lennon’s peace campaign was getting instant dismissal from all sides. “It seems to contain something to offend everyone. Even more hostility is being aimed at his artist wife Yoko Ono (“Use your blood to paint. Keep painting till you faint. Keep painting till you die” ). Beatle Lennon, with Yoko sitting quietly by his side, talked at the Apple office about peace to Sandy, my ever-loving and hard-working wife.
Tim Leary’s personal hero was Humphrey Osmond whom he often referred to as “God’s secret agent” and in a piece for Other Scenes (Oct/70) titled Cosmic Courier nominated this “acid-king millionaire, test tube Pancho Villa” for ‘romantic immortality’
After this somewhat overblown beginning , Tim reiterated the tale of Albert Hoffman in the Swiss laboratory of Sandoz, hoping unsuccessfully to persuade psychiatrists and medical researchers to use LSD. Next in the chain came Al Hubbard, wealthy from uranium mining, whose dream was of a chain of medically-approved LSD clinics dispensing the drug.
Shortly after (1962) setting up his own loose distribution system for LSD, Leary received a call from a mysterious Dr. Spaulding who claimed to have inside knowledge of a power struggle in Washington between the Treasury department’s narcotics bureau and the medics and scientists who wanted to handle LSD as a medical matter. A crackdown was coming, the doctor said, and all sources for LSD would be sealed off. Meanwhile, a few wise heads in Washington had seen it coming and stockpiled the raw lysergic acid base. They had the largest supply in the world. How much could Leary’s group use? “I looked at him in surprise”, Leary recalled. “ He starts out like a fed and now he’s offering me acid. The scene was surrealistic. This famous, eminently respectable professor offering to set us up with unlimited supplies of acid. It was hard to keep from laughing. I asked him one question. Why? “Oh, you know why Tim. Can you see any hope for this homicidal, neurologically crippled species other than mass religious convulsion. Ok. How much do you want?’” “That was the only time I met Dr. Spaulding. A week later the acid began arriving at Millbrook—in brown manila envelopes and hollowed out books mailed from different cities throughout the country. In hardly any time at all we have given away ten million doses”. I wrote about 1972 as the Year of the Great Hoax "when millions of otherwise sensible people get the crazy notion that they are able to do something to shape the society they live in when dupes are told, and being dupes believe that they are electing a president. Nobody tells the dupes that they're pawns; in fact, they're called voters and they're flattered and bribed, excited and entertained. Everybody joins in the game--newspapers, television, movie stars, wealthy novelists, even your friends. They all refer to the robot who's going to be president by different names and even pretend that he's different people!" In the year of The Great Hoax, ran my argument, it was hard to find anything else to play because the people who ran the game were trying to make sure nobody dropped out and all the others wouldn't even talk about it. "The best place from which to watch the game is from the top of the nearby hillside. That's where all the important people sit--the ones who don't care which way it comes out because whoever 'wins' will still maintain the important things of life: oil depletion allowances, bank rates, germ warfare research, agribusiness, imperialism, the space race. "From this hill there's rather an amusing view of the valley below. It's much like the medieval battles that kings used to watch: dozens of knights on grey horses (a trick of the light makes them appear white close up) rushing around with banners waving, some with a handful of camp followers, others with countless throngs. From time to time what at first had seemed like a minor rally on the sidelines suddenly surges forward sweeping hundreds of foot soldiers with it. The crowd twists and turns as all try to see if one of the mounted men has a clear advantage and can make a run up the valley. Which is a dead end, of course. "In the year of the Great Hoax there's a role in the game for everybody, each according to his naiveté or cynicism. Some declare outright that one cipher is superior to another or else maintain that there's no difference between them (true) until the last moments of the game when they suddenly discover that more virtue resides in one quarter than the others (false). “The all-important rule of the game is that it be confined to personalities: concepts and specifics are taboo. ‘Ending’ something (such as war or poverty) or ‘increasing’ something (the size of the Pentagon or welfare) may be advocated but the rules are insistent that as promises cannot and will not subsequently be kept that they must not be identifiable. "Mainly though, it's important that the players keep their eyes on the board and don't start thinking in terms of 'ideas' which might distract attention from the game itself or, heaven forbid, to the people atop the hill who are running it. Welcome to the Year of the Great Hoax". Interestingly enough, as I write this, we are on the verge of the ninth presidential election since I published the words above and I can't honestly say that I've changed my mind about any of it. More traveling came next, first to Switzerland and then to England.
In London, Richard Neville had earlier turned over the summer issue of OZ to a group of seditious pre-teenies to produce an issue of their own, the idea being not to patronizingly write about the lively youth scene, but to allow it to write about itself. The youngsters proceeded to publish a salacious issue so full of near-porn and other aggravations in their “School Kids issue”-- a shamelessly shocking "farrago of filth" the law termed it-- that on his return, he and his OZ colleagues, Felix Dennis and Jim Anderson, were arrested. A fossilized dinosaur named Judge Argylle concluded that pictures and stories produced by a bunch of school kids were liable to corrupt the morals of...er, school kids. Argylle, in the dyky dress and elaborate wig favored by the judiciary, decided that the culprits' hair--almost as long as his own fake locks--was too lengthy and thus the trio's heads were shaven. The Old Bailey trial was a farce with all the fake majesty of the law—judges in wigs and robes, everybody pontificating endlessly—and although they were convicted, jailed and shorn of their long hair, the conviction was overturned on appeal and the judge reprimanded for the idiot that he was.
In retrospect it was a turning point in the generation gap. The forces of common sense and open mindedness went to battle, many liberal academics acting for the defense, and turned back the reactionary tide. That free and easy summer in Ibiza could be regarded as a pointer to the new freedom that was about to come. Amber and I attended the trial and though tempted to display my contempt of this court by remaining seated when the judge entered, I behaved myself and listened attentively. Richard defended himself, maintaining that the relevant law was archaic and irresponsible. "The very offence of 'corrupting public morals'', he argued, " rests on the assumption that there is one all-embracing moral code to which all classes of the community subscribe, and that this is so weak, so unstable, that a single publication can bring it into jeopardy....It is the prosecution which corrupts public morality by seeking to rob us of our freedom of speech". Despite support from numerous cultural and literary defense witnesses, the trio were found guilty and--certainly not to our surprise--the "straight" press by and large backed the verdict. Some individuals, however, were outraged. Sociologist Michael Schofield pointed out that it was not only the OZ trio that had been on trial but thousands of young people. "They have convicted a whole generation", he said, an opinion echoed by Time Out 's David May who opined that this single act had polarized a generation. "I can't say I'm surprised", said author Paul Ableman, "given the present state of the law. It just shows the absurdity of the law". Kenneth Tynan called it "the wrong verdict reached for the wrong reasons" and MP David Steel described it as "very disturbing". David Hockney said: "I just think it's terrible. I now believe, whereas I never did in the past, that there is an attack on a certain kind of culture. The vindictiveness of the judge is just disgusting". Even Private Eye's Richard Ingrams, who had been unsympathetic to the counter-culture, commented that what was striking about this sort of case was that real pornography was not attacked, just literary pornography. "The whole proceedings are a total farce" he added. "Everyone comes into disrepute". John Cleese said he didn't believe that any kind of material could corrupt people. "The whole thing is very pointless". Afterwards when I was talking to Jim Haynes, that famous American-in-Paris, he picked up on another aspect. "Do you know what to me is obscene?. The standard answer, of course, is violence--we all know that. But also what's obscene is materialism. A Rolls Royce car is for me a symbol of obscenity, a bowing down to materialism". Recently, Jim continued, the Times had shown a picture of a Titian that had been sold for about two million pounds. "Everybody was bowing down in reverence to something which some cat did hundreds of years ago. Who cares? Let's demystify art a little. All it is is brush and paint. It's a medium that nobody uses any more except as a commodity to sell. And because the nature of the medium is its scarcity, the whole structure of supply and demand comes into being. If some cat wants to get his reputation pumped up a little bit he becomes an artist, an imitation Titian. Everybody comes around and kisses his ass. It's bullshit. It's gross. The Rolls Royce is gross. Art is gross. The diamond ring is gross. Fur coats are gross. Beauty is ultimately gross. It's been made so. "Germaine Greer in The Female Eunuch makes this point about the ecological effect of worshipping beauty, Miss Beauty, the stereotype: raping nature, destroying pearls, killing tiny furry animals. For what? It's ridiculous".
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