Inspirational messages taped by Charles Harbutt
Lincoln Park, Chicago
27 August 1968
If you don't want it on TV, write the word “FUCK” on your head, see, and that won't get on TV, right? But that's where theatre is at, it's TV. I mean our thing's for TV. We don't want to get on Meet the Press. What's that shit? We want Ed Sullivan, Johnny Carson show, we want the shit where people are lookin' at it and diggin' it.
They're talking about reaching the troops in Viet Nam so they write in The [New York] Guardian! That's groovy. I've met a lot of soldiers who read The Guardian, you know. But we've had articles in Jaguar magazine, Cavalier, you know, National Enquirer interviews the Queen of the Yippies, someone nobody ever heard of and she runs a whole riff about the Yippies and Viet Nam or whatever her thing is and the soldiers get it and dig it and smoke a little grass and say yeah I can see where she's at.
That's why the long hair. I mean shit, you know, long hair is just another prop. You go on TV and you can say anything you want but the people are lookin' at you and they're lookin' at the cat next to you like David Susskind or some guy like that and they're sayin' hey man there's a choice. I can see it loud and clear.
But when they look at a guy from the Mobilization and they look at David Susskind, they say well I don't know, they seem to be doing the same thing, can't understand what they're doin'.
See, Madison Avenue people think like that. That's why a lot SDS's don't like what we're doin'. 'Cause they say we're like exploiting; we're usin' the tools of Madison Avenue. But that's because Madison Ave. is effective in what it does.
They know what they fuck they're doin'. Meet the Press, Face the Nation, Issues and Answers - all those bullshit shows, you know, where you get a Democrat and a Republican arguin' right back and forth, this and that, this and that, yeah yeah. But at the end of the show nobody changes their fuckin' mind, you see.
But they're tryin' to push Brillo, you see, that's good, you ought to use Brillo, see, and 'bout every ten minutes on will come a three-minute thing of Brillo. Brillo is a revolution, man, Brillo is sex, Brillo is fun, Brillo is blblblblblblblbl.
At the end of the show people ain't fuckin' switchin' from Democrat to Republicans or Commies, you know, the right-wingers or any of that shit. They're buying Brillo! And the reason they have those boring shows is because they don't want to get out any information that'll interfere with Brillo.
I mean, can you imagine if they had the Beatles goin' zing zing zing zing zing zing zing, all that jump and shout, you know, and all of a sudden they put on an ad where the guy comes on very straight: “You ought to buy Brillo because it's rationally the correct decision and it's part of the American political process and it's the right way to do things.” You know, fuck, they'll buy the Beatles, they won't buy the Brillo.
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| On This Day in Snigglery | November 21, 1953: The British Museum publishes its study showing that the “Piltdown Man” fossils were faked. (See Archaeological Forgeries for information on pickled relics) |
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