Dark Side of the 60's Moon by Mike Marino (beginner reading books for adults txt) 📕

of support. She got pictures and I jotted it down in my notebook. Should the shit hit the fan...look for the peace police!

We were trying to keep this peaceful. No more Chicago’s please. Any more brain damage by police batons and bad acid and I’d end up in catatonic world of Cheshire cats and drooling banjos!

Danny said, “We have to do our best not to react to any catalyst. We will win by following a spirit path of peace. Remember, both Gandhi and King led by example, as did Moses when he said..Let My People Go. Gandhi got independence and King had a dream. Both men had what a leader needs to lead and inspire others to action...commitment to a cause...conviction of purpose...and the heart to see the battle through to it's conclusion. We must remain united!”

My reply was quick and not without irony. “Yes, and both were shot dead! Lincoln if I remember said, ‘United We Stand, Divided We Fall’ and took a box seat at Ford’s Theater where he never made it to the final curtain. Look Danny, the spirit world aside, I like what Thomas Jefferson said, ‘The people should not be afraid of their government. Their government should be afraid of it's people!’

“Geez, no wonder you guys bit the dust at Little Big Horn!”

Today, nobody wants a dose of Quinn the Eskimo anymore. Woody Guthries land is no longer your land or my land. Instead it belongs to the corporate interests and politicians who rape  and violate the environment on a daily, hourly basis. Organic mantras of peace, brotherhood and sisterhood have been sucker punched by the behemoth corporations. The peace symbol has become as dinosaur extinct as tie-dyed Grateful Dead bears, while peaceful protest or protest of any kind is stuck in negative neutral of the American left today.


Once we had cleared the area that Friday, we were highly animated. Tomorrow was another day. (You can tell I thought I was in ‘Gone with the Wind’) On Saturday, we were still buzzed from the night before at the camper with our newfound comrades in tear gas, once you shared tear gas together...you are brothers and sisters of the canister.

Saturday we Myrika and I were hand in hand, holding tight to each other as  we all assembled on Pennsylvania Ave. once  again along with over 500,000 other demonstrators against the war, including   Peter, Paul and Mary, Pete Seeger, Arlo Gutherie who probably brought in a couple of keys, to Ed Saunders and the Fugs.  President Richard Nixon said about the march in the Washington Post  "Now, I understand that there has been, and continues to be, opposition to the war in Vietnam on the campuses and also in the nation. As far as this kind of activity is concerned, we expect it; however under no circumstances will I be affected whatever by it."

Imagine standing with half a million demonstrators across from the White House where  Pete Seeger led us all in singing John Lennon's new song "Give Peace A Chance", Pete’s  voice above the crowd, yelling, gently, as Pete will do  "Are you listening, Nixon?", "Are you listening, Agnew?", "Are you listening, Pentagon?" between all of us singing, "All we are saying ... is give peace a chance"

Later, violence erupted when police used tear gas again on some of the more radical elements  who had split off from the main rally to march on the Justice Department. That crowd of about 6,000, led by  the Youth International Party or Yippies, threw rocks and bottles and burned U.S. flags. Almost 100 demonstrators were arrested. So much for Lennon’s pleas for peace.

As John Lennon said later in an interview as did Peter Fonda’s Captain America character in “Easy Rider” ‘Man...we blew it!”

The Alcatraz Occupation lasted for nineteen months, from November 20, 1969, to June 11, 1971, and was forcibly ended by the U.S. government. The Occupation of Alcatraz had a direct effect on federal Indian policy and, with its visible results, established a precedent for Indian activism.

Chapter 47 - Kids Do the Damnedest Things.

 

The sexy Sixties were whacko weird as hell, but, on the other hand  more fun than target shooting  with Helen Keller after spinning her around five times to disorient her. Duck and Cover!! One of the stranger things to transpire was Art Linkletter blaming LSD for making his daughter leap to her death from an upper apartment window. He came out guns blazing, a real John Wayne schmuck blaming the psychedelic culture. “Dirty hippies!!”  the Berkeley Barb newspaper in the Bay area had a retaliatory monster headline…(for real! I still have it in my archives) “Hey, Art. Kids do the damnedest things!” Turns out she didn’t take  LSD that night according to friends there with her, but mental problems of her own pushed her to suicide regarding issues with her family and her failed acting career...but the Barb headline did add some stoned comic relief in a bizarre bong sort of way.

Now, back in D.C. the Sunday morning after the Moratorium March, there would still be throngs of milling subterranean creatures of the field jacket and jeans sub-cultue counterculture still  in town keeping the cops, congress, and the FBI edgy and tense.  Perfect conditions to grab the doped up FBI undercover agent, Paul, from the local safehouse we had placed him in until we were ready to inject his messed up mental state of  mind from a month of constant daily doses of  LSD and speed, a real hipster breakfast of champions into the FBI building tripping out looking for pinko’s & communists with only a .45 loaded with blanks while he himself was loaded on a full metal  jacket of LSD 25.  What fun!

We picked him up and drove back downtown to the haunted house of J. Edgar Hoover. Paul was babbling stoned in the backseat about how he had served bravely with Sgt. Pepper’s lonely hearts club artillery platoon in the Napoleonic Wars and how they all got wasted on Bonaparte Purple Haze on the corner of Haight-Austria before hitting the Fillmore in Waterloo in colorful uniforms riding unicorns.  We almost believed him. Sounded plausible the way he explained it, but then again life was a lava lamp to me in those days, and even an atomic explosion could pass as a light show at the Fillmore on any Saturday night.

We rolled the camper to a stop a block away from the FBI building where Danny Two Horse and I eased our psychedelic Lee Harvey Oswald onto the street and walked him across to Hoover’s Pee Wee’s Playhouse while Myrika, ever the perfect gun moll, kept the motor running while acting as lookout.

We made double damned sure Paul had his secret agent decoder ring and pistol in hand while we  filled his head now substituting as a chemical pinata with final instructions to go in and be tough. Take no prisoners, take no bullshit and bring the J. Edgar imposter to justice. We basically wanted Paul to come off as a deranged mental defective so anything he might tell them about the inner workings of the War Resistance would be taken with a grain of salt and he would be institutionalized at some happy farm upstate drooling and playing solitaire with a “talking” mouse that would visit him nightly in his cell.

We didn’t really think he would be shot dead outside Hoover’s office door by five agents with live ammo. We waited in the doorway of a building across the street when all of a sudden...all Hoover hell broke loose. People were running from the building, unarmed clerical help no doubt. We could hear numerous shots coming from the lobby area along with the obligatory high pitched screaming and “drop your weapon” commands that usually accompanies such goings on.

Later reports showed that Paul fired blanks first at what he felt were KGB agents taking over Washington. The FBI agents working that day didn’t recognize him as he was from the Detroit office anyway. They thought he was some damned hippie/yippie with a gun having traded the flowers in his hair for a .45 automatic. Yep...Jerry Garcia had become Dirty Harry!

We had delivered Paul to his final reward. Now he could infiltrate the Pearly Gates and inform on subversive angels under St. Peters command and get the goods and blow the whistle on the Virgin Mary, a real film noir gun moll if ever there was one. St. Michael was really Humphrey Bogart and God himself was the Maltese Falcon!

We got in the camper, aimed her towards the setting sun...California...and Alcatraz. The tribes were gathering to take over the island and Myrika and I would cover the story from the inside while Danny Two Horse, his girl Kaylee and Danny’s friends in his car would carry the sacred spear of the Michigan Ojibwe tribe.

As ‘Flashback’ cruised away from the FBI building..I couldn’t help but feel guilty having set up Paul for assassination...oh hell...Kids do the damnedest things!

Chapter 48 - The Road to Alcatraz

On the road to Alcatraz was not exactly a schtick filled slapstick vaudevillian Bob Hope-Bing Crosby musical comedy extravaganza replete with Broadway show tunes with Carmen Miranda and a head full of tropical fruit.

We had one stop to make first before we joined the Tribes for the occupation of “the Rock” as it was called by everyone from Al Capone to Machine Gun Kelly. It was no longer being used and was unofficially up for grabs, or so it seemed on the surface by the Native Americans who were re-grouping for  gathering of the tribes. Fuck up this treaty “Great White Father’ who lives in Washington and the mystical white buffalo will gore your ass!

Danny Two Horse wanted to stop at the Ocqueoc Indian Reservation in Michigan on our way westward ho from the Moratorium march in Washington in order to pick up a rez buddy, Jackson Anoki Begay who didn’t want to miss out on any of the promised death wish action  of the Alcatraz occupation either. He’d hitch a ride with Danny, Kaylee and Danny’s two swarthy co-horts  in Danny’s old school heavy as a ton of bricks Buick, yet he would be storing  his small amount of gear, knapsack, sleeping bag, peyote (we hoped!)  in our camper, “Flashback.”

Olivia  had invited her new found Canadian lover, Martin Bouchard, along for the ride riding  with us. I imagine they would be making love along the