Above is a photo me which was taken last night. Below is me in 1969. I had more hair back then but was just as pissed off then as I am now, and was just as involved in protesting what the goverment was doing. Today I do it mostly on Substack. Then I was one of the leaders of the protest movement at against the Vietnam War at Michgan State, albeit only in the Social Work Department. Michigan State students and faculty were very active in protesting against the war. There were rallies, marches, and teach-ins. After the Kent State Massacre there was a student strike. All of my grad school clesses were held off campus or not at all. Out of five classes I got deferred grades in four of them. MSU was one of the five universities featured in the book “Campus Wars: The Peace Movement At American State Universities in the Vietnam Era (read review).
You can read more what happen at Michigan State here.
In the 1960’s I subscribed to Paul Krasner’s not particularly slick antiwar and anti-establishment magazine, The Realist. It was printed on newsprint paper.
One isse was sent out with an insert that became infamous becasue of one word. That word was “fuck.”
This is photo of Krasner is from The Realist Archive Project.
From the Archive:
Original "Fuck Communism!" Typography and Design by John Francis Putnam, who also designed The Realist logo. Poster concept was a collaboration with the suggestion for "Fuck" belonging to Putnam, followed by the suggestion for "Communism" belonging to Krassner. Putnam was a regular contributor to The Realist, best known for his MODEST PROPOSALS column. Read a few here, here and here.
Also Note: The MOTHERS OF THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION was a fake organization created by The Realist for use on this poster, and for letterhead for occasional correspondence with parties of differing political opinion that would most likely not communicate with The Realist itself.
The idea of the poster was to mash together two charged themes of the early 1960s, obscenity and anticommunism, but it was obviously Krasner want to offend people by using the then charged word “fuck.” Now even people like Mary Trump use it in their writing. She has finally had it with him so much so that in her recent Substack podcast, The Depravity is the Point, she used the word fuck twice.
Here’s a bit about Krasner from Wikipedia:
Paul Krassner (April 9, 1932 – July 21, 2019) was an American writer and satirist. He was the founder, editor, and a frequent contributor to the freethought magazine The Realist, first published in 1958. Krassner became a key figure in the counterculture of the 1960s as a member of Ken Kesey's Merry Pranksters and a founding member of the Yippies, a term he is credited with coining.
Here’s the part about the poster which Kurt Vonnegut described as
"a miracle of compressed intelligence nearly as admirable for potent simplicity, in my opinion, as Einstein's e=mc2." Vonnegut explained: "With the Vietnam War going on, and with its critics discounted and scorned by the government and the mass media, Krassner put on sale a red, white and blue poster that said FUCK COMMUNISM. At the beginning of the 1960s, FUCK was believed to be so full of bad magic as to be unprintable. ... By having FUCK and COMMUNISM fight it out in a single sentence, Krassner wasn't merely being funny as heck. He was demonstrating how preposterous it was for so many people to be responding to both words with such cockamamie Pavlovian fear and alarm.
Now we have many versions of merchandise saying “Fuck Trump.” This is from Amazon.
I think we need to go beyond saying just “fuck Trump” even though he is so easy to demonize. He has fostered a cult of personality. He wins when we make it all about him. It is about the movement he has unleashed which would still be here if he died tomorrow. We don’t just need to fuck the hell out of Trump, we need to fuck the hell out of Trumpism. If he disappearred tomorrow, we’d still have J.D. Vance, Mike Johnson, and all the wee fascists in Congress, and half the coutry who voted for an autocracy.
I personally think this is too much of a cliche to buy one of these “Fuck Trump” posters to put on my wall. I don’t want his name in my house. I want anyone who comes into my living room to look at this sign and mentally see the word “Trumpism” rather than”Communism.” I want it to be a testament to the protest movement which led to the result we wanted.
Enough about posters:
What this time in our country reminds me of is when protesting against the government ended up making a difference. The Kent State Massacre was a turning point during the Vietnam War. Many supporters of the war found scenes like this to be too much.
One photograph more than any other showed the horror of the war.
Then the most credible voice in the county, Walter Chronkite, said the war was hopeless.
This is the conclusion of his editorial:
To say that we are closer to victory today is to believe, in the face of the evidence, the optimists who have been wrong in the past. To suggest we are on the edge of defeat is to yield to unreasonable pessimism. To say that we are mired in stalemate seems the only realistic, yet unsatisfactory, conclusion.
On the off chance that military and political analysts are right, in the next few months we must test the enemy’s intentions, in case this is indeed his last big gasp before negotiations. But it is increasingly clear to this reporter that the only rational way out then will be to negotiate, not as victors, but as an honourable people who lived up to their pledge to defend democracy and did the best they could.
This is Walter Cronkite. Good night.”
I hope I don’t have to wait as long as I did for the end of the war against Trumpism to result in the victory for democracy as I did for the end of the Vietnam War. It is possible that at 81 I won’t live to see Trumpism defeated. I may spend my final years watching in horror along with half the county as Trump turns the United States into a police state.
Addendem:
Now the word “fuck” appears in two pictures in my house.
I want to thank all of my readers and my Substack subscribers. You can read all of my Substack posts here. If you subscribe you will recieve an email every time I post. Respectful comments are always welcome even if you disagree with me. I generally reply to comments.
I post on BlueSky though the day, You can read my posts here.
