Up Against the Wall Motherf**er: A Memoir of the '60s, with Notes for Next Time
Osha Neumann
Language: English
Pages: 146
ISBN: 2:00207451
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
They called themselves the Motherfuckers; others called them a "street gang with an analysis." Osha Neumann's thoughtful, funny, and honest account of his part in '60s counterculture is also an unflinching look at what all that rebellion of the past means today. The fast moving story follows the establishment of the Motherfuckers, who influenced the Yippies and members of SDS; makes vivid the art, music, and politics of the era; and reveals the colorful, often deeply strange, personalities that gave the movement its momentum. Abbie Hoffman said the Motherfuckers were "the middle-class nightmare . . . an antimedia media phenomenon simply because their name could not be printed." In the few years of its existence the group forced its way into the Pentagon during a war protest, helped occupy one of the buildings in the Columbia University takeover, and cut the fences at Woodstock to allow thousands in for free, among many other feats of radical derring-do.
Progressing from a fractured family of intellectuals to rebellion in the streets of New York and on to communes in California, Newmann shows us a view of a life led in rebellion, anger, and eventually a tentative peace.
The Nation (9-16 January 2012)
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Side. The plan for separate but unequal entrances stank of southern style racism and the community was up in arms. There had been numerous community protests joined by SAS, but construction continued. Now the issue of the gymnasium would become the spark that ignited the largest protest Columbia had ever seen. Discontent with the university went far beyond its voracious land grabbing. The SAS students were joined by members of SDS, who had been protesting the University’s links to the Institute.
And Rachel accompanied me. Yeshi went to nursing school. I took up mural painting, inspired to return to making art by the murals I had seen in the Mission district of San Francisco. We had another child, Emma. And then, when Emma was two years old, we divorced. I initiated the break-up because . . . well, the usual becauses—a feeling of being trapped, a building up of resentments. “Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way,” is the famous first line of the.
Exposed as a lie and unreal. It is important, I continued, to expand those moments, and for theory to preserve and incorporate them into itself. And I am not sure that either anti-foundationalism or materialism could do that. My speech was mercifully short, and largely drowned in the static of my quivering rebellious body. I felt thoroughly humiliated. I alone quivered and shook and betrayed my fear. I was a rank amateur among professionals. I was insufficiently familiar with the literature. So.
Opposition to the System. They enter into a battle, which is, among other things, a battle of ideas. They demand recognition of the ways in which their gender and skin color have determined their history, and shaped their consciousness. A multiracial/multigendered global corporate hegemony would still be a disaster, despoiling the planet, sickening us, breeding misery and starvation in the midst of plenty. It would still be a hideous irrationality. But the system is not blind to color or gender.
Circular paths wound between iron fences, behind which the grass grew like an exotic animal, caged in for its own protection. In the 1850s, ’60s, and ’70s the park had been the scene of many demonstrations. On January 13, 1874, thousands of unemployed workers who had rallied here to demand government relief were beaten out of the park by a mob of club wielding mounted police. Now the iron fences prevented large assemblies, and at least for the time being tranquility prevailed. My first Lower.