The Diggers in New York

...The idea of individuality is baloney—you can do more in a group than you can on your own...

...The store's only rule is "You Can't Steal...

...Many Diggers live in "intentional" communes, sharing the rent from their earnings at part-time jobs, making beads, painting posters...

...Admittedly, this decade hardly comprehends its clowns, especially those who marry indignation to fantasy and burlesque...

...Their answer is "not guerrilla warfare, but monkey warfare and silly sabotage": chanting mantras around the Pentagon to exorcise the evil spirits within...

...They expect the United States to become very ugly—because of the reactions to Negroes...

...The Diggers also urge the organization of workshops to educate parents about drugs, and are establishing a free medical clinic, plus free legal aid services, in their neighborhood...

...Now we're all acting out the myth created by the media...

...However, despite the collective efforts, Diggers insist that no one must impose his will on anyone else...

...They have thus dropped out of the new society that Diggers intend to build...

...The Diggers' philanthropies have roused comparisons to the Salvation Army—"But we don't make anyone sit through religious services...

...Those who hymned LSD in August were more cautious in September...

...to take runaways off the streets and find beds or jobs for them...

...Throughout history, Bohemia never created a sub-culture...

...Despite their belief in free goods, Diggers say that they have no disdain for cash...

...Free stew is dispensed every afternoon in Tompkins Square Park, and a Digger "Sweep-In" cleaned up a startled neighborhood...

...New York is absorbing in a dual sense: aside from its fasA Digger who found 400 runaways sleeping in a small park formed the East Side Service Organization (motto: "ESSO—It's A Gas...

...The Diggers in New York by NORA SAYRE Pin wheels erupt, mutate themselves, red blurts into blue: any galaxy of psychedelic lights is a valid image for "the new consciousness," which can't quite be captured by the panting media nor the earnest sociologist...

...Their talents for parody are sometimes classified as psychoses...

...While depressed liberals contemplate the notion of profound national lunacy—and try to reject it because it is too simplistic—these jesters and harlequins enact a living caricature, often, function more promptly and helpfully than local poverty offices, and gleefully elude the psychologists who would love to be their apologists or the prophets of their ruin...

...Converts point out that since the waxing population forces everyone to live more closely together, "Good Vibrations" (as in a song by the Beach Boys) are essential...

...Fiction, the despair of publishers, is indeed ignored, with the rare exceptions of Thomas Pynchon, Joseph Heller, Ken Kesey, John Knowles, John Fowles, and Doris Les-sing...

...It has thirty or forty members...

...Theater, film, any visual experiences, and music are all intensely preferred to books...

...Censuring the despotism of traffic, Diggers blocked St...

...Diggers do want to convert others, and they say that the best way to destroy the middle class is to leave it...

...Mark's Place for thirty minutes while chanting Hare Krishna (the Hindu love mantra), then polished the waiting cars...

...Incoherence is almost a virtue...

...Diggers collected and distributed a truckload of food after Newark's riots—noting that canned food was preferable, since it could also be thrown at the police...

...Collective energy is much greater than any one person's...

...Runaways in their early teens are now a national anxiety...

...They run a Free Store in New York where anyone can help himself to clothes, books, or the furniture that is collected by "going garbaging" at night...

...But, primarily, "Music is the literature of this generation...

...Still, certain Eastern philosophers do have a small audience here, as does The Wall Street Journal, "the nippiest paper in town...

...They feel that how people speak reveals far more than what they say, that eventually (perhaps in 2000), the vibration concept could replace speech—that people will not need to talk, but will converse through all their senses...

...Heeding the deplorable state of many mental hospitals, disapproving of certain "transits' communes"—such as one recently abandoned by a hippie called Galahad, which became so notorious for amphetamines and syphilis that the Diggers have asked the Health Department to close it—they feel especially responsible for runaways...

...cinations, it absorbs strays to a merciless vanishing-point, rendering their afflictions and their very existence unknown—as though they had fallen through the cracks in the pavements...

...Another is The Group Image, which has an acid rock group which has made $2,000 per weekend in uptown discotheques...

...Still, among the diversities of hippiedom, the Diggers emerge with some perceptible traits...

...Voluntary poverty would have no charm for Negroes or the poor who were born too far outside the system to be able to reject it...

...the New York Youth Board suspects that there are usually about 4,000 under eighteen in the city...

...NORA SAYRE is New York correspondent for the New Statesman...

...A Digger remarked that films are now so expensive to see that many resort to making their own...

...However, the Diggers have quite amiable relations with their local East Village precinct officer, whose fortunate name is Captain Fink...

...One Digger pondered the difficulties of maintaining an avant-garde—since the media makes it so public...

...Above all, Diggers are calculated comedians: their games sprinkle absurdity over whatever they protest—a point that has so far befuddled the press...

...Apolitical, they dislike the Vietnam war, but do not want to talk about it...

...In the scope of Things, everyone has a talent: from painting to driving trucks or having babies—or just being...

...This movement will not produce writers, and reading itself is minimal...

...While there are rescue societies for lost dogs, there is no equivalent for humans...

...It is cheerfully admitted that most hippies come from middle class or upper middle class families...

...Stockbrokers, clerks, and runners on the floor blew kisses and cheered until the dollar-disposers were hustled out...

...It is easy to be dejected by the extreme passivity of many hippies, who numbly rely on being turned on by others, assaulted by external sensations, having everything done to them...

...Many Diggers were civil rights dropouts, especially those disillusioned about voter registration...

...Now one is told that the attitude towards LSD has altered in recent weeks, because of the reports of chromosome damage...

...Named for the Seventeenth Century common-land cultivators, they evolved from the San Francisco Mime Troupe about two years ago...

...Marijuana has already been pronounced middle class...

...Consolidated Edison,- distinguished for air pollution and often grimly rebuked by City Hall, was recently deluged on "Black Flower Day": Diggers brandished a sign ("Breathing Is Bad For Your Health"), presented emerging utility executives with begrimed flowers, and then poured soot on them...

...Well-nourished on theatrical history, the Diggers are swiftly developing their concept of "street theater...

...The Diggers agree that they do attract many "strung-out" waifs, who want drugs but are not "conscious hippies...

...Ironically, the Puritan heritage of utile et dulce seems to belong to the Diggers...

...Meanwhile, many musicians and painters are being scooped up by the commercial world which they meant to reject...

...Collectivism thrives throughout the Diggers' realms...

...Smoke-flares stained the building responsible for soiling so much of New York: a plea that may be more memorable than the hundreds of editorials already published...

...Solitary egos are not admired : the goal is "collective ego...

...He added that "The automatic record-changer is even more important than psychedelics" —as a wellspring for electronic culture...

...Now we have the numbers to do it...

...one intelligent Digger even apologized for being too articulate...

...Diggers are convinced that people must take care of one another, particularly during spells of limbo, when someone needs to "be freaky...

...In some communes, participants play the roles of mothers, fathers, and children...

...But the kinetic Diggers are a cheering presence in the landscape: few humanists have their humor, and humorists are rarely so humane...

...Naturally spontaneity is cherished, but each performance has a purpose that "happenings" lack...

...Now he thinks that a "post-drug" period has begun, especially among those with substantial drug experience—although the newest hippies, who have made no "deliberate" choice, do still clamor for drugs...

...But it's also clear that this world is anti-verbal, distinctly mistrustful of words...

...But the country's making them into a criminal class...

...One day some thirty $1 bills floated down to the floor of the New York Stock Exchange, flung by Diggers who were miming "the death of money...

...In a current issue of Daedalus, Margaret Mead and others, discussing the dissolution of the family unit, indicated that intentional communities may be the life-style of the year 2000...

...There are rules—"No balling of chicks"—and selective screening to see who is capable of staying with strangers...

...It is in the current tradition of dealing directly with the audience, with no division between actors and spectators, plus an opportunity for everyone to participate...

...But people must be turned on to themselves...

...The city sensibly hired—but then fired— some Diggers for this project, which they will continue on their own...

...One Digger said that Time's modish cover story on the hippies "gave us 400,000 instant pseudo-hippies...

...The point was to give the dealers "some real money," instead of coupons and stock certificates, and to ridicule the entire Western economy...

...Later, they planted a tree (quickly uprooted), passed out 500 free cups of strawberry yogurt, and gave a street dance...

...In these "clusters against meaning-lessness," LSD has been called "a binding substance": many feel that it makes them more patient and tolerant...

...But they dislike the power that it gives people over one another, and the tyranny of economic systems...

...We don't know what to do about Vietnam or Harlem...

...One "closed" commune was called The Family, supported by a long-haired IBM computer-analyst...

...Runaways spring from all economic contexts, many from homes so brutal that it would be futile to advise them to return—although the Diggers suggest sending postcards...

...It is notable that some who have taken copious and repeated LSD-doses speak very slowly indeed...

...Once you define things, they're meaningless...

...there is now a robust New York chapter...

...One initiate explained that the chief problem encountered under LSD is choice —that if a friend says, "It looks like a good day," that every factor must be reconsidered before replying...

...They are both useful and pleasing, and the key dulcitude is comedy...

...At any rate, Diggers have charmingly good manners...

...Her reviews have appeared in The Reporter and The Nation...

...In New York there was a Tribal Council, now disbanded but quite likely to regroup, where leaders from many tribes sat in an Indian circle, each addressing himself to the center, debating such problems as what kind of schools to form, and—most urgently— "How do you protect yourself from being seduced by uptown...

...The Diggers plan to renovate an old hotel for a runaways' dormitory...

...A Digger dictum: "Do your Thing—until it encroaches on someone else's Thing...

...Their street events seem an improvement on much of the Off-off-Broadway random audience-touching, and the tedium of happenings, just as the best media-mix is a delightful advance beyond many scrambled but boring Underground films of two years ago...