American Communes Voluntary Maoism

...We know what happened to all that naive energy of the 1960s through the fates of the leaders of that generation: Leary, babbling...

...get their-water -fkm natural sources,‘aid build shelters from scraps left around by the rest of us...

...Why haven’t they told us about Stephen Gaskin, a man who led 500 ex-college students and defected professionals to abandon their careers and raise soybeans on a giant farm in Tennessee...

...On a simple physical level, at least, they are able to get on with an infinitesimal amount of money and a minute amount of energy...

...But at the Farm, they do not allow it...

...John Rothchild is a contributing editor of The Washington Monthly...

...It is hard to switch gears on commune hippies...

...You’re on an ego trip...

...that the only way Fidel and Mao can get so many people to follow them is at the point of a gun...

...There was enough without around there to challenge every visitor’s conception of necessity...

...Would my precious writing career be swamped in the mush of drugs and peyote meetings...

...The commune people didn’t lean on me in any of the ways I had imagined...

...Abbie Hoffman is seen as a silly egomaniac...

...Jerry Rubin, bemoaning age...

...A successful commune would be one in which the child could grow and still acquire the skills and intelligence to choose to live someplace else...

...It is one thing for the primed achiever with a $20,000 education under hs belt to join the Peace Corps or work in a poverty program or drop out for two years to round out his experience and season his resume...

...I could understand why reporters had not been out here, why this fascinating version of the movement had not been covered...

...It did not make me comfortable...

...I could imagine everything that a commune, as a last refuge for hippie anarchy, might allow...

...The commune people now see the straight world in roughly the same way the straight world once saw the hppies...

...It doesn’t matter so much if the person is a son-of-a-bitch as long as we know he is a good doctor...

...They see us pursuing immoral professional fantasies at the expense of what might work...

...Rennie Davis, under the turgid thumb of the 15-year-old guru...

...I got a glimpse of how far communes have come from those originators of the movement when I accompanied Jerry Rubin on a visit to a California commune...

...The story of what happened to the doctor at the Farm will better explain what they meant...

...I had always claimed allegiance with people victimized by professionals, and had allied myself with the average man against the growing specialization and mysticism surrounding every simple task...

...They told me that as long as I relied on a job definition to explain what I was doing then I was hiding the real truth about my motivations and about my fears...

...The sense that cut across all the communes was a sense of personal responsibility, and actions were judged on the most individual basis available...

...The sexual mores were not particularly striking one way or another, people ifi some communes swapped around, but they didn’t enforce it...

...I assumed that Libre meant what the name implied-freedom, man, not only the gray legal freedoms but also all the psychedelic freedoms promoted by Abbie and Rennie and the Great Speckled Bird...

...Not an unusual idea in the annals of religion, but unusual for the hippies who we remember only as gratifiers of their own selfish desires...

...In the same way, we can dismiss peasants because they are probably forced to work in the fields and because we are sure that someday they will want our television sets...

...there are no writers, poets, researchers, bureaucrats, or thinkers, and the Farm band is only a part-time position...

...They see it as a threat to the community, to the feeling of closeness among people...

...and “Where is your head at...

...In every conversation in every bus they assaulted my professionalism, as a psychiatrist assaults a person’s defenses...

...The jobs are all practical...

...Nothing is political in a commune, and a commune is the last place that would put up with the frenzy and the put-ons and the gyrations of the counterculture we remember...

...For all my reasons to dislike the F arm, I could see direct benefits of Gaskin thinking...

...If you sit in here long enough, the people will even kick you out...

...Yet when faced for the first time with giving up my own professional shield, even for a few days, I went into virtual shock...

...But with this new kind of American voluntary peasant, you can’t help but wonder about him, wonder if he is here in the commune because he can’t make it any place else, wonder if he is incapable of struggling with the big issues...

...It is one thing for an aspiring writer to figure he has a better chance of being recognized with a rural byline than an urban one...

...They have also given up their bank accounts and all private assets, which are turned over to the Farm when one makes the commitment to live there...

...It was another major surprise of this anonymous civilization, that hippies do anything serious...

...It is a giant plantation, 1,100 acres, covered with old Army tents and ex-Greyhound buses (where most of the inhabitants live) and soybean fields...

...In the outside world, a doctor is allowed to demand a certain amount of deference in return for his skill...

...They have given up privacy, with communal showers and dual-seat outhouses and the constant scrutiny of 699 other people...

...And second, because the F arm people were not poor peasants who might well choose to sacrifice freedom of speech for the guarantee of a decent meal...

...The Farm also had a high percentage of ex-doctors and lawyers and teachers who were living without their professions, without what Peter Rabbit calls “the ego stash...

...They see it as immoral and irresponsible, ridiculous, and patently self-gratifying...

...There is a trading in smugness that we put up with in the real world, because what else are we going to do...

...There is no abstract reasoning in a commune...

...The horns are blown at 4:30 a.m...

...They accused me of hiding my immaturity behind a profession...

...The Farm underscored the classic liberal dilemma about Red China or Fidel's Cuba...

...If somebody was getting on somebody's nerves, they Were forced to sit down and work it out immediately...

...Would my special bond with a woman be threatened when our sleeping bag was detached and connected to a giant, group sleeping bag, filled with dirt and pot seeds and horny and diseased people who don’t believe in property rights or the boundaries of separate zippers...

...they were no more or less confused about sex than me or my friends back in Washington...

...The last great commune figure was Charlie Manson, and we all know what happened to him...

...There are several crews-soybean crews, carpentry crews, maintenance crews, salvage crews...

...crossed with dirt footpaths where 700 men, women, and children amble through the day...

...What has this information got to do with you...

...Anytime I tried to extract information, from a teenager named Eric, for instance, I was countered with challenges like: “Why do you want to know this information...

...Which wasn’t so bad, except that I couldn’t do interviews even in my spare time...

...After the program was over, Jerry spent a few more uncomfortable moments walking around the Farm and then said he had to get out of there...

...Soybeans The most extreme form of ego loss occurs at the Farm, Gaskin’s place, the largest and most rigid of the communes...

...The Farm had attracted one M. D., and they certainly needed his skills, with all those people and-since Gaskin doesn’t allow birth control-all those babies...

...I had imagined myself to be a self-appointed mediator between two hostile cultures, but I found myself to be an outsider to the new alliance, a useless and probably not-to-be-trusted word-pusher...

...They see the rest of us blundering through careers and fattening egos while the world around us is more and more out of our control...

...Street theater and protests were all calculated gestures, calculated for effect...

...It was a close-knit community in the way Fourth-of-July orators talk about their towns...

...To the Farm people, the very definition of a professional-especially a successful professional, which luckily I was not-is somebody who is hiding something...

...The real battle between me and the communes was on a professional level...

...And this sense of community is more important to them than the benefits they might receive from a doctor’s skill...

...Why hasn’t the press told us about these Americans who survive communally, who use less energy, who do all the things that William Simon said the rest of us should do to save the country...

...Beyond these specific functions, information and thinking were useless smoke screens...

...There were no social problems or political topics at the Farm, everything was personal...

...By traveling the mountainous regions of America-the Ozarks, the Appalachans, the Rockies, northern Californiaand driving to where the road knocked the oil pan off my car, I would find the rainbow buses and domes and scrap-built houses and victory gardens that are the landscape of communes...

...I thinned carrots at Libre, sanded wooden toys in New York State, cleaned pistons in New Mexico, nailed floors in Tennessee...

...There was a spirit of trust and good will in this place that was undeniable, even after several years of subsistence living...

...If the tangible benefits of labor cannot be immediately recognized, then the labor is frivolous...

...women who are totally independent from men, and yet who recognize the liberation issues of better jobs and more ego gratification for women as misdirected...

...It was like that all over the country, a strange alliance between commune hippies and the rural people who are supposed to hate them the most...

...I could stand the soybeans and the- tents, seeing them as an even trade for tranquillity and beauty...

...He had nothing in common with communes...

...Many of the communes, in fact, have returned to iron-clad marriages and stringent rules of monogamy that few so-called straight people today practice...

...Only a handful of the original Farm pioneers had left the compound for the city life...

...What happened to me in a few days at the Farm was analogous to what happened to the doctor...

...But the commune people have been out of it for eight or nine years now, long enough to embalm the resume, and they tell you they don’t care: ex-teachers and ex-physicists and ex-everything who have reduced their personal aspirations to keeping a couple of cars running and a couple of people fed...

...While sexual license may appall the rest of the country, professional license is what appalls the commune hippies...

...What I could not accept was the Farm’s attitude toward work, an attitude that unsettled me in my deepest gut attachments...

...A teenager could not justify his destructive behavior on the grounds that society pushed him into it...

...Part of that is self-interest, to be sure, but part is a genuine admiration for Gaskin and his people...

...They have given up food that has anythmg to do with pleasure, subsisting on a diet of soybean coffee, soybean dinner, soybean dessert and soybean snacks, varied by curleydoc, a nutritious weed that they pull from the ground to make salads...

...I was assigned to the carpentry crew...

...The rest of them had given up thinking and put their energies into physical labor and into feeling good-which was the goal of every person at the Farm...

...Would I be lost to a gunfight with hostile redneck neighbors...

...Voluntary Maoism is a very hard life to accept...

...Not for my physical contribution to the farming-he could see that it wouldn’t be crucial-but for the spiritual good of the community...

...Still More Soybeans When 500 people tell you that you are full of shit, the message carries a certain power...

...In Hector, Arkansas, near a commune called the Dubie Plantation, the old postmistress, a town fixture and solon, told me: “We understand them hippies...

...They have given up movies and television, the only entertainment being smoking grass or listening to a Gaskin lecture or occasionally dancing to the Farm’s rock band...

...Communes provide a whole universe for the people who choose to live in them, and a mirror in which outsiders can see their own foibles and dilemmas by contrast...

...After visiting dozens of communes, I was convinced that the counterculture was dropped from the news at the precise moment it became seriousthat is, tenable-and that there is something so threatening about the successful communes that we would rather not know about them...

...Dozens of people asked me how long I thought 1 would need to be a writer, and when, if ever, I would grow up...

...I suspected conspiracy...

...Their message carried particular power, because while I could dismiss the Jesus freaks as kooks, these Gaskin people were intelligent and articulate and competent and hard working...

...Communes are populated by white, educated Americans...

...Libre, the name of this particular commune, had invited me to stay for the summer, to occupy one of the domes...

...People who said to me, "If you really want to feel better about the world, then give up your profession and change your head...

...I was not a newcomer either to radical politics or to the drug scene, and yet communes brought on a flood of Dionysian associations...

...I and Thou The Farm is an unusual commune, unusual in its rigidity, and unusual in that it has a recognized leader...

...But on the other hand, there is the thorny problem of the lack of newspapers, the lack of dissenters, the lack of public criticism...

...They lacked the aimless indulgent quality of urban encounter groups, because a t the F arm there was a specific goal-to get back to productive work as quickly as possible...

...Revolutions are fought over the amenities and attachments that these Farm people have chosen to do without...

...The commune threat did not materialize, at first...

...They have gone so far that a regular American businessman currently has . far more in common with Jerry Rubin and Abbie Hoffman than those two radical spokesmen have in common with commune people...

...The inhabitants of one (who said they hadn’t seen a reporter for five years) directed me down the road to another, and so on, until I began to envision this vast, anonymous civilization, like the straw-hut tribes that once lived in the shadows of Mayan temples and Aztec pyramids...

...My disturbance at even being in the garden was a gauge against which I was able to judge them as inferior because they have given up the serious business of thinking for fixing cars and planting and hoeing a few carrots...

...We read pages of speculation that Patty Hearst may be hiding in a commune, in her outmoded attachment to 1960s radicalism...

...The next thing I discovered was that the lady next to me in the carrots used to be a research chemist, the man down the row was a lawyer, the woman on the brown horse was a physician in California...

...The man who once threatened to run Steve Gaskin and his 500 hippies out of Tennessee on the barrel of a shotgun now owns a sawmill in conjunction with Gaskin...

...First, because the sacrifice made by the Farm people was their own choice, a kind of voluntary Maoism...

...In those days, we could read about their exploits with the satisfaction that they would someday fall apart, that those adolescent fantasies wouldn’t hold up...

...The same kind of scrutiny that was applied to me and my behavior was applied to all the relations on the Farm...

...On the one hand, it is easy to admire all that dedication and self-sacrifice and the better standard of living it produces for the peasant...

...It is the kind of spirit you associate with unpaid community volunteer projects, except in communes the entire day was an unpaid volunteer labor project, and in communes I discovered the price you pay for that kind of unity...

...but who wonders about those hundreds of places that are still organized enough to even harbor Patty Hearst...

...But, somewhere in the publicity void, things changed around...

...The commune mentality is so different from what we are accustomed to that it is alien to both American radicals and American traditionalists...

...A hybrid culture built on farm labor and homespun and horseshoe mysticism that has somehow transcended sex and drugs and Charlie Manson...

...But the people in the matured form of the movement are less involved in publicity...

...But in more informal places, too, I sensed the same spirit at work...

...In the long run, there may be no middle ground between the opposing realities of the communes and of the straight world, but for the moment I am trying to live in between, glad that both worlds exist...

...All of us around here has been livin’ like hippies for generations...

...Commune people have found what they believe to be a happier and saner world by turning in an entirely opposite direction...

...Information was not valued except when it helped fix a tractor or when somebody’s life could be changed by it, when it could be used to resolve a personal problem between two people...

...The way we relate to one another around here is through work.’’ As I ambled toward the garden, I could feel for the first time what it must have meant for the Havana journalist (who thought he sympathized with the revolution) to be handed a hoe by Fidel...

...People had jobs, but they were not allowed to use their jobs as an excuse for bad behavior...

...Peter Rabbit, founder of two communes, suggested with the air of a bouncer that 1 get into the Libre garden...

...So they told this doctor that he had to become a member of the soybean crew until he could learn to practice medicine in a less ego-involved way...

...People got along with a minimal amount of bickering...

...Neither Gloria Steinem nor Ralph Nader nor Jerry Rubin nor Jimmy Hoffa nor Senator Fulbright could stand the immediate ego loss that goes with living in a commune...

...political radicals and drug radicals copped-out or sold-out or imprisoned or crazy or dead...

...Abbie Hoffman, indicted for coke (a Park Avenue drug...

...But if you are outside, in the garden, working with them, then they will get to know you and feel good about you...

...That’s another thing...

...In the early days, the radicals and the media worked side by side...

...But how many people will want to live that way...

...Radicals often said they didn’t care, but then you could see it in their eyes, the unspoken bargain that gives a journalist the license to ask personal questions without putting himself on the line personally, to function with professional impunity, to reserve judgment...

...The communes that have survived since the 1960s are not all the same, of course, but I was surprised to find out that most of them have made peace with the rednecks and the rural neighbors...

...They can’t really enjoy soybeans and tents, they can’t really prefer hammering and sowing to important mental work...

...If you sit in here in front of this machine,” Peter Rabbit said, “then the people will wonder about you, they will wonder where your head is at, they might get paranoid...

...While everything in the outside world has become politicized, where even having babies and sex have become political (and therefore impersonal) the hippie culture has gone in the opposite direction...

...There weren't enough safe, impersonal issues...

...One can only suspect repression...

...A woman could not justify whining, pushing, yenta behavior on the grounds that society is screwed up and she is only defending her rights as a woman...

...The first reaction to a situation like this is to say the people have been duped...

...When last heard from, they were exemplars of indulgence and self-expression at all costs...

...Still, most people would shudder if all the world were a commune-with a uniform, almost medieval stillness hanging in the air...

...He took on the smugness that skilled people are allowed when they are fulfilling their special function- the way the auto mechanic treats you when you are in his shop, the way you treat the auto mechanic when he is in your shop...

...We have come to accept being a little arrogant as part of being a doctor, part of the manner...

...in fact, they made him extremely uncomfort able...

...these descendants of publicity seekers did not believe in the value of words, or in my using their words as raw materials for some theory I had concocted in a private room...

...It made me wonder what the hell they were doing...

...in fact radicals refused to work without the media, seeing publicity as a sign of success...

...I wish my kids were that nice,” the shotgun man said...

...For openers, they have given up houses...

...In fact, my original worry about the commune children was: can any of them ever get out of here...

...instead they leaned on my ego...

...I could stand it only to the degree that I might cash in my ego chips later by writing about the experience...

...He retreated to the basement and turned on a television which had been dormant for several weeks...

...They are the only group of Americans for whom you could say: “If everybody lived like them, then there would be no energy crisis...

...My fascination with information was not accepted, like the doctor’s arrogance, as trappings of professionalism...

...Farm people all have jobs, even the mothers of the 150 children running around the place...

...My imagined dilemma of finding enough kids to write about became instead a real problem of knowing when to stop...

...Would I get hep, strep, syph, or clap, was the level of my concern...

...They look down from their mountains with amusement and a hint of piety...

...I only discovered the actual size and strength of the commune nation while doing research for a book on children of radicals...

...It was disconcerting to find this unknown civilization out there...

...The communes that have survived the 1960s do seem to work...

...The Farm day begins when two people traverse the property, blowing primitive shellhorns to announce wake-up time...

...A writer could not justify arrogant, reclusive behavior on the grounds that isolation is the only way to produce a good article...

...They also have reestablished what most Americans say they would like to have-control over their own lives...

...As far as I know, he is still planting soybeans, and the Farm is still without its own doctor...

...it was looked on as evidence of my inability to reveal anything about myself...

...He walked into the living room, where people were talking and working, and something about the whole scene made him very nervous...

...I would have imagined Rubin to be completely at home in a commune, but nobody recognized him...

...he said he didn’t want to miss a special on Spiro Agnew...

...I began to build a mental line of defense, imagining these situations and how I might get out of them, how I might survive in a society founded on Steal This Book and Euell Gibbons and the horoscope section of the newspaper and The Strawberry Statement and the general libido madness that ended up at Charlie Manson’s place...

...but here was an outright prohibition, in the form of this gangly rabbit-man who put a lid on my creativity...

...Th-ey let me get away with being a writer in only one or two communes-one where I had hepatitis and they may have taken pity-but in general I found it difficult to function as a journalist...

...In no commune could I strike a bargain like that...

...At Libre commune, in the Colorado mountains, they not only barter labor and food with the local mountain people, they are also very tight with the sheriff who, on more than one occasion, has helped them out of some sticky situations...

...However horrifying their rebellion to certain people, those two general goals are ones with which most Americans can readily identify...

...You immediately think of what people have given up to live here...

...As the doctor was setting up his clinic at the Farm, people began to notice that his personality took an arrogant turn...

...We kept in close contact with the early stages of 1960s radicalism, when it involved kids who were struggling for self-expression and self-gratification...

...They were people like me, but who had given up both intellectual indulgence and luxurious meals and through it all said they were happier than before...

...Yesterday’s Heroes The entire philosophy of freedom on which so many underground newspapers based their existence has been discredited in communes...

...Thev s o w their own food...

...It was especially easy to conclude this at Gaskin’s place, since the other people saw him as a prophet and almost everything, they said, had its origins in Gaskin’s brain...

...Gaskin had the only functioning, reflective mind in the place...

...They came on like a new breed of happy, healthy, dancing darkies, darkies from the days when the white folks could say and believe that “they are happier than us...

...Drugs were not that prevalent, either, except for grass, and an occasional Sunday afternoon acid trip, a nostalgia trip, really, like taking an old car out for a leisurely drive...

...Gaskin was often present at these encounters...

...At the Farm, I had to grapple with the problem on a much deeper and more personal level...

...Around me in the garden at Libre were several people hoeing and weeding, men and women in their late twenties, wearing shorts or topless Levis, giving off glowing, agrarian looks...

...I was sitting in a geodesic dome in the Colorado mountains, trying to catch up on some notes, when a man with the unlikely name of Peter Rabbit barged in to suggest that I stop typing and do something “serious...

...they have abolished rhetoric and pondering about anything beyond one’s own personal control as irresponsible goofing off...