The Illuminatus! Trilogy

"That's the pentagram, not the pentagon." Barney lit a cigarette, adding. "This is really getting on our nerves, isn't it?"

Saul looked up wearily and glanced around the apartment almost as if he were looking for its absent owner. "Joseph Malik," he said aloud, "what can of worms have you opened? And how far back does it go?"

WE SHALL NOT

WE SHALL NOT BE MOVED

In fact, for Joseph Malik the beginning was several years earlier, in a medley of teargas, hymn singing, billy clubs, and obscenity, all of which were provoked by the imminent nomination for President of a man named Hubert Horatio Humphrey. It began in Lincoln Park on the night of August 25, 1968, while Joe was waiting to be teargassed. He did not know then that anything was beginning; he was only conscious, in an acid, gut-sour way, of what was ending: his own faith in the Democratic party.

He was sitting with the Concerned Clergymen under the cross they had erected. He was thinking, bitterly, that they should have erected a tombstone instead. It should have said: Here lies the New Deal.

Here lies the belief that all Evil is on the other side, among the reactionaries and Ku Kluxers. Here lies twenty years of the hopes and dreams and sweat and blood of Joseph Wendall Malik. Here lies American Liberalism, clubbed to death by Chicago's heroic peace officers.

"They're coming," a voice near him said suddenly. The Concerned Clergymen immediately began singing, "We shall not be moved."

"We'll be moved, all right," a dry sardonic, W.C. Fields voice said quietly. "When the teargas hits, we'll be moved." Joe recognized the speaker: it was novelist William Burroughs with his usual poker face, utterly without anger or contempt or indignation or hope or faith or any emotion Joe could understand. But he sat there, making his own protest against Hubert Horatio Humphrey by placing his body in front of Chicago's police, for reasons Joe could not understand.

How, Joe wondered, can a man have courage without faith, without belief? Burroughs believed in nothing, and yet there he sat stubborn as Luther. Joe had always had faith in something-Roman Catholicism, long ago, then Trotskyism at college, then for nearly two decades mainstream liberalism (Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.'s, "Vital Center") and now, with that dead, he was trying desperately to summon up faith in the motley crowd of dope-and-as-trology-obsessed Yippies, Black Maoists, old-line hardcore pacifists, and arrogantly dogmatic SDS kids who had come to Chicago to protest a rigged convention and were being beaten and brutalized unspeakably for it.

Alien Ginsberg- sitting amid a huddle of Yippies off to the right- began chanting again, as he had all evening: "Hare Krishna Hare Krishna Krishna Krishna Hare Hare…" Ginsberg believed; he believed in everything- in democracy, in socialism, in communism, in anarchism, in Ezra Pound's idealistic variety of fascist economics, in Buckminster Fuller's technological Utopia, in D. H. Lawrence's return to preindustrial pastoralism, and in Hinduism, Buddhism, Judaism, Christianity, Voodoo, astrology magic; but, above all, in the natural goodness of man.

The natural goodness of man… Joe hadn't fully believed in that, since Buchenwald was revealed to the world in 1944, when he was seventeen.

"KILL! KILL! KILL!" came the chant of the police,-exactly like the night before, the same neolithic scream of rage that signaled the beginning of the first massacre. They were coming, clubs in hand, spraying the teargas before them. "KILL! KILL! KILL!"

Auschwitz, U.S.A., Joe thought, sickened. If they had been issued Zyklon B along with the teargas and Mace, they would be using it just as happily.

Slowly, the Concerned Clergymen came to their feet, holding dampened handkerchiefs to their faces. Unarmed and helpless, they prepared to hold their ground as long as possible before the inevitable retreat. A moral victory, Joe thought bitterly: All we ever achieve are moral victories. The immoral brutes win the real victories.

"All hail Discordia," said a voice among the clergymen- a bearded young man named Simon, who had been arguing in favor of anarchism against some SDS Maoists earlier in the day.

And that was the last sentence Joe Malik remembered clearly, for it was gas and clubs and screams and blood from then on. He had no way of guessing, at the time, that hearing that sentence was the most important thing that happened to him in Lincoln Park.