The Illuminatus! Trilogy

(Harry Coin curls his long body into a knot of tension, resting on his elbows and sighting the Remington rifle carefully, as the motorcade passes the Book Depository and heads toward his perch on the triple underpass. He could see Bernard Barker from the CIA down on the grassy knoll. If he carried this off right, they promised him more jobs; it would be the end of petty crime for him, the beginning of big-time money. In a way he was sorry: Kennedy seemed like a nice enough young fellow-Harry would like to make it with both him and that hot-looking wife of his at the same tune- but money talks and sentiment is only for fools. He released the bolt action, ignoring the sudden barking of a dog, and took aim- just as the three shots resounded from the grassy knoll.

"Jesus Motherfuckin' Christ," he said; and then he caught the glint of the rifle in the Book Depository window. Great God Almighty, how the fuck many of us are there here?" he cried out, scampering to his feet and starting to run.)

It was almost a year after being clubbed-June 22, 1969-that Joe returned to Chicago, to witness another rigged convention, to suffer further disillusionment, to meet Simon once more and to hear the mysterious phrase "All hail Discordia" again.

The convention this time was the last ever held by the Students for a Democratic Society, and from the first hour after it opened, Joe realized that the Progressive Labor faction had stacked all the cards in advance. It was the Democratic party all over again- and it would have been equally bloody if the PL boys had their own police force to "deal with" the dissenters known then as RYM-I and RYM-II. Lacking that factor, the smoldering violence remained purely verbal, but when it was all over another part of Joe Malik was dead and his faith in the natural goodness of man was eroded still further. And so he found himself, aimlessly searching for something that was not totally corrupt, attending the Anarchist Caucus at the old Wobbly Hall on North Halsted Street.

Joe knew nothing about anarchism, except that several famous anarchists-Parsons and Spies of Chicago's Hay-market riot in 1888, Sacco and Vanzetti in Massachusetts, and the Wobbly's own poet-laureate, Joe Hill- had been executed for murders which they apparently hadn't really committed. Beyond that, anarchists wanted to abolish government- a proposition so evidently absurd that Joe had never bothered to read any of their theoretical or polemical works. Now, however, eating the maggoty meat of his growing disillusionment with every conventional approach to politics, he began to listen to the Wobblies and other anarchists with acute curiosity. After all, the words of his favorite fictional hero, "When you have eliminated all other possibilities, whatever remains, however improbable, must be true."

The anarchists, Joe found, were not going to quit SDS-"We'll stay in and do some righteous ass-kicking," one of them said, to the applause and cheers of the others.

Beyond that, however, they seemed to be in a welter of ideological disagreement. Gradually, he began to identify the conflicting positions expressed: the individualist-anarchists, who sounded like right-wing Republicans (except that they wanted to get rid of all functions of government); the anarcho-syndicalists and Wobblies, who sounded like Marxists (except that they wanted to get rid of all functions of government); the anarcho-pacifists, who sounded like Gandhi and Martin Luther King (except that they wanted to get rid of all functions of government); and a group who were dubbed, rather affectionately, "the Crazies"-whose position was utterly unintelligible. Simon was among the Crazies.