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LIBERATION NEWSPAPER
(FRANCE) - DECEMBER 25, 2000
- THE DIGGERS -
30 YEARS IN AN AMERICAN ALTERNATIVE MOVEMENT
PETER COYOTE & THE STATUTES OF FREEDOM
In search of the California anarchists with the
noted actor
by Edward Waintrop
In 1966-1967, in contrast to the San Francisco
hippies, the Diggers were revolutionaries. They
vanished from the city when they believed there was
nothing more to be accomplished, established
communes in the country, and took a new road toward
radical environmentalism.
Thirty years later, the Diggers still haven’t
abandoned their American Dream.
Mill Valley – one day in late October:
Peter Coyote sits down to lunch in a small Mill
Valley Mexican restaurant minutes from his house
north of San Francisco Bay. Thin, handsome,
animated, not looking his fast-approaching 60 years
of age, the film actor, (Pedro Almovadar’s Kika,
Roman Polanski’s Bitter Moon,) remembers the ‘60s in
San Francisco’s hippie neighborhood, the
Haight-Ashbury. He also reminisces about the Mime
Troupe, the revolutionary theatre company where his
acting career began 35 years ago.
“Each of our performances was a frontal attack on
the mainstream culture and its fashionable and
nonpolitical theatrical shows. When they accepted me
into the troupe, I was ecstatic. I believed I was
beginning my career with the best, the most
audacious.”
Coyote also remembers the Diggers, the most radical
group on the West Coast, born of the Mime Troupe and
with whom he was very close: a group of militant
actor-anarchists, very active during the psychedelic
era, who then vanished at the end of 1967 like so
much smoke. Coyote knows what became of them; in
fact, he was still friends with them in the ‘80s,
when they reappeared with a new political point of
view, still firmly convinced that social change was
possible.
In Coyote’s memoirs, "Sleeping
Where I Fall", he begins
by describing his own beginnings: his family whom he
characterizes as “very far to the Left.” His mother
Ruth, a Russian Jew, had seen her cousin thrown out
of the American public school system in the ‘50s for
being a communist and she had since then remained a
rebel against the system; his father, Morris Cohon,
originally from Uzbekistan, was a banker but counted
among his friends the founders of the Monthly
Review, a socialist periodical. Several months
before his death in 1971, he says to Peter, who at
the time was living in a radical commune in
California: “Capitalism is dying, boy. It's dying of
its own internal contradictions. You think that the
revolution's gonna take five years. It's gonna take
fifty!"
Despite the closeness of their political beliefs,
Peter and his father don't have an idyllic
relationship. A former college wrestling champion,
Morris Cohon wants his eldest son to be a
competitor. He gives him wrestling lessons, from
which Peter always emerges defeated. The actor
observes today, “A man who teaches his son that he
can never win creates in the boy a world of terror
and violence.” Unwilling to engage in the
competitive spirit, he writes, “My pleasures became
solitary ones: reading, writing, observing people
and animals, and first and foremost,
daydreaming."(1)
In 1964, Peter Cohon/Coyote leaves the East coast
for San Francisco. He wants to become a writer.
Instead, he joins the Mime Troupe. He’s not yet 24
years old. He’s fascinated by Ron Davis, the
troupe’s founder, whose ambitions are to transform
contemporary theater - which he finds merely
innocuous and decorative - by abolishing the line
between the stage and the audience; and to transform
political art, by denouncing the racism of the
government and the police, American policy in
Vietnam, and the repression of the black power
movement. The Mime Troupe’s approach to these
weighty objectives is to present light-hearted but
blustery performances, inspired by the Commedia
dell’arte, in the streets, the parks, and the public
squares. Of course, all done with enough provocation
to earn the comedians and Davis himself frequent
trips to the police station.
Revolution:
In the Mime Troupe, Peter meets Emmett Grogan, a
young New Yorker who had known, via burglaries
undertaken in the name of pro-IRA militancy, an
adventurous adolescence, the story of which he will
eventually tell in Ringolevio. The actor recounts,
“Emmett was my brother; he’s the one who did my
ear-piercings in ‘68.” He’s also the one with whom
Peter shot up heroin. “Emmett was a guy that was
hard to understand - egotistical and charismatic,
vulnerable and charming. A sort of Robin Hood, even
if, contrary to what he wrote in his book, he was
not the architect of the Haight-Ashbury revolution.”
In the troupe, Cohon also gets to know Peter Berg,
alias The Hun, “Of the entire group, the most
eccentric, the most radical, and without a doubt,
the most brilliant.”… He joins many discussions
organized by Berg. “Each of these contained advice
on how to disrupt the status quo," he says. Faced
with Davis, the Marxist, he sees himself as the
libertarian of the group. “The Hun and Davis were
two guys who were intelligent, revolutionary, and
committed. But the troupe just wasn’t big enough for
the both of them.” When dissidents Berg, Grogan, and
others left Davis, they founded their own group: the
Diggers.
Psychedelic celebrations:
The “Diggers” name comes from British history, from
a 17th century commune where peasants farmed the
property and then appropriated it. Cromwell had
destroyed this little group of hardy agrarian
reformers who intended "to observe the Law of
righteous action, endeavoring to shut out of the
Creation, the cursed thing, called Particular
propriety, which is the cause of all wars,
bloodshed, crime and enslaving Laws, that hold the
people under miserie."
Peter Cohon doesn’t follow the dissidents leaving
the Mime Troupe. “I wasn’t a purist like the
Diggers,” he explains between bites of his
burrito. But he continues to pay close attention to
what his friends are doing, spends many nights with
them deep in discussion, protests as they do against
the killing of black militants by the FBI or against
the Vietnam War, and gets involved in the
Haight-Ashbury’s psychedelic celebrations. He
describes this era brilliantly in his book. In San
Francisco-become-hippie capital, where hundreds of
penniless youth arrive en mass thinking they’ll find
peace, harmony and LSD, the Diggers stand out.
Not content to merely denounce American society, its
egotism, and the role of money; they equally mock
all aspects of a counterculture which defines itself
with the slogan “peace and love”, lampooning those
who take advantage of the situation, the small
Haight Ashbury businesses that make money off the
backs of the new arrivals. The Diggers publish
controversial leaflets and post them everywhere. But
above all, they deal with everyday life; feeding the
runaways who have no money, organizing the
distribution of free stew in the streets under the
slogan “Free Food for a Free Life”. And every
morning, they get up and start all over again,
repeating these heroic acts day after day.
They also organize free stores. And to promote their
ideas, they produce shows. For some of these shows,
they call on still relatively unknown rock
musicians: The Grateful Dead, Country Joe and the
Fish, or Jefferson Airplane. For other shows, they
feature themselves. They present The Invisible
Circus in a neighborhood church. This show, with its
strong sexual content, causes a huge outcry in the
local newspapers. Another time, they parade giant
puppets on Haight Street to celebrate the death of
money (a little prematurely, it turns out). Coyote
likes the Diggers’ provocative style. He describes
their battles with civic officials like the Mayor of
San Francisco, as well as with self-proclaimed
revolutionary organizations - they invite themselves
to meetings of the fledgling New Left and to the
student unions, and then heckle their leaders.
The Diggers’ ferment attracts the sympathies of
others. The poet/novelist Richard Brautigan (Trout
Fishing in America; Dreaming of Babylon: A Private
Eye Novel) enjoys taking part in their activities.
They have other allies in the Black Panther Party,
an Afro-American radical organization with its roots
across the bay in San Francisco; with them, they
open a free store known as The Black Man's Free
Store.
Occasionally, they call on the Hells Angels to help
them with their shows or food distribution, despite
the fact that this Harley Davidson motorcycle club
doesn’t generally approve of revolutionary acts.
It’s apparent that the Diggers and the Hells Angels
are mutually fascinated with the freedom and style
of the other. At the end of 1967, the Haight
Ashbury’s ambiance changes. The ravages of hard
drugs have taken their toll. Grogan and Coyote
themselves both fall victim. The Vietnam anti-war
movement becomes more hard-core, the police
crackdowns as well. Repression befalls the Black
Panthers.
On July 4, 1967, the Diggers, who don’t see
themselves making theater of armed resistance,
change their name - they become the “Free Family”,
and in the succeeding months, they disappear,
hitting the road. Some of them move to the country.
Peter Cohon follows them and changes his name. “In
1962, while on peyote, I had a dream in which I saw
myself as a coyote. Seven years later, I went off
into the desert with my Shoshone friend, Rolling
Thunder. I thought about it and decided to become
Peter Coyote. Now, it’s been 31 years, and I’ve been
Coyote longer than I was Cohon.”
The Diggers diaspora extends north from San
Francisco to several farming communes. But between
shouting matches about who does the dishes, the lack
of money, the personality conflicts, and the
dissention caused by sexual intrigue and jealousy,
rural communal life is difficult. Nonetheless, some
of them succeed because of strong organization,
their convictions, and the help of friends;
for example, the “Black Bear Ranch", located in a
remote corner of Northern California, where a new
political and ecological outlook is
developed. Coyote tells of a trip he took with Berg,
who will become the theoretician for a new ecology,
to visit Beat poet Gary Snyder at a commune
established on the banks of the Yuba River. There,
they find folks who try to understand and respect
the fauna and flora that surround them, and who
fight against mining, the wholesale logging of too
many trees, and senseless construction practices.
New ecology:
Since the late‘70s, Peter Coyote has worked as a
professional actor in the heart of the industry’s
mainstream. “My daughter was growing up and I owed
her a good education.” He’s filmed in Hollywood with
Steven Spielberg (E.T.) and Steven Soderbergh (Erin
Brockovich), in Madrid with Pedro Almodavar, in
Paris with Roman Polanski. But he still considers
himself a member of the Diggers family. For example,
he voted like them for Ralph Nader in the November 6
election. “Democrats are only interested in liberals
when it comes to getting our votes - and we are
going to deny them those votes.”
In the last pages of "Sleeping
Where I Fall", he reflects
on his past. A good number of his friends from the
‘60s are dead; Grogan of an overdose in 1978,
Brautigan commits suicide in 1984. Others succumb to
cancer, or are shot. Others have even become
narcs. And then there are those who have become
radical environmentalists and continue to want to
change America and the world; Peter Berg in San
Francisco - “He no longer speaks to me, but we do
cross paths at funerals and weddings”; and Nina
Balhausen, Jane Lapiner, Freeman House and David
Simpson, who have all moved to the banks of the
Mattole River in California.
[Kindly translated by Rosie McGee of Portland,
Oregon]
[ The
Official Peter
Coyote Web Site ]
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