TULI KUPFERBERG AND ROBERT BASHLOW
During the 1967 March on the Pentagon and its intense, earnest confrontations between marchers and soldiers, over at a different Pentagon wall The Fugs were attempting to exorcise the building itself—“out demons out,” they chanted, which Norman Mailer found attractive and Robert Lowell distracting. That moment suggests something about the relation between The Fugs and the mainstream antiwar movement; The Fugs were outrageous, visionary, playful, and impudent. Most of those characteristics are on display in 1001 Ways to Beat the Draft (1966), which is the wittiest and most obscene text included here in opposition to the Vietnam War, lacking formal discipline, argument, and logical sequence but full of Rabelaisian energy and Whitmanian capaciousness.
1001 Ways was the work of many hands and no doubt fun in the making (the book’s copyright page acknowledges the contributions of twenty-five collaborators, with their initials). Robert Bashlow (1939–1979), one of its two nominal authors, was reportedly a musical prodigy in his youth but was never a band member; he published the short-lived International Journal of Greek Love and earned his living as a coin dealer. Tuli Kupferberg (1923–2010), the other, grew up on the Lower East Side of New York, graduated from Brooklyn College in 1944, became a medical librarian, and intended “to be a doctor at one point, like any good Jewish boy.” But he turned to poems and satires, attempted suicide in 1945 by jumping off the Manhattan Bridge (an incident referred to in Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl”), survived, became a beatnik celebrity and anthologized poet, and with Ed Sanders founded The Fugs in 1963 in Sanders’s Peace Eye Bookstore.
FROM
1001 Ways to Beat the Draft
1 Grope J. Edgar Hoover in the silent halls of Congress.
2 Get thee to a nunnery.
3 Fly to the moon and refuse to come home.
4 Die.
5 Become Secretary of Defense.
6 Become Secretary of State.
7 Become Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare.
8 Show a li’l tit.
9 Castrate yourself.
10 Invent a time machine and go back to the 19th century.
11 Start to menstruate. (Better red than dead.)
12 Attempt to overthrow the Government of the United States by force and violence.
13 Advocate sexual freedom for children.
14 Shoot up for a day.
15 Refuse to speak to them at all.
16 Enroll at the Jefferson School of Social Science.
17 Replace your feet with wheels.
18 Rent a motel room with a ewe.
19 Rent a motel room with a ram.
20 Say you’re crazy.
21 Say they’re crazy.
22 Get muscular dystrophy when you’re a kid.
23 Marry J. Edgar Hoover.
24 Take up residence in Albania.
25 Stretch yourself on a rack so that you become over 6½ feet tall.
26 Marry your mother.
27 Marry your father.
28 Blow up the Statue of Liberty.
29 Marry your sister.
30 Marry your brother.
31 Marry your daughter.
32 Join the Abraham Lincoln Brigade.
33 Marry your son.
34 Marry Lassie.
35 Marry President Johnson.
36 Marry Mao Tse-tung.
37 Proclaim that Mao Tse-tung is the Living God.
38 Proclaim that you are the Living God.
39 Stamp your foot in the earth like Rumpelstiltskin and refuse to eat until our boys return from Viet Nam.
40 Get elected Pope.
41 Get elected to the Supreme Soviet.
42 Get lost.
43 Shoot A for one month.
44 Grow seven toes on your head.
45 Commit an unnatural act with Walter Jenkins.
46 Make the world go away.
47 Wear pants made of jello.
48 Say you are a wounded veteran of the lutte des classes.
49 Solder your eyelids shut.
50 Ride naked through the streets on a white horse.
51 Declare war on Germany.
52 Tell the draft board that you will send your mother to fight in Viet Nam in your place.
53 Study Selective Service reports on malingering and military medicine, and/or military psychiatry texts or journal articles on the same subject, and use the clever methods they describe.
54 Organize your own army and advance on Washington.
55 Tell the psychiatrist that if he doesn’t let you into the Army you’ll kill him.
56 Turn yellow.
57 Infiltrate your local board.
58 Don’t agree to anything.
59 Contract Addison’s disease.
60 Contract Parkinson’s disease.
61 Contract Bright’s disease.
62 Contract Hodgkin’s disease.
63 Contract Cushing’s disease.
64 Contract Fröhlich’s syndrome.
65 Announce that you have become the bridegroom of the Virgin Mary.
66 Announce that you have become the bridegroom of Jesus Christ.
67 Get your friends to crucify you.
68 Counterfeit money and omit the motto In God We Trust.
69 Become a publisher of smut and filth.
70 Become the publisher of the Little Mao Tse-tung Library.
71 Prove that Brezhnev is a Trotskyite wrecker.
72 Burn down the building located at 39 Whitehall Street.
73 . . . 450 Golden Gate Ave.
74 . . . 536 South Clark Street.
75 . . . 55 Tremont Street.
76 . . . 916 G Street NW.
77 Burn down the Pentagon.
78 Burn baby burn.
79 Write a best-selling novel which portrays the CIA as incompetent.
80 Catch St. Anthony’s fire.
81 Say you’d be happy to serve because it’ll be easier to kill the fucken Americans who are interfering with the freedom of Viet Nam.
82 Recite the Pledge of Allegiance 2400 times a day.
83 Cut off your ears. In ancient times no animal was sacrificed unless it was a perfect specimen.
84 Cut off your left ear and send it to the draft board.
85 Grow a tail.
86 Learn to talk with your anus.
87 Become a graduate student in a subject vital to the national security, such as the epistemology of phenomenological methodology. Achieve your degree only after fifteen years of 2-S.
89 When you reach the age of 17 don’t get any older.
90 Drink an elixir that will cause you to shrink to a height of 2 feet, 3 inches.
91 Buy a slave and send him in your place.
92 Take your girlfriend with you when you get called and insist you will not serve unless you can sleep with her at night.
93 Take your boyfriend with you when you get called and insist that you will not serve unless you can sleep with him at night.
94 Take your mother with you when you get called and insist you will not serve unless you can sleep with her at night.
95 Take your chihuahua with you when you get called and insist you will not serve unless you can sleep with it at night.
96 Wet your bed.
97 When the doctor tells you to spread your cheeks, let him see the firecracker you have planted there beforehand.
98 Handcuff yourself to Lenin’s tomb.
99 Handcuff yourself to Nicholas Katzenbach and shout: “We shall not be moved!”
100 Travel to Havana.
101 Grow a long straggly black beard with maggots crawling all over it.
102 Travel to Hanoi.
103 Travel to Tirana.
104 Travel to Peking.
105 Travel to Washington and tell them you intend to travel to one or more of the above.
106 Publish a satirical pamphlet purporting to advise young men how to beat the draft.
107 Tell the psychiatrist that you are a closet queen.
108 Tell the security officer that you are a brother of Allen Ginsberg.
109 Tell the security officer that you are a brother of Ralph Ginzburg.
110 Hand out copies of this pamphlet at the induction center. When they tell you you cannot do this ask if it’s all right if you sell them.
111 Make sure that by one method or another you get to see the psychiatrist. Do not let them rush you through without your chance. If necessary you should faint, scream, or start crying.
112 Give the psychiatrist your standard three-minute lecture in favor of bisexuality, being sure to mention again and again that animals do it.
113 Tell them that you will leap into your grave laughing.
114 Run for the House of Representatives on the platform that Red China should be invited to send its surplus population to colonize New York and Arizona.
115 Commence psychotherapy with Dr. Robert Soblen.
116 Ask Gus Hall to go down to the induction center for you the day you are called.
117 Write a letter to the New York Daily News stating that the Viet Cong are nothing more than peace-loving agrarian reformers.
118 Use an American flag for a breechclout.
119 Contract tertiary syphilis.
120 Steal a laser and fight it out with the CIA.
121 Develop bleeding stigmata.
122 Cop out.
123 Conspire with a known homosexual in the Soviet embassy in Ankara.
124 Conspire with a known heterosexual in the U.S. embassy in Ankara.
125 Become chairman of the Committee to Legalize Marijuana.
126 Develop an otherworldly metaphysical system and live by its precepts.
127 Cut off your head.