Is it coincidence that our major elections in this country always take place within a fortnight of Halloween? That we always talk about making a choice between the lesser of two EVILS when choosing our leaders? To help with the frightening implications of choosing one soulless zombie-politician over another, we at Cosmik Debris turned to longtime activist, writer, comedian and all-round expert on demonic possession among our leaders, Paul Krassner.

Paul is a master of satire. He started the legendary magazine, The Realist, over forty years ago, in a time when traditional American white-bread mentality was locked and loaded into society. A time when ideas like "alternative," "underground" and "counter culture" weren't even gleams in the collective eye.

The Realist opened many doors for Paul. He was a friend of Lenny Bruce and eventually his biographer. He also wrote articles and conducted interviews for Playboy magazine in addition to the Realist. As the beatniks of the 50's transformed into the hippies and campus radicals of the 60's, Paul became more active politically. As a founder of the Youth International Party or the Yippies, Krassner was in the front lines of the protests at the 1968 Democratic Convention along with David Dellinger, Jerry Rubin, Booby Seale, Abbie Hoffman and the others of the Chicago 7. This year he continued that tradition and appeared at the Shadow Conventions, helping to provide an antidote for the toxic Linda-Blair-expectorant that passed for public debate on the issues at the major parties' conventions.

Over the last few years Paul has released four albums of comic monologues, starting with We Have Ways of Making You Laugh in 1996, followed by Brain Damage Control in 1997 and Live at MIT last year. New on Artemis Records is Campaign in the Ass, released just in time for the Presidential election. In it he reads from his 1999 book, Impolite Interviews, (published by Seven Stories Press--the best of his many wonderful conversations originally in The Realist over the years) and adds more thoughts via monologue to the assembled crowd.

What follows now is a long talk on the more frightful aspects of the upcoming election, Paul's latest work and his long voyage through American Life in general.

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Cosmik: Which of the candidates is scariest to you?

Krassner: George W. ...George looks like all those images we see of carved up pumpkins with a candle inside. Actually so does Gore. They all do, maybe Ralph Nader would too.

Cosmik: I like Ralph Nader's principled stand on the issues, but he's not scary like the other two is he?

Krassner: The best line I heard was, somebody said that they were voting for Ralph Nader because he was the lesser of TWO evils (not three). Somebody else said, well I'm going to vote for Nader because everyone I know is going to vote for him. I know at the Shadow Convention there were buttons that said "Think Nader, Vote Gore." And that's what a lot of people think, who were torn between the two. I think that at this point with Gore up in the ratings, people feel kind of freed to vote for Nader.

Cosmik: In '96, mostly because Dole hadn't had a prayer and because the Chinese money thing was already coming to light a few weeks before the election, I voted for Nader.

Krassner: Me too. My feeling is, why should one postpone idealism?

Cosmik: Are any of them truly evil? What's the worst that could happen?

Krassner: [Bush and Gore] both do evil acts. But if Bush gets elected, he appoints reactionary Supreme Court judges, and Roe vs. Wade gets overturned...though I don't believe that will happen, it's just a worst case scenario.

Cosmik: I think some of Bush's fellow travelers are to be feared, but would a Bush presidency be really fundamentally different than a Gore Presidency?

Krassner: Well certainly in appointment of Supreme Court justices it would be. But ah, otherwise they're just hand shakers.... ordinarily they wouldn't have any influence over abortion except in the case of appointing Supreme Court Justices. Otherwise it's state legislation.

Cosmik: I don't think a lot of younger folks realize what it was like when performing abortions was a terrible crime. I was reminded about it reading the interview with Dr. Spencer in your book. There was a long and hard fight to make it legal.

Krassner: A lot of young people take their freedoms for granted. They forget there are young girls in school who can wear jeans who just aren't aware that their foremothers fought for the right not to have to wear skirts! It's changed so much. That's why kids on the Internet today, they don't have to do as much de-conditioning as we did in my era, as so they have less innocence to lose. There were so many taboos when I started The Realist in the late 50's [and now] virtually all of those taboos are gone. The language, the concepts. I'm not sure what the next taboos will be. I guess Eminem represents one of them, the taboo on political correctness.

Cosmik: When I interviewed Tom Lehrer, one of the things he said was, "Irreverence is easy, what's hard is wit." I think by that he meant that being foul-mouthed is a relatively easy thing to do, to shock people with nothing behind it.

Krassner: One of my favorite moments was at a San Francisco Comedy Day, which was out in the park with one comedian after another. One guy got up there and he said, "Isn't Reagan an asshole?" And then everybody yells and cheers and claps and then he says, "Oh, you like the political stuff, huh?" That's how easy it was. This was in 1981, or something like that.

Cosmik: There's been much ado about marketing violence and hedonistic culture by Hollywood lately. The major parties seem to be casting about for an issue that piques voter interest but doesn't really mean much, but does Bush have it right about Gore, that he's having it both ways, scolding them as he accepts their money?

Krassner: Sure, but hypocrisy is the name of the political game. It's all bluffing and wink-winking.

Cosmik: If Gore gets elected do you think Tipper will try a new wave of rock censorship?

Krassner: I think she'll probably start her own band, called The Big Kiss.

Cosmik: One of the other aspects about Bush versus Gore that I wanted to pursue was the fact that they've both done drugs, unless you accept Bush's tepid denial.

Krassner: That wasn't a denial, it was a refusal to talk about it. I think that's virtually a given [that he did some drugs].

Cosmik: But because they've both done it, how can they support things like mandatory sentencing?

Krassner: Because they both worship at the great god of Hypocrisy. There's another thing-- Nader has come out for the legalization of pot and the hemp industry.

Cosmik: What would it take to loosen up Bush and Gore on this issue?

Krassner: You know it's conceivable that Gore... I mean he'll be committed to Columbia of course, but he might appoint a commission so that it takes the onus off of him. I'm just speculating in the hope or the delusion that he hasn't sold out completely.

Cosmik: I almost think in some ways that it's like when only Nixon could go to China, or only Clinton, a Democrat, could tone down welfare, that it has to be a Republican ending the Drug War. I was very heartened to hear Gary Johnson, the Republican Governor of New Mexico, and Representative Tom Campbell of California and Salt Lake City Mayor Rocky Anderson at the Shadow Convention. They were all totally explicit in their opposition to the Drug War.

Krassner: I guess courage can be bi-partisan. The bottom line is-I saw Ethan Nadelman approach Michael Moore and start to ask him about that and Moore said, "Well I don't smoke marijuana." And Nadelman shot back and said, "You don't have to smoke marijuana to know that it's wrong to put people in prison for smoking it!"

Cosmik: It's certainly not in the same class as any of those other illegal drugs. I had a friend once who started shooting cocaine and he dropped out of being a rational human being really quick.

Krassner: And the bottom line there again is that he should have help and not imprisonment.

Cosmik: I think that's the point. In many of your albums you pointedly make mention of marijuana, but do you think that the legalization movement is getting off on the wrong foot by pursuing this medicinal thing? It can be good medicine for some folks but why not have it legal as a recreational drug too, just like alcohol?

Krassner: And who's to decide at what point medicinal ends and recreation begins? Because you can help somebody stir their creative juices as well as relieving nausea. I don't know if you came to the Peter McWilliams interview in the book yet, but we discuss that. There's been a lot of criticism that medical marijuana movement is just being used as a wedge to decriminalize marijuana altogether.

Cosmik: Somehow I think that's ultimately the wrong strategy.

Krassner: Not that it's true, but it's a start. I can't fault them for that.

Cosmik: Remember back in the early Seventies when the album Child's Garden of Grass came out? It seemed like everyone was saying that in five years pot would be legal.

Krassner: In 1960 Lenny Bruce said it would be legal in ten years. I just got a letter from Todd McCormick, who grew 4000 plants and is serving five years for gardening. He's in solitary confinement now and he wrote to me from there, and he quoted that Lenny Bruce line and said, "Who could have thought that 40 years from [1960] I'd be in prison?"

Cosmik: I guess that's a comment on how far the bible thumping conservative movement has taken over.

Krassner: Even though they think we are the Devil, they to me are an example of that phrase, "The Devil never sleeps."

Cosmik: But do you think in the 60's maybe the Counter-Culture did take it a little too far, got a little too hedonistic, and because of that we have this backlash from the straight people?

Krassner: It's partly that the dinosaur culture wants to survive too, the way that the dinosaurs did. It's getting to more and more of a critical mass, for the tide turning, to mix metaphors. There will be a time in the future when I'd like to think that all this will be looked back upon as barbaric.

Cosmik: I'd like to believe that also but at the same time I have to marvel and people's ability to believe in utter crap.

Krassner: People have been brainwashed since infancy, so it's pretty deeply embedded.

Cosmik: Yeah, one of the other things that I wanted to ask you about, the control of the Internet and things like that, they keep raising the boogey man of Pornography on the Net as a excuse for control over content. Do you think that they'll ever be able to grapple with something as amorphous, as spread out as the Net?

Krassner: They'll keep trying, but it's international, it crosses boundaries. I guess in some Far Eastern country they try to cut down on it, but it's just changed the nature of everything from research, to organizing protests. I am as much in awe of technology as I am of Nature.

Cosmik: With so much mega-media control of the broadcast networks and all the cable channels too, the web creates a nice back channel to get around all of that.

Krassner: The Web just democratizes it...It's not like the alternative press, that was not as accessible. In other words you can easily get some fifteen year old genius in Idaho as you can get CNN over a website. People give links to other links so you can really have word of mouth instead of corporate hype.

Cosmik: And thank God for it! I am dubious that it will be subverted, but the Big Brother is always in the background watching.

Krassner: You gotta watch out for the death throws of the dinosaur's tail.

Cosmik: Do you think the Shadow Convention was the start of something big?

Krassner: I think they served as consciousness raisers and raising consciousness usually precedes the start of something big. I think it was the continuation of something big or the crystallization of it because the three causes-Campaign Finance Reform, Poverty and the Failed Drug War--or as I call it "The War On Some People Who Use Some Drugs"--it was all in the air already, it was all in the mix. It was just a way of formalizing that. I think that there were a lot of young people who were there and got inspired and didn't feel so alone and really mingled. There was a lot of networking going on in the best sense of the word going on at the convention.

Cosmik: What happened in 1968 in Chicago was nothing like what happened here and in Philadelphia this year, but there was rubber bullets and pepper spray used on people when they shut down Rage Against the Machine.

Krassner: I think it was to scare people, to scare them from further protests. In was more insidious in other ways, because while that was going on, there were fake bomb scares at both the Shadow Convention and the Independent Media Center, so there was an overt assault on the First Amendment when reporters were deliberately targeted and photographers. But this was a more covert way of attacking the First Amendment.

Cosmik: I heard Arianna give several statements about what she knew about what happened, but I never heard anybody figure out exactly who was behind the fake bomb scares. She said something about a particular van was declared suspicious by the police themselves, and that was the form that the bomb scare took.

Krassner: There was an anonymous tip and the bomb squad took four hours to arrive. Then they allowed a reporter to go up with the bomb squad to the roof (of Patriotic Hall the site of the Shadow Convention). If it was a real bomb scare they would never allow that.

Cosmik: Do you feel there's a legacy to the Yippies?

Krassner: One of the organizers of the protests at the conventions this year had known Abbie Hoffman and had served as a tour guide on tours he led of Nicaragua. It gave me a strong sense of continuity, like passing on the torch of organizing. And also the spirit of the Yippies is evident in a lot of the humor that was present at the protests.

Cosmik: You knew Abbie Hoffman quite well, how did you feel about the recent film on him, Steal This Movie?("")

Krassner: I hated it myself and many of the people who knew Abbie hated it. It was such a dumb portrayal of him. It didn't capture his charisma, let alone that the guy who played him (Vincent D'Onofrio) was half a foot taller than Abbie and his Boston accent sounded more like a speech defect. I thought that just as a movie it was bad. The editing was choppy, the script was awful, filled with clichés. It was extremely disappointing.

Cosmik: Do you think that someone who had never known anything about him would be inspired to learn more about Abbie after seeing it?

Krassner: Well, there are younger people who might understand their parents a little better. And they might like the fact that it was anti-war, it wasn't hippie-bashing and it was essentially pro-demonstration. So on that level, it's better than nothing. But the movie came and went, there was no word of mouth about it because it was a boring movie even though some people liked it. To most of my friends it wasn't funny, it wasn't exciting and it wasn't accurate. You didn't miss much.

Cosmik: Let's move on to your albums. You've been giving lectures and satirical presentations for decades, but you've released your first standup recordings only in the last few years, right?

Krassner: Yes. There was never any label that was interested in these and then Danny Goldberg came along and he's rare in that industry. As Don Imus, the radio guy said, "He's not like the other thugs in the business." I went with him from Atlantic to Warner to Mercury and now to Artemis Records. And he described it as if he was a refugee and I was the utensil that he kept wrapped in a napkin that he hid under his coat.

Cosmik: Where was your new CD, Campaign in the Ass, recorded?

Krassner: First it was going to be recorded at a Humanist convention, but they held it in a hotel penthouse near the airport in LA, so you could see planes flying by. And the room it was such a strange thing, it was like the size of three bowling alleys, that thin and that long with tables all the way back. It was the first night of a convention, they had delayed flights and they hadn't eaten and they were cranky. It just wasn't right. So a couple of weeks after that I taped it at a Borders Books and Music store in Pasadena.

Cosmik: Somewhere Lenny Bruce said that he always did ten or fifteen minutes of improvisation tops and the rest was written out, is it like that for you?

Krassner: This particular album, Campaign in the Ass, I intertwined reading from Impolite Interviews and then doing standup. I would for example read something from Dr. Spencer, the humane abortionist and then I would talk about the candidates running for President and how one of the only differences between them was reproductive rights. That Al Gore was for, at least his focus group is for, abortion rights and George Bush was against abortion rights except in the case of rape, incest or if one of his twin daughters got pregnant. So it was a different concept really. I would read something about Lenny Bruce as a comedian from the interview and then talk about him. But generally my shows are-I don't know what the percentage is-but um, there's a portion of it that's improvised and other things that are pretty set. Then the next show that little bit of improvisation will develop into a couple of more minutes and finally it becomes pretty much of a set routine and then one of the other set routines will go out and be outdated by that time, so it keeps me fresh and it keeps me topical.

Cosmik: You've been doing speeches and presentations for a long time; none of those were ever recorded for release?

Krassner: No, they might have been taped but not put out on records... I started out in college and I wanted to be a standup comedian but they weren't quite ready for the kind of material I wanted to do and I didn't have that show business drive that Lenny Bruce and Mort Sahl had. And I was also doing my magazine, The Realist, and that took up a lot of time and energy.

Cosmik: It was 1954 or something when you first started The Realist?

Krassner: 1958, in Astoria, Queens, New York.

Cosmik: And that was when you were still in your teens and living at home, right?

Krassner: Um, no, I started it when I was 26 years old and still living at home! ... I had started working for Lyle Stewart's paper, The Independent, when I was still in college. I was 21 then, it was like my apprenticeship, and I started The Realist out of his office several years later... In those days I remember saying to my mother, "I want to find my own apartment." And she says "Why?" And I said, "Well, I don't have any place to be alone with a girl," as they were then called. And she said, "Well Dad and I will step into the other room." And I said, "No, I mean REALLY alone." And she went in and she took a shower and she came out wrapped in towels and said, "Any girl who does that is a tramp." So that was my background. I was never angry at my parents because I realized that they were just victims of their own conditioning.

Cosmik: Was your family religious at all?

Krassner: Not really. We went through the motions of certain holidays, but it was more social than religious.

Cosmik: Did your folks appreciate what you were trying to do, starting your own magazine?

Krassner: They were ashamed of the contents... My father did [read it]. My mother didn't. Although my dad wanted me to avoid controversy, I later found out--after he died--that he really respected what I was doing.

Cosmik: I imagine you must feel jealous of the kids who are doing things today, starting their own publications via the Internet.

Krassner: Um, no, not jealous. I'm glad they are there because when I started I was a lone voice and one of the reasons I'm retiring The Realist now is that irreverence has become an industry. And in that industry there is some crap and a lot of good stuff and a lot of that good stuff is included on the zines that you find on the Internet. So I'm not jealous, I pleased. Especially since People Magazine labeled me the Father of the Underground Press-and of course I demanded a blood test!

Cosmik: It started out just as comedy?

Krassner: I would just never label an article as journalism or not, so I had some serious articles in there like on the Assassination of Malcolm X, and then ones that were obviously satirical and then others that you just couldn't tell. I would never label an article as satire or journalism because I didn't want to deprive the reader of discerning for themselves whether something was the truth or a satirical extension of the truth.

Cosmik: How successful was it? Did it make you enough to live on in those days?

Krassner: Oh, well, I was doing interviews for Playboy--they would have "Playboy:" with a question and then the answer and there was no mention of me, so I told Hefner that I wanted to change my name to Paul Playboy, then all my friends would know it was me!--and I did free lance advertising and the occasional comedy gig and borrowed money. Somehow, even though the Realist didn't take advertising, in the mid 60's when it reached a peak, it was bringing in some money... At it's peak in 1967 [subscriptions] reached a hundred thousand. Some people in the business said that with second hand readers it could have reached a million or so.

Cosmik: I found in Impolite Interviews you've spoken with so many of my heroes-Alan Watts, Lenny Bruce, and later I saw Mort Sahl in there, mixed in with Hugh Hefner, Albert Ellis and the abortion doctor, Robert Spencer-that's quite an array!

Krassner: Running a magazine opened a door for me, because you can't just ask people that you admire, "Can I spend some time with you asking you questions?" But if it's going to be published and reach more people then I guess they are more willing to do it. And I was either friends before or became friends with a lot of them.

Cosmik: Another one that really stuck me was the interview with George Lincoln Rockwell.

Krassner: He was the only one in the book that I had no admiration for. He was head of the American Nazi Party and I almost wasn't going to include him in the book, but I thought it was just a good revealing of his mindset that I thought it should be included. Most of the other figures were counter-cultural in some sense. He was counter-cultural, but not in the way you usually think of it-as a stoned hippie.

Cosmik: Are you doing any projects on the Internet, any URL's that might be important for people to track your work?

Krassner: I started to do a daily commentary but it was diverting time and energy from the novel I want write.

Cosmik: What's your novel about?

Krassner: A contemporary controversial comedian, inspired by my association with Lenny Bruce.

Cosmik: When do you expect to have it done?

Krassner: In at least a year, maybe more. Writing fiction is going to be a new challenge for me. "It's hard," I said to a friend who is a novelist, because you have to make up stuff. And he said, "Paul, you've been making stuff up all your life." And I said, "Yeah, but that was journalism."

Cosmik: And there's only one issue of The Realist left?

Krassner: I'm preparing that now, and in a burst of editorial egomania, I decided to devote it almost entirely to my own recent freelance writing. So for example the George magazine article on comparing the protests in 68 to the current ones, it was supposed to be 2000 words and I did 3000 words and they trimmed it down to 1000. It's a good edit I'm not complaining, but I'm including the 3000 word version in the final Realist. And there will be other stuff like a cartoon by Jules Fieffer.

Cosmik: What's the main reason for shutting down The Realist again?

Krassner: I think it served its purpose. There are so many other voices now and I've done it for over forty years.

Cosmik: Any great philosophical wisdom you have for us?

Krassner: My philosophy, what I remember from Philosophy 101 in college, the instructor said on the first day, "The definition of philosophy is the rationalization of Life." And I thought, "Okay, I don't have to read anything else."

Cosmik: You never got into Hegel and Jung and all those other guys?

Krassner: Oh I did, but it all applied, they all had different rationalizations for the mystery...To sum up my philosophy, Life is a mystery and if it's not a mystery, what the fuck is it?




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