Vulgar and Repulsive

Ed Sanders was arrested in 1961 for disrupting the launch of a nuclear submarine in a canoe. There, in his jail cell, he wrote his first notable poem on a piece of toilet paper. The following year he founded Fuck You: A Magazine of the Arts, which was dedicated to “Pacifism, Unilateral Disarmament, National Defense thru Nonviolent Resistence, Multilateral Indiscriminate Apertural Conjugation, Anarchism, World Federalism, Civil Disobedience, Obstructers & Submarine Boarders, and All Those Groped by J. Edgar Hoover in the Silent Halls of Congress.” The magazine included the work of William S. Burroughs, Tuli Kupferberg, Allen Ginsberg, Andy Warhol, and more.

Sanders also opened the Peace Eye Bookstore in Manhattan’s Lower East Side, which was raided by police in 1966 and resulted in obscenity charges.

Sanders, along with his friend Tuli Kupferberg, founded avant-rock group The Fugs in 1964 and were joined by drummer Ken Weaver. They represented peace, sexual freedom, and the psychedelic revolution – everything the government feared. The band is referenced in FBI documents about The Doors, calling The Fugs “vulgar and repulsive,” saying their latest album was the “filthiest and most vulgar thing the human mind could possibly conceive.” The writer, whose name was redacted, believed action needed to be taken to stop the distribution of such “trash.”

Levitating the Pentagon

The Fugs performed their first exorcism on October 21, 1967. During the March on the Pentagon anti-Vietnam demonstration, The Fugs gathered along with activists Allen Ginsberg, Abbie Hoffman, and Jerry Rubin at the Pentagon, vowing to raise it three hundred feet in the air. In the book Abbie Hoffman: American Rebel author Marty Jezer writes that they viewed an exorcism ritual as “a perfect way of attracting hippies to Washington and transforming the religious mysticism that was an essential part of acid consciousness into the political goal of ending the war.”

The group donned handmade witch costumes, meditating and chanting “In the name of the generative power of Priapus, in the name of the totality, we call upon the demons of the Pentagon to rid themselves of the cancerous tumors of the war generals.”