From the American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 4th edition. 1. Dazed or distracted with romantic sentiment. 2. Affected by insanity; crazed. From the belief that the moon caused insanity....
About the end of May 1969, after about a week in one side of the federal lockup, 4 tiers of cells full of mostly black men, buried deep in the bowels of the Baltimore City Jail, I was released on bail, raised by movement friends in Maryland and D.C., thanks in large part to Mary Moylan, a nurse and midwife who I came to know in early 1969.
As we planned our action, I moved out of Blair House, a commune chock full of draft resisters including especially Chris and her husband Rick, Les, the O'Mara brothers, myself and others, and supporters just inside the District line, and into St. Francis House at 1620 S St, NW - Mary lived in NW Washington as well. She had taken part in the Catonsville draft-board action in 1968 which had been planned in part at St. Francis House, the first action at which draft files were burned to cinders using home-made napalm, and also the one to put draft-board actions on the movement map.
For our action, we decided to steer clear of napalm, since we were walking into a cultural monument and were not going to take a chance on someone getting hurt. Our action was also more of a demonstration, than an attempt to destroy large numbers of files. We asked Mary to help us "donate" our blood, and she did, probably on my 18th birthday - about a pint from each of us (ouch!) - which was poured onto draft files a week later. Thanks largely to Mary but also other members of the Catonsville group, bail was raised for me within a week. Of the other two who took part in our action (we were known, in rarefied circles, shortly, as the Silver Spring 3), the eldest, 22 years old, already had a 5-year sentence for refusing induction, while his brother, 17 at the time, got a suspended sentence. This was back when Americans thought 17-year olds were children and 18-year olds were adults.
I had some explaining to do
From the first day out of the Baltimore City Jail, I began to speak publicly, and I think the first time was at Georgetown University, about why we had poured paint and blood on draft files, knowing we would go to prison for it. I took every available opportunity, at teach-ins and demonstrations, outside supermarkets, in public squares, at libraries, to hand out our statement, together with a primer on the draft, and to explain my action, and why I thought a point could be so important to make as to give away years of my life in prison.
And it was about the honor of law-breaking in the face of tyranny - a patriotic American tradition from the Boston Tea Party onward - and about civil disobedience, another revered American tradition. And it was about the draft being the life-blood and the death-blood of the war, about the racist and class-conscious core of the war - the rich man could get out on a note, or on a deferment, or by simply leaving the country, while the poor man was issued GI gear and a number.
It was about how unprovoked and illegal wars of expansionist aggression like the one in Vietnam have forever been fueling the American Dream of more, and ever more. Above all it was about conscience: I had been exposed to unusual teachers and teachings: Teilhard de Chardin, in whose "...future, the greatest event will be the sudden appearance of a collective humane conscience...", whose words I first read in a prescient birthday present (The Future of Man) sometime in my early teens; Thomas Merton, ("The whole idea of compassion is based on a keen awareness of the interdependence of all these living beings"), whose life and works I was learning about just as he was found dead in Asia; Martin Luther King ("Human salvation lies in the hands of the creatively maladjusted"). And it was about individual choice, about the sanctity of life over property, and ultimately about the Universal Soldier in each of us bearing responsibility for the acts we commit and the acts we silently allow others to commit in our names.
I explained how easy some steps of resistance are, how difficult some can be, that raising your voice can be done in relative safety when done with others, that it is vital to find your comfort level: prison bars are not for everyone. I pointed out that it is important to not avoid the issue simply because you will never achieve the peace-crazy stick-to-it-ive-ness of an antiwar hero of ours, Phil Berrigan, who having already risked everything for his country fighting in Europe during World War II, spent over a decade of his life - thousands of 24-hour days - in prison cells, thanks to his unflinching willingness to put his life on the line to call attention to the senselessness of war and "war-preparedness".
I wasn't clergy, and although Latin masses were still second nature to me by then I was no longer more than tangentially Roman C, but the Catonsville people befriended me, and they turned me on to a crazy and infective sanity, in part engendered by their experiences in other subjugated cultures, and their reasoning reverberated in me. I borrowed freely food for my own brain-roof chatter, especially from Phil's brother Dan: "Our apologies, good friends, for the fracture of good order, the burning of paper instead of children. … We could not, so help us God, do otherwise."
It is indeed a special sense, that I'm sure friends who have spent time on the inside of the crazy equation we were fast approaching all will recognize, the sense of having arrived at a moment, at a point of commitment, past which there was no turning back, the realization of an impossibility for most of us, that had now become a searing truth - moving as peacefully, non-violently, even lovingly, and forcefully as possible against the war machine had magically transformed from an act observed in our heroes to our only ethical option - transubstantiatio!
Moon launch, July 1969
A few weeks down the line, probably early July, I was approached after a speaking event by a very pleasant man named Philip Burley, who said he and his friends really enjoyed my talk. They would really like to meet with me and hear more, would I like to come along to their place for a bite to eat and a chat? I had no particular plans for the evening, so I agreed. We were driven in a minibus to a huge old house in the nicest part of northwest Washington, a building I was told had housed the Liberian embassy. Enormous, building style 1890's, less ornate than Victorian, and it might have been newer.
They offered me a sandwich and a cup of tea in one of the front rooms of the house, that may have been a living room once but was being used as a classroom. I can't clearly recall the exact technique Philip used to ease me into his spell, which is what he did. After a while it was just the two of us there, and he began to tell me about how he and his friends - like me and my friends - were concerned about the evil rampant in the world today, and how important it is to stand up as an individual for what one believed in, and to move in the direction one's conscience bids one to move.
So far, it all sounded just fine. He eased carefully into a talk about prayer as a technique for self-examination and self-renewal, which also made some sense, though I was no longer a praying kind of person, though I knew quite a few who were. Having spent a lot of time with priests and nuns in my life, the concept of contemplation and prayer was not foreign to me. He described prayer as a method for cleansing oneself "for the important work there is to do". These two ideas - "prayer as cleansing" and "important work to do" - this is where he stayed that evening. I vaguely recall that he prayed openly with me there, but I don't recall the prayer.
Prayers answered
His prayers were probably answered, since he managed to convince me to return the following day. The next 24 hours are a blur, but suffice it to say that with the dramatic and orderly review of hitherto unseen cycles in history, together with the overarching importance of emotional honesty, and lastly the dangerous work needed in order to save the people, in fact the planet, he sucked me - 18-year old sucker with a martyr complex - right in. I was already there: I had guaranteed myself a federal prison sentence and all I expected in return was that my act in some way be able to interfere with the war in Vietnam and thus hopefully save some lives.
The menu of the feast of ideas Philip Burley served was called "The Divine Principle", which in my memory is a general introduction to the notion that evil looms large in the world, in the form of The Devil himself, who has been like messing things up big time ever since the world was created about 5,973 years before, more or less, and the only hope for humanity is the Messiah, and luckily: Philip knew him personally. Astounding news!
This Messiah, the 2nd incarnation of Jesus of Nazareth his very self, was none other than Sun Myung Moon, a Korean individual of the rabidly anti-communist persuasion, according to reports a badly mistreated (by Godless Communism) prisoner in the Korean war, during which time he was tortured but also fundamentally changed by a fantastic thing: in visitations by the Blessed Jesus His Almighty Self, Moon was brought up to speed with the fact that he was in fact the Messiah V.2.0, and that he had come to Earth to save us all from Satan's fire when we had gone astray, oh tidings of comfort and joy, comfort and joy...
Taken in
Going on my 2nd month as 18 year old, having grown up in Washington, D.C. and Maryland, in relatively comfortable circumstances, as circumstances go here on the planet, I was relatively protected from most of the realities of the world outside of the D.C. metro area not to speak of the American mind-bubble, but thanks today to the perspective granted by my special interest in the matter of distinguishing between psychosis and transcendence, dependence, compulsive disorders and so on, I can understand how I was sucked into Philip's spell, but though he was incredibly good from the point of view of the youngster I was, and being able as we are to read his relatively current writings on the web, still it is hard to admit that I didn't see through him at once, even at that tender age.
Although I was younger than anyone else in the place, I was asked to move into the house, which at the time was the home of the Unified Family in Washington, D.C. - a.k.a. the Moonies, though that more Californian instantiation of Moon-related hustling had not erupted onto the Washington scene - which was in short a house and a group of devotees that ostensibly served as Sun Myung Moon's most important forward base in the United States, the foundation from which he intended to establish his hegemony over hosts angelic and otherwise, beginning principally in the United States of America.
Big plans
I vaguely recall sensing that Philip trusted me, though I also know that people with the unusual conjunction of propensities he exhibited have an uncanny ability to incite trust in others, to gain their support and cooperation. He had me completely for a while. By the time I left the house for the last time, which took a few weeks, Philip had confided in me that he had been chosen by "True Parent" Moon to one day become President of the United States.
Toward that end, and the other political and spiritual machinations Philip explained would be required to cause those drastic changes in the course of human history Moon envisioned (Heaven on Earth), the Moon people - the Divine Family - in Washington, in particular Philip and a small group of others, had been carefully grooming a number of individuals in the military and in national politics, and while I recall no figures, nor any names, Philip claimed that an appreciable number of influential individuals at the Pentagon and in the rest of the U.S. government were aligned with Sun Myung Moon, many of them openly, and more were to come, and all of these would be taking part in the planned takeover of the country.
Evangelical sucker
I took part in prayer meetings a number of times - it was discovered I could play guitar, which was put to use at these meetings, during which some evangelical music-making or other was going on. I took part in many such meetings, often populated by military people and others who arrived with their chauffeurs - these were formalistic, even ritualized, though the public praying during the meetings was more akin to pentecostal let-it-all-hang-out get-togethers.
Some of the meetings I attended were of the outreach variety - for instance visiting Baptist and other congregations in Baltimore and other parts of Maryland and D.C., even appearing on television with them, guitar in hand. At one meeting we watched some 5,000 Pentecostal True Believers getting it on at a huge hotel - may have been the Washington Hilton - replete with singing in tongues, casting out devils, holy rollers rolling in the aisles, the great raging spirit of some almighty power overflowing, threatening to take us all down with it - many of the details have mercifully slipped into oblivion, though images remain.
Bottom line
It took more than ten years for me to even notice a personal issue these memories describe (see Conflagration), in short to do with the core of my commitment, and more to the point: exactly what of my having taken part in the action against the draft board had survived this onslaught of a simplistic, almost simpleton, view, of history, and of the mechanism of change in human reality? I had moved effortlessly from what supposedly savvy folks would have called left-wing activism to what I not much later learned was an activism about as ultra-right as it comes!
Had my own participation at the level of commitment required to carry out an act of civil disobedience entailing a federal crime - not a one-night stand kind of thing, repercussions being counted in years behind bars - been the result of some distortion in my personality? Extremist by any means necessary? Was it only the ghost of true conscience, a cheap copy of the real thing, a specter finagled into life by my having seen and seemingly understood the example of experienced souls like Mary, Phil, Dan and the rest - people who had been around the world and experienced decades of the dismal realities that spurred them to act?
I saw my act of civil disobedience, before I ever acted on it, as something requiring understanding and backbone. It required stick-to-it-ive-ness as well, and an important corollary to acting was following through: to speak about one's action, to use the interest inspired craziness might generate to point up the contrast between on the one hand the violence of a criminal regime commanding young men - at the threat of prison, or exile, or worse - to pour burning napalm onto the bodies of exquisitely beautiful Asian children, and on the other hand the "violence" of pouring black paint and our own blood onto a drawer full of papers. And after it all, there I was, flirting with reactionary flat-earthers, themselves flirting with not-so-bright brass and like-minded movers and shakers of the scourge America had become.
But these thoughts did not enter the equation for me in the aftermath of what would turn out to be the singularly costly act of conscience I committed in 1969. A few doses of reality, some as comical as my Moonie fling, did strike home. In April of 1969, I fell deeply in love with Diana. Or at least - I fell deeply into bed with Diana - it certainly felt like - love. I was also Diana's hero - we shared a bed in the basement of St. Francis House, before and after the action. A few days after having been DP'd (Divine Principled), I enticed Diana to come along to the Unified Family's D.C. headquarters, where Philip B & Co gladly took on a new aspirant. Diana was hooked in an instant - they had obviously come up with something especially attractive for us 18-year olds.
I was oh so happy, and after Diana had bought it all hook, line and sinker, which took an evening, we made our way home - I was still living at St. Francis House, but spending about half my time at the Unified Family's residence. On the way there we ran into a hermeneutical conundrum, and it was a biggy. The Unified family you see had many weird ideas, the principle one being that absolute chastity for a number of years after having begun one's journey back to the True Parents and etc was, well, de rigeur. And as it turned out, Diana was keeping her part of the bargain with our dear lord, meaning: no more carnality, not for a few years.
What - no more carnality?! Such top-notch carnality, and no more??!! I was flabbergasted, not to say blown away. I worked very hard on Diana, I really did - my recollection is she went along with a session of astoundingly good (now that even forbidden entered the equation) carnality - for old times sake I guess, or maybe it was a mercy jump. But that was it: the gates of heaven-for-the-moment were now officially closed.
Well, the business with Diana was almost the last straw. Somewhere along the way that summer I had a talk with someone else in the Catonsville group - might have been the Melvilles, though I'm not sure, who talked me into something of a corner with the Unified Family stuff, and I began to come to my senses. Experimentally, I pulled my things out of the Unified Family residence - Miss Kim, Moon's resident Korean, was not unhappy to see me go, though Philip was - and I began to live full-time at St. Francis House.
Within a day or two we had an FBI bust - they charged in, might have been 15 agents, guns drawn, and held one against the head of a small child of one of the residents (Ann S?), and I think they proceeded to arrest someone for refusing induction. I had had enough of D.C. for a bit, and lit out to the west coast. That adventure entailed a visit to the residence of the Unified Family in San Francisco, whose address I'd gotten from Philip Burley
I was breaking bail by being outside of D.C. and Maryland, but had taken part in some discussions about the relative merits of actually doing one's time or not, and had begun to feel a little bit of doubt creep into my general awareness. I had thought to give myself a break for a few weeks from the D.C. scene, and after having been told that nobody would get too badly frazzled economically if I did not return to Baltimore at all for my court hearing, I was vaguely considering leaving for Canada. An argument would later make the rounds, to the effect that accepting one's time, though once part and parcel of the civil disobedience bargain, was a little like aiding and abetting the miscarriage of justice it entailed, and its toes were wiggling, vaguely visible behind the curtain of Thoreauian respectability.
When I got to San Francisco, I went first to see the people at the Unified Family, who also lived in incredible surroundings - beautiful old Victorian mansion, about the size of the D.C. place, but much classier. The ambience however was very different - very hassled, very uptight, lot of suits walking around, each more important than the next. They took me into a room and we talked, and although I had a written letter of introduction from Philip Burley, after having told them my story and asked for some help for a few days so I could sort my head out about what I wanted to do, they made it abundantly clear that they would do no such thing, "Good luck, buddy, but get out!" They would give me five minutes to make tracks before they called the police. So I made tracks. And that was the end of the Unified Family for me, True Parents and all.
Freaky fundamentalist trance now ended, I had a couple contacts in the Bay area, one of which led to a beautiful nun and via her to an old monastery on Stanyan Street, where I stayed a few days. She was waiting on tables and go-go-dancing to send money back east to support draft board actions, and she took me to the monastery. Girls were definitely not permitted, but when the brothers woke up one morning to a kitchen full of fresh pancakes and bacon, they let her hang out.
It was at the Stanyan Street monastery that I met Bernie, friend of friends in Ohio. Bernie was an incredibly generous and funny priest from Cleveland, and he let me tag along for an amazing journey, that originally was going to go to Vancouver. Riding up the Californian coast from San Francisco I had a lot of time to walk and think in pristine nature: I was getting cold feet in the face of possibly-permanent exile, and by the time we reached Seattle, streets still slightly cluttered with police in riot gear, after some antiwar something-or-other, I had re-oriented toward taking up where I left off when I'd been derailed by the Moonies - it must have been around the time "The eagle has landed!" hit the airwaves. So I ended up heading back east with Bernie, but not before a week or so in the wilds of the Rockies, Glacier National Park, Cutbank Pass, incoherent snatches of radio about some disaster area in upstate New York ("Where's Woodstock?"), herds of wild horses, eagles, scouting for forest fires on horseback, fat trout competing to take our hooks, sleeping out in Montana canyons lit up by that same Full Moon, and bats, coyote, marmots, deer, a few late night birds, huge moths - every instant crystalline, reverberating in my brain cage yet today.
In the East where the Sun comes up - there lies prison - what was I headed for?
Copyright © 2008 Michael Bransome
