Fascism Wants to Disintegrate Us

I. The Acid Queen

Legend has it that Grace Slick—famed singer of Jefferson Airplane and Jefferson Starship—was eating bread, drinking wine, and reading poetry in the Marin County countryside when a police officer accosted her. When the officer told her he was going to arrest her for public intoxication, she spat back “‘Drunk in what public? . . . What do you mean? What are we talking about, the trees, these deer here, these leaves on the ground? What public? You’re the only public here.’” She was arrested for what she called “Drunk Mouth.”

On another occasion, the engine of Slick’s Aston Martin burst into flames, and when she called highway patrol for help, the officer said,

“‘O.K., what’s going on here?’ Remember, there are flames coming out of my car. I said, ‘What the fuck does it look like is going on? I’m having a goddamn party at four A.M. with fucking flames coming out of my car.’”

She was arrested again.1 Drunk Mouth. They didn’t care about her.

Grace Slick was nicknamed “The Acid Queen,” implicitly for the drugs—she wrote the inimitable “White Rabbit” in an hour while under the influence.2 She had her hand in another pop cultural/acidic legend: in 1970, Slick and famed activist Abbie Hoffman planned to lace Richard Nixon’s tea with LSD, in hopes of inducing a trip in the president, but the plans were foiled.3

Slick was acidic in more ways than literal; I can’t help but recognize it in her sarcastic words for the oppressive police officers in the stories above. Not to mention the bite in her voice musically and lyrically:

When the men on the chessboard
Get up and tell you where to go
And you’ve just had some kind of mushroom
And your mind is moving low
Go ask Alice
I think she’ll know

When logic and proportion
Have fallen sloppy dead
And the White Knight is talking backwards
And the Red Queen’s off with her head
Remember what the dormouse said
Feed your head
Feed your head
Feed your head

“When the men on the chessboard get up and tell you where to go,” also remember: They don’t care about us.

—

II. The Acid Corpse

Leon Czolgosz was a Polish-American laborer/miller in the late 1800s. Czolgosz joined a workers’ strike when wages at the mill were cut, but