Raymond Mungo

What's it like to turn your back on society -- to just drop it all and run off to a communal farm? There's a bit of the drifter in all of us, and so we wonder.
Mungo was the rabble-rousing, issue-inciting editor of the school paper at Boston University the year I entered. That was the year that Nat Hentoff, writing in the Village Voice, named the News the best college weekly in the country. That was the year I became interested in journalism.
After his graduation, Mungo dropped out of a fellowship at Harvard Graduate School and went to Washington, D. C., where he and Marshall Bloom formed the Liberation News Service, a radical alternative to AP, UPI, and Reuters.
That didn't last long. Mungo writes: "I woke up in the spring of 1968 and said, 'This is not what I had in mind,' because the movement had become my enemy; the movement was not flowers and doves and spontaneity, but another vicious system, . . . a minority party vying for power rather than peace. It was then that we put away the schedule for the revolution, gathered together our dear ones and all our resources, and set off to Vermont in search of the New Age'" (p. 17).
What follows is a loose, monologue-style journal, composed of three sections. The tone of each section is similar to the development of a sonata.
The first section is perhaps the most interesting. It takes place in the fall, and is subtitled "Another Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers." In it, Mungo and his friends retrace the steps of Thoreau's expedition a century earlier. What they found, contrasted with Thoreau's observations, makes an interesting commentary on what pollution and commercialism have done to this rich land.
But the section is marred by self-indulgent ramblings: some of them revealing, others distracting. I don't know how interesting his comments about his friends would be to someone who didn't know them. They don't suffice as character development, they are merely impressions.
The second section, or movement, varies the theme with depression and desolation. Set in winter 1969-70, it is marked by two jolting tragedies: Bloom's suicide and the death by fire of four on a neighboring commune.
The section mainly covers the time between these two events, during which Mungo and friends took a wild but somber trip to the west coast in a drive-through car. The writing shows the pain and strain of the time, and is the weakest section of the book.
The book ends with an apocalyptic fairy tale, set in the spring and summer. In it, Mungo drops the hip language and literary allusions of the previous sections and looks through the eyes of a child at the destruction of the old order and the dawning of the new age.
In it, he asks "why the kids here can look on each other as brother and sister, . . . and cast their material lots together . . . how can they all live in a heap, . . . why have they no ambition? Is it because they cannot pursue the material goals which their parents before them succeeded in reaching? No, not really; but because their own goals and lives are truly material, not the fake comforts of Buick and Sylvania but the richness of soil and the texture of oatmeal bread; the children are not idealists and politicians, children never are, but real hedonists: they want the best of everything, and at Total Loss Farm that is the standard" (pp. 150-51).
The name of the commune, Total Loss, refers not to financial ruin but to a way of life that seeks to renounce the ego. Mungo sees the present and future of America much as Charles Reich did in The Greening of America, but the idea of achieving the Kingdom of Heaven by reverting to the innocence of childhood is much older.… (meer)

Total Loss Farm: A Year in the Life by Raymond Mungo has an appeal (as far as the reissue of a piece of stream of consciousness writing from 1970) based on capturing a specific time and place and movement rather actually representing a selection of great literature. It is, as mentioned in the forward by Dana Spiotta "essentially a diary of a very bad year: bad for Mungo and bad for America. The book begins in the fall of 1969..." and is the "first-hand account of a decisive moment when the intense idealism of the anti-war movement scattered. At its best the book achieves a genuine poignancy. The young bruised idealists have a brutal comedown ('a colossal bummer') while Nixon and the establishment rule the land. The desire to change the world gets downgraded to just trying to change yourself, and even that was difficult."

While there isn't going to be wide audience appeal for Total Loss Farm, any student of human nature and history who also has an interest in studying the 60's and early 70's (and hippies) would likely appreciate reading Mungo's observations and reflections from a sociological/historical perspective. It has, in truth, very little in totality, to do with a farm or farming. There is much talk of hitchhiking and traveling and some experiences with living on a commune. What is does do is expose those who are interested in the ideological roots behind many current movements and causes you see continuing on today.

"But I woke up in the spring of 1968 and said, “This is not what I had in mind,” because the movement had become my enemy; the movement was not flowers and doves and spontaneity, but another vicious system, the seed of a heartless bureaucracy, a minority Party vying for power rather than peace. It was then that we put away the schedule for the revolution, gathered together our dear ones and all our resources, and set off to Vermont in search of the New Age."


Disclosure: My Kindle edition was courtesy of Pharos Editions for review purposes



… (meer)

Raymond Mungo recounts the history of LNS, the radical underground news service he and a friend started. It includes his version of events surrounding the split between two factions at the press, how that split happened and how very terribly the other side behaved. Those on the other side have described his account as a work of pure fiction, and I'm not very interested in who was right and who was wrong in that famous long ago that has little to do with me and is over details of a philosophy and politics I don't share- especially when the details are so fine an outsider can hardly distinguish them. However, the book is powerfully written and very interesting for reasons that perhaps Mungo did not envision- or maybe he did.

I just missed the sixties, but being somewhat countercultural ourselves, I find the period fascinating.

I also enjoy reading any book, from any period of time, written in such a way that assumptions, standards, values and culture of that time and place are revealed in such a living way as one could never get from reading an encyclopedia entry. Ray wrote his Famous Long Ago in 1969. He and Marshall Bloom had only started the news service in 1967, the split was in 1968, and it was also in 1968 that Ray, Marty Jezer, a girl called Verandah and a few of their friends started the commune at Total Loss Farm in Packers Corner. So the window of history in Famous Long Ago is immediate, and much of the flavor and generally taken for granted assumptions of the era are revealed inadvertently rather than didactically. It's a great historical relic. Here are some of the pieces I found particularly interesting for one reason or another:

Ray Mungo describing the people he and Marshall Bloom gathered around them, or rather, who drifted up around them, in their 1960s DC apartment building:

"They were people who were homeless, could survive on perhaps five dollars a week in spending money, and could tolerate the others in the house. I guess we all agreed on some basic issues—the war is wrong, the draft is an
abomination and a slavery, abortions are sometimes necessary and should be legal, universities are an impossible bore, LSD is Good and Good For You, etc., etc.—and I realize that marijuana, that precious weed, was our universal common denominator."

These would be countercultural issues where we do not have much in common. It is interesting to note that while the propaganda arm of the sixties would have us believe it was all about peace, love, and acceptance, the acceptance was really largely just for those who shared a belief in those 'basic' issues- and whose judgment was warped by drugs.

Raymond also notes that "it is difficult to remain "independent" of aggressive young Trotskyites when you share a bathroom with them."

The whole point is that a free community does not have meetings, and your attendance is never required in a free community. You are welcome to do whatever comes to mind, so long as it does not actively harm others, in a free community. Nothing is expected of you, nothing is delivered. Everything springs of natural and uncoerced energy. Compassion and understanding will go a long way toward making your community free, delegation of labor will only mechanize it.

Sometimes, of course, you harm others by omission, by inaction, as much as you do by actions. If nothing is expected of you and nothing is delivered you don't really have a free community. You are in bondage to your own and everybody else's whims. And then we have a disconnect between the previous comment and this one- why is it difficult to be independent of aggressive young Trotskyites? Where's the compassion and understanding? In this freedom to do whatever comes to mind, why may they not hog the bathroom and proselytize?
If the most important bond you share in common is shared use of mind-altering, reality bending, hallucinogenic substances, then maybe, you know, that bond isn't really one that will support a life together in community without the crutch of mind-altering, reality bending, hallucinations. It's also odd that these things could be written by a man who writes elsewhere that there is no such thing as good evil, these are just intellectual conceits.

After all that carping, I have to say I think I largely agree with the quote below. Before reading I will explain that the term 'ped-xing' comes from 'pedestrian crossing,' and is used to refer to taking care of the boring, mundane, routine drudgery of the 9-5 lifestyle- getting appointments made, paying the rent, getting the phone turned on, answering business mail, getting papers to the printers on time, meeting deadlines, that sort of thing.

"...ideals cannot be institutionalized. You cannot put your ideals into practice, so to speak, in any way more "ambitious" than through your own private life. Ideals, placed in the context of a functioning business enterprise (such as the government, SDS, or LNS) become distorted into ego trips or are lost altogether in the clamor of daily ped-xing which seems related to the ideal but is
actually only make-work."

The ped-xers of the world are those who get things done and we cannot do without them. I share Raymond's dislike of ped-xing, but not his disdain. I wish I were better at that sort of thing and I know that the reasons I am not have to do with personal character flaws and failings and are not a mark of my superior approach to life.

However, I totally agree that the best place to put your ideals into practice is through your own private life, at home, with your friends, in the local community where God has put you (not an idealized, artificial community created by you and some of your friends who think a sort of monastic withdrawal from the community of the lost is where it's at. Soapboxing over. For now).… (meer)