In this speech, Jan, a scholar whose love for (and collection of) Rock'n'Roll records draws the ongoing attention of the police, points out to his dissident friend Ferdinand why police hate rock music more than they hate dissidents:
Jan: Why do you think you're walking around and Jirous is in gaol?
Ferdinand: Because he insulted a secret policeman.
Jan: No, because the policeman insulted him. About his hair. Jirous doesn't cut his hair. It makes the policeman angry, so he starts something and it ends with Jirous in gaol. But what is the policeman angry about? What difference does long hair make?
The policeman is angry about his fear. The policeman's fear is what makes him angry. He's frightened by indifference. Jirous doesn't care. He doesn't care enough even to cut his hair. The policeman isn't frightened by dissidents! Why should he be? Policemen love dissidents, like the Inquisition loved heretics. Heretics give meaning to the defenders of the faith. Nobody cares more than a heretic. ... It means they're playing on the same board. So [the man who pays the police] can relax, he's made the rules, it's his game. The population plays the other way, by agreeing to be bribed by places at university, or an easy ride to work ... they care enough to keep their thoughts to themselves, their haircuts give nothing away.
But the Plastics don't care at all. They're unbribable. They're coming from somewhere else, from where the Muses come from. They're not heretics. They're pagans.Having worn long hair since I was 19, and hung out with neo-Pagans for about as long, I've found myself personally attached to this passage; but today, I find that it describes that quality which I've found familiar about the Occupy Wall Street movement, and what distinguishes it from its predecessors.
It's not so much that I think this describes the Occupations directly; it's that this approach to revolution parallels the problem so many have in trying to tell their story (and in so doing, claim some ownership over it). Part of the point of the Plastic People of the Universe, as Jan puts it, is the audacity of existing at all, because their existence defies definition or delineation.
It is the audacity of daring to occupy our public places and re-invent what public life means - to dare to live so differently in public - that irritates the skin of our American body politic, so attached to its master narratives and its narrow imagination.
