Publications and Activities - Jonathan Horelick

On Labor Day, 1971, we invoked the scandal known as “The Kings County Comics”. The comic strip was released at the actual hospital complex, Kings County, which is situated on the periphery of the Brownsville ghetto district in Brooklyn. Insofar as the hospital was familiar to us, we decided to specify the revolutionary critique as well as to denounce the conditions there. We simply used the opportunity presented by an evacuated institutional location in order to revel in subversion.

The results were by no means marginal either among the patients or the workers of the hospital. To the extent that the comic referred to particular bureaucrats and administrative procedures known at the hospital, word rapidly circulated about the comics in spite of a very limited, clandestine distribution. At the same time, the scandal encouraged the refusal to pay among the patrons as it advocated the use of direct democracy among the employees in denouncing the repressive aspects of their function especially. From friends and colleagues employed at the hospital, we can relate the results which followed: much of the hospital administration was inflamed the following day when it found its employees gathering together in the reading and discussion of the mysterious parody-denunciation which appeared on each of their desks that morning; queues of patients found and read copies of the text in defiance of the cashiers behind the pay booths who were enraged; no copy of the “Comics” ever returned to the central office of hospital administration, as the directors had demanded.

The positive significance which the agitation accomplished was underlined, moreover, by the simple fact that people in districts as far away as Bedford-Stuyvesant had gotten wind of what happened. Certain subjective conditions were presented for the first time among us in New York. The composition as well as the diffusion of the text emanated from diverse sources, namely, several comrades as well as their friends and the sympathy and support of one or two workers at the hospital itself. We had realized again an episodic agitation, without banality and without interference, as we are certain that those we ridiculed will never be quite the same.

The text entitled “To the Readers of Contracultura” was issued on November 8th, 1971. In the spring of 1972, we drew up the tract “Have a Moment for the Examination of Reality?” in answer to the commercial repression of revolutionary theory which had built up ever since the first publications in 1969. It was circulated around key newsstands and bookstores which automatically resisted all critical publications which are independent of the monopoly of commercial distributors and are free of commercial advertisements. There, we emphasized the spectacle of obstruction which “little newsstands” and the “distribution racket” have imposed, as outright censorship parallel to the political terrorism known to bureaucratic state capitalism. We have continued to embarrass those merchants who defend by virtue of habit and “propriety” the papal lists of weekly journals and newspapers handed to them by various middlemen. Moreover, the publishers and editors who have refused to print English versions of Society of the Spectacle and On Knowing How to Live for the Use of the Younger Generations, as at Grove Press and Avon Books in New York, or those who worked to sabotage their publication, as Porter Sargent in Boston, have not heard the last of us.

A cartoon-advertisement extracted from the present text, “The Poverty of Ecology,” in combination with the diversion of Marvel Comics, was issued in 500 copies, preceding the publication of our magazine. This spring, we published a Spanish version of the situationist text, “Contributions Serving to Rectify Public Opinion Concerning the Revolution in the Underdeveloped Countries” by Mustafa Khayati. It appears under the title “La Verdad de los Paises Subdesarrollados en La Revolucion Internacional” and it was translated by Julian Cordero. This text has been circulated, in particular, in the Dominican Republic as well as in New York. Five thousand copies of the present magazine have been issued initially.

Text from https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/jon-horelick-diversion-number-1#toc63