 Hi, I'm reading from Naked Lunch by Holy Burroughs and I have to say it almost takes the First Amendment junkie like me to love a book like Naked Lunch. Naked Lunch is by the now-famous beat homosexual and junkie William Burroughs and it's about addiction. It's been favorably compared with or he has been favorably compared with Walt Whitman, Dante, Mark Twain and St. Augustine and he needed all those kinds of comparisons in order to get out of an obscenity suit after the book was banned in Boston. Naked Lunch lost on the first round. It was also banned in Los Angeles around the same time in the mid-60s, not long after it was printed in this country and but it won in the second round and it was pretty good for a book whose own author called it necessarily brutal, obscene and disgust. The first round but it won because of its socially redeeming value and one of the reasons it was found socially redeeming is that addiction is it's not just about addiction to junk or derivatives of opium but it's about addiction as a metaphor for the addiction to power to control over others and to consumption which characterize our society as a whole. In Naked Lunch it appears the only way to avoid victimization is to victimize but the victimizer is merely another victim of the system and of his own habit. I'm going to read a sort of a Kafkaesque passage about a guy named Dr. Benway. Dr. Benway had been called in as adviser to the Freeland Republic, a place given over to free love and continual bathing. The citizens are well adjusted cooperatives, honest, tolerant and above all clean but the invoking of Benway indicates all is not well behind that a hygienic facade. Benway is a manipulator and coordinator of symbol systems and expert on all phases of interrogation, brainwashing and control. I have not seen Benway since his precipitate departure from Annexia where his first assignment had been total demoralization, TD. Benway's first act was to abolish concentration camps, mass arrest and except under certain limited and special circumstances the use of torture. ID plur brutality he said it's not efficient. On the other hand prolonged mistreatment short of physical violence gives rise when skillfully applied to anxiety and a feeling of special guilt. A few rules or rather guiding principles are to be born in mind. The subject must not realize that the mistreatment is a deliberate attack of an anti-human enemy on his personal identity. He must be made to feel that he deserves any treatment he receives because there is something never specified horribly wrong with him. The naked need of the control addicts must be decently covered by an arbitrary and intricate bureaucracy so that the subject cannot contact his enemy direct. Every citizen of Annexia was required to apply for and carry on his person at all times a whole portfolio of documents. Citizens were subject to be stopped in the street at any time and the examiner who might be in plain clothes in various uniforms often in a bathing suit or pajamas sometimes stark naked except for a badge pinned to his left nipple after checking each paper would stamp it. On subsequent inspection the citizen was required to show the properly entered stamps of the last inspection. The examiner when he stopped a large group would only examine and stamp the cards of a few. The others were then subject to arrest because their cards were not properly stamped. Arrest meant provisional detention that is the prisoner would be released if and when his affidavit of explanation properly signed and stamped was approved by the assistant arbiter of explanations. Since this official hardly ever came to his office and the affidavit of explanation had to be presented in person. The examiner spent weeks and months waiting around in unheated offices with no chairs and no toilet facilities. Documents issued in vanishing ink faded into old pawn tickets. New documents were constantly required. The citizen rushed from one bureau to another in a frenzied attempt to meet impossible deadlines. All benches were removed from the city. All fountains turned off. All flowers and trees destroyed. Huge electric buzzers on the rang the quarter hour. Often the vibrations would throw people out of bed. Searchlights played over the town all night. No one was permitted to use shades, curtains, shutters or blinds. No one ever looked at anyone else because of the strict law against import tuning with or without verbal approach. Anyone for any purpose, sexual or otherwise. All cafes and bars were closed. Liquor could only be obtained with a special permit and the liquor so obtained could not be sold or given or in any way transferred to anyone else and the presence of anyone else in the room was considered prima facie evidence of conspiracy to transfer liquor. No one was permitted to bolt his door and the police had pass keys to every room in the city. Accompanied by a mentalist, they rush into someone's quarters and start looking for it. The mentalist guides them to whatever the man wishes to hide. A tube of Vaseline, an enema, a handkerchief with calm on it, a weapon, unlicensed alcohol and they always submitted the person to the most humiliating search of his naked person on which they make smearing and derogatory comments. Many a latent homosexual was carried out in a straight jacket when they planted Vaseline in his ass or they pounced on any object, a pen wiper or a shoe tree. And what is this supposed to be for? It's a pen wiper. A pen wiper, he says. I've heard everything now. I guess this is all we need. Come on, you. After a few months of this, the citizens cowered in their corners like neurotic cats.