I Shall Be Set Free
The UPSTART GROUP
By Richard Seeley
The Supreme Command has reinterpreted the Constitution so that “We the People” refers only to the UPSTART GROUP which, if you don’t know what it is, you know you don’t belong to it. The UPSTART GROUP is the management of the Workhorse which is a Wholly Owned Subsidiary. The machines in the Workhorse are run by people who are bored anyway. Everyone around here who is doing what he is supposed to, is doing it because the UPSTART GROUP supposed he should.
The main offices of the UPSTART GROUP are located in a one hundred-story building underneath a dry cleaner in Spanish Harlem. I remember when it was a respectable neighborhood before the prostitutes joined the Woman’s Improvement Club, and they started having meetings in the house across the street from where the coffee shop exploded. The dry cleaner’s is used on Good Friday by day maids who get their suits done for Easter. The rest of the year it is frequented by guilty men who go there in the early morning and late afternoon directly from seeing the crystal ball lady.
The UPSTART GROUP was founded by Alexander the Wizard the evening his water pipe overflowed and he couldn’t get a repairman at that time of night so he had to find something to occupy himself with. Starting with only his girlfriend and their eight children, Alexander built it up until it is a going concern that employs everyone in the general vicinity of this planet. Those who it can’t employ it classifies into three groups: outcasts, outlaws, and communists.
All things that modern man needs are manufactured by the Workhorse. The following is an impartial and incomplete list of the things that are made: munitions, peace symbols, cars, buses, all other forms of transportation including artificial legs, Phil Ochs’ records, Barry Saddler records, high school records, prison records, quick-frozen octopus tentacles, Women’s fashions, Men’s fashions, birth control devices, pills, calendars, non-fattening food, non-alcoholic beer, non-sugar sweeteners, non-dairy cream, all other non-existent things. Newly added is a factory that makes electric Stradivarius violins, which some people may find shocking if they are not grounded.
Inside the UPSTART GROUP building are two amazing computers. One knows all that the human mind is capable of knowing, and the other knows the truth. Between them, they are able to determine how many artificial flowers will be purchased by women who wish they were not married to their husbands.
The UPSTART GROUP also has a computer which figures exactly how you will live your life right up to the exact second when you blow your mind. Some people should be relieved to know that something knows what they are doing even though they don’t know themselves.
What this is actually is an experiment in the mind-expanding powers of lack of sleep and a demonstration of the many uses of the word IF which would be my favorite word even if it weren’t.
This further explains the high regard I have for the Mafia. The UPSTART GROUP has sent many of its best agents out to get the Mafia but they always end up in the same place -- the bottom of the East River.
Besides the Mafia, only Bob Dylan and Allen Ginsberg are in any way free of the UPSTART GROUP.
If you now understand what the UPSTART GROUP is, you may walk out of here into the night and go do whatever your conscience tells you.
(from the Quaker Campus, the student newspaper at Whittier College, Nov. 8, 1968)
