Means and Extremes

By P.S.

DEAR AMERICA by KARL HESS 279 pages. Morrow. $7.95. Back in 1964, Karl Hess was a true believer of the right. As a speechwriter, aide and ideologue to Presidential Candidate Barry Goldwater, he packaged the slogan that may have helped lose the campaign: "Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice. Moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue." Today, at 51, Hess is a welder. He now opposes war, government in general and most U.S. Government activities. He has become, in fact, an anarchist and a tax resister. As much out of sheer angry cussedness as conviction, he admits, he refused to pay the Internal Revenue Service a penny in 1966; nor has he given them any money since then. The IRS, in response, slapped a 100% lien on any money Hess earns and any property or savings he may have. So Hess lives mainly by barter, trading his welding skill directly for food, clothing and shelter.

St. Paul was blasted from his horse and converted to Christianity by a bolt of lightning and a deep voice on the road to Damascus. In a more American epiphany, Hess was converted by the deep-throated roar of a motorcycle. Many middle-aged men take up cycling --as Hess did in 1965. Mostly what they get is kidney trouble, pavement burns and a chance to act out a few fantasies. As Hess tells it in Dear America, he got secular religion. The need to repair the machines he wrecked led him to welding and, finally, to working as a welder of trucks and construction equipment. "It was there, under trucks, inside buckets, working hard," he writes, "that I faced the final contradictions, the ones that ended any hope of anything in my life ever being quite the same again."

Radiant Vision. Hess's life is indeed different, but his extremist way of thinking has not changed. He has no use for either of the major political parties, for it has been revealed to him that liberals as well as conservatives believe in "the concentration of power in the fewest practical hands." He was once one of American business's staunchest supporters; now, in a paraphrase of Proudhon, he writes. "Corporate capitalism is an act of theft" because "a very few live very high off the work, invention and creativity of very many others." Hess does not buy state socialism either, regarding it as "an act of betrayal... by bureaucrats who have contrived a new synthesis of capitalism's obsessive bookkeeping with feudalism's top-down, absolute authority." Having thus disposed of today's major isms, what Hess does advocate is a free society in which people, without any help from city hall or Congress, organize at a local level to run their own schools, businesses and neighborhoods. Writes Hess: "I want to live in a community where decent human beings all will practice those skills which all may possess in common, truthfulness, consideration of others, a sense of proportion in undertakings and in ambitions and the various human traits associated with deep love of another and an abiding respectful sense of self."

This radiant vision has long tormented man, and it is quite possible that big government and big business are not the best means to pursue it. In Dear America, Hess often seems possessed of a belief in the perfectibility of human nature that is as simplistic as his Goldwater conservatism--but, like the faith of most converts, totally sincere. As TIME Correspondent Arthur White learned when he visited Hess recently, the man seems to be practicing the classical, nonviolent anarchism he advocates. Hess owns little more than welding tools and the blue denim clothes on his back. "I had a bicycle," he admits, "but it was stolen."

He owes the IRS some $15,000, and to outwit them he has even sold the rights to Dear America to a community organization for which he works. "I can't own anything," he explains in a soft voice. "Those IRS people are Like a gang of thugs." His first marriage, which produced two sons, ended in divorce in 1967. Now he lives with his second wife, Freelance Editor-Artist Therese Machotka, in a three-room flat over a store in a racially mixed Washington, D.C., neighborhood. He exudes what a friend has described as "the ethereal, inexplicable cheerfulness of a nun scrubbing floors."

A big (5 ft. 11 in., 210 Ibs.), barrel-chested man, whose post-Republican beard lends him a faint resemblance to Fidel Castro, Hess spends most of his days in the warehouse that contains the office of Community Technology Inc., the self-help organization for which he serves as unpaid project coordinator. Surrounded by posters of Russian Anarchist Mikhail Bakunin, Mexican Peasant Leader Emiliano Zapata and Revolutionary Pamphleteer Tom Paine (all of whom he admires "because they kept on doing their own sticky things until the world changed"), Hess pursues a variety of projects that more than make up in imagination what they may lack in immediate applicability.

One aims at promoting neighborhood self-sufficiency by teaching inner-city people how to raise organically grown vegetables. Another project involves construction of solar-powered hot-water heaters on apartment roofs. A third seeks to increase food supplies by teaching people to raise fish at home. "It's protein," says Hess, pointing to a tank full of tiny rainbow trout. "You can trade them or sell them."

True Believer. Hess's nonconformist life-style leaves him plenty of time for thinking and writing. He offers no excuses for his philosophical flipflop, which he sees as a natural response to the growth of big government in America. "It's not just the war," he says. "I'm as opposed to the welfare state as I am to the warfare state. The Government is doing everything that the Declaration of Independence said you should resist," he says. Like the British, the Government "is sending hither swarms of officers to harass our people, and eat out their substance."

It is one of Hess's articles of faith that the Government should be radically reduced as well as reorganized. "I also think the public school system is a failure and prudent people should abandon it." Not by violence, however. Anarchists like the 19th century Frenchmen FranC,ois Ravachol, and Edouard Vaillant who tossed a bomb into the National Assembly, assumed that bombs and bullets would be necessary to free mankind. Hess, who has been arrested three times for participating in an antiwar demonstration, is willing to forgo force in favor of example. Like many a true believer, he is convinced that the world is changing in his direction. Says he, with a smile: "You'll be here with me sooner or later." . P.S.

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