Terry Southern reports from the 1968 Democratic Convention

'Right after lunch we very dutifully piled into the car and headed for the Convention Hall. It is exactly like approaching a military installation; barbed-wire, checkpoints, the whole bit; Genet was absolutely appalled, I was afraid he was going to be physically sick; Burroughs, of course, was ecstatic; it was all so grotesque that at one point he actually did a little dance of glee. He has a tape recorder, and he applies his cut-up and fragmentation theory to its use -recording speeches by the delegates and committeemen, then putting blank spaces in them, and filling the blanks with pieces of other speeches, and finally playing back this composite of cliches and inanities in such a way as to sound like live radio coverage, a possibility which was enhanced by the fact that this particular recorder looks exactly like a portable radio. It was Burroughs' belief that if these tapes were played constantly in the Convention Hall, the subliminal effect of the repetitions, the non sequiturs, and the general idiocies would so confound any chance listener as to possibly snap his mind, and thus become a profoundly disruptive factor in the overall "Convention profile."'

Link