Fifth Estate 9, June, 1966 Add to the Bookbuilder

For as long as the “New Left” has been in existence, “New Leftniks” have talked about the need for serious thought and analysis within the various “movements” which have arisen: analysis of American society, its history, its power structure, its operating mechanisms; analysis of other countries, especially those of the under-developed (overexploited) Third World; analysis of the problems which this country is or very soon will be confronting, i.e., automation, foreign policy, poverty, etc.; and analysis of where we as a movement, should be concentrating our attention and organizing energies. Unfortunately, very few New Leftniks have actually undertaken this type of work.

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On Tuesday, May 3, 1966. Thomas L. Baker, a 16 year old black youth was shot and wounded while entering the office of the Afro-American Youth Movement (A.A.Y.M.), formerly known as the Adult Community Movement for Equality, at 9211 Kercheval on Detroit’s East Side.

This incident is only one of a long series of violent acts directed at the A.A.Y.M., as well as A.C.M.E. The A.A.Y.M. has been in existence for approximately three months. In that time, burning rags have been thrown through the rear office window, a bomb has been tossed through the front window, and a shotgun blast at the office in the middle of the night.

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The most important event of the last few weeks was a concert by the Joseph Jarman quartet from Chicago. This was Joseph’s second concert in Detroit. The first one, on March 18 in the Lower DeRoy Auditorium at WSU, was such a success (not financially, certainly, but meaning that the music was so beautiful that the people who came to hear it wanted to hear more of it) that the WSU Artist’s Society decided to sponsor these Chicago musicians again. With Joseph Jarman, who plays alto saxophone, bells, whistles, & other musical instruments, will be Christopher Gaddy on piano; Charles Clark, bass; & Thurman Barker, drums. A ‘delegation” from the Artists’ Workshop fortunate enough to be in Chicago on May 13 to hear Joseph Jarman’s concert entitled “TRIBUTE to the HARD CORE” at the University of Chicago & will not soon forget that historic performance.

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Thirty-five people from the DCEWV picketed at the Detroit Stock Exchange, Thursday, May 19, protesting the fact that the war in Vietnam, although in the interest of certain American corporations making skyrocket profits from war production, benefits neither the Vietnamese people nor the GIs who are sent to Vietnam to kill and be killed.

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This past week the D.C.E.W.V. conducted a survey in the segment of the 17^th district in which we intend to concentrate our efforts on the Lafferty campaign this summer.

In order to plan specific strategy we thought that it would be important to know something about the people who lived there. We felt that with a survey we would have more of a concrete estimation of prevailing sentiment than one painfully derived from an endless committee discussion.

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Face the Nation

Thru Hickman’s rolling earth hills

icy winter

gray sky bare trees lining the road

South to Wichita

you’re in the Pepsi Generation Signum enroute

Aiken Republican on the radio 60,000

Northvietnamese troops now infiltrated but over 250,000

South Vietnamese armed men

our Enemy—

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According to Time Magazine, prostitution has always been part of the American soldier’s life. It is a continuation of a grand tradition going back to the Crusades and extending through the vivandieres of World War I to the B-Girls called tea girls in Saigon today. After dysentery and other intestinal diseases had multiplied fourfold in four months and venereal disease had afflicted one-third of the 21,000 troopers of the U.S. first cavalry (Airmobile) in the small town of An Khe in the central highlands, the local commander acted. He made the town off limits. Prices, which the soldiers had forced up, and disease rates soon fell but, as Time puts it, “In March the first cases of ‘battle fatigue’ showed up.”

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TIME MAGAZINE is in many ways the most honest representation of the American conscience today. Reaching more than 3,000,000 families it presents official thinking and popularizes the attitudes of the “tastemakers.” The May 6^th issue is an historic document. In three stories it summarizes and epitomizes the most important problem the peace movement faces—the brutalization of the American conscience.

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On May 15, at the Wayne Campus, the Detroit Committee to End the War in Vietnam and the Students for a Democratic Society marched to demand that Wayne State University stop their cooperation with the draft system. A brief sit-in of 60 students followed.

WASHINGTON, May 6. The defense Department yesterday boosted the draft back up to 26,000 men for July compared to 15,000 in June.

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Reprinted from The Free Student

FS: What is your reaction to the New York Times quote that “SNCC officials insist that they would prefer segregationist officials because their presence would keep Negroes aroused and militant?”

Courtland Cox: I think the facade—that if you vote for Wilson Baker as opposed to Jim Clark you have improved something—is really something people have to look at as not being true. I would feel much better if Negroes would stop thinking in terms of which is the lesser of two evils and start thinking of how I can get somebody that benefits me. The Democratic Party in the South is still racist

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First installment of a regular column syndicated by EVO [East Village Other] for L.A. Free Press, Berkeley Barb, Fifth Estate, & The Paper

This is the first of a series of columns by Timothy Leary, Ph.D. spelling out a theory and method of becoming a conscious person. The blueprint for a new religion. The working plan for a new species. The subsequent columns will present detailed, practical, day-by-day, step-by-step instructions, for rearranging your life, for establishing a harmony with your nervous system, your cells, your molecules and the multiple energy networks around you.

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The Committee for Independent Political Action (CIPA) on the West Side of New York City was formed at the end of the summer of 1965, on the basis of a draft statement prepared by two editors of Studies on the Left, Jim Weinstein and Stanley Aronowitz. The initial CIPA nucleus consisted of about twenty people, all conscious “radicals” from a diversity of activist backgrounds—single issue and housing groups, reform democratic clubs, “old left”, SDS and others. They all came to CIPA with some sense that the actions they had been engaged in were inadequate: those of us from the anti-war movement felt that a certain saturation point was being reached with demonstrations: that they were no longer bringing in or educating significant numbers of new people, and that the old people were beginning to feel frustrated and discouraged.

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Paul Krassner, editor of a magazine of free thought, criticism, and satire, called The Realist, was in Detroit last month. In his “Evening with A Self-Styled Phony,” Krassner turned people on to what turns him on. The Realist, for example:

“I wake up every morning and I giggle: I’m the editor of The Realist ha-ha-ha. It really is strange because I’ve been doing it for eight years now and I really haven’t accepted that fact. If I walk past a store and it says ‘boy wanted,’ I stop—I say ‘maybe I can still get the job.’ I really don’t relate to this—you know what it’s like; working, you know, not going to a job, it’s like playing hooky all day long. I mean you can go to an afternoon movie and you don’t get in trouble. I have a secretary to take the calls while I’m gone. It’s very strange, you know, just putting out a magazine and not getting paid for it.”

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