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If you took the most ardent revolutionary, vested him with absolute power, within a year he would be worse than the Tsar.

—Mikhail Bakunin

Modern fiction is replete with stories of revolt and failure. The setting might be a brutal dictatorship, maybe it is a medieval fantasy or a cyberpunk dystopia, but the ending is similar. The usual tropes are presented: violence of policing, spy agencies and brutal military forces, all of whom perpetrate torture, disappearances and murders.

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Answer to last issue’s quiz: The designer of the nationally known Willow Run bomber plant was Charles Lindberg, former Warren-Forest resident and grandson of John C. Lodge, of X-way fame...

Rumors of the week: The J.L. Hudson Co. will announce after this Xmas that it will abandon its downtown Detroit store due to lagging sales. The last day of business will be after Xmas of 1971 (of course)...

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a review of

Finding the Mother Tree: Discovering the Wisdom of the Forest by Suzanne Simard. Alfred A. Knopf, 2021

I was hanging out in the dayroom of the Federal Correctional Institution at Danbury, Conn. late last year. It was noisy with the sound of the guys playing cards and Scrabble, when a friend brought a book with an intriguing cover to the table. It was Suzanne Simard’s Finding the Mother Tree, and it jolted me back to another place and time in my life, when so much of my world was about saving the trees from destruction. Her book is full of the wisdom gleaned from decades of careful and loving observation.

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Fifth Estate

STAFF

Debby Brentz

David Gaynes

Carol George

Alan Gotkin

Mike John

Keep on Truckin’ Co-op

Resa Jannett

Jim Kennedy

Lee Ann Kennedy

David Levison

Julie Medvecky

Harvey Ovshinsky

Dave Riddle

Bill Rowe

Marilyn Werbe

Peter Werbe

Cathy West

POLITICAL PRISONER:

John Sinclair

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Last week we went out on strike. We shut down universities and colleges across the country. Over 400 schools learned the power of the political strike. Hundreds of thousands of students moved militantly in rage over the Cambodia invasion and the Kent State murders. We trashed ROTC buildings, occupied administration centers, fought police, and made demands that put our schools against the wall.

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a review of

Kimi, Dir: Steven Soderbergh, 2022

Director Steven Soderbergh is well-known for both prolific output (an astounding 47 films and counting) and speed of production (roughly a movie a year over the past decade). Yet his work’s quality seems not to suffer from such a pace.

On the contrary, something about its fleetness belies a fascinating realism of the outlandish. Fittingly, in Soderbergh’s latest, his third collaboration with the streaming arm of HBO, a film simply titled Kimi, a villain’s posture bumbles unceremoniously. A tech millionaire conducts a Zoom interview in his garage before a pitiable, fake bookshelf background. The manner in which these characters are painted, all through edits and camera framings, bleeds with an obscure intentionality. Form as function.

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a review of

24 Reasons to Abandon Christianity: Why Christianity’s Perverted Morality Leads to Misery and Death by Charles Bufe. See Sharp Press, 2022

Charles Bufe’s jeremiad is a scathing rebuke of Christianity filled with lurid details that support the charge made in the subtitle of 24 Reasons. It traces religion’s fearmongering and fire and brimstone manipulation by faithful zealots in service to the powerful, but also chronicles its inherent dishonesty, authoritarianism, sexual morbidity, hypocrisy...,well it’s a long list.

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a review of

AMOK by Steven Cline. Trapart Books, 2022

Alone hitchhiker sticks out his thumb on a dusty Georgia back-road. He is wearing an all-white paint suit, clutching an ambiguous briefcase. His bearded face is ornamented in haphazard colors, ghastly reds and yellows. Disturbingly, he is not wearing any shoes. Does he not know where he is headed? Maybe he just wants to go, to go out there, to go with you, to show you...What? Do you pick him up?

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a review of

We Take Care of Our Own by Christopher Clancy. Montag Press 2021

Imagine Amazon, Walmart, Exxon, Mobil, Pepsi, Coke, Fox News, Blackwater, the AMA, and Haliburton all rolled into one messy Play Dough ball of a supraconglomerate. The only corporation.

Add the military, and you have USoFA Worldwide with its finger in every pie, in bed with everyone and everything. And, it’s leading the War on Terror around the world the way a rock band goes on tour.

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The American Servicemen’s Union (ASU) at Selfridge Air Force Base is inviting the peace movement to join them on the base in a “Picnic for Peace” on Memorial Day, May 30.

This is an excellent opportunity for the entire anti-war movement in the area to give support to and show solidarity with a vital faction of the movement, the GIs who are standing up to be counted.

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a review of

Cheap Copies! Cheap Copies! The OBSOLETE! Press Guide to DIY Hectography, Mimeography, & Spirit Duplication by Rich Dana. Obsolete Press, 2022

The first question many people have when looking at a how-to manual like this one is, why bother? What’s the motivation for doing something the hard way with antiquated techniques and materials? Scouring junk shops and the Internet for the equipment and supplies, that, in printing, have been made obsolete by the machines that produce what you’re holding in your hands—computers.

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The photographs of Ken Hamblin, photographic director for Detroit Scope Magazine, will be featured in an exhibit combining photography and poetry in the Fine Arts Corridor of the Detroit Main Library from May 12 to June 14.

Hamblin’s photos have appeared several times in the Fifth Estate and the WSU South End.

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On Sunday, May 18, from 2 p.m. to 6 p.m., the Detroit Artists’ Market, 1452 Randolph will open an exhibit entitled “The Common Ground” which will include new work by 22 artists of the Common Ground of the Arts.

The exhibit will continue through Saturday, June 14.

Contributors will be Patricia Duff, George Ettl, James Lewandowski, Jonnie Russel, Marilyn Schechter, G. Alden Smith, Jerry Gibbons, Al Hebert, Stanley Rosenthal, Bradley Jones, William Jordan, George Rogers, Arthur Wenk, Marie Tapert, Gary Boyll, Stanley Dolega, Edmund Morais, Jean Pollack, Nolan Ross, Michael Frantz, Bette Klegon, and Aris Koutroulis.

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Those events marked with an asterisk (*) need Fifth Estate salesmen. If you want to earn some extra money, come down to our office and pick up some papers.

THURS. MAY 15

* ROCK CONCERT, Savage Grace, Red, White and Blues Band. WSU Upper DeRoy Aud. 8 p.m. Adm. $1.

FRI. MAY 16

* FACTS OF DEATH “Death and the Human Imagination” with Eugene J. McNamara from the University of Windsor. Rackham Aud. 8:30

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NEW YORK—Strange and very hypocritical how Dwight D. Eisenhower seems to have been loved and revered by everybody. While he was alive one could scarcely hear a good word for or about him; now he’s dead the air is full of unctuous, oily tributes to his role as a beloved father figure. Wasn’t it he who took over our role in Vietnam from the French? Wasn’t it he who blew the whistle on the military/industry cartel? And yet strange, strange, apparently everybody loved him.

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The Michigan music scene will rock on over the Memorial Day weekend with the First Annual Detroit Rock and Roll Revival.

Rather than hire performers at random out of the Billboard charts or the record ads in Rolling Stone, producer Russ Gibb, of the Grande Ballroom maintains that rock and roll is the true culture of America’s youth, and must be presented as such.

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The ageless Sun Ra and his thirteen-piece Astro-Infinity Arkestra will unite with the MC5 and the people of Detroit at the Grande Ballroom May 16 and 17 for a mass manifestation of revolutionary culture and energy that’s sure to bathe the city in its vibrations for weeks to come.

The Arkestra will also appear at the 1^st Annual Rock and Roll Revival, May 30 and 31 at the State Fair Grounds.

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LIBERATION News Service — Columbia Records is owned by CBS. It owns the Yankees and God knows what else. Its offices are at 51 West 52 Street in New York in a new skyscraper whose walls are already peeling and crackling.

Right now it is the home of the revolution.

Or almost. It is certainly spending more money promoting the Youth Revolution than one would think possible for a standard American corporate enterprise. Columbia ads divide the world into “we” and “they,” with the “we” including the longhairs, the youth and Columbia and “they” including anyone you want to include because you happen to be against him or he against you.

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UNCLASSIFIEDS cost 50 cents per line per issue. Figure four words per line. (A word is a word including one and two letter words. A phone number is a word. Street numbers are words. Abbreviations should be sensible. DISCOUNT RATES: Five runs cost 35 cents per line.

Happy Birthday, Thomas C! May you always think of me...Bev.

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Free Speech Fight in Plymouth—Students around Detroit may have been misled by the so-called “news reports” on what recently went down in Plymouth. I cleared up the story after talking to Jim Kalliel, editor of Free Verse, an underground paper which the Plymouth officials tried to silence.

The fascists in Plymouth were beaten out of a victory when Jim faced the Court, the pigs, and the “powers that be” in the tradition of all those who have dared to print what they believe in the face of much opposition and a repressive ruling group.

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This interview was conducted and transcribed by Dena Clamage.

[Part 1 of the interview appeared in FE #78, May 1–14, 1969.]

Editors’ Note: John Watson, editor of the Wayne State University South End, has been involved in Detroit revolutionary politics for a number of years. Former editor of the black community newspaper, The Inner City Voice, Watson was one of the original founders of the League of Revolutionary Black Workers. He is currently serving as a member of the Central Committee of the League.

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We just finished reading your paper “the 5^th Estate” dated April 3–16, which couldn’t be classified as good trash. After wasting 4 books of matches we finally got your paper burning so we could heat our C-rations.

You probably are wondering why we are writing this letter to you. Well, we read some articles concerning Vietnam and some of the letters from men in Vietnam which we will call clerks, because we know they haven’t seen any combat by the letters they have written. The rest of the articles were written by the girlish boys back in the world.

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a review of

Still Hungry in America, text by Robert Coles, photographs by Al Clayton, introduction by Edward Kennedy. $2.95, 115 pages. World Publishing Co.

Still Hungry in America may be considered a sequel to Michael Harrington’s The Other America, published in 1962. Harrington’s book described the America most middle and upper-middle class whites never see.

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Most movies leave us with so little that it probably seems unfair to dump on Sergei Bondarchuk’s film of “War and Peace” simply because it doesn’t leave us with enough.

What it does give us is some rich and memorable images: a pregnant woman sewing by the light of an open window, reminiscent of Vermeer. The coming of Spring heralded by a variety of colors and textures that send the senses reeling, almost as if you could touch and smell the infinite sweetness of that budding flower up there on the screen.

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Police representatives from twelve suburban communities have been training in methods of riot control on the Cranbrook School campus once a month throughout the year.

The newly-formed Cranbrook SDS concentrated on their removal as a primary goal. A victory was scored May 8, when the pigs failed to appear, apparently aware of the increasing militancy of certain students at Cranbrook School. This eliminated the necessity of an open confrontation between SDS and the cops, as this was the date when such a confrontation was supposed to have occurred.

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MADISON, Wisc. (LNS)—Students and non-students in the University of Wisconsin community, responding to publicity which asked “Why don’t you do it in the road?”, found out why when they turned up for a block party on Saturday, May 3.

They were driven off the streets by police with clubs and gas in what led to three nights of fighting between cops and at least 1,000 young people on the tree-lined Madison streets.

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Dr. Eugene Schoenfeld speaking at Community Arts Auditorium, May 28, 1969 at a benefit for Open City. Photo: Alan Gotkin.

QUESTION: I am writing to you in regard to my weight problem. I am 22, five feet six inches tall and I weigh 134 pounds. I would like to weigh 125 pounds. I have been as heavy as 145 pounds and really have had no trouble losing the first ten pounds but the second are a problem.

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Dr. Eugene Schoenfeld speaking at Community Arts Auditorium, May 28, 1969 at a benefit for Open City. Photo: Alan Gotkin.

Dr. Eugene Schoenfeld, known and loved “Hippocrates,” will be at WSU’s Community Arts Auditorium on Wednesday May 28 at 8 pm in a benefit for Open City, Detroit’s service organization for the free community.

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WASHINGTON, D.C. (LNS)—In spite of government repression, draft resistance continues to increase. There are nearly twice as many draft cases in Federal courts as there were a year ago.

If the same rate of prosecuting holds true for the next few months, Selective Service cases will probably be the third greatest producer of criminal court business.

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FT. JACKSON, S.C.—The Army has dropped charges against some GIs affiliated with the group GIs United Against the War in Vietnam at Ft. Jackson, S.C., and will discharge others without ever bringing them to trial.

Of the nine soldiers originally arrested following an anti-war meeting on the base March 20, only three now face charges.

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CHICAGO (LNS)—Dick Flacks, an assistant professor of sociology at the University of Chicago, and founding member of SDS, was severely beaten in his university office May 5.

Flacks was beaten over the head, causing multiple skull fractures, and his right hand was almost cut off in an attempt to leave him to bleed to death.

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Editors’ Note: Marc Kadish is Mid-West organizer for the National Lawyer’s Guild and is active in Detroit with the National Organizing Committee (NOC).

Fort Riley is a sprawling Army base located between Manhattan and Junction City, Kansas about 200 miles from Kansas City.

Included among the 15,000 GIs on the base are approximately 3,000 soldiers who are being “rehabilitated” at the Correctional Training Facilities. If they don’t get rehabilitated they get shipped to the Army Disciplinary Barracks at Fort Leavenworth.

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Dave Valler passed his sanity tests with flying colors and has pleaded guilty to two counts of possession of grass.

Valler’s court-appointed attorney requested the sanity hearings contending that, “Valler’s habitual and heavy use of drugs impaired his mental ability.” (See FE #77, April 17–30, 1969).

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Trouble time again at Northland. The punk rent-a-pigs out there have been giving our salesmen such a hard time when they are trying to sell that we are going to begin a suit against the shopping center to enforce our legal right to sell in a public area.

Our staff and our attorney, James Lafferty, met with the jerks that run the place last year and came to an agreement whereby the harassment of sellers would stop, but apparently it meant nothing to the businessmen who are trying to drive elements of the free community out of the shopping center.

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A second man has been ordered to stand trial in the March 29 wounding of Patrolman Richard E. Worobec outside the New Bethel Baptist Church on Linwood.

Clarence J. Fuller, of Detroit, was bound over for trial on a charge of assault with intent to commit murder by Recorder’s Court Judge Joseph A. Gillis. Fuller and the first man due to stand trial in the New Bethel Incident, Alfred Hibbitt, also of Detroit, have been both accused of wounding Worobec.

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Fifth Estate

A Newspaper of Detroit

FIFTH ESTATE #79, May 15–28, 1969, Vol. 4 No. 1, page 2

EDITORIAL GROUP

Alan Gotkin

Peter Werbe

Cathy West

Tommye Wiese

DISTRIBUTION

Bruce Montrose

Fred Frank

MUSIC EDITOR

John Sinclair

STAFF

Dena Clamage

Claudie Montrose

Franie Nelson

Marlene Tyre

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[two_third padding=“0 30px 0 0”]Special to the Fifth Estate

SAN FRANCISCO—With Thompson submachine-guns blazing, 160 armed cops moved in on the Fillmore District Monday afternoon, April 28, to quiet a Black Panther loudspeaker.

Sixteen persons were arrested in a bust which resulted from a police complaint that a Panther loudspeaker was insulting the pigs. A number of guns were seized (and have not been released), including two double barreled shotguns, a.45 automatic, a .22 caliber rifle, an M-14, and assorted ammo.

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Those events marked with an asterisk (*) need Fifth Estate salesmen. If you want to earn some extra money, come down to our office and pick up some papers.

THURS. MAY 1

* FREE HUEY — demonstration at the Federal Building on Lafayette at 1 p.m. Sponsored by Black Panther Party.

* ANN ARBOR ARGUS Benefit with the MC5 & the Amboy Dukes at the Grande Ballroom, Adm. $2 8 p.m.

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LIBERATION NEWS SERVICE—When two North Korean MIG fighters attacked a U.S. spy plane and shot it down on April 15, self-righteous protests immediately came puttering out of Washington.

The official response has been a “protest” and action by President Nixon ordering fighter plane protection for future reconnaissance flights over North Korea.

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Thanks for reprinting my Other Scenes article on nudity in and out of the theater (They Can’t Get Any Nuder. FE #75, March 20-April 2, 1969). I’ve just seen it and you did an esthetically nice job. But a line was dropped from one of the final paragraphs.

My point (the important part) was that “the real qualitative difference in the experience of public nudity lies in its goals. If one’s goal is to convince a skeptical public that nudity need not lead to sensuality, then one’s participants dare not touch. But if one’s goal is personal self-fulfillment—and nudity is just a means to that end—one will want to touch. And to be touched.

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State Senator Roger Craig, along with Hijinio Rangel, a striking worker from Delano, California, will kick off the International Grape Boycott Day activities in Detroit on May 10^th.

The day’s activities will start with a bus Caravan for Social Justice at 10:30 a.m., leaving from All Saints Episcopal Church at 3837 W. Seven Mile, two blocks east of Livernois. All interested persons are invited to join the caravan which will visit several A&P stores throughout the Detroit Area.

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UNCLASSIFIEDS cost 50 cents per line per issue. Figure four words per line. (A word is a word including one and two letter words. A phone number is a word. Street numbers are words. Abbreviations should be sensible. DISCOUNT RATES: Five runs cost 35 cents per line.

Get ordained—Send name and address to Universal Life Church, 1766 Poland Rd., Modesto Ca. Get 4-D draft exemption, half fare on airlines and trains and marry people. No cost or obligation, only “What is right.”

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Wayne State University is a working class college in a working class town. It is located in Detroit, a city which has long since taken the United Auto Workers bureaucracy into its ruling class and blunted union militancy by cooptation.

Many of the students of WSU work in Detroit’s factories and belong to unions. Almost all have come into contact with union experience through their parents.

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A cop stood on the Grande stage, presumably to hold the crowds back. He was confused. He had no idea what was happening.

Some black guys and a girl went on stage coming out of the stoned-filled amorphous crowd to reaffirm their blackness and hipness. They knew what was happening.

The kids were there. They come every week. It doesn’t really matter who’s playing. They can be with their friends, dance, and lie on the floor high. Drop out on a Saturday night to prepare again for their pretty one-story suburban high school-prison. They kinda knew what was happening.

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WARNING: Word is out that some tripsters are using the anesthetic cyclopropane (Trimethylene) for their highs. I hope this message reaches you in time.

Cyclopropane is far more dangerous than laughing, gas (nitrous oxide). Arrhythmias of the heart and respiratory failure are not uncommon effects of this gas. In other words, the heart may stop beating or beat so quickly and weakly that blood is not circulated through the body. Or the brain centers which control breathing may be so heavily anesthetized that breathing stops.

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[Part 2 of the interview appeared in FE #79, May 15–28, 1969.]

Editors’ Note: John Watson, editor of the Wayne State University South End, has been involved in Detroit revolutionary politics for a number of years. Former editor of the black community newspaper, The Inner City Voice, Watson was one of the original founders of the League of Revolutionary Black Workers. He is currently serving as a member of the Central Committee of the League.

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Editors’ Note: The author of this article is currently doing time in a federal prison in West Virginia on a conviction of possession of two grams of marijuana. Prior to his transfer, he spent close to a month in Wayne County Jail where he wrote the following commentary.

Upon reading the article in the South End of February 24, “Seven Days in Detroit’s Hell Hole” I was inspired to write this commentary on the Wayne County Concentration Camp where I am presently incarcerated.

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The MC5 have always had the policy of kicking out all of the jams so it should come as no surprise that the Ann Arbor based group has severed their contract with Elektra Records.

“At this point we’re totally unsatisfied and unhappy with the way things have been going with Elektra,” said Wayne Kramer, MC5 lead guitarist. “They’re far and away the hippest record company, but they don’t even know what we’re talking about.”

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“The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie” is not a great movie, but it’s an unusually good one, and maybe Maggie Smith’s performance should really be called great. Her characterization is in the grand manner as modulated and controlled, and yet as flamboyant, as anything you could ever see on stage.

Miss Smith plays Jean Brodie with a relish and force and tenderness that makes her Miss Brodie ours.

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MONTEREY, Calif. (LNS)—The Army is taking a Danang-sized shelling as the climactic phase of the Presidio “mutiny” case enters its third week here at Fort Ord.

In a sharp departure from earlier trials, with defendants taking the stand to apologize for the Oct. 14 sit-down, or not testifying at all, Terence Hallinan’s clients have begun testifying that their actions were justified.

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