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LANSING—Justice moves slowly.

Two years ago Gary Grimshaw, who at that time was art director for the Fifth Estate, was arrested in the Artists’ Workshop office on John Lodge for displaying an obscene kite.

The kite had on it an Egyptian peace eye symbol and the words “Fuck America Go Fly a Kite.”

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GRINNELL, Iowa (LNS) Brice Draper is a PR man for Playboy Magazine. He travels around to college campuses, selling the Playboy line and “promoting products for our advertisers.”

When Hefner’s boy Draper came to Grinnell, the local folk engaged him in naked confrontation. Ten students, six of them girls, took off their clothes to protest Playboy’s exploitation of the female body.

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is áille ná bratacha an domhain é ...

an níochán

ar an líne

.

more beautiful

than the flags of all nations ...

washing on the line

A haiku in Irish and English by Gabriel Rosenstock (Ireland) with artwork by Masood Hussain (Kashmir) whose first book together, Walk with Gandhi, commemorates the 150^th anniversary of the Mahatma’s birth. More bilingual haiku posters from them are available at

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In politics nothing can be taken at face value; many times what passes for an elaborately drawn political point of view is little more than a posture which conceals psychopathology. Trotskyism, a stillborn variety of marxism notable for the bizarre historical ironies embodied in it, is a particularly appropriate example.

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In the waning moonlight, three bands of sullen men with ash-blackened faces stealthed through the woods and dales of central Yorkshire, one of the first counties in England to industrialize.

Quietly, the three groups, each traveling from different villages, picked themselves through paths they traversed since childhood and assembled in a clearing near their target. Though they passed outlying cottages, no dogs betrayed them.

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Marius Mason was struck by the story of these early civil rights activists and their assassination by the Ku Klux Klan. He painted this portrait (“Harriet and Harry T Moore”, 2022) using prison coffee as the main medium.

The Moores incurred the wrath of the Klan for their advocacy of voting rights in segregated Florida in the 1940s. They were both killed on Christmas night 1951 by a bomb set at their home in Mims, Florida. This followed their both being fired from teaching because of their activism.

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The American Civil Liberties Union has called on 900 college and university presidents throughout the nation to deny the House Unamerican Activities Committee (HUAC) information concerning the makeup of anti- Viet groups on their campuses.

The civil liberties group’s plea came in the wake of subpoenas of membership lists of anti-war groups at the University of Michigan and the University of California at Berkeley last summer. The ACLU called this “one of the most serious breaches of student academic freedom in recent decades, including the McCarthy era.”

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SAN FRANCISCO, CALIF., JULY 19 (Libeeration News Service)—The scene in San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury was tense Friday evening. Street confrontations between cops and free men had occurred the two previous nights and more street activity was expected into the weekend. On Wednesday and Thursday night, according to one witness, “People were throwing molotov cocktails as freely as rocks and bottles.” Barricades were erected and set aflame in the streets of Hashbury and the pigs were greeted with flying objects.

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

One in every 40 deaths in the United States is caused by lung cancer, and this ratio is expected to increase in the next ten years. according to the October 7^th issue of the Journal of the A.M.A. But this year sales of cigarettes declined for the first time: hopefully a snowballing trend. What has been the response of cigarette manufacturers?

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CHICAGO—Hundreds of SDS members, responding to two separate calls, moved in the streets of Chicago and braved police gunfire on several occasions in the opening days of the Oct. 8–11 action against U. S. imperialism.

Workers at Harvester Plant in Chicago say “Right On” to demonstrators. photo / LNS

On the first night four hundred young people, mostly members of SDS’s prominent Weatherman faction—wearing helmets and carrying sticks—charged through Chicago’s fashionable Gold Coast district, smashing left and right the windows of stores, banks, cars, apartments and hotels.

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Over the course of a decade, almost ten million Americans served the US military in the Vietnam War, and one quarter of those were draftees. Almost 60,000 Americans died, and almost 60% of those were under the age of 21. In terms of sheer numbers, today’s all-volunteer army is much leaner. And many young people who signed up out of economic necessity aren’t that stoked about Bush’s War Without End.

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Age 90 is very different. A dusty journey has been traveled, a time-tunnel has been penetrated. Her 20^th Century is a vast prismatic blur, a fantasy in which some parts hold up for the Truth.

In 1900, this beautiful woman was 21 years old. So many years ago that what you’re saying, what I’m saying today is a drop of curious mist in the great and sheer storm of human survival. Little more than a grunt, glint, tiny fart, etc., of the 90 year old cosmic voyage of this lady.

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The Draft Resistance Committee has pulled off a minor victory in an attempt to stop some of the harassment directed at it by landlords, vigilantes, and the City of Highland Park. (See Fifth Estate, Sept. 15–30).

On Sept. 22, the Committee brought their landlord, Tom Jewell into the Circuit Court room of Judge Carl Weideman in an attempt to keep Jewell out of the groups storefront headquarters at 12820 Hamilton. Jewell had entered the building several times and had torn down signs and done other damage.

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In the early hours of July 13, Will Van Spronsen was shot to death by police outside of an ICE-contracted private detention facility holding migrants in Tacoma, Wash. He was confronted by police in a parking lot full of buses; buses that were to be used to deport large numbers of migrants in a coordinated, nationwide action launched by the Trump administration. Will was trying to destroy as many buses as possible.

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“What the fuck are we going to do about those crazy White Panthers?” “I don’t know, man....I’m too wasted to even think about it.”

“Me too, man, shit, how are we gonna have a legislative session this afternoon?”

“Look, go wash your face with cold water and drink some coffee,” the fat one said, “I’ll call Schweigert and tell him what’s happening. If we can’t get it together, we’ll call the State Police and have everyone thrown out. It’ll be rough for those junior high kids from Petoskey, but we sure can’t let them see us like this.”

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“A lot of us have been smokin’ reefers and layin’ broads in the bushes at Belle Isle for the last twenty years...and nobody ever called that a Love-In.”

—anonymous

Greaser and Frat Rocker and Mod Lower-middle class versus upper-middle-class America.

The struggle for the supremacy of class values among the recent Young. Both begin more or less together, as Screamies. It is the Mod who characteristically veers off to become the Teeny-Bopper and eventually the Hippie.

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The tales of violence go on-and-on.

There is a bold arrogance that comes with class privilege and economic security and comfort. Certainly there are exceptions, but for the most part there is little or no sympathy in affluent communities for the plight of the poor, the homeless, the unemployed.

¿“Te compadeces de los destechados?” I asked one of my students, after explaining the Spanish verbal phrase “to sympathize with” and the noun for the homeless, “los destechados.” No, he answered, in slow, perfect Spanish, I don’t sympathize with the homeless. And when asked why not, he confidently explained that there were plenty of jobs for people if they really wanted to work, and then went on to complain about welfare fraud. A middle-class black student, whose family recently moved to the suburbs from the city, denounced AIDS victims, telling me they got what they deserved, they made their choices, opted to take drugs, chose to be gay or not to use condoms.

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

I’m strung out on heroin. This doesn’t seem to have any long term advantages.

There are a good many places which offer help to addicts who wish to kick. But to the best of my knowledge, all of them ask the name of the patients and take photographs, etc. The confidential file always eventually becomes available to the law enforcers.

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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: Where can I get myself CASTRATED? I’m tired of sex, I hate sex, I don’t want to be controlled by women any longer! I hate the two-facedness, double-think, hypocrisy. I can’t stand living in the Sexual Contradiction any longer: sex is condemned, sex is admired; sex is dirty, sex is fun; if I ask her or imply that I want sex, she hates me (“What? You think I’m a WHORE?”), but if I don’t ask her and in fact act like ‘I don’t want sex’ (and I have done this) she says, “What? I’m NOT GOOD ENOUGH for you?”

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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 a serviceman in Vietnam and my wife thinks I am having sexual relations here. Not so. But after arriving I noticed some pimple-like protrusions in my pubic area. I went to my sick bay where the corpsmen laughed them off as venereal warts.

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A Conference in Chicago of Dec. 26–29, student and anti-war activists has called for National Student Actions April 8–15 against the war in Vietnam. This will culminate in the transportation of as many students as possible to New York and San Francisco as part of the general Spring Mobilization of the anti-war movement on April 15.

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Over the weekend of September 8–10, a Detroit Area High School Anti-war Conference was held. Many concrete resolutions came out of it, including “support of the October 21^st demonstration in Washington; support of all activities based around the confrontation; that a call go out to all high school students to participate in the march and organize around it. That they march in it under their own banners.”

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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: An old lover of mine was fond of a certain trick taught to her by an old lover of hers—which involved the placement of an ice cube in her vagina and then copulation.

Certainly an exciting experience, but I have two questions: 1) Could this harm her? 2) Could this be used as an effective means of contraception as well as groovy orgasms?

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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: Is there such a thing as sexual allergy? I have been dating a recently divorced woman, but we have had intercourse only once. Here’s why: Shortly after we shared one of the most explosive, mutually exciting and uninhibited amorous encounters a man and woman could experience she developed an irritating vaginal infection.

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Dear Dr. Schoenfeld:

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

In a recent column you printed the letter of a girl whose “problem” was a boyfriend who had an almost continuous erection and made her sore with continuous and lengthy intercourse. I think you missed the obvious solution. Let her share her good fortune with a girl friend. God knows there are many sexually frustrated girls who would be happy to get half of such a good thing.

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In the face of a seemingly inevitable campaign driven by the capitalists and their warmongering politicians, anti-war sentiment around the globe continues to grow. As resistance diversifies and broadens in political scope, fresh faces appear in the streets, voicing a firm rejection of the rulers’ policies.

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

Dear Dr. Schoenfeld.

This may be a bit out of your line but I have a dog who is gay.

Not that he will pass up a chance with a female dog, but he really goes out of his way to do it with a male dog.

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Imprisoned Italian insurrectionist anarchist Alfredo Cospito’s six-month hunger strike ended in April with a partial victory of a reduced sentence.

Over the past year, Cospito has waged a struggle against the brutality and dehumanization of prison life in Italy. (See “Alfredo Cospito’s Struggle,” FE #413, Spring 2023). He and his comrade Anna Beniamino were convicted of kneecapping the CEO of Italy’s main nuclear power company, and later of planting bombs at a school for Carabinieri, the national police.

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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 have six children and would like to find a way to present my soul-mate with a more shrunken area to play in. Dig?

My physician told me that I had an unusually good pelvic floor for having had so many children (whatever that means). I have exercised my vaginal muscles but I think I have accomplished all that can be done that way. My husband is sweet and says it doesn’t make that much difference, but...

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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 have used the pill for five years but have become concerned and frightened by what I’ve recently heard about the dangerous side effects. What are they? And if I should give them up, what is the comparative efficiency of (1) a diaphragm with contraceptive cream, (2) a ‘loop”, (3) vaginal foam?

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a review of

Uncanny Valley by Anna Wiener. Macmillan/Farrar Straus Giroux/MCD Books (Holtzbrinck Publishing Group) 2020

To escape her stagnant work as an assistant in publishing, Anna Wiener sold out and took a job in tech. Now she’s written about her experience, and published it. The result, Uncanny Valley, is a portrait of Silicon Valley from the perspective of a literary impostor, promising to reveal the scandalous truth.

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“Anti-Work and the Struggle for Control” continues John Zerzan’s work demonstrating the massive erosion of traditional American values, in this case centering on popular allegiance to the work ethic. Following it [in this issue, FE #309, June 19, 1982] is a rebuttal from Tim Luke, which appeared in Telos magazine No. 50 (Box 3111, St. Louis MO 63130, $5); this is followed by a reply from Zerzan and a comment from Bob Brubaker from the FE staff.

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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: Last weekend my boyfriend and I were picking mushrooms in the woods and found some funny yellow ones with long stems. Could these have been hallucinigenic mushrooms?

ANSWER: Before you go tripping off in the woods again, you should realize that only experts should try to distinguish between edible mushrooms and poisonous toadstools. Toadstools (Amanita muscaria, A. verna, A. Phalloides, A. Brunnescens) may give a kind of trip but collapse and even death may follow. Amanita muscaria has a sudden (1 to 2 hours) onset of action and causes confusion, excitement, thirst, nausea and vomiting, diarrhea, wheezing, salivation, slow pulse, tremors, weakness, collapse and perhaps death. Amanita phalloides, brunnescens and verna have a delayed onset of action (12 to 24 hours) and cause confusion, depression, headache, convulsions, coma, nausea, vomiting, bloody vomitus and stools, jaundice, reduced flow of urine and fluid in the lungs.

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2004 is a leap year—a fantastic opportunity to leap into something new. Are you gonna use your extra day like you use so many other days—using up more of the earth’s resources while the forests, the oceans, and tree communities wither and die? Watching it all go on around you—an “information consumer”—feeling helpless to do anything to resist it?

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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: My husband drives me nuts every night. His right leg sort of jumps every 30 seconds on the dot (trying to put myself to sleep I timed it). He used to chew and grind his teeth but since he got a pin between his two front teeth and it hurt him, he stopped, but replaced that with scratching his head and rubbing his arms.

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This is dedicated to all those who are suffering.

In the Summer of 1998, following a fed-up trip to city life, I resolved to live without electricity or running water in a trailer in Montana in complete social isolation. How long it would last I hadn’t considered. Turns out it was a year before the hermitism (literally not speaking to a soul for six months, broken only by a passerby requesting directions, and thereafter resumed), and tedium took its toll.

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As E.B. Maple points out in the following article (which first appeared in FE #285, August 1977), the atomic bombings of civilians by the American Army Air Corps at the end of World War II was not the knockout punch that convinced an intransigent Japan to suddenly change its strategy and surrender.

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Descending on Detroit from all parts of the nation and the globe, nearly 150 people attended the Anarchist People of Color Conference from October 3 to 5. Anarchists and anti-authoritarians drove over 20 hours from Texas, flew in from Seattle and rode the rails from the Northeast. Over a dozen activists from Canada made their way across the border, while others hailed from Brazil, Colombia, Bhutan, Jamaica and Korea.

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The court-martials for the three GIs who have refused to go to Vietnam began on September 6. All three were convicted—Pvt. David Samas and Pfc. James Johnson to five years at hard labor, forfeiture of pay and dishonorable discharges, and Pvt. Dennis Mora to three years at hard labor—and appeals are now being prepared by lawyer Stanley Faulkner. Each of the three were tried by a different trial panel of 10 officers, all of whom reached verdicts in less than a half hour.

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FE Note: The police have always done surveillance of revolutionaries. What is new now is the technological capabilities of government snoops. Being noted on paper 3X5 cards didn’t stop our predecessors, and their electronic gadgets won’t deter us.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation defends civil liberties in the digital world. Founded in 1990, the San Francisco-based EFF states that it “champions user privacy, free expression, and innovation through impact litigation, policy analysis, grassroots activism, and technology development.”

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Reprinted from FE #285, August 1977.

The barbarity of the nation-state since its emergence 8,000 years ago has only been limited in its intensity by a lack of the technological means needed to perpetrate horrors upon humanity. By the advent of World War II, science and industry, joined together in wedlock by Capital, achieved the breakthrough in destructive methodology and allowed a carnage of a staggering 30,000,000 dead.

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My country’s red, long so I was told

Victories, a star glows

Flag crimson, glorious so

Vanguard leads, the people follow.

.

Red in sight, we have traded lives

Beat armies, lay siege to empires.

Red in mind, we have triumphed fights

Bathed rivals in blood and plight.

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Why today I see but grey

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This article was originally written for our 30^th anniversary edition which appeared in 1996. It has been updated and expanded for this issue.

“The Fifth Estate supports the cause of revolution everywhere.”

-- FBI Report

This nine-word summary by the nation’s secret police, I suspect, serves adequately as an abbreviated history of this paper on the occasion of its 40^th anniversary. It is not due to an inflated sense of self-importance or radical nostalgia that people in the current Fifth Estate collective feel the story of our four decades of print should be recounted. Rather, it is because the history of this paper mirrored a period of large-scale rebellion throughout those years and continues today to give expression to a body of ideas which often finds little expression elsewhere.

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April 5: Trial of Camilo Viveiros scheduled to begin in Philadelphia. Defend Camilo! Defend Dissent!

www.friendsofcamilo.org

April 9–11 — Positive Action’s Fourth Annual DIY/T (Do It Yourself/Do It Together) Fest and gathering in Athens, Ohio. If you’re interested please email pos_act@yahoo.com for more info.

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a review of Dancing at Armageddon by Richard G. Mitchell (University of Chicago Press, 2002)

In sociologist Richard G. Mitchell’s Dancing at Armageddon (University of Chicago Press, 2002) we meet Zillah, dressed in home-patched camouflage, who has come to a weekend retreat with a sheaf of photocopied fliers detailing her vision of localized radical democracy. Sound like a familiar character? Well, you’ll never find Zillah at an infoshop or an anti-WTO action. She’s on a different FBI list: not an “anarchist” but a “survivalist,” and hence a subject for Mitchell, whose book is subtitled Survivalism and Chaos in Modern Times.

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“We might as well leave, Fred.”

Not many of us are fortunate enuf to have parents like the above.

For a book directed at (against) the establishment & the reaction, Tuli Kupferberg is seeking info about young people with ideas radically different from their families: case histories of the generation gap. For example: at the last great Pentagon demo, the daughter of Gen. Hershey’s first assistant was arrested. “A colonel’s son was arrested in Lawrence, Kansas, for parading in front of the local draft board with a sign reading: “Fuck the Draft.” An admiral’s son is a member of the Cornell resistance. Sen. McGovern’s daughter has been busted for dope, &c &c. (He is looking for people in all branches of the establishment, not just the military: i.e., in industry, finance, government, education, &c.)

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a review of

Hitler’s American Model: The United States and the Making of Nazi Race Law by James Q. Whitman. Princeton University Press 2017 press.princeton.eduititles/10925.html

The United States and Germany shared an important characteristic in the 1930s. Both were determined to cement white supremacy into Law. Racist statutes in the US were then state of the art. The Nazis sought to catch up after taking power in 1933.

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The rhetoric is anti-State. “They picture me as a threat to the nation,” Robert Miles told Metropolitan Detroit magazine (June 1987), referring to the FBI. “But let me tell you the kind of threat I am: I publish a newsletter. I don’t harm or threaten anyone. Granted, I don’t like the government—I’m an anarchist, in fact. But these Ollie Norths see sedition in the five cows I have out in my pasture.”

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There is a staple of the Yiddish theater written in 1921 entitled, The Golem (sort of a Jewish Frankenstein).

It still remains quite popular in translation including a 2002 Off-Broadway run. I saw it performed in 1984 at a free outdoor staging starring Randy Quaid as the monster.

However, the play has two striking peculiarities. First, no one seems to remember the author’s name. Second, it was written as a “dramatic poem in eight scenes,” and originally thought to be unstageable because of technical demands. Although adapted into its current form, many theatergoers still find parts of the play dreadfully obscure.

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a review of

Bloc by Bloc: Uprising, The Insurrection Game 3^rd edition (Out of Order Games)

Bloc by Bloc is a strategy game inspired by contemporary protest movements. Designed and self-published by Greg Loring-Albright and TL. Simons from Out of Order Games, it uses the tabletop board game format to illustrate the impact of gentrification and the power of popular uprisings. As in the two previous editions, the goal is to liberate the city before the military arrives to reestablish order. In accordance with their anarchist ethics, low-cost upgrade kits are available for owners of the second edition, and the source files are free online.

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