Rev Left Radio - Resistance in the 60s with Dr. Doug Paterson

Episode Date: April 10, 2017

Doug Paterson is a lifelong revolutionary who has been active as an organizer and agitator since the 1960s. He is an absolute fountain of wisdom and experience. Brett sits down with Doug to discuss theater-as-resistance, campus activism in the 60s, fighting cops in the streets, the anti-war movement during the Vietnam War, draft dodging, parallels between the 60's and today, how to reach out to (and organize in) rural areas, and the continued relevance of Karl Marx in today's world.    Anyone who is an activist/organizer today has plenty to learn from Doug, he is deeply knowledgeable, perpetually engaged, and truly fascinating. Do yourself a favor and listen to this episode, you won't regret it!

I don't like them putting chemicals in the water that turn the friggin' frogs game. Shut up! Will you shut up? Now we see the violence inheriting the system. Shut up! Come and see the violence inheriting the system! Hell yeah, I would. Almost confess to her Marxist's use. Very nice words, but happens to be wrong. Wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong, fuck, wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong.

They're smashing the Starbucks windows. They're smashing the Starbucks windows. barbex windows right now. This is complete anarchy. God, those communists are amazing. Welcome to Revolutionary Left Radio, coming to you today from outside the 1968

Democratic National Convention. I'm your host, Brett O'Shea. And with me today is a very special guest who I'm very excited to have on. His name is Doug Patterson. Would you like to introduce yourself and maybe say a little about who you are? Hey, Brett. Thanks for having me on. Yeah, my name is Doug Patterson. I'm

I teach at you and I've been teaching you, for about 35, 36 years. And I teach in theater, but a long time ago, my shift, I made a shift to theater and social justice, which also includes, like, community-based theater. That was one of the big changes that happened in the 80s, is that people who were doing, like, alternative theater, wanted to make it even more part of people's lives.

And so community-based came along, and that's kind of how I made the shift myself, was to get into community-based theater. Awesome. So you combine activism, theater in that way? Right. Take it to the streets literally? Yeah, take it to the streets but also take it to the neighborhoods. The work that I started with, I was from South Dakota. That's where I started from. And during my graduate education, it was very clear to me that my education was

kind of taking me away from the people that I knew best, which is small town of rural people in South Dakota. And I'd been raised a Republican, and finally by 1960s. managed to, you know, get as far as to Bobby Kennedy. And then Kennedy was killed of the day of the South Dakota primary, which is my first time to vote, which is the same day as California primary. And I just kind of, by that, I kind of figured that just sort of let me, set me free, and I went across the country.

You mentioned the Democratic National Convention, 68. I followed that all the way across the country. I watched it a lot before I left for the graduate school. I drove by, you know, by right through that area on the day after it was all finished. So the matter of being educated in a graduate, sort of an Ivy League graduate environment, I was acutely aware of the fact that the education was meant to separate me from people that I knew. And to create forms of theater, you know, like the experimental theater, you know, take off your clothes and say profanities. or absurd theater, you know, where life doesn't mean anything.

And in retrospect, it was so smart to set those aside, to understand what they were, but set them aside because, you know, people who are oppressed are not necessarily leading an absurd life. You know, what I mean, if you look at absurdity is that sort of, you know, trying to find meaning, but there's no meaning, blah, blah, blah. That's not to struggle that people are engaged in.

People are engaged in to overcome oppression, to fight back and to identify those systems and structures that are oppressing them. And they have no time for this kind of intellectual, you know, European, I would say, European intellectual playground. So I wanted to be able to get back to the people that I knew best, and I had a long time had an idea. I was teaching out in Oregon, an idea I wanted to get back to South Dakota and just had to start from scratch.

So we got a number of people together. We got three people from Oregon and the three people from South Dakota. And my plan was, in the summer of 77, just to get together and make a play and take it on tour. And that's what we're going to do. And we're going to learn from the community. And so we were in the Angton area, and I knew a lot of people there. And so what we do is we kind of would sing for our supper. If they would be willing to kind of be interviewed and tell us stories of their families and their backgrounds and how they got there,

we would also play a music program, which we put together very fast. We'd do a music program, and they would give us supper. That's awesome. But we'd have much money. We had a very small grant. I mean, very small grant. But that got us going. So for a month, we worked just our little tails off.

We made a play. It turned out to be sort of the history of South Dakota from the point of view of rural people and small town people. We didn't mention a governor, a senator, a rich person, nobody. but just, you know, and indigenous people, even though we were, we had no indigenous among us. We simply wanted to be able to sort of present something that would be counter to the dominant narrative. Like the people's history, like Howard Zinn-esque sort of. Yeah, a people's history. What do they say? Well, we went and asked people, and we found out, they'll tell you.

In just a few, just a few days, it was very clear for interviews that, because you're talking to farm people, and small town people, small town business people, and teachers, that if you didn't, if you're going to talk about South Dakota and do a play about that. If you didn't talk about, you know, family, the weather, harvest, and the earth, they didn't really care. You had to have some acknowledgement of that. So we decided we began to invent this story of five generations of a family that were coming over from Germany and from Norway, you know, white and all. But rural, of course, as you probably know, the history of the, um, the history of the, um, um, sort of the deception of people in Europe to come over

because the ruling circles wanted workers. And they needed, especially in the Great Plains, people, once the indigenous people were corralled and put in reservations, they needed people to live there. And if you had a railroad, you couldn't have a railroad going that far, like from Utah, or wherever it was that end was,

all the way to, like, Chicago, not have anything in between. So what they wanted, they wanted to have poor, you know, land-hungry European immigrants. And people were conned. A lot of people were conned. We found posters of South Dakota of tropical paradise, palm trees and, yeah, lagoons, Dakota land, right? You know, and then people came out and what they saw was, you know, 10 million acres of buffalo grass. It was a con job. A lot of people, you know, went crazy because it was so isolated and so lonely.

They left everything at home. But their task was, as workers, was to make something out there out of the land. That's what they had to do. And when you get out there, you know, this is the land of milk and honey, the land of promise, you go do it. And so a lot of people were able to get on there. And there weren't very many people in 1865, 1870, but boy, with those those campaigns to get immigrants over here.

There were a lot of people that came over, which is also true in Nebraska. Right, of course. Nebraska got, people got conned. And we're given an opportunity to start. What we keep forgetting about the fact is there, you know, there used to be a farm on every quarter acre, and, you know, people were able to get by back in 1880 and 1890 and 1900 on a quarter acre.

A quarter of land, I'm sorry, a quarter of land. 160 acres. But, you know, by the time we get to 1920 after the war, no, that's not going to quite do it. You have to expand. Well, if you expand, somebody else has to go away. Right. And so the failure of farmers was key to the expansion of farming.

And getting more and more equipment and machinery to run things. The idea being that if you could keep a piece of machine running for more hours, that would be good for you because you've got the machinery. And if you're not using it, that's just lost money. It's very capitalist kind of enterprise. And so when we were there working, you know, if you didn't have, you know, at least, at least, oh, 1,500, 2,000 acres at the very least, you're going to make it. 5,000 would be better.

And we have land barons out there with, you know, 50,000, 100,000 acres. all made possible through some very strange United States government plans. How do you just pay them off? Anyway, so this was a chance for us to go out there and find out about the region, so we made the play, and we took it to small towns. We did get to the big towns, but it's only like five. Yeah, they're not that big. That's true, and they're not that big.

By the time you get to, here is 10th. It's a capital city. They were at the time about 10,000. So you're getting down to really small town. So most of our towns we went to were population 2 and 3,000. But some we went to were 200, 100, 1 place with a population of 9. It was just a junction. But we had such a wonderful reception.

We asked people, you know, we literally, Brett, we did this. We sent out a letter in the early part of our making play in Yankton. Sent out a letter that said, you know, we want to come to your town with a play. We've got a play. Who can we contact? Who should? And we sent it to mayor, Brooke. South Dakota. That was all we did. I don't think you can do that anymore. Yeah, I don't think so

either. We sent it out and we got lots of responses and they gave us names to contact so we called those people. This is before cell phones, just regular phones and letters and so we put together a tour and went all through South Dakota and it was just a wonderful experience. The next year the South Dakota Arts Council was so excited about it. They helped us go back again and after that year we were so excited about it, and we've been to so many towns, 45 different towns in South Dakota. And so we made plans to go full-time.

So I was tenured out in Oregon at a university, and they just quit the job and went full-time. That's awesome. And so we went full-time, and we were able to keep it going for a couple years, and then Ronald Reagan was elected president, and that kind of, we all just said, find a foxhole.

Yeah, yeah. This is not the time to be a little theater in South Dakota. So anyway, that was my beginning point, a beginning to realize that it's really a people. That's the core of the theater. Right now, we do odd things in the theater and try to find an audience, audience development. And I've been away from that model for a long time.

I do, at the university, I have to direct regular plays. I'm happy to direct regular plays. But I realize that the source is, you know, power is a people. That's what, you know, and peoples. So I was fortunate enough at the, very beginning of the 1990s to run into this person named Augusta Bawal who had developed Theodore the Oppressed. Now, you probably know pedagogy the oppressed. No, not in any detail now.

It's something to read. It's really something. It's called, what again, the pedagogy of the oppressed? Pedagogy of the Oppressed. And Palo Fri was a Brazilian. He was very high up in the administration of education of literacy in Brazil, which was very illiterate, especially for African-Brazilians, really the lowest, you know, people. And he had wonderful systems of getting people to be literate. And then in 1964, there was a military coup, helped by the United States.

Of course. And they didn't think it was fascist enough. And so a lot of people were killed and Polo Frere was arrested and exiled to Europe. And Augusto Boal was arrested and tortured because he was doing. kind of a real political theater. Wow. And the tortures, you should know that they had, which I think is probably fairly standard,

the tortures worked a nine to five job. They just sent people to be tortured. They worked a nine to five job. Awful. That's, yeah. And what they wanted was names. They didn't care what names. They just got names they got,

they went and got those people and brought them in. And just tortured them and killed them. Get more people or killed them. Fortunately, there were some people in the United States and in Brazil who were really, you know, very close to Boyle. He was the director of the National Theater, and people came together and got him, you know, freed from, he was in solitary confinement.

They saved him? They saved him. So he went to Argentina, and Argentina then started to circle the drain, and he had to leave Argentina because it was the right was just taking over everywhere. And so we went to Europe for about 10 years just to get away because it was so dangerous. Yeah.

Anyway, then he developed his theater, the oppressed. and it's a tribute to, and the naming of it to Palo Ferry, and that's community-based theater, community-based, you know, a people's theater that is designed to help people look at their oppression and dialogue about the oppression. Through art? Through art, through theater, through performance making?

I didn't even use the word art anymore. Just too bourgeois. It's a very bourgeois. But, you know, through theater making and perform, all human beings can perform, all human beings are capable of that. It isn't something you have to go to school. to learn. And when you do the kind of theater, the ball does when you're asking the audience

to stop a play, to stop it, and to take the place of the person who's oppressed, and do what you think they need to do, make a proposal with your body and your voice. And then they do that and you applaud in the audience. What do you think of that? And you get debates and discussions about certainly something that is fictional, but it's also not fictional. Somebody did do it. They did use your body and their voice to try to get something. the community once. And then somebody says, I got another idea. And someone says, I got another idea. And all of a sudden it's not just one, two, three, four. Lots of talk and lots of laughter and lots of good time. And a sense of community that arises out of that.

Deep sense of community. In fact, I've got this desire to make that here. And we've got some ideas after today at the concert I was at. I want to go pursue that even further with that space. but the um this is what made me was was a series of sort of encounters with kinds of theater that were connected to the lives of people now also um you might have heard in that story that i told um from the other podcast that i was deeply involved in campus protests when graduate school very deep and that's kind of what i wanted um to touch on um because i did hear that and it's truly an interesting story and i have this theory that we're kind of living currently through a new 60s era.

And so to touch base with what was actually going on in the 60s, I think is really invaluable to me and to my generation of activists and organizers and political thinkers who want to learn from people like you who have been on the ground for decades doing as much activism as you can do. So yeah, if you want to just tell us about your experiences on campus in the 60s, it would be awesome.

Well, it was all of my education. I went to school in 1964, I got out in 72. That was the years of the United States involved. in Vietnam. 64-72. 64-72. That was the United States' biggest involvement. And we were obviously there for a long time when the French were in Indochina.

We were there. And it took us a while to finally get our butts kicked out of Vietnam finally. But I went to school in Fall 64 as a good Republican. It was a very good group. I grew up a Republican family in a Republican state. And in February 65, just six months later, we invaded Donang. Marines van landed there. So that all that period of time, up to 68 when I graduated, the war got larger and more awful.

And by the time I got to my junior and senior year, I was a resistor. I was, you know, we're doing programs against that war, that horrific war. And feeling fairly arrogant that we had done so much research on it, it was so clear that not only we have no business being there, but we should withdraw yesterday. It was so horribly wrong. And it was built on such a lie, such a lie. And so I was, my family would say, you know, you're not going to have to worry about this. You know, this will be over by the time you graduate. Well, it wasn't.

In fact, I applied to graduate schools in the fall of 67, and that was going to get me out. Graduate school was going to get me out, dang it. I was going to escape this thing however I could. I would even go to the military. You know, I was going to, you know, I play trombone, and I'd go there and make a joyful noise. but in January the Congress took away the graduate student deferment and I had all these applications out so I was going unless I could you know really do something different so I ruined my health so we just to be clear your thing was to escape the draft you were going to go to grad school

because there was a grad school deferment program and then Congress stripped that got rid of that in January 68 and I'm going to graduate in June 68 right so I you know it's like well you're facing it And a lot of guys we were facing it there in the college and in the town. So we decided, I decided to just ruin my health. You know, I had a couple of things kind of wrong with me. And I said, I can make these really wrong. What were they if you don't mind me asking? Well, I'll give you one of them.

Okay. Yeah, I had ulcers. Okay. Because I had a lot of psychological recovery to do anyway. But I had ulcers by the time I was about 20. and they were really bad. They were bleeding and awful. So I wanted to be able to just throw up, you know, on cue, you know.

So that helped. And a couple of other things, very private kind of thing. Yeah, yeah. But something to get out. But also, it's a double-edged sword because I was extremely aware, as I was there in the military examination room in Two Falls with, you know, hundreds of other guys. all of in our little white skivies.

That when I failed, I knew when I'd failed, they gave me what they called a shortcut. That a lot of guys weren't coming back, and if they came back, they were going to be injured. I didn't have the sense at this point that how many were going to come destroyed by PTSD. That was sort of a new wrinkle. It's not new in the annals of war.

Anyway, so I was very aware that it was my privilege. with a general white educated male who had some options. You know, I was able to conceive of something. What I am proud of is the fact that I continued to be a militant, resistor of the war increasingly from the very time I got to graduate school until the time that I had to leave, that I got my doctorate. And this is one of those things that maybe you can understand this. There have been lots of demonstrations, and there's been lots things happening nationally.

I mean, just every day, I was sort of like, I was thinking at the time, I said, I would say, I know this isn't the normal experience, but boy, this feels normal to me. And we'd had so many demonstrations and so many organizing events. And so probably April 15 or so, tax day, April 10, 1972, we had a big, we planned a huge demonstration. We got a whole bunch of people from Cornell and a whole bunch of people. whole bunch of people from Ithaca college and a whole bunch of people from the Ithaca community and it's going to be three demonstrations all coming together and it was thousands of people in Ithaca which had maybe a population of 35,000 there must have been 10,000 people and how did you organize that I mean we have social media today but you did you put up signs and posters you put

leaflets and that's what you did and people said oh the demonstration awesome let's see do I have time for that way because there were so many and and and And there were groups that had organized, all kinds of groups that were available, both at the two colleges in downtown, who were either community-based or they were working against the war or they were working with battered women or whatever. So you network all that. We got a lot of people that all came together in a huge demonstration in a downtown park. And we had a stage built up and people, you know, we'd go stop with us yell, and scream, much yell, let's scream, let's yell, let's yell. And at the end, there were a bunch of us sitting on the stage and going, everybody's gone.

Another demonstration has come and gone. Something's going to change. So I wasn't in on the planning. I think the planning of this was a very small group, of very committed people. Of radicals, would you say? Political radicals? Oh, yeah.

Revolutionaries. We were in the midst of people who were in it for keeps. One of the groups was called Pafro, the People's Anti-Fascist Resistance Organization. Wonderful. And they were Maoists. And they'd fight. Anytime they had to, they'd fight.

They were known for it. Bad ass. Ah, yeah. Very badass. And so, I was trying to get my dissertation done. I used to like a lunch over at the student center. I went down to the student center from the library.

As I was coming out, a couple of my very close colleagues, said, listen, there's going to be an action. We're going to do a little demonstration now. It's got to be an action, so get ready. So I said, cool. I can always go to the library. And so we had maybe two or three hundred people. It was noon.

It was noon. None of the day. April. Beautiful day. And the line of march marched down the street, about a block, and then it turned up this street. I can't remember the name of the street anymore.

And over here was the engineering quad, where about six or seven engineering buildings were. And right in the corner was Carpenter Hall, which was the administration building for the engineering school. And the line of march got up in front of that building, and it turned to the right, and it went straight through the front doors. And so I found myself just following the line of March in there. I didn't know what was going to happen.

But it's that moment for all of us to say, are you really against this or not? Is it just when it's convenient? Are you ready to really raise your level of action? And I just said, yeah, I've got to stay here. this is where I am. Because you knew things were going to get heated by piling into that building like that.

Oh, yeah, that's illegal. Yeah. That's just plain flat against the law, especially if you're at a privileged university. Well, so all of a sudden out came, you know, newspaper, sheets of newspaper and tape. And so they taped all the windows up, these big, huge plate glass windows.

And they out came masks. The mask was only, ski masks, only eyes on them. Of course, I'm there with my little briefcase. looking around, I don't think I'm prepared for this. But I stayed and I knew some of the people and so the organizing started to meet. Well, one of the best things there was that Cornell had been very involved in all kinds of military research and still are to this day, as is to a minor, minor degree, UNO. So let's not let anybody off that hook.

But Cornell had been, engineering students knew this, had been very involved in developing this, this really lethal antipersonal weapon called, the cluster bombs. That's a big mother bomb, a huge mother bomb that is dropped from a plane and opens up to a lot of little bomblets that have louvers on them so they start to spin because of the air and they fall down and at a certain level when they get to a certain speed of rotation, they explode, like, you know, 15 feet off the ground with little tiny pieces of shrapnel.

They're not designed to take down a building. building. They're not designed to injure people. Yeah. Just, yeah. Injure, not kill, injure. Oh, it's still used around the world, made in the United States. And that Cornell had a founding. Yeah, a founding role in that. Well, with students in engineering, you know, when they went into that building,

the other crowbars, and they went up to the file cabinet and they just crowbar those things open and ran all the material out of the back window and copy it. and distributed it broadly. And all of a sudden, there it was. You know, great Ivy League, oh, halls of ivy, very involved in war crimes as far as we would call war crimes. So that occupation lasted about five, six days.

You got a state hold up in that building for five to six days? Five to six days. Well, I mean, so much happened. Yeah, yeah. Later that afternoon, the campus police and the sheriff. came in, they broke all the plate glass windows and just walked through. Even though all the doors were chained shut. They walked straight through.

And this Pafro group, which to this day, I really admire them because I knew them. And a number of them stood up and said, everybody in this, we were in the library by this time. We'd all run out at the library and they were surrounding us. Everybody sat out, just sit down and hold your arms. They don't know who's a Vanderbilt. They don't know who's a Carnegie. They don't know who's a Rockefeller. sit down and hang on it was true wow they didn't do a thing so you use the

privilege of the the privilege of the student pod you weaponized it and and so and you know me oh I came from South Dakota my mom taught Latin does that make me does that make me very privileged so so it was it was an amazing struggle because we had hold the building, I became in charge of security outside the building. We didn't want to be able to control anybody who went in and went out. So we wanted to keep bodies 24 hours a day at the two or three major entrances. And so that was my task. But it wasn't all that hard. There were more people than you could imagine wanting to do that. So we held the building four or five days and make long story short. We left after five days, maybe six days. And then it

turned into, the policy by that point, right after that, the policy was since they won't stop the war, since this government won't stop the war, the government and the corporate state, by the way, since they won't stop it, we will make wherever we are ungovernable. So there was a demonstration about two or three days later that I helped organize. I was out there with a bullhorn all over campus, and it turned into a riot on campus, breaking of windows. Enormous number of windows were broken. An armist and one was broken. And then about a week later, now we're into about middle of May,

another one happened. And what had happened was the police were, some fraternity people were going to have a party. Doesn't that how it is? The fraternity's going to have a party. And they started on a Friday afternoon. They put their speakers in their, from their second floor apartment, going out onto the street in college town.

The music started, and yay, it was great. and people are gathering and you could hear it forever, and it's fraternities, and it's us, and everybody's getting together for a great springling. And all of a sudden, you said the cops go in, and, of course, you have to have a record player to understand this, and just a bit on the speakers, you hear this, right?

And everybody goes, whoa, whoa, you're going to take away our music. And our thought was, shit, we don't have to do anything. So we went off on the lawns of all these places, which were like rental places. where students were living, so it wasn't property owner. So we're all along there for like two or three blocks. And the order goes out to the cops that they have to keep everybody moving in the sidewalk. Nobody can gather on the sidewalk anymore.

And you can't gather in the street. You can cross the street, but you couldn't gather in the street. Well, what happened was people to start to walk up and down the street. And then the cops were being followed by two. they were twos and then they were fours and then they were sixes being followed by 50 people oh trucking

you know because we're moving and then crossing the street and across the street and across so it was a continual movement of people back and forth it was wonderful it was subversion of every order and it happened out of the imagination

of everybody there like a spontaneous thing people started to do it they said great that's good that's good let's torment the cops and these are small town Ithaca cops they're just scared as anybody all of a sudden one of the Pafro people

who they've been looking for from a previous action they saw him behind a house and the cops went grabbed him and brought him out and he was like a bucking stallion he was really fighting

and a lot of people went over this his name was Doug Gray I wonder where he is today and they went people went over and all of a sudden a cop went up and coal cocked with a, and he went down like a sack. Like with a baton over the head?

A baton. A hard baton on the head. Went down like a sack of potatoes. And this crowd, I was right close, just went in on them. And you could see the terror in the cop's eyes of what they had just done. Good. And in the middle of it all, tear gas. Well, the next four hours was a tear gas fight. Wow.

It was a tear gas fight all over College Town. Until about two or three in the morning when they brought in the sheriff's deputy, who had to be like 6-3 and 240 or whatever. They were really big guys. And they finally cleared it all out. I mean, people had started fires in the intersection, the major interstations, started fires, and the cops were trying to come in.

I love that. It was amazing. And then what they also did, I couldn't believe it. They cleared out all the bars. It must have been like 10 bars in college, and they cleared them all out. Everybody asked you, well, you've got all these fraud guys

who are half drunk. I don't know, police! They're not even necessarily political. Not at all. They're just pissed off because they can't drink. Because they can't drink. It was a riot and fire started. One of the tear gas canisters went into a garbage can of one of the little delisies.

A fire started. They were bringing the fire truck. But how do you got a fire truck through like, you know, 4,000 people? Yeah, yeah. So, but the idea was, and it was realized, almost inspired us, to make it ungovernable. So for a while, that space was ungovernable. It was a chaos. It was a huge...

I got finally chased into my house. I was living in a commune. And about 4 o'clock in the morning, they got sufficiently close to me, and I made it. But no, they were... They were cold-clocking people and calling people in.

The sheriff's deputies are always really nasty. They're really, really nasty. So, but it was able to see at that time the kinds of struggles are engaged in. Let me do a little bit of sort of preview about this. One of the things we have to remember, remember about the anti-war effort is that we stood on the shoulders of the civil rights movement. And that had been going on for a long time. And not only do we have the civil rights

movement, you know, Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, and the Black Panthers. The notion of revolution and massive disruption was in the air before you got to the actual Vietnam War. So we were standing on some very strong shoulders and that just really helped to make that wave go up. To what extent we have that we might be the civil rights movement in a sense in terms of energy off of which other movements will then spring. That's one possibility. I can't emphasize how much that those movements of the African-American people, especially the Black Panther. I went to a number of Black Panthers meetings, discussions and whatever. They were serious. They were no wonder the FBI took them down.

They were really serious, and they were very smart, totally committed. Organized, armed, intelligent. Intelligent and community-based and working communities. They're doing breakfast programs for the underserved in their own communities and shit. Yep, yep, you've got to destroy that. So that was a real glimpse into what that kind of struggle was. And then when I got out into the teaching world, I just felt that I needed to do something really different. And that's when I started to come up with this idea of a theater company in the rural area.

What I could do was theater, and one of the things I didn't like was my being separated from the people I knew. I would make theater about the people I knew. It was very successful. It was really wonderful. And I would say that's one of the big divides that still exists today between the urban and the rural cities versus in the last election. We saw that as well. And I think a lot of activists, including me and the groups that I run in, we're trying to really think hard how we can reach out to the rural communities.

because we'd make each other stronger if we can reach out and we can organize together. But there are these cultural divides and there are things that make that extremely difficult and distance not being the least among them, but still. It might be something worth sitting down because in a sense we have to understand that the situation of rural people

and foreign people and ranch people in the United States was a project of the United States government. As you know, probably in 1920 of the First World War, 50% of the people still lived, you know, farms. It was a farming country. But by the time he had done of the Second World War, it's down to about 20%. And that itself had been, I think, the functions to a certain sort of capitalist and capital production are trying to maximize use of land and machinery. But it's also because after the Second World War, the corporate state was very aware of the fact that there

had been insurrections in the rural area that had threatened the food supply. And the Determination was made in the Eisenhower administration, I think, a guy named Ezrafft Benson was the head of agriculture. And they came up with a policy of 2%. They wanted 2% of the population to be farmers. Because that was a focal point that they could really bring the system down if they revolted. If you get 20% in charge of the food supply, you know.

They had certainly showed themselves to be militant in many ways. So the plan was, it still is, to take the population down by encouraging expansion of farming, encouraging farmers to expand. And that's been, I remember the 70s, I said, to venture forth, to venture forth. We heard that a lot. Don't be concerned about this, you know, this thing that happened back in the 30s and all that. You know, it's not going to happen again. Of course, it happened in 82 all over again.

But to really cut down the number of farms, which the other, under 2%, you know and that so what you have is a lot of those farmers the ones who are big farmers are very well off yeah very wealthy and the time of the small farmers is really I don't know what the data is but small farmer almost doesn't exist anymore it's why I kind of like the ideas of you know urban agriculture yeah you know this is really appealing to me and sustainable farming and I have a very dear friend and former faculty member of mine who's over at Iowa State who has been working

on sustainable agriculture for like 40 years. You know, getting rid of fertilizers and pesticides all the input and farming organic and there's techniques galore of how to do that. And of course

we are now just doing you know single crop you know, sort of like what we did at Cuba. You know, Cuba you're going to grow sugar can And a lot of people that couldn't grow it And some people didn't have the physical ability to do it

And then sugar came and went Depending on the season And it certainly came and went if there was a war or not a war And the unemployment rate was just like a roller coaster And that's kind of what we got going now With these single-cash crops You know, wheat, you know, field corn for cows Sunflowers, some barley, oats, about it.

You know, so it's just what happened to all the other things that are able to be grown, like lentils, for going to say. Was that part of the plan just to reduce the amount of farmers and make them bigger and their incomes bigger so that almost like their class loyalty within shift? Absolutely. And I think that's what's happened. And we could see that when we were on the road because we went to some small farms, you know, there were only farming maybe three or four thousand acres.

But we were also at places with 25,000 acres. And that was, you know, you build yourself a big home out on the ranch. And you are aware of how much, you know, money and how you have to pay your help. Right. And how often you have to exchange out machinery. It's really quite a science. But it has changed profoundly the class loyalty of farmers who've been farming, but not necessarily small town people. Small town people are under the gun.

That's what the alliance has to be. I mean, I always want to keep a respect and a regard to real farmers. The farmers that go out there and put their butt on the tractor and do things. I want to regard them very highly because it's a tough job. A lot of people just own land and rent it out. And have other people farm and just profit off it. Well, yeah, it used to be called, what is it called? Sharing.

What was that? Sharecropping. Sharecropping. It's a version of sharecropping. And so my sense is that the small town areas, which the Democratic Party, for which I have very little regard. You know, they were supposed to be a champion of rural people and small people and working people and unions.

You never hear a thing. Hello, hello, except we need your vote. Exactly. So the ability, I think, of urban radicals, progressives, revolutionaries in the best way to link with small town people is to find ways to work together on some kind of projects. It's what I love to do in theater,

is that I can bring people together and we can make theater together. Absolutely. We can make theater about the situations that they face and the contradictions and bring people together to have a really good time and look at it and get a chance to get involved

and make discussions and I can do that. And I just, I miss it so much. Yeah, that's extremely interesting. And yeah, I think using the theater as you're in to get into those rural communities and start those conversations is so important. we're just, a lot of us are at a loss to figure out how to do that.

And, you know, that could be one way to try to replicate that model because you've had success with it. Yeah, yeah. And the idea of the ball head was to have, when he'd, like, do his workshops, the workshops in which people would, oh, you can just do the workshops and play games and have a wonderful time. Because a lot of his game work, but it is remarkable game work. It is really wonderful stuff. Because his premise is that human beings are very good at communicating if you only give us a chance. if you only give us a chance

we can really connect in with other people and of course the games you don't use words you use gestures and sounds and touch and invention of things or whatever and people have a wonderful time and so you build this kind of solidarity among people and then from there you move on to do some theater

and anybody can make theater it's not that big of a secret but only making theater for about a scene lasts maybe two three four minutes you don't need an hour and a half flight and so the people make scenes together and then they show them to each other and suggest how each one can be made better and do better and then bring an audience in at the night and bring an audience here

from that town and got some people from Omaha and got people Lincoln and got some people from Alliance that's a long ways away but you know maybe Greta and and people see the theater together they have a good time they get to talk to each other's Dialogue was key for Prairie. People in dialogue who are really assuming a kind of basic humanity and equality between people. People who are talking, as opposed to this, as opposed to monologues, that's, he said, this is the most revolutionary action. And there's a cooperative element there. So you're not competing, you're working together.

Yeah, that builds solidarity, that builds community. That's so almost taboo to the way things are in the broader society, which is individualistic, competitive, you know, step on somebody. else to get ahead sort of thing. And it's not, it's not accidental. That's, that's intentional. This is how, this is the corporate ethic, which, and the corporation based corporate, the corporate state now owns the public state. It's theirs. And it's, and the public government, its task is to help out the corporate state. And so therefore individualism and, and succeeding and getting ahead and getting a leg up and whatever is the ethic of the corporate state and the government. And this just kills people, it kills people, alienates people, separates them.

So if you're talking about that, you know, we should sit and talk about those kind of possibility. It doesn't have to just be theater. But I think working on projects together, that's the key thing. Key thing. In Nebraska recently, we had that pipeline battle, which might be very well coming back. But that was a hot spot where the urban and the rural people could come together and, like you say work on an explicitly political project together, and that built some bridges.

It really did. And it might be coming back in, you know, in my activist circles, I'm always talking, like, let's be thinking ahead because we can really get out there and lock arms with these people. The hearing for the state legislature is in August. That's when they're going to, you know, put it before the Public Service Commission about whether they're going to prove it or not. And I think that has to be a real, real energized militant event. It can't just be passive.

I think we all need to figure out what is the best task because if they pass it then there will be people who are going to go in front of their equipment and die that will happen so we're not talking about

just sort of the mild inconvenience of having to walk an extra miles in place. This is really serious and I think we should deal with it that way and I think theater is a great way to do it you can take these plays whatever you do you can take them right out into a group of people and ask the audience

who's gathered around on a street come on in I've seen that work I've seen it happen come on in make a proposal you know you can have a scene about how would you stop you know the KXL company how would you stop them

and so you put up something in which the protagonist the good person is really trying to do something and they fail because we in the theater don't know how to solve things. But we can ask a question. We can say, does this happen? You say, does this happen? You know, somebody, good person tries to do something and they get overwhelmed. Is that true? Does it happen? This is a really good person. They fought really hard, but they lost. Does it happen? Yes, it happens.

Good. Talk to each other. What would you propose they do? Wonderful. And you get proposals. And people talk to each other and drinking beer and eating some pizza and talking to each other about what they were proposed they do. So it's a real community event. If you organize it that way, or even in a a park or whatever. And then we say, okay, we're starting again. Anytime you want to stop this thing and take that person's place, just you'll stop. Stop the oppression. And they do. I've been around the world and people stop it when they've got a stake in it. I love that. If they've got a stake in it, they'll stop it. I've had situations. One guy, these is my best example, although I've seen it many times, came to a room and I knew him and he said, oh, he's not going to

get me to go. I heard about you. I'm not going to get me to go on that. I'm not going up on that stage. and we had a piece that was just right in his wheelhouse. Right in his wheelhouse. It had to with a boss. Yeah. And I saw him go. And he was up there doing his thing. Awesome.

And it's like, I don't care if it's good or bad or whatever. People take action. And then the audience says, well, this is what I thought about it. Or maybe this or how about that. I really liked when he did this. And so it gets some feedback and says, I got another idea. Okay, let's do another one. That's awesome.

So it's a great way for a community to come together to really vision, problem solving. And then, by the way, the next step is if you get a real sense of what is the oppressions that we have to confront, what is the next step? What do we do? Let's make some scenes about that. Like let's say we're going to go, I won't give away anything here because we probably won't do it, but let's say we're going to go down and occupy the mayor's office. Why not, regardless of who it is? So let's go down, let's rehearse it. Let's put together a scenario in which we do that.

Okay, who does what, who does what, who does what, who says what, what time, organize it, and then we practice it and say, okay, what else we need, this isn't right, this doesn't feel right. So you practice it through a little bit, get a little bit ahead of the game. It's almost like you're running simulations. Simulations, it's a simulation. And you get a sense, okay, solidarity, there's, you know, a dozen, 15, 20 people are going to take an action, they know what to do, go in and it's not new and it's not chaotic right you know what to do wow yeah it's wonderful and you know if this if this keystone excel pipeline does come through i promise you i'll be out there with you and

i want to see this theater thing in action we have to do it we have maybe you know there's a couple of statewide organizations are really good of course nebrassasks are a piece is statewide yeah and they have some real good connections out there's really good people bold bold Nebraska it's it's more of a liberal organization but they have those bridges built they have the bridges built we can say listen can we do some theater is there a town around here where you know maybe a dozen people from Omaha, from Vrastness for Peace, and from the various left coalitions who go out and sort of talk to people,

and we ended up, you know, the first thing you do is you play games. You play games. And then, to give you the full run, you play games and this kind of thing and have a wonderful time and laugh and get a little bit of sweaty and you're meeting people as real human beings.

And then we say, okay, we're going to make some scenes tonight. What are the things, what are the great oppressions? What are the things we're being oppressed by? What's our barriers? And then you make a list of what it is. you know, farm prices, land prices, the government programs, you know, corporate power, put it all, you know, as many topics has come up, and then we do, but we'll call sort of voting a la Chicago, you can vote as many times as you want, as opposed to a normal way you can

only vote once. This is, if it matters to you, if it really means something to you or means something to somebody you know, then vote for it. And so we've got 25 topics here, vote for the ones that matter to you. So it's not as if you only get one vote. What's one of the horrible things about electoral democracy? You get one vote, and as soon as you lose your power, as soon as you use your power, you'll lose your power. Exactly right.

So there gets to be a sense that this group of people have come down to sort of, you know, four or five scenes eventually. And then you say, okay, everybody's interested in the corporate issue over here, everybody who wants to do the farm price over here, a land price over here, family issues and whatever. And then people vote with their bodies. That's awesome. And then I say, okay, sit down and tell you. other while you chose that group and the dialogue starts wonderful yeah that's awesome I hope people there people out there listen to that and you know take that take that tactic up because that's a really unique novel but but thrilling

and in human way to approach the situation very you're not lecturing anybody you're not talking down to people you're getting into them yeah that's the worst that's the worst worst thing is lectures especially I mean for for for Pella fray oppression meant a monologue this was it and there were Economic oppression and gender oppressions and class repressions and color oppressions and people who are dealing with a lot of oppressions every day. They deal with monologues. They deal with a lack of power.

So why would we want to come in and tell people what to do? Exactly. It just makes no sense, but get people into this. And extraordinary things happen. Wonderful. Extraordinary things. Awesome. So let's pivot a little bit.

I know that we have probably about maybe 15 more minutes. That's okay with you? We can fill it. Okay. Yeah, absolutely. So I was going to wonder if I was going to ask you, if you could maybe draw some parallels between what you saw firsthand in the 60s, 70s, and what you see today is our general political situation,

but also maybe ideas that worked back then or didn't work back then, that you could tell this new generation of activists, organizers, what they can kind of think and do based on your life experience. Yeah, well, I do believe that we had such a push in the, civil rights, period, and that we stood on those shoulders and on those springboards. Because by the time we get to 1965 and the war started, there was already a real network of people beginning to protest.

It took a year for it to really catch on because there was so much, you know, U.S. propaganda about real communists, you know, got to stop them. And you know, by the way, just so everybody knows, the war was started with a lie, if you ever hear about the Tonkin Gulf Resolution because of the Tonkin Gulf incident that happened in late 1964

in which the North Vietnamese, there was never in North Vietnam, it was only declared, the North Vietnamese had somehow sunk a U.S. patrol or attacked a U.S. patrol boat. It never happened. It never happened. But that was the reason the United States Congress passed the Tonkin Gulf Resolution. It is the same thing as the weapons of mass destruction over in Iraq.

It was a massive lie. and part of it's because the corporate state and capitalism makes so much money off of war. So much money. So, anyway, that was a sidebar. But an important one. And so one of the things we have,

I think we're smarter now. We had a lot to learn. We were really, I think, behind as a culture of being able to identify and articulate oppressions and dominant, you know, colonialism and imperialism, both domestic and abroad. We had to learn a lot.

so I think we're ahead in that regard we have the capacity to articulate and people can articulate those kind of things and also I think we have a kind of a kind of multiplicity of of what are intersectionalities we've got many different oppressions to deal with all of which I think are are capable of funneling together you know so that kind of coalition is always difficult to work with. And one of the things I do remember out of the 60s, coalitions were essential and they were hard to make. Because people had different interests. Still through today. Coalitions are tough. But so in that regard, I think there is some sort of knowledge of resistance. I think one of things that different is that the corporate state and its government, the U.S. government,

are very keen now on management. You manage things. You don't deal with. they're solved problems, you manage them. And so it's okay if you have, you know, neighborhoods across the country that are, especially in Omaha, that are very poor, very marginal, and people are really in despair. We're not going to deal with that. You know, we're just going to manage it.

And that's how they're dealing with things now. They're not worried about it, you know, 400,000 women's March in Washington, D.C., it's going to manage it. Climate change, just manage it. Just manage it, and manage, especially the people who are, who are trying to come out and say you've got to do something right now no organ management

I've got some real high-end paranoia about why the bourgeois state that loves science ever since Newton they love science and why they're not picking up and I've got some paranoid reasons I'm not going to it

I'll talk to you later about listeners are like oh come on maybe we can have another episode on that why don't they stop it These are the people who have all the mechanisms in terms of oil extraction, fossil fuel extraction. Coal, they have the ability to stop this. They do it.

And they're not doing it for jobs. They get care less. Part of me says they know that the planet can't take seven billion people. Especially not under a capitalist paradigm. Not a capital system. No, you have to just discard it about. And even during the Second World War,

during that massive war, the population of the earth increased. So how are you going to cut this thing? Well, there's climate change. So you just kind of, you know, manage it and you keep it. They're very, very, this is my paranoid fantasy, that they are very aware this is going to start in the southern hemisphere. Absolutely.

The people that are going to get most hurt are the global poor. The global elite are totally going to be able to kind of protect themselves from the worst of it. See, this is one of my paranoid things, too, you know, is the new Ford class of aircraft carriers. You heard about those? I haven't, no. Oh, it's a new super carrier. It's taken over for the Nimitz aircraft carrier.

The Ford class, they just put one in the water. I mean, it's, what, 450 feet long. So it's way longer than a football field. And they've managed to get the running crew down small enough. But I said, you know, when things get tight, They can put 5,000, 10,000 people on there. Right. And then you just have to.

You just have to. And you have places to go. And one of the things we're used to is gated neighborhoods. There are people living in neighborhoods, and you're not going to find them. You're never going to find them. Well, they're good at that. So isolated islands or what are this part of my paranoia. I said, why don't they stop it?

Maybe they just figure that what this globe needs is 100 years, 150 years of some real catastrophe. And that'll about take care of the problem. Yeah. And there's actually been buying up of old silos by the ultra wealthy. And then they kind of recast these silos as like underground facility bunkers that are really, you know. Lavish? Yeah, lavish, you know, gilded out. But that's like, that's the paranoia of the bourgeoisie being like worst case scenario.

I can just step away from the problem. Yeah, yeah. And that is a problem in and of itself when the people that run the world at the same time are convinced that no matter how terribly they run it, that they can always elude the worst consequences. That's right. They can get away from it. Because they're separated from us. Exactly.

If they manage it right. Yeah. If they manage it right. And this goes back to fallout shelters, bomb shelters. Follow shelters in the United States exploded in the 50s. People were bailing fallout shelters all over the place. Well, people made a lot of money. Some of those follow-out shelters were, in fact, palaces.

They were huge. It's, it's, so I don't expect that necessarily to be true, but it is something I think you have to sort of keep ahead of this ruling class and it's a global ruling class it's not just here it's all globalized

and what is that they're prepared to do to sort of manage the problem of our population what are they going to do because they're certainly not going to let go of capitalism I don't think so because the socialist argument would be like well we could have us

of a world with that many people if it's sustainable and egalitarian it could happen I think that's true yeah I think that's true but they're not going to let that No, no, no, because that would mean the dismantling of capitalism. It would mean that would have to go. And hence their power.

Hence their power. So we have to understand the forces that raid against me, against us, no against me. You personally. That's the paranoia. It's, it's, it's, these are smart people. They're not dumb. They're not dumb. They're very strategic, very smart.

And I would say working in profoundly in here. human structure. And that's, I try not to get too caught up even instead of, you know, hating, oh, Trump maybe, that's right. Yeah. But, you know, the corporate CEO here, the corporate CEO there, because once you've decided to join the system, you just run the system. Right. So our task is get rid of the structure. We have to get rid of the system. That's what we have to do. So if someone wants to go out and be very militant and go take some pot shots at CEOs, I go, oh, come on. Yeah, yeah. Come on. You know, solving the problem. Yeah, it's sort of like, you know, back in Russia in 1995, and they shot one of the aristocrat leers,

and Lenin's brother got involved in that and was executed for it. And Leonard just said, that's the wrong thing to do. That's not what we're doing. You know, that makes you maybe feel good or you feel you've done something righteous and important. What we need is a structure of revolutionary change, which is positive. Now, I'd say this, by the way, and I'm going a little off to. The one thing we didn't have at the time, which we got now, I think, in the left, is we have an understanding of class, not comprehensive, but we understand that class is in the mix. We didn't know that. You didn't hear that much. Really?

Not much in the 60s. It was anti-war and, you know, pro-civil rights and pro-Black Panthers and, you know, finally just at the end, pro-women, just a very, but class you didn't hear about. I remember hearing about it a lot in our group at Cornell. There was a lot of talk about changing class. And a bunch of the people, I think, moved to Seattle. It may be one of the reasons Seattle's got this sort of, you know, extra special, you know, cutting edge. I don't know, but there was a lot of talk about that was not pervasive at all. That was not part of it.

Today you can't really find any struggle that isn't talking about, what role does class play? Yeah, and I wonder, too, if, you know, in the 60s for all the problems, socially and domestically and on the warfront that they had, the economy was doing pretty well. Oh, yeah. And a lot of people were doing okay financially, whereas that's not true anymore. After the recession of 0708, I mean, we're living in the ruins of that system.

And a lot of us, I mean, I was 19, 18 when that happened. So, you know, you come out of high school, you're going into college and you're faced with this. I have a degree, but I don't have anything to do with it. I just got $60,000 of debt to deal with and no job to show for it. So the system is producing these people that are educated, but have. have no opportunity, so we're thrown back in the working class. And then we're kind of like Molotov cocktails in the working class.

Like, we have the weaponry, we have the tools, and we're pissed off, and we know exactly why we're being oppressed, and we're going to start organizing. And when you went to college, you were told, this is going to get you employment. Oh, of course. That was a big lie, our entire lives. It's a lot. It's that things will be, and that is not, that is not working, and it is, it just adds to the oppression that's already there.

So, yeah, I think, I think there are some things about our age right now. that are a little better. Certainly the understanding of class, the classes involved. And now a very sophisticated understanding of intersectionality. Now, we may have to come up with other words for that.

That might be kind of an off-putting word. But the fact that these are multiple oppressions that need to be able to address and some might move forward, others might back, it's a fluid. I don't know how you really can make a graph for that.

But I do think this, for the left, and I meant to say this, I want to say it now, is that we in the left have never really taken responsibility for the notion of, look, we are here and we describe this as an intolerable situation for hundreds of millions of people and billions of people around the globe. And we see ourselves, I'm putting my hand out to the side here, over here, that's what we want to get. We have to take responsibility for everything. We have to begin to put together some

credible paths, not the path, but some credible, imaginative, well-grounded paths of how, this can be made into a much better kind of world and culture and we've never done that but I think we need to do that and part of it is an imaginative exercise but you know people on the left have a lot of information about you know there's this and the issues of color issues of gender issues of sexual orientation issues of class issues of production issues of employment and especially jobs when I went to college there was no question about a job so you had an education

that was just sort of you know explore the world it was terrific because it's going to be a job of course and that's in a sense that's what Marx is talking about is the people who just are able to live a life that they can pursue what interests them

you know poetry in the morning and fishing in the afternoon a wonderful vision it is I was going to ask you then that maybe this would be the last question I asked because I had this on the queue. Oh, sure.

Is Marxism still relevant today? And if so, could you give a defense of that? Because a lot of people, you know, there are people out there that say, you know, Marx is dead. He died with the Soviet Union, the Cold War is all over, all that bullshit. So I know he's smiling for people that can't see him. Well, it's really too bad the Soviet Union didn't use Marx. Yeah, right.

I agree. I agree. And neither to China. One of the great things that I love what Fidel said. he said that Mao destroyed with his feet what he created with his head. There was so many problems in China after the communists took power.

And yet there's also, you know, Trotsky was adamant. He said you have to go through capitalism. He was adamant about that. And that was one of the great struggles and questions in 1860, 70, 80s, Germany, and England and France about Russia. What was going to happen to Russia? And didn't Russia have to go through capitalism?

And then Marx came down on the side of maybe not. Maybe not. He didn't have a lot to do at all with what Lenin did. But it was a matter of saying, this is something that maybe I can see how our class analysis and our struggles are going to play out in a way to get a revolutionary change.

So maybe, Tarski is right, maybe everybody has to go through capitalism. Okay, we've gone through it now. Okay, we've gone through it. Plenty, thank you very much. Especially here in the U.S., we're at the forefront of it. We can check that box now.

So is irrelevant today, I guess. Well, I think so, because one of the things about, he was excellent just targeting oppression. Oppression exists. And class oppression exists. And related to class oppression are other oppressions. And which I think his analysis sharpens our brains to be able to. You know, there's a class oppression,

but there's also going to be national oppression. There's going to be work oppression. There's going to be gender oppression. He didn't get too far that way, but he understood it. He set the groundwork, too. The other thinkers came along and picked that up. Right. But he was very keenly aware that gender was an issue.

It would have to be addressed. And, of course, all the meetings they're going to, it's all men. All those communist groups that they formed. So I think, but you have to understand that Marxism is a tool. Not a dogma. It's not a dogma. It's a tool. I think it's a very alive tool.

and if you read it and get to it, read it with other people, don't read alone, try to apply it. I'm part of our theater that we made the Dakota Theater Caravan was to change class. We were making theater for a very specific kind of people who's a rural people, you know, in the 19th century they call them peasants, I don't think you use that word anymore. But a rural people with their specific issues, problems, we weren't going to New York. We weren't down in Broadway. We weren't in San Francisco. on the conservatory theater.

We weren't any of that. We were starting grassroots right in South Dakota to make that kind of. It's what a mouse said this in the Toxia and N-FORM. He said, the change will come not in what is done, but with whom. So you can go and do all your revolutionary action you want,

but if you're not really making a serious analysis of with whom you are working, then it's pointless and I think Marx is very aware of that he talks so much it's maybe a little overused term now about the proletariat I don't know if we can resurrect that word

very far maybe we can but workers and working people are living desperate lives it's not rewarding it's mechanical it's narrow it's underpaid it's stressful

it hurts families it hurts relationships And if that's part of our analysis, we have to find a way, which is why we've got this little newspaper going on here. We want to be able to kind of communicate with people and say, here are some other ways of looking at things. But we don't, as you can tell, there's not a fist up here and it's not saying, you know, seize power.

Although I think that's what we have to do. But it's ways of finding your ways into communities that might not, they probably don't read marks. They're not going to start talking about historical materialism to them. But one of the articles here, is what's wrong with capitalism. I wrote that. And I wrote it in a very kind of daily kind of language.

Good. So if anybody reads it, I think, well, okay, okay. I understand a little. But this is also, when they hand this out, you know, dialogue starts. Right. As opposed to this world. When I'm punching my palm here, like a phone, and I look at UNO and I see the students walking around,

everybody's in their phones. And I think the real joy is the people are. you. That's the growth. That's the vision. So we hand out this paper. I just went over to the concert today and handed out a number of these people were leaving. I got some great discussions going. Just really good discussions.

That's awesome. So that's part of what we did this. Who wanted to say, get out of the phone. Let's talk. And in my activist circles, when you come face-to-face, other people that think like you and that are really passionate and caring and involved and engaged, the phones fall by the wayside. We actually met

through the phones. So it's actually like through Facebook or whatever you could meet up with like-minded people, but then when we're in there planning what our actions are going to be or whatever, or having just a good time as comrades, you know, nobody's in their phones because you're alive.

Yes, you're alive. And you're alive with other people who are also increasingly alive. And once you get a taste of that community, and you realize how much the broader society lacks it, it just plants a seed in your soul and you just have to keep fighting for it. Well, Marx is one of the first people

to articulate alienation. And he talks about in terms of, you know, work and that, but he also applies it from each other, the separation, alienation, the separation, the distancing from each other. And man, talk about hitting that one on the head. Right. So, so relevant, even today. It's so relevant. It is so relevant. But it's not, it's not a dogma. It's not a, it's not a catechism. It's something you look at and use what makes sense to you.

I found myself going back to Marx and I didn't see that before. Oh, that's really cool. That's really interesting. And other stuff, you know, like I see proletarian, I go, oh, that's, I don't know if I'm ever going to sell it. that one. Yeah, yeah. But it's kind of jargony. Kind of jargony. So anyway.

All right, well, let's wrap it up. I guess before we would leave. Do you have any, I always end this way, do you have any books, films, or articles that you would recommend? About the 60s or about Marx or about theater, about anything. There's a wonderful film. It's a tough film to find. It came out about 1976, 1977, and it's called Burn.

And it's a very free adaptation of the story of, um, Toussaint Loveture in Haiti, stars Marlon Brand. That was the Black Jacobins, right? It was Black Jackabins, yeah, yeah. It was written by C.L.R. James, right? Oh, I can't remember the guy's name. It's a wonderful book. And they made this very broad kind of movie about, you know, an insurrection in an island in the Caribbean.

And Marlon Brando is the lead kind of, you know, U.S. American pimp going in and trying to make revolutions and all that. and using the black people. Marlon Brando, and it didn't get distributed. You have to find that one. No, and it's a wonderful film. It's a really uplifting film. It really, I mean, it's awful what happens, and then at the end is just, oh my God, it's possible.

That one you should see. You see Byrne. Oh, it's such a film. Awesome. A book, as I told you, I just finished, I'm just finishing the last like 10 pages of reading a 400. page biography of Marx and I really wanted to get back to that and that's been really inspiring

you know I did read a book just a couple months ago that I really liked it was it was what an eye-opener it's both a civil war and it's called a savage war and it was really it was an awful war and it kind of in one sense sort of laid down the patterns and the forms of future warmaking and you know getting rid of that sort of British you know line up in the lines and walking. You know, this is going to be masses of humanity organized along, you know, West Point kind of structures. And one of the points of the book, there are many, is just how incompetent the leadership on both sides was. Really incompetent. And they're all West Point people. And this is not to blame West Point. But they hadn't really had a good war, you know, since 1812.

Right. It's been 50 years. And so nobody really knew how to fight a war. a war. Well, a couple of people did. I mean, Lee knew how to fight them, Grant, know how to fight one. But how much waste and how much incompetence and how many people were sort of, went to their graves, you know, absolutely needlessly over and over, which is still a case. Yeah. Still a case. And I think that looking for a book on war and technology and what the But the problem is with that. The whole notion of drone fighting now is, I think, made war, you know, a permanent, a permanent war crime. Yeah.

Drones are war crimes. It's dystopian. Dysopian. Disopium. So those are a couple of things. I did a lot of readings last week in an article read. Can I remember? Well, I'm 71, so I'm getting up to where I have.

I have permission to forget stuff. Absolutely. And I guess I would just recommend anything on the Black Panthers. Anything. There's lots of documentaries online. Any books about it? Hear speeches from their leaders because I think there's a lot that they did that is applicable today. As far as building up alternative structures to do for their community

what the broader system refused to do. I would suggest this, one of the books that just grabbed me by the three, trod and shook me was the autobiography of Malcolm X. That is an extraordinary text. I have not read that yet, but it's been on my list forever. It's just, it was it, okay, fine. I understand now. Awesome.

Yeah, I also was very moved, even though he became quite a reactionary, but Eldage Cleaver's Soul on Ice. He talks about colonization, the colonizing of people that we are a colonized people, African Americans are. And now, now the nation is basically colonized. I think that's, oh no, I guess it isn't that the text that the MSNBC guy put out called a colony in a country.

Oh, yeah, yeah. He'd heard that about, you know, somebody had said that, he wanted to explore African-Americans as colonies. But I think we have to go beyond that. I think the working class is colonized. You know, we are now coerced into making endless amounts of money as wage slaves

for the ruling capitalist class. That's what the workers are for. colonized why we struggle to make ends meet that's right that's right all right well hey thank you so much for coming on you're just an absolute found of wisdom and experience it's been honestly this i'm honored to have you on so thank you so much thank you for the right appreciate everybody we'll talk to you next time Thank you.