Culture Jamming: A Long View Back - A Panel Discussion With John And Leni Sinclair, Pun Plamondon, David Fenton, and Genie Parker At The Michigan Union - Pendleton Room

Wed, 01/23/2008 - 1:41pm

When: December 10, 2011 at the University of Michigan: Michigan Union Pendleton Room

Panelists John and Leni Sinclair, Pun Plamondon, David Fenton, and Genie Parker--all members of Ann Arbor's White Panthers and Rainbow People's Party--participate in this panel discussion which is part of the of 'Freeing John Sinclair: The Day Legends Came to Town,' a series of events celebrating the launch of AADL's Freeing John Sinclair website (available at aadl.org beginning on Friday, December 9), marking the 40th anniversary of the John Sinclair Freedom Rally that took place in Ann Arbor on December 10, 1971. These five panelists were central to many of the actions and ideals surrounding Ann Arbor's late-1960s counter-culture. For this event, they'll reflect on what they called their "total assault on culture" during the late 1960s and early 1970s - what worked, what didn't, and what it means today.The panel will be moderated by Professor Bruce Conforth of the University of Michigan Program in of American Culture. This special event will be held in Pendleton Room of the Michigan Union, 530 S. State Street on the UM Campus.

Transcript

[00:00:30.65] ELI NEIBURGER: Good afternoon, everybody. How are you doing? Thank you all for coming. I'm Eli Neiburger, I'm the associate director of IT and Production at the Ann Arbor District Library, and we'd just like to thank you all so much for coming to this event today. This is the final event of our series commemorating this amazing event that happened 40 years ago today. We want to make sure that you all have an opportunity to sit freeingjohnsinclar.org, which is the online website of this product. We've digitized the whole Ann Arbor Sun. We've got numerous interviews with almost everybody on stage, as well as a bunch of people who aren't here yet, as well as numerous documents from the period and photographs. So it's a really great resource. We hope you all check that out.
[00:01:09.05] Those of you who didn't attend the event last night at The Arc, we have more of the wristbands that were given out, which are precious mementos for sure. eBay will surely be hopping. So if you feel free to help yourself to them over there. We also have a couple free copies of the book about the Del Rio, which is a very interesting work as well. So please take a look at that.
[00:01:28.36] And before we get started, I just want to take one moment to think two people who have been very instrumental in this project. It's my unique opportunity and pleasure to call myself these people's boss. Amy Cantu and Andrew McLaren are the librarians who pulled this entire project together in the back of the room. They are truly showing what the future of librarianship is. It's not your mother's librarian, it's not even your librarian. It's your grandchildren's librarian. So thank you Amy and Andrew for all your hard work on that.
[00:01:59.81] And with that, it is my pleasure to introduce the moderator for today's event. That's Dr. Bruce Conforth. He was raised in New York City's Greenwich Village where he was part of both the folk scene in the early 1960s and the countercultural rock scene that emerged in the middle of that decade. Touring with a blues-based rock and roll band until late '70s, he returned to academia, earning his Ph.D in ethnomusicology and American and Afro-American studies from Indiana University. He was a founding curator of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum and is now a faculty member in the University of Michigan's program in American Culture. So please join me in welcoming our moderator today, Bruce Conforth.
[00:02:37.08] BRUCE CONFORTH: Thank you very much. Thank you. I don't usually use notes, but today I wanted to make sure that I got things exactly the way that I wanted to say them, because this has been 40 years in the making. The title for this whole undertaking was "Freeing John Sinclair, the Day the Legends Came to Town." But I would contend that the legends didn't have to come to town because they were already here.
[00:03:09.02] [ONE PERSON APPLAUDS]
[00:03:11.22] Well, go ahead. Applaud. I think it's true.
[00:03:15.63] [APPLAUSE]
[00:03:21.99] In real estate, if there's such a thing anymore, they say it's all about location, location, location. And as I tell my students, it's always all about context, context, context. And personally, I don't really think that any particular event-- no concert, no happening-- ever really defines a generation. But rather, those are just manifestations of the larger cultural context that made those events possible.
[00:03:55.51] And just like I don't think Woodstock defined either a generation or hippies at that particular moment, but rather was made possible by the context of those times. Neither did I think the Free John Sinclair concert define a particular generation, or everything that was happening in Ann Arbor and Detroit.
[00:04:20.53] Certainly, the legends representing some countercultural, counter-political, and musical undertakings did come to town. But I think the real legends, as I said, were already here. Because they were the people who helped create the context that enabled such an event to take place. So it's my pleasure to host this event and to share the stage with these individuals who might balk-- although I'm not sure about some of them, John-- about being called legends, but without whom none of the events that took place about 40 years ago would have been possible. So it's now my pleasure to introduce to my left, Pun Plamondon--
[00:05:09.86] AUDIENCE: Plamondon.
[00:05:11.65] BRUCE CONFORTH: Plamondon. I knew I was going to screw it up. Plamondon. Pun is a member of the Grand River Bands of Ottawa. He is an author, playwright, native storyteller, and activist. He is President Pro-Temp of CUR, Congress of Unrepentant Radicals. He was co-founder and Minister of Defense of the White Panther and Rainbow People's parties, and lives quietly on a farm in the Ottawa-seated territories of Michigan, where he tries to avoid difficult tasks.
[00:05:58.61] To his left is David Fenton. In the 1960s, David dropped out of high school, ran away from home, and went to work for the Liberation News Service, where he supported himself as a photographer. While in Ann Arbor, he worked with the White Panthers and Rainbow People's Party on their underground newspaper, the Ann Arbor Sun, which later moved to Detroit and became the Detroit Sun. After leaving Michigan, he spent time directing public relations for Rolling Stone, then entered the activist fray in the anti-nuclear movement of the late 1970s, co-producing in 1979 the No Nukes concerts headlined by Bruce Springsteen and Bonnie Raitt. From there, he went on to found his own activism-centered PR company, Fenton Communications. In 1982, he turned leftist activism into big business, working with groups such as the Center for Food Safety, Greenpeace, the Natural Resources Defense Council, and moveon.org.
[00:07:16.32] To David's left is Leni Sinclair. Few artists have captured the spirit of the '60s as did photographer Leni Sinclair. Leni Sinclair brought a camera with her when she emigrated here from Germany in 1959, and soon found her way to the Wayne State University's nascent alternative cultural environments. She met future husband John in the early 1960s at such Detroit venues as the Red Dog Gallery. Together with John, jazz trumpeter Charles Moore, experimental filmmaker Robin Eichele and others, she helped found the Detroit Artist's Workshop in November, 1964.
[00:08:04.55] As I mentioned, Leni was on hand to document some of the most important cultural scenes of the '60s. During those proto-unto revolutionary, legendary 1960s music and cultural explosions in Detroit, Leni documented political events, the White Panther party, music from individuals like Sun Ra to John Coltrane, from the MC5 and Iggy Pop to Jimi Hendrix, creating iconic images that now place her as one of the foremost visual documentarians of that era.
[00:08:44.22] To Leni's left is Genie Parker. In the 1960s, Genie fell in with Trans-Love Energies Unlimited, headed up by John and Leni and Gary Grimshaw in Detroit, moving with them in 1968 to Ann Arbor where she became active in the White Panther party as Minister of International Affairs. She even visited North Vietnam as part of her responsibilities in that regard. And became very active with the Rainbow People's party. She ran for Ann Arbor City Council as a Human Rights Party candidate in 1972, and now teaches tai chi.
[00:09:40.89] And of course to her left, and last but not least, is John Sinclair. I've known John since 1968. And I thought, how do I say anything about this man?
[00:09:58.40] Short.
[00:09:59.08] Short. Well, it's tough to be short. John attended Flint College of the University of Michigan, now the University of Michigan, Flint. At that time, he served on the university's publications board, the school newspaper, The Word, and was president of the Cinema Guild. He was also involved in the reorganization of the Detroit underground newspaper, Fifths of State, during the paper's growth in the late 1960s. He contributed to the formation of the Detroit Artist's Workshop Press, which published five issues of Work Magazine. He worked as a jazz writer for Downbeat from 1964 to 1965 and was one of the new poets who read at the seminal Berkeley Poetry Conference in July, 1965.
[00:10:45.56] He was, of course, manager for a time of the band the MC5, and was co-founder and leader of the White Panther party. Under his guidance, the MC5 embraced the counterculture revolutionary politics of the White Panther party founded in answer to the Black Panthers' call for white people to support their movement. It was during this period that the group became the regular house band at Detroit's Grande Ballroom, and what came to be known as the "Kick Out the Jams" shows. In 1969, John was famously, or infamously, sentenced to 10 years in prison for possession of two marijuana joints, thereby becoming a cause celeb in the countercultural scene.
[00:11:30.73] This was, of course, what prompted the Free John Sinclair Concert at Chrysler Arena exactly 40 years ago today on December 10, 1971, bringing together such diverse artists as John Lennon and Yoko Ono, folk singers and activists Phil Ochs and Pete Seeger, local groups to The Up, Commander Cody and the Lost Planet Airmen, Bob Seger. Other artists like Stevie Wonder, jazz legend Archie Shep, and speakers Bobby Seal from the Black Panthers, Jerry Rubin, Allen Ginsberg, Rennie Davis, and many others. John was released from prison three days after the concert was held.
[00:12:19.57] JOHN SINCLAIR: Could we say there's Wayne Kramer is over there?
[00:12:21.99] BRUCE CONFORTH: Yes, Wayne Kramer is in the house. So I think one of the places that I'd like to start and see where you go from here, is to harken back to March 1, 1968, the March 1, 1968 issue of the Sun. In which, John, you wrote about the philosophy that the White Panthers and you were putting out at the time and talked about how--
[00:13:00.24] JOHN SINCLAIR: The Panthers didn't exist yet. Get your dates straight, Professor. There were no White Panthers in the spring of 1968.
[00:13:09.76] BRUCE CONFORTH: But you are you were still putting together the idea that, come out in the open and smoke some dope with us, pass the joint around to your friends, doesn't it make you feel good, doesn't it make you want to fuck, well then go right ahead. Because after all, what we want is fucking in the streets.
[00:13:30.17] JOHN SINCLAIR: Amen.
[00:13:33.47] BRUCE CONFORTH: What were you thinking?
[00:13:37.26] JOHN SINCLAIR: Thinking? Does thinking have anything to do with a statement like that? We also had an expression at that time called cut your head off, stop thinking, follow your body. That would be part of that rhetoric. Cut your head off, get rid of it. People thinking too much. Thinking was what got them into the war and the whole ugly shit that America has become all came from white men with a lot of money thinking about how they wanted a perfect world. Now they have it. Do you like it? It's like Frank Zappa said. Do you love it? Do you hate it? There it is, the way you made it.
[00:14:25.79] Sorry. I don't want to be a wet blanket here, but Jesus Christ, you know. It's 40 years later, and it's like a long swirl down the toilet bowl. We aren't to the bottom yet, but they're getting there. On September 17, 2011 Americans finally stood up and said, wait a minute. This shit is fucked up. That was two months ago. Good start, you know. I hope they don't just shut their eyes and turn the TV back on again. I'm excited about that. Why am I doing all this talking? What did you ask me? See I look out here and I see it's 1:00 on Saturday afternoon. Haven't you people got anything better to do?
[00:15:19.00] AUDIENCE: Absolutely not.
[00:15:22.72] JOHN SINCLAIR: Well, you have to take whatever I say then. Pun told me that last night. I've been dreading this for months. They're going to have a reunion of the Hill Street. I lived there, my dad was here, and blah blah blah. It was a rough period of ups and downs in many ways, trying to do a lot of things. I'm thinking, to see all these people again. I don't know They're going to want to beat me up and shit. Pun came up to me last night before I went on stage and he said, man, these people love us. And I said, wow, really? He says, yeah. They had such a great time in those periods and they forgot all the bad stuff that happened. I said, oh wow. So I figured if I get through today without a heart attack, we won't have to deal with this or waste another 10 more years. Because in our contemporary culture, if you don't have a zero on the end, it doesn't exist.
[00:16:25.75] BRUCE CONFORTH: How about that?
[00:16:27.22] JOHN SINCLAIR: Maybe I won't even have to live another 10 years, who knows.
[00:16:31.47] BRUCE CONFORTH: How about the rest of the panel--
[00:16:33.88] JOHN SINCLAIR: Yeah, shut him up. Shut that nut up.
[00:16:39.11] BRUCE CONFORTH: Really. It wasn't all good times.
[00:16:45.15] JOHN SINCLAIR: Yeah, but I'd trade today for that any time. Except for the penitentiary part.
[00:16:52.80] GENIE PARKER: What, you want to hear about bad times?
[00:16:57.02] BRUCE CONFORTH: think we want to hear about anything you want to talk about, but I think if 40 years can lend us anything, maybe it's a little bit of honest perspective.
[00:17:12.59] JOHN SINCLAIR: Or false perspective, for that matter.
[00:17:15.49] BRUCE CONFORTH: No, we've had enough false perspective. That's what we get from the politicians all the time.
[00:17:19.74] JOHN SINCLAIR: College does a good job, too. I'm sorry.
[00:17:22.37] GENIE PARKER: It's OK. Here's a thought. If you were not around for the '50s, you have a hard time understanding the '60s. The '50s was the golden age of the old white men running this country.
[00:17:40.52] JOHN SINCLAIR: And like the '80s. In was worse, the '80s. You had Ronald Reagan, we only had Ike.
[00:17:45.32] GENIE PARKER: They're not done. So there were some bad times. First, you would walk down the street looking like we look and you stuck out like a sore thumb. I look around the room here and a bunch of us look alike. We look alike. It was a cultural thing. And I think that's what John was trying to say. At first, it was just a cultural thing. It wasn't political at all. We were into music, clothes, food, drugs, entertainment. Our culture was different. And we didn't become politicized until we start getting attacked. And that started on the streets when we would just walk around looking like we looked, and people would attack us, literally, physically.
[00:18:31.81] JOHN SINCLAIR: The myth of the hipness of the campus in the '60s is an enormous myth. In the '60s, the campus was squares. Wall to wall squares. Football players, they hated hippies. That's what I loved about the Occupy thing. When they finally asked the people, they put a poll, what do you think of this? 62% of Americans said, this is a good idea. And I thought, Jesus, when we did this, if we got 6.2% it would have been a lot. They hated us. They put me in prison for 10 years for two joints. Think about that. How much is that an index of hatred?
[00:19:12.50] GENIE PARKER: And they would still like to do that.
[00:19:15.41] JOHN SINCLAIR: Yeah, but we've got roadways right now.
[00:19:17.79] GENIE PARKER: Are we getting there?
[00:19:19.84] BRUCE CONFORTH: I think your point was extremely well made, that the '50s really were the context for what laid after that. And your point about it being a cultural thing at first I think is very well-taken. There was that moment in time when there were so few of us that you instantly were able to recognize another person because not only did you know that they had something in common with you, but you pretty much knew that they were suffering the same grief that you were suffering, too. It was kind of like understanding another victim of war.
[00:20:04.78] JOHN SINCLAIR: You know, Bruce, at the same time though we were just pure hippies. We were also against the war in Vietnam, we were against the oppression of black people, we were for civil rights and economic justice for everyone. Because that's the way hippies were. So hippies, they've kind of erased--
[00:20:22.52] GENIE PARKER: I'm going to interrupt you this time. It wasn't just people attacking us that made us political either, because it was the Black Panther party who really took an interest in us. And I know that name generates all this fear, and because there was a lot of stuff that was said about them. But when they contacted us, they were very kind to us. They were very considerate, and they were very clear about wanting to help us to understand what was really going on, and to help us to understand how we could actually help changed things.
[00:20:55.30] JOHN SINCLAIR: [INAUDIBLE]. They made us read the Red Book, for one thing. How about Pun? Pun probably has a speech. I don't say that in a negatory way.
[00:21:15.53] PUN PLAMONDON: No, I don't take it. What's the issue?
[00:21:20.52] GENIE PARKER: Bad times and the good times.
[00:21:23.26] PUN PLAMONDON: Well, I don't know. I didn't have many hard times.
[00:21:38.04] JOHN SINCLAIR: In jail?
[00:21:40.62] PUN PLAMONDON: No, I did easy time. I wrote about it in my book. When I went to the penitentiary, the warden called me in and it's kind of like the movies. They make you sit in this chair that they cut the legs off. So your knees are way up like this. And you're looking up at the warden and he says, Plumondon, we've got two kinds of time here. We've got hard time and easy time. What can I put you down for? And I said, easy time, man. It's a lack-love institution, it's full of violence and rejects from the dominant society.
[00:22:24.51] But I always found beauty in those people and as long as there's a lower class or a criminal class, I'm in it. I make no bones about it. I don't really remember getting beat up. I got 100 stitches in Detroit. Some guys tried to castrate because I was a hippie living in a hippie house. And I got 100 stitches from that. But I mean, it passes. Everything else, the struggle against the state, watching young people stand up, believe in something, risk their lives for something so amorphous, so out there, there was no real example on this planet of what we were trying to do. But we had a vision that it could be done. And quite frankly, I'm humbled to my very core to see Wayne Kramer, Diane Ripley, Kathy Kelly. I was 22, 23 years old. These people were youngsters. Fuzzy is sitting back there. 16 years old he came to us.
[00:23:40.35] In those days, there weren't no drug help, there wasn't any homeless shelters, there wasn't any shelters for women who were being abused by husbands. Many of the runways were abused at home and that's why they run away. There were no institutions to address those issues. That's why we had all those runaways staying at our house. That's why the police were kicking in the door all the time looking for some 15-year-old or 16-year-old runaway. So we didn't say, I believe there's a need in society and let's address that need. No, these were just people like us. Long hair, crazy clothes, listening to rock and roll, smoking reefer who didn't have a place to stay. And now, of course, they've taken those away from us, from the community, and they've put them in these institutions. So I'll rest a minute.
[00:24:45.86] DAVID FENTON: So the first time I met John and Pun, they were both in prison. I had never met them.
[00:24:54.12] JOHN SINCLAIR: [INAUDIBLE].
[00:24:56.12] DAVID FENTON: I saw Pun once at an underground media conference in Ann Arbor. And I remember, Pun, you were guarding the entrance with a gun. And I must've been 17 years old. And we're all sitting around meeting people from the underground newspapers all over the country and it was in some rural area--
[00:25:17.24] JOHN SINCLAIR: Tell them what an underground newspaper was.
[00:25:19.36] DAVID FENTON: An underground newspaper was a hippie, countercultural, anti-war, utopian, psychedelically influenced newspaper. I worked at Liberation News Service before I came out to Ann Arbor, and it was started in part by former Washington Post reporters who were so upset at the bias and horrible coverage of the Vietnam War in the Washington Post that they started their own news service to tell the truth about Vietnam. It's hard to imagine today.
[00:25:50.00] JOHN SINCLAIR: They could use one now.
[00:25:51.79] DAVID FENTON: So I'm at this conference. I'm 17 years old. I'm sitting in a field with Andy Hoffman, Jerry Rubin, all these icons of the time. And the next thing I know, there are armed police descending on us from 360 degrees, from everywhere.
[00:26:11.63] JOHN SINCLAIR: As long as they're not county sheriffs.
[00:26:12.84] DAVID FENTON: I remember, people started mysteriously emptying their pockets onto the ground. It's hard to imagine how tense it was. I went and met John in prison. And I was just a photographer, and I was a kid, I was 18. All I had ever done is take photographs. So John said he was going to start telling me how I was going to help him get out of prison, and I said, sure. He started sending me letters from Jackson State Penitentiary. Long, handwritten legal pad letters with detailed instructions on how to get him out. And that's how I learned public relations.
[00:27:01.56] [APPLAUSE]
[00:27:07.89] JOHN SINCLAIR: [INAUDIBLE] get credit for that.
[00:27:12.76] DAVID FENTON: At Liberation News Service, I covered the Chicago Seven trial. At that time, I was about 16. The first time I ever went into an American courtroom was the day they bound and gagged Bobby Seale, a story of most of you know about. I go, I guess this is the law. I get these letters from John, and he says, take my wife to the Michigan Supreme Court. Tie her hands behind her back and put a gag in her mouth and call these reporters.
[00:27:49.05] So between Sinclair and Abbie Hoffman, who I was also spending time with, who was a masterful public relations genius. I'm very happy to carry on in the tradition.
[00:28:05.77] [APPLAUSE]
[00:28:11.49] DAVID FENTON: There were downsides, sure. Trying to reinvent how to live in a utopian aspirational community was not all a bed of roses. It was hard. We were making stuff up as we went along. People got abusive, there was great emotional stress. We experimented with things that I kind of wish we hadn't.
[00:28:36.46] JOHN SINCLAIR: It was an economic struggle, also.
[00:28:38.61] DAVID FENTON: It was tough. For me, as an Upper East Side, New York City kid, I have to say, it was tough. We had no private property. Imagine. I had to get permission from John's brother to buy a pair of blue jeans. That didn't last too long, thankfully.
[00:28:55.01] JOHN SINCLAIR: $5. They didn't cost $150. They ripped because you wore them too long.
[00:29:01.46] DAVID FENTON: Politically, also there was a big plus side. We changed a lot of things in this country. When I say we, I mean the movement of the '60s. The status of women today, the rights of gays, the personal freedom, experimentation, human rights, the end of the draft, it's a different place-- thank god-- in so many ways. But our excesses-- and that's what they were-- fueled a counter-reaction that we are all saddled with today. It wasn't just us. Abbie used to walk around chanting, off the pig. That was really going to endear him to the--
[00:29:41.79] JOHN SINCLAIR: [INAUDIBLE].
[00:29:42.70] DAVID FENTON: Right. And it was appropriate for them, the pigs were offing them. But we engaged in excesses rhetorically and certain behaviors that I think we could have been more thoughtful about. It helped re-elect Nixon, let's face it.
[00:30:01.01] PUN PLAMONDON: I resemble that remark.
[00:30:03.50] DAVID FENTON: It helped Newt Gingrich, the conservative movement today.
[00:30:07.78] JOHN SINCLAIR: [INAUDIBLE] have nothing to do with that mother--
[00:30:10.96] [LAUGHTER]
[00:30:14.73] JOHN SINCLAIR: [INAUDIBLE] but nothing to do with the Newt story.
[00:30:18.63] DAVID FENTON: We can agree to disagree about that. It was a great, heady, amazing time. It's really wonderful to feel part of it. I've been working a little with some of these Occupy Wall Street people as a volunteer.
[00:30:33.40] [APPLAUSE]
[00:30:39.68] DAVID FENTON: It's really interesting to watch them go through some of the same dynamics that we had to face. They're going to have to deal with the anarchists in their midst. That's coming. My favorite moment is when I said to a couple of them, you've got the attention of the country. Maybe you should go negotiate with the city for a permanent encampment. And they said, no, we're never going to do that. I said, why? They said, we don't recognize their authority.
[00:31:09.33] [LAUGHTER]
[00:31:11.74] JOHN SINCLAIR: Good start. I thought they'd finally found the right target, Wall Street. Somebody said, that's quite a symbolic target. I said it's also literally where this shit is, they own this whole country. We don't have a government anymore, they own them all. Like Michael Moore says, until you get rid of the campaign financing, you don't even have a shred of democracy in this country. It's just rich people. I hate them, I always have and I always will.
[00:31:43.99] [APPLAUSE]
[00:31:49.95] [INTERPOSING VOICES]
[00:31:50.87] JOHN SINCLAIR: I guess it's alright if you're rich, but if you aren't rich, it's kind of ugly.
[00:31:55.07] LENI SINCLAIR: When he shuts up, I'll stop talking.
[00:31:58.11] BRUCE: John?
[00:32:00.25] JOHN SINCLAIR: Now you get into a marital issue.
[00:32:06.12] BRUCE: Leni, what was it like for you? It was hard?
[00:32:09.37] LENI SINCLAIR: First of all, before getting into any of this, I just wanted to mention the John Sinclair Freedom rally was on December 10. By the way, it's a full moon today. But since you mentioned human rights, at the time in 1971, I don't think any of us knew that December 10 was International Human Rights Day, which was established in 1947 after World War II. It had the charter of human rights that pretty much mirrors the White Panther Party [INAUDIBLE].
[00:32:59.78] If you put somebody in jail for possession of two joints, isn't that a violation of human rights? I would say. And that's what we celebrate. We celebrate today as International Human Rights Day.
[00:33:14.50] [APPLAUSE]
[00:33:22.50] BRUCE: But speaking of the concert, it wasn't all altruism. John Lennon had to be convinced by Jerry Rubin to come and do the concert. John didn't want to do the concert initially. And John had his own alternative reasons for doing it. He had been planning a large tour anyway, he wanted to use the concert as a venue to test out the sound system, his filmmaking equipment. I mean granted, yes, he did come and do it.
[00:33:56.29] JOHN SINCLAIR: You gonna slag him for this? I'm not trying to slight John, but let's lay our cards on the table.
[00:34:04.74] JOHN SINCLAIR: He's a beautiful cat, get off his ass.
[00:34:06.73] BRUCE: Let's lay our cards on the table. John did not do it solely for altruistic reasons. I was there, too.
[00:34:14.69] JOHN SINCLAIR: I didn't go to prison solely for altruistic reasons. This is the world.
[00:34:21.07] BRUCE: The point that I'm trying to make is a lot of what we did, like David was saying, we didn't always make the best decisions. And some of the decisions we made were sometimes very self-involved, very self-interested.
[00:34:34.98] JOHN SINCLAIR: Well, let's put other stuff against Richard Nixon and Lyndon B. Johnson. We did pretty goddamn good compared to them.
[00:34:42.15] BRUCE: I'm not saying we didn't.
[00:34:44.08] JOHN SINCLAIR: I'm not going to take no flagellation on this stuff.
[00:34:48.01] BRUCE: Everything has to be placed in its proper context, and Jerry Rubin had to argue to get Lennon to come here. It wasn't just like John just said, oh what a cool idea. I'm going to go and do it.
[00:35:01.22] [INTERPOSING VOICES]
[00:35:05.21] JOHN SINCLAIR: Jerry Rubin was one of the biggest egomaniacs of all time, but he came here and he got John Lennon to come here.
[00:35:11.57] BRUCE: Yeah all right, you want to talk about what happened with the money after the concert?
[00:35:15.66] LENI SINCLAIR: No.
[00:35:16.74] JOHN SINCLAIR: What happened? [INAUDIBLE]. There wasn't any money. We charged $3, man. The stupidest thing I ever did in my life.
[00:35:29.32] PUN PLAMONDON: That's what Pete Andrews said last night, he tried to get them to charge more.
[00:35:32.61] JOHN SINCLAIR: It's true. They all tried to get me. The central committee tried to get me.
[00:35:36.38] PUN PLAMONDON: And it went on for 12 hours, right?
[00:35:37.37] JOHN SINCLAIR: And I said it's gotta stay at $3.
[00:35:39.57] DAVID FENTON: So how much is that an hour?
[00:35:41.12] JOHN SINCLAIR: If we would have charged $10, our whole lives would have been different. We might have taken over the country. My brother David, who ran our organization as the chief of staff, every day he kept this rag tag bunch of hippies together. 35 people with beds, house, clothes. They've got a place to drive, or they could drive to the gig or whatever. But it was hard. Every day was uphill. We didn't have no money.
[00:36:11.97] GENIE PARKER: Which is why you had to ask for $5 to buy a pair of jeans. There wasn't any money.
[00:36:18.05] DAVID FENTON: I don't agree with you, I think it was mostly altruistic. But human beings are emotional creatures and so people, of course, were acting on emotions. And sometimes that led to beautiful experiments, and sometimes it lead to strife and blows to people's egos and bad decisions. But that'll happen anywhere. But the sense of possibility and experimentation, the early days of it anyway, the optimism was incredibly infectious. And then of course, Genie talks about how when it first started, they were the odd hippie walking down the street. And then it was everybody.
[00:37:03.62] GENIE PARKER: There was a big bang.
[00:37:04.85] PUN PLAMONDON: Once the Beatles went and grew their hair long and all the music was celebrating that culture, the amount of unity among young people at that time is really hard to imagine now.
[00:37:19.39] JOHN SINCLAIR: Just people with long hair.
[00:37:21.41] PUN PLAMONDON: And that's why after the Supreme Court lowered the voting age to 18 and said students could vote here where they went to school, we looked at each other and said oh my goodness, we can take over this city because there's a majority of people who think like we do here and have the same interests. So we did. And it was a shock. We didn't really think we'd succeed, but we did. And you couldn't imagine that happening now.
[00:37:50.04] JOHN SINCLAIR: Sure you could.
[00:37:50.76] DAVID FENTON: Well, that's hard.
[00:37:52.61] JOHN SINCLAIR: People can do whatever they want at any time.
[00:37:54.54] DAVID FENTON: But that led to a kind of reaction. I think one of the untold parts of this story is the authorities moved against this in some very obvious ways, but also in some subtler ways. And we don't know the whole story yet of how they helped turn the community against what we were doing. But we also helped turn the community against what we were doing. We made some stupid errors. There's a letter in the exhibit at the library I had never seen before. I think, Pun, you haven't even seen it yet. It's a letter from J. Edgar Hoover, the head of the FBI, to President Ford, warning him about the White Panther Party and how they were armed and dangerous and organizing young people through music, and were talking about the end of the money.
[00:38:43.83] [LAUGHTER]
[00:38:48.25] JOHN SINCLAIR: Still a good idea.
[00:38:54.59] DAVID FENTON: It was frightening to them. We know the story of how they moved against Lennon, and they started deportation proceedings against him to shut down what they were all planning to do. You can't imagine back then. When John Lennon said the Beatles are bigger than Jesus, he was right. There's never been a bigger myth. The potency of that myth was unbelievable. And so when we announced on the radio that after the breakup of the Beatles, John Lennon was coming to Ann Arbor, nothing bigger had ever happened here.
[00:39:30.14] And look at the amount of political pressure that translated into that the Supreme Court that wouldn't give this guy bond on appeal after 2 and 1/2 years, including a lot of solitary confinement, on a Constitutional challenge to the marijuana laws, saying that they were as addictive as heroin. And three days after this concert, they let him out on bond. I went, oh my god, rock 'n roll.
[00:39:57.51] JOHN SINCLAIR: The other half of that was that we forced the legislature to pass the law, which was the basis on which they gave me the bond.
[00:40:04.74] LENI SINCLAIR: So John Lennon martyred himself for nothing.
[00:40:08.39] BRUCE: Why do you say that?
[00:40:11.53] JOHN SINCLAIR: That was years later.
[00:40:12.91] LENI SINCLAIR: He got stopped for doing what he wants to do by the government, on account of playing this concept for John. They shut him up. They were trying to deport him and Yoko back to England based on John Lennon's marijuana conviction in London years ago, and they were going to use that conviction to deport John and Yoko. And they did. And they got a stay of execution in America, provided they would not engage in any more political activities. And that, right there, was a sentence for a working class hero.
[00:40:52.81] BRUCE: And that was because of his relationship with the concert. So here's the odd thing.
[00:40:59.91] [INTERPOSING VOICES] it ends up biting him in the ass, basically.
[00:41:05.13] DAVID FENTON: Yeah, they muzzled him. And there's a great movie about it called The United States Versus John Lennon that I highly recommend. It focuses a lot on December 10 and it's beautifully done. The real movie of that concert, Ten for Two, has never been released. I think you can see parts of it on YouTube now illicitly. But it's a great, great movie. It's probably one of the classic music political movies ever made. And Yoko, to this day, will not let it come out.
[00:41:31.23] JOHN SINCLAIR: I don't think it's that simple.
[00:41:32.52] DAVID FENTON: She won't. I've asked her, she will not let it come out.
[00:41:36.56] LENI SINCLAIR: And do you know why?
[00:41:38.69] DAVID FENTON: No.
[00:41:39.22] LENI SINCLAIR: I think probably the promise they made to the government not to do anything political might have included showing that movie. It's very political.
[00:41:48.82] DAVID FENTON: Not in perpetuity.
[00:41:51.87] [INTERPOSING VOICES]
[00:41:56.64] GENIE PARKER: They wouldn't give me my passport only like three, four years ago. They called me from Washington to tell me they were not going to give me my passport. And I'm like, why? And it was a very nice lady. We had long conversations for weeks and we tried to figure it out. She knew everything about me.
[00:42:14.56] BRUCE: Because of your trip to Vietnam?
[00:42:15.82] GENIE PARKER: No, she would never say. She just kept saying, well what have you done? And I kept saying, I haven't done anything for a long time.
[00:42:25.46] [LAUGHTER]
[00:42:28.58] GENIE PARKER: And then I got on the phone with somebody I knew. I knew somebody who knew somebody in the ACLU. So I got on the phone and I had mentioned to somebody on the phone that I was in touch with somebody from the ACLU. The next week, I got this big envelope with my little passport in the corner, and they sent me my passport. Don't underestimate their rabidness.
[00:42:49.03] JOHN SINCLAIR: I have to dispel the conspiracy theories. I go back and forth all the time with my passport. My passport's got so many stamps on it it ain't even funny. And last Friday, for the first time in I don't know when, I landed in Detroit, I went up, handed my thing, my little thing about what you were doing. They said, go on, have a good time. They didn't even look at my bags.
[00:43:20.61] GENIE PARKER: That's great.
[00:43:21.58] JOHN SINCLAIR: If they were going to get somebody, it would be Sinclair coming to the 40th anniversary [INAUDIBLE]. I think our problems with the government go way beyond anything that might hit any one of us. It's just this whole culture that they've created here of ugliness and hatred and no heart and not giving people their pensions. Jesus Christ, wake up. They've ruined this country. It's not the place that we grew up in. I hope they change it back.
[00:43:54.74] [APPLAUSE]
[00:43:58.61] JOHN SINCLAIR: You've got the nerve of a guy like Newt Gingrich to step up there and run for president. Jesus. Why don't they shoot-- no, nevermind. I don't want to say that. But he is the guy who ruined the government of our country in the '90s, if you remember. They try to erase all these things like they've erased hippies and the Black Panthers. That's why I love what they're doing here-- Amy-- with the library. To keep this alive like this and to be here in the flesh with these people in front of you, and to talk, this is beautiful. This is what America's all about. Remembering our past, our achievements, our problems, the things we did to get out of them, how we triumphed over adversity. We're sharing all this today. This is beautiful.
[00:44:48.27] When I go back to Detroit where I stay at right now, it won't be anything like this. The world there, it's a whole different world. They don't even have computers. You think I'm joking. They've got a whole different world in Detroit. It's black people without any money. They've been there like that for 40 years. The stuff they noticed in 2008 about General Motors and all that, that happened in Detroit 40 years ago. They have three generations of people in Detroit who don't even know what a job is. They don't know anybody with a job.
[00:45:25.74] BRUCE: So then what's the message? What's the legacy? What do you bring from this to that environment?
[00:45:32.47] JOHN SINCLAIR: I bring my ass. I bring it from here to there, where I stay at. I don't have a car.
[00:45:39.12] BRUCE: That's a nice thing to say, but--
[00:45:40.60] JOHN SINCLAIR: I don't have heat where I'm staying. It's fucking freezing. I can't go anywhere because there's no transportation. I mean, I live in Amsterdam. If you want to go somewhere, you walk down and the tram comes by and you get on and it takes you where you're going. You don't even have to think about it because they thought about it. There's intelligence at work in their planning of daily life. In Detroit, it's just been stripped. I'm just saying this because you all are here in Ann Arbor and we're all here with our little white faces smiling and having a great time and everything. But man, in Detroit, it's fucked.
[00:46:18.84] BRUCE: So what do we do about that?
[00:46:19.92] JOHN SINCLAIR: I don't know what you do. I fled. I fled Detroit 20 years ago. I moved to New Orleans. I lived there 12 years. I couldn't make a living. And I said if I'm going to starve here-- I was pretty well-known. I had the most popular radio show in New Orleans for five years, but I couldn't pay my rent. I thought, I'm not going to starve here. I'm going to try and starve in Amsterdam, I like it. And so I did. I starved for about three years. And now I've got my sponsors, the Ceres Seed Company. I've got my own brand of seeds just released, the John Sinclair seed. Buy some today.
[00:47:00.82] BRUCE: David, you're involved in things like moveon.org, so what's your perspective? Is fleeing the answer?
[00:47:08.31] DAVID FENTON: No. Propaganda has really triumphed. It's really remarkable. This is the richest country on earth and the richest country that has ever existed in the history of the world, with the richest people in it who have ever existed in the history of the world, and they have convinced this country that it's broke. It's amazing. Talk about bait and switch. So the people who took all the money have convinced everybody that they don't have any and they've--
[00:47:41.27] JOHN SINCLAIR: It's like Corzine. I don't know what happened to it.
[00:47:44.09] DAVID FENTON: Now John, you've mellowed, you're ready to let other people talk a little.
[00:47:50.14] JOHN SINCLAIR: they're doing this is my name, I figure I've got free reign. Don't like it, throw me out. Go ahead and have the John Sinclair Freedom Rally without Sinclair.
[00:48:01.26] [APPLAUSE]
[00:48:07.83] DAVID FENTON: That's what I had to tell him last night when we were having our joints in the dressing room in The Arc. It's the John Sinclair Freedom Rally. What do you think it was about?
[00:48:18.06] DAVID FENTON: So at any rate, this is why I think we need a new underground press. The corporatization of the mainstream media basically leaves messages like the one I just said. It's very hard to find. This is why I'm so excited about these Occupy Wall Street kids. Talk about an incredible accomplishment. You go out on the street pretty much anywhere in America now and ask people, 99 versus 1, what does it mean? They'll all know. They can all tell you. That happened in six weeks. That's incredible. And I know that those kids are going to build on this. They're very determined.
[00:49:07.04] LENI SINCLAIR: Did you do that?
[00:49:07.80] DAVID FENTON: No, I did not do that. A marketing guy did it, who runs this is newspaper in Canada called Adbusters, he did it.
[00:49:17.29] LENI SINCLAIR: Can you talk a little bit about your accomplishments that everybody knows about, but they don't know you did it?
[00:49:24.13] DAVID FENTON: I don't know about that, but you can go to our website and see it. To me, the issue now is for everybody to take this up. We are not broke. Talking about what you're talking about, John, in Detroit. This country used to spend twice as much of its GDP on infrastructure-- on roads, on rails, on education, on public housing-- than it does now. All the rest of that money has gone not only to the top 1%, but to the top 1/10 of 1%. One that every $4 in this economy goes to the top 1% who own 40% of the wealth. Now in Europe, they still invest in public goods and public infrastructure, and they have a much better quality of life. And yet, you talk to American politicians and they go, you don't want to be like Europe. Please.
[00:50:24.69] [INTERPOSING VOICES]
[00:50:27.39] DAVID FENTON: So I think that we need to join with these kids in making this issue. Because it's the only issue. This country is not broke. We have all the money we need to solve all our problems, we have all the technology we need to save the atmosphere from destruction, and we're in this giant Shakespearean tragedy right now where a very, very few number of families and companies-- it's almost like a Banana Republic-- are in the way of this great amount of progress we can make. And that sounds simplistic and crazy, but it's true.
[00:51:01.08] [APPLAUSE]
[00:51:10.43] LENI SINCLAIR: It's like Bobby Seale said at the John Sinclair Freedom Rally. The only solution is the people's humane revolution.
[00:51:17.65] DAVID FENTON: The only solution to pollution.
[00:51:19.71] PUN PLAMONDON: Well, which leads to the issue of leadership. Like most people, I'm very enthusiastic about Occupy and followed it somewhat closely. But eventually, it's going to come down to leadership because in order for there to be a revolution, there must be revolutionary party. There must be a group of dedicated people who make this analysis about the 1%.
[00:51:51.86] But then always the next step after the analysis is to create the machinery. By machinery, I mean the political machinery or the party by which people could put this analysis to use. Because there's tons of students-- political science students, economy students-- here at this university who can make that same analysis. So there needs to be this machinery of taking this stuff and then addressing the issue.
[00:52:23.61] I have been advocating and speaking for a long time about a third party, a Socialist party. For one thing, I believe we need to get away from that tremendous fear and brainwashing that's been going on since the '40s about the word socialism. I mean, Jesus Christ. It's so simple. We can see the collapse around us. This was all written by Marx in 1848. Capital would continue to be condensed and consolidated into the hands of a smaller and smaller group of people. That's the Communist Manifesto, it's right in there. And this is what we're seeing now.
[00:53:04.72] I think that there needs to be a massive re-education, a massive counter-brainwashing. Most Americans suffer from that Stockholm Syndrome where they identify with their oppressor. It takes a lot of young people and some of us who have been there to articulate this stuff and see that it happens. On the one hand at a revolutionary stage, the anarchists are our closest allies. But then when you're trying to build, the anarchists are just in the way. Just like Fenton so articulately mentioned.
[00:53:48.67] DAVID FENTON: There needs to be leadership, but things are different now. In the internet era, the crowd can organize itself. Sure, there has to be spokespeople and people have to articulate things. But what we've seen in Egypt and Tunisia and here in this country, there's a new tool, and we're just at the very beginning.
[00:54:15.87] JOHN SINCLAIR: It's not the same.
[00:54:17.19] DAVID FENTON: I think the conditions for people to organize themselves are very different now. And I'm really quite optimistic it will happen. I'm sure there's not going to be a vanguard leadership party, that's for sure.
[00:54:32.82] [INTERPOSING VOICES]
[00:54:38.41] JOHN SINCLAIR: That was funny, you telling this group of people-- us and people like Frank Buck and Peggy [? Tobby ?] and whoever else was on the central committee. We spent 18 million hours sitting up all night in a room arguing these things out amongst ourselves. 18 million hours. And that we'd sleep for three hours and then we'd get up and go do all the stuff that we decided that we had to do the next day. But man, we debated this. We were the central committee of the Rainbow People's Party. We were serious as fucking cancer. We were trying to take over Ann Arbor and build it into a revolutionary base area so we could show what you could do in one community, and then you could replicate this in other places. We were serious. We dedicated our lives, we didn't do anything else. We got high, we fucked a lot, we listened to a lot of great music. That was all coming from within ourselves. But what we were dedicated to was trying to change this stuff.
[00:55:42.84] BRUCE: And therein lies--
[00:55:44.66] JOHN SINCLAIR: And it wasn't a vanguard party that was necessary.
[00:55:49.74] BRUCE: You were about trying to change it. It was about trying to change. Correct me if I'm wrong. I don't see it as much as working within the system as overtly changing the system. And so David, I think you're right. It's a beautiful quote, like Pun said, that I should write it down and I did. In the internet era, the crowd can organize itself. But organization is just one part. You can organize, but what do you do once you're organized? Do you work within the system, or do we have to radically change the system into something it isn't now?
[00:56:25.10] PUN PLAMONDON: Some people, all they can do is work within the system. That's fine. Back in the day, down there at Wayne State, remember the young dude who took over the Wayne State Newspaper? Johnson was his name?
[00:56:38.40] JOHN SINCLAIR: John Watson.
[00:56:40.99] PUN PLAMONDON: Some people, that's all they can do is work within the system. So it's not an either or, it's an everybody.
[00:56:48.09] BRUCE: But can the system significantly be changed to affect the change in social structure?
[00:56:55.66] PUN PLAMONDON: Of course we can. We got the 18-year-old vote, we ended the war, threw out Nixon.
[00:57:03.26] JOHN SINCLAIR: Jesus Christ, what do you want?
[00:57:04.77] DAVID FENTON: Look at what Franklin Roosevelt did. That was within the system. That was pretty massive.
[00:57:10.09] JOHN SINCLAIR: They could do it now if they had a system. Our president wants to change some things within the system and they don't have it. They dismantled it. Sorry. We're going to take your ball and go home. You aren't going to have a government now. Nigger. You ain't getting it, sorry. We're going to make you look so bad that they're going to put you out of office.
[00:57:30.00] LENI SINCLAIR: There's somebody who wants to ask a question?
[00:57:35.13] BRUCE: Sure. Question. Can you tell us who you are?
[00:57:39.71] BOB ALEXANDER: I'm Bob Alexander.
[00:57:42.84] JOHN SINCLAIR: Human Rights Party.
[00:57:45.79] BOB ALEXANDER: It's tremendous to see you all in one place. So help me. Many of our friends are not here today. They've gone on. One of the things I haven't heard you comment on so far is the splendid organizing that's going on in Wisconsin and Ohio. In Wisconsin, they recalled several Republican state senators. All those state senate Republicans have been there for at least four four-year terms. Two of them had not had a Democratic opponent in eight years. We knocked off one of those, and we missed knocking off a second one by 1,000 votes. They are just organizing. In Ohio, the organizing is so-- all the unions are working together, all the various groups are working together. They put on the ballot the repeal of collective bargaining ban that the governor had put in there. They needed 300,000 signatures to put it on the ballot. They organized, they turned in 1.3 million signatures. to put that on the ballot. And the largest number of votes Ohio has ever had yes or no on a ballot proposal, was 1.9 million. And then last November, a month ago, that thing won four to one or something like that. It was just phenomenal.
[00:59:04.99] PUN PLAMONDON: But they're organizing for a band-aid. They're not organizing for socialism. They're organizing for more capitalism.
[00:59:12.31] BOB ALEXANDER: Your point is well-taken. One of the things that you've alluded to--
[00:59:17.51] JOHN SINCLAIR: [INAUDIBLE] nerd program about the [INAUDIBLE].
[00:59:25.97] BOB ALEXANDER: Let me just finish. The major thing we obtained in the late '60s, early '70s, was people's opposition to an imperialistic war. We're the first empire in history where the people finally convinced the powerful, no, you're going to stop. I think you all were very, very instrumental in that. Thank you for all that you did. We need to look at what Ohio and Wisconsin are doing, and others, to organize here in Michigan. Some of us have got some petitions for putting the repeal of the prohibition on marijuana on the ballot in January. We'll be out in the hall as you go out. Others of us have-- it's not a petition, it's just signing up to support our January petition drive. The second one is for John Conyers's bill for Medicare. Improving and expanding Medicare for all in the United States. We support to be active on that. We'll be out in the hall if you want to help with that. Thank you very much for being here.
[01:00:25.75] JOHN SINCLAIR: Soon they'll be organizing against the emergency manager system. And I suggest that you sign us on that too.
[01:00:32.29] BOB ALEXANDER: That petition drive is going on.
[01:00:34.07] BRUCE: We have another question here. Could you identify who you are, please?
[01:00:40.93] JOHN SINCLAIR: I'm John Sinclair, I was just saying something. Excuse me.
[01:00:48.45] MARION SUNNY SINCLAIR: I'm Marion Sunny Sinclair. My question is actually directed toward my mother, Leni Sinclair, just because I've heard her speak on it before. I'd like to ask if you could talk about how the artists, the graphic artists, and the musicians all worked together to help free my father.
[01:01:13.13] LENI SINCLAIR: I don't know where to start.
[01:01:17.30] MARION SUNNY SINCLAIR: The politicians, the lawyers, the judges.
[01:01:20.84] LENI SINCLAIR: Yes, before John Sinclair was freed by John Lennon, we started organizing against the marijuana laws way back after his second arrest. We started an organization in 1965 called LEMA, which was started by Allen Ginsberg and some people in New York--
[01:01:41.76] JOHN SINCLAIR: Ed Sanders.
[01:01:42.74] LENI SINCLAIR: --Ed Sanders, in the late '50s or early '60s. LEMA stood for Legalize Marijuana. We started having lectures and educating people that marijuana was not narcotic like heroin and other narcotics. So it started then. When we all got busted in 1967, we held off the trial for about two years by a whole number of lawyers helping us with pretrial motions. One of them is sitting right over there.
[01:02:20.99] [APPLAUSE]
[01:02:28.41] LENI SINCLAIR: We challenged the law on a number of grounds. That it's not a narcotic, that young people are excluded from the juries. Anyway, after two and 1/2 years, after the last of all motions were denied, there was a very short trial lasting two or three days. Originally, John was charged with dispensing two marijuana cigarettes by giving two joints to a young lady who turned out to be an undercover police officer. Since John had already two prior convictions, he was facing 20 to life as a third offender.
[01:03:12.38] JOHN SINCLAIR: Everyone faced 20 to life. That was the penalty for sales and dispensing.
[01:03:18.07] LENI SINCLAIR: Possession was 10 years, and sales and dispensing was 20 to life. And that's what he was facing, 20 to life. The judge, Colombo, on his own accord reduced the charges to possession in order to get a conviction. Because if it was 20 to life, the jury might have found him not guilty. But since it was possession, the jury found him guilty and immediately he got snatched up and put away without appeal bond. [INAUDIBLE] was our lawyer at the time, and he said don't worry, don't worry. We'll get him out on appeal Monday. Well, it took two and 1/2 years before they finally gave him an appeal bond.
[01:04:12.26] But during that whole time, we worked on all kinds of fronts. We lobbied the legislature, we lobbied the governor, we lobbied in the newspapers. We put full-page ads in the Detroit Free Press. And there was one company, one person who was very instrumental in helping us was [? Maury Gleisher ?]. I don't know if anybody remembers. [? Maury Gleisher ?] had the agency that was responsible for elected Coleman Young and John Conyers and all these black politicians to our offices in Detroit. [? Maury Gleisher ?] took it upon himself and his firm to create a campaign that appealed to the so-called middle class.
[01:04:59.08] JOHN SINCLAIR: The white people.
[01:05:00.16] LENI SINCLAIR: The liberal white people. We had cocktail parties, we had demonstrations, we had press conferences in Lansing. Every time John had an appearance there would be a whole bunch of White Panthers and other people coming to the courthouse. So for two and 1/2 years while he was in jail, all our energies were geared towards survival and getting our leader out of jail. So when John Lennon came, it was like the cream of the top. It was like the last exclamation on a long struggle. And finally it worked and the doors sprang open.
[01:05:44.80] JOHN SINCLAIR: Finally, [INAUDIBLE].
[01:05:47.95] DAVID FENTON: I first met Leni in New York at a gathering of music industry and publishing and media people who had gathered to talk about John's case and what people in New York could do about it. You probably don't even remember that. That's the first time we met.
[01:06:04.68] LENI SINCLAIR: I got pictures.
[01:06:05.61] DAVID FENTON: Ah, so you do remember.
[01:06:09.49] PUN PLAMONDON: I'd like to take off on what Leni was talking about. Some of you probably know that Sinclair and I had a case that went to the US Supreme Court regarding wiretapping. Some of you probably also know that there was a point when I was charged, along with Sinclair, with conspiracy to bomb the local Ann Arbor CIA office.
[01:06:35.63] [APPLAUSE]
[01:06:39.85] PUN PLAMONDON: Kind of tepid applause on that one.
[01:06:42.46] [APPLAUSE]
[01:06:48.11] PUN PLAMONDON: I was only charged, I've never admitted or denied doing it.
[01:06:53.57] [INTERPOSING VOICES]
[01:06:56.20] JOHN SINCLAIR: Pun, Pun. They Didn't really exist, did they?
[01:07:00.84] BRUCE: But I think the point is you were the first hippie to be placed on the FBI's [INAUDIBLE].
[01:07:06.23] PUN PLAMONDON: That's what it says in the People's Almanac.
[01:07:10.16] DAVID FENTON: You'd go into post offices and you'd see Pun's picture on the wall.
[01:07:13.68] AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE].
[01:07:17.64] [SIDE CONVERSATION]
[01:07:29.65] PUN PLAMONDON: When we went to the Supreme Court with that wiretapping case, first of all, in Detroit Judge Damon Keith ruled in our favor. We argued that the wiretapping of me was illegal because they did not have a warrant. And of course, the government-- now, when I say the government we're talking about Richard Nixon, John Mitchell, J. Edgar Hoover-- they were saying we don't need a warrant because Plamondon's a threat to national security. I know we've heard that just recently.
[01:08:01.17] Keith ruled that we could still go to trial. All you have to do is release the logs or release the wiretaps to the defendants. The government refused. They went to the Court of Appeals in Cincinnati. We won a three-judge panel in Cincinnati, they ruled in our favor. Again, the remedy was release the logs or the wiretaps to the defendants and to their attorneys. Again, the government refused. They went to the US Supreme Court. The Supreme Court unanimously ruled in our favor, that you needed a warrant to wiretap people. Again, the remedy was release the goddamn logs. The government would not.
[01:08:46.15] So the question arises, why wouldn't they release these logs? Here's my speculation. Before I went underground-- like Leni was talking about-- Genie P. And the whole party, all 35 of us were working tirelessly to get John or to get money so we could give some money to the lawyers so they could have gas money to drive, whatever. We're just working. My job, at that time we had a plan where we were going to take out a full-page ad in the Detroit Free Press. And this full-page ad would be signed by Stevie Wonder and Bob Seger and various significant not just artists and musicians, but political people. John Conyers, on and on. We were going to get these big signatures of all these prominent people in Michigan.
[01:09:40.27] So as part of my job trying to get those signatures, I called the archbishop of Detroit. Hey, you've got to sign this petition because we're not saying that marijuana should be legal, all we're saying is that he has a right to appeal bond. I called my senator. At that time, it was Senator Griffin. Senator Griffin, you ought to sign this because this is constitutional, this is a constitutional issue. He has a right to appeal bond, nonviolent crime. So I was calling the mayor of Detroit, the mayor of Grand Rapids, like I said, the archbishop. All these people. I think that's why they won't release the logs. Because no one gives a shit if they have wiretapped this Commie Pun Plamondon. But when they wiretap me, they're also wiretapping whoever I called. Now here's the bishop saying, what do you mean I'm on the wiretap? Or here's a senator. That's why I think, because those are the people that they don't want to offend. They don't care about people in this room.
[01:10:46.70] JOHN SINCLAIR: There's a sidebar to that, too.
[01:10:48.29] PUN PLAMONDON: Go to it.
[01:10:48.91] JOHN SINCLAIR: They also find out that in total violation of the law, they were wiretapping the deliberations of our defense team while we were in court. This was totally verboten. They couldn't let that be let on. They got busted for that in Chicago inadvertently and it was the biggest scandal of the whole Chicago Seven trial. That they were wiretapping the defense team while they were forming their defense strategy in their private legal room.
[01:11:22.79] LENI SINCLAIR: They didn't even have to do that. They had somebody right there writing everything down. We had our central committee meetings where we discussed our strategy for getting John out of jail, we went to [? Delhi ?] Park. We sat under a tree because we knew our house was bugged. But little did we know, about 25 years later we find out there was an informant that was living with us who wrote everything down.
[01:11:47.81] BRUCE: Who was that?
[01:11:48.46] LENI SINCLAIR: We don't know.
[01:11:49.75] DAVID FENTON: All the names are blacked out on the police files, so we don't know. I was telling the library today, somebody should go and find out who it was.
[01:11:58.89] LENI SINCLAIR: How?
[01:11:59.86] DAVID FENTON: I think you could find it out. If somebody really looked into it, I think they could discover it.
[01:12:05.89] BRUCE: Question?
[01:12:08.14] DAVID FENTON: How about Jerry? Jerry's been waiting a long time.
[01:12:20.26] JERRY: You were talking about John's motivation for coming to the concert, but he also did a recording called "John Sinclair" and the motivation I think is obvious for that, and would apply to the other. Also, Genie, you talked about '50s and '60s. I think it's exactly political. It's people wanting to be different from what was. They couldn't stomach what was, and they had to change. And that's where it began. And one more thing. All that you're talking about required a lot of press.
[01:12:57.19] LENI SINCLAIR: That's where you come in.
[01:13:00.47] JERRY: I will take a little credit for that, working on the radio.
[01:13:04.53] [APPLAUSE]
[01:13:09.21] JERRY: Whenever there was a rally, whether it be for John, or let's say the mobilization committee against the war in Vietnam on the campus of Wayne State University. It was always announced at least a couple of days ahead of time, and on that day, on WAVX. I think that was a part of the whole deal.
[01:13:27.54] PUN PLAMONDON: I gotta jump in here because I got a beautiful story and I've been wanting to tell Fenton how much I love and appreciate him. There was a time after the wiretap issue-- John had been released from prison and I had been released from prison-- and a short time later-- I know I should be telling this story with some shame, but I'm an unrepentant radical. But anyway, I got hooked up in a 30-pound marijuana deal up in Beulah, Michigan and got arrested and was taken to court, along with a local resident here, and I don't have permission to use his name.
[01:14:10.44] But anyway, we went to trial up there on a big pot charge. Fenton came up and lived in the defense house with us, and he had his little cassette recorder. God, he had that recorder everywhere. I've never seen him without it. In fact, this is the first time. But now he's got a phone. After every day of court, Fenton would find somebody-- a spectator, or the defendant, or the defendant's attorney, or try to get an interview with the prosecutor.
[01:14:46.20] And so he'd make this little tape on his cassette. Then we'd go back to the trial house, Fenton would take the phone off, take the mouthpiece off the phone, hook these two little alligator clips up to the phone, he'd call this guy over here, Jerry Lubin. Who was on the radio, WABX, and say hey, man. I got a feed from Plamondon's trial. And Lubin and his cohorts would run this live feed from Cadillac where we were going to trial about the latest on the Pun Plamondon trial. It just blew me away that, one, Fenton knew how to do this. And two, that someone had organized us enough to get a radio station to play our shit.
[01:15:40.90] BRUCE: Just one more thing. Everybody here should read Pun's book. It's a fabulous story of everything that we're talking about, and it's very well-written. Read it, get it.
[01:15:53.71] PUN PLAMONDON: Thank you.
[01:15:54.70] [SIDE CONVERSATION]
[01:15:58.49] JERRY: Yeah, read Pun's book. Beautiful advice. Thanks, Jerry. I wanted to say that when the Freedom of Information Act was passed, I got a notice, and I actually got a file. And they told me that at the age of 15, when I was attending tribal council meetings, that got me on their shit list. It was a great honor. But I want to say that--
[01:16:26.31] JOHN SINCLAIR: You are a dedicated enemy of the state.
[01:16:28.56] JERRY: Yes, sir. You people were great role models. I mean that, because a real role model can teach you by their actions what you ought to do, and what maybe you ought not to do. And we all learn this way, correct? But I just wanted to thank you. You kept us off needle drugs, you kept us from taking pharmaceutical pills to get high. And most importantly, you showed us that we need to pay attention to African-American culture and the culture that is not necessarily part of the dominant group. And that is your lasting legacy that changed my life. Thank you. I love you. Thank you, each of you.
[01:17:25.74] BRUCE: That was why, during my introduction, I said we didn't have to wait for the legends to come to town, they were already here. They really were. Another question here.
[01:17:35.25] AUDIENCE: Amen. I was 19 going to Wayne State, met my wife there, my son is going there now. We're lifelong Detroiters. From a Detroit point of view, Ann Arbor was Pepperland.
[01:17:55.51] JOHN SINCLAIR: That's why we moved here. We were tired of the Blue Meanies.
[01:18:01.65] AUDIENCE: It took until '90 to do it. But I wanted to say that I listened to that concert live on WABX that night. Tape recorded it onto a reel. It's buried somewhere. But the idea that you guys were role models was true, because you guys are only a few years older than me.
[01:18:21.46] JOHN SINCLAIR: That was the idea, though.
[01:18:24.19] AUDIENCE: I'm convinced that there are millions of people who heard that directly or indirectly that are my age, upper middle aged--
[01:18:37.19] [LAUGHTER]
[01:18:39.34] AUDIENCE: --upper middle aged. But we are a latent force.
[01:18:42.52] JOHN SINCLAIR: We can say it proud, we're old people now.
[01:18:46.97] AUDIENCE: But we're a latent force. We're aware of the Stockholm Syndrome, and everything that you guys are saying is right on. I want to see somehow for all of us to carry this on, tell the kids, find the venue, find the new ABX-- whether it's viral on YouTube or whatever-- and kick some ass.
[01:19:11.13] [APPLAUSE]
[01:19:19.51] JOHN SINCLAIR: I was trying to tell some kids about free concerts. We used to have free concerts every Sunday here in the parks in Ann Arbor. We fought with the police for years to get it established. And they were saying wow, that's incredible. I said well no, really you just have to have a band that wants to play, and you have to have a space, and then you go down there and play. And then people come because they want to come to a free concert. It's not hard at all. You just have to overcome the brainwashing of the entertainment industry that there's no such thing as a free concert. Unless it's sponsored by Shell Oil or somebody. Even Shell Oil makes you pay for the Jazz & Heritage Festival.
[01:20:00.84] DIANE RIPLEY: I am Diane Ripley and I lived at the Hill House from 1973 to 1974. I was not part of the earlier White Panthers. But I am very curious as to how you did support yourself financially at that time, and what the day-to-day dynamics were.
[01:20:24.31] JOHN SINCLAIR: There's a statute of limitations on that.
[01:20:28.74] DIANE RIPLEY: How was your day determined? Who did what? How was it determined who did what? And what were your daily activities like?
[01:20:42.47] PUN PLAMONDON: When I got arrested, [? Buddy ?] Davis said, don't answer any of those kinds of questions. And that was 40 years ago, but I'm still under that order.
[01:20:53.43] DAVID FENTON: That's an answer.
[01:20:54.63] JOHN SINCLAIR: Why don't you tell them about my brother?
[01:20:55.70] AUDIENCE: All right. [INAUDIBLE].
[01:21:00.89] PUN PLAMONDON: Who are you?
[01:21:03.27] FUZZY: [INAUDIBLE]. Fuzzy. -- do this emotionally. Going to use my poker face.
[01:21:12.59] JOHN SINCLAIR: Fuzzy, the hero of the South University Riots in 1969.
[01:21:16.80] FUZZY: We all had our moments. By the way. We all had our moments during those times. To answer that, David Sinclair was a tremendous role model for me. I was a young kid when I came to the scene. And I'm from Ann Arbor, Michigan. I was born and raised here. But my family had moved away and then I'd run away from home at 15,16. I was on the streets and, as this gentleman here was talking about, there was all kinds of bad stuff going on when you were that age. You didn't have enough respect yet.
[01:21:50.62] You can look at it now and you can say, man, I would never have shot drugs. That was so stupid. Well, I totally agree with you. And anybody in their right mind would say that, but a lot of that stuff was going on and a lot of young kids who were getting into a lot of really bad stuff. And this group right up here saved my life. [INAUDIBLE]. I'll talk about it. I'll talk about David. We had a bunch of young guys come in, young people. Boys and girls. We came in and David was a guy that seemed like he did all the-- he was not in the spotlight. He wore the mantle of responsibility. David could always be counted on, no matter what had to be done. If there's a dirty job that had to be done, David Sinclair would volunteer to do it. He would get it done. There was nothing that he couldn't do.
[01:22:41.98] He was managing the Up band. They were putting on concerts, he would do all the setup. He would go in and take all the equipment up there for all these free concerts, they'd build the stages. He was in charge of all that stuff. He was in charge of making sure we had food in the house. He was in charge of making sure the vehicles operated or we had vehicles. There was gas money. And you know what? I don't know how we'd pay for it. We'd get up about 12:00 because we always stayed up real late. So around noon, they'd come kicking at us and David and these guys would go, here, take these newspapers. Go sell some newspapers on street. That's my reality. We did everything we could, from selling newspapers to whatever else we had, or financial allies, cultural allies.
[01:23:28.02] JOHN SINCLAIR: We used to call them [INAUDIBLE].
[01:23:31.26] FUZZY: There was a lot of pot smoking going on, and that had to come from somewhere.
[01:23:34.65] JOHN SINCLAIR: [INAUDIBLE].
[01:23:36.12] FUZZY: But I just want to say, in terms of role models, you guys really-- I don't care what happened later. I don't care about the ups and downs of life and the ups and downs in all these years that have gone by, it doesn't mean shit to me. What means something to me is what you guys were to me. You took a lot of us in. I've got six kids, three grandkids, doing great. I got a bestselling book out, I'm an author. I don't think I would have lived beyond another six months if I had to make it by myself. So I appreciate you very much.
[01:24:10.48] [APPLAUSE]
[01:24:20.67] JONATHAN DOBSON: First of all, I admire you guys greatly. Thank you very much for everything you've done. Jonathan Dobson from Missoula, Montana. This is pursuant to Occupy Wall Street. If all of the efforts that they do inside lead to nothing more than just creating more tyranny, oppression, disparity, and equity, would you ever advocate any type of organized violent revolution against such tyranny and oppression? And at what point would you?
[01:24:56.48] JOHN SINCLAIR: We did. It didn't work. They had much more guns than us. We surrendered on that issue because there was no way to win.
[01:25:05.83] DAVID FENTON: I think that was a fantasy. I think there's a lot more lessons in Martin Luther King and Gandhi than anything else from contemporary society.
[01:25:23.07] PUN PLAMONDON: As a former minister of defense. You know how I got to be minister of defense? I was the only one who ever shot a gun before.
[01:25:33.94] [LAUGHTER] But I agree with what was said earlier. I think it's fantasy. I think for the first time in history, it's unnecessary violence. I think with the internet and with the technology. And I've always believed this, going way back to '68, that what was needed was the cultural revolution. In all the other revolutions around the world , they had the political revolution, then they had the cultural revolution where they tried to change all these capitalists into socialists. What I'm saying is because of the technology and because of our wealth as a nation, we have the ability to create the cultural revolution first and then adapt the political revolution to it. I know that's counter-something. Genie, I'm sorry.
[01:26:41.13] GENIE PARKER: Diane had asked about how we lived. Did you guys want to hear about that kind of stuff? Leni's real good at that stuff.
[01:26:49.81] JOHN SINCLAIR: When do the smokers get a break?
[01:26:53.04] GENIE PARKER: Go take a break.
[01:26:55.02] JOHN SINCLAIR: I'm an addict.
[01:26:56.00] GENIE PARKER: I used to be. We lived in a huge, big house. You guys know the houses, right? There were two of them. Everybody had their own rooms, couples had their own rooms. We shared bathrooms. You took care of your own areas. Somebody built us this enormous, long table. It was bigger than this one, wasn't it? It was huge and beautiful.
[01:27:20.29] JOHN SINCLAIR: [INAUDIBLE].
[01:27:22.10] GENIE PARKER: And we would sit around, and sometimes we would eat together. Sometimes we wouldn't. We had people who would make big things of food. Most of the time, we didn't have enough money. But you would take care of your own place, your own area. And then we would wait until everything got so bad in the other areas, somebody would clean it up. Usually Leni. The mother. Some of us would help.
[01:27:46.24] PUN PLAMONDON: Pun.
[01:27:47.05] GENIE PARKER: Basically. And how did we make our living? The bands. We had the MC5. This is the legal way, what we can say. We had the bands, we had the Up, we had people who would help us. And David was the rock of that. He was our financial manager. He was the one who took care of the every day. Making sure we had enough money to pay the rent. And when we didn't, then he would negotiate and help. And we were always behind, we were always having trouble. But luckily, the people who owned houses worked with us enough that we got through for a long time.
[01:28:23.48] AUDIENCE: Who did the cooking?
[01:28:24.85] LENI SINCLAIR: Frank. Frank Buck.
[01:28:27.91] DAVID FENTON: There was a chart system. When I got there, people had assigned roles.
[01:28:37.01] GENIE PARKER: That was later.
[01:28:38.42] JOHN SINCLAIR: [INAUDIBLE].
[01:28:39.83] DAVID FENTON: One of the people who lived in the commune was telling my wife last night that when I first got to Ann Arbor and I was assigned chores of cleaning up, I confessed to him that I had never cleaned before. So we had this chart system, and it got very complicated. There were no computers. 35 people who was supposed to do what and on what day, and all the other responsibilities. We were hippies, it's true. But we were very active, activist, engaged in the world, organizing hippies. It's kind of a weird contradiction.
[01:29:13.87] JOHN SINCLAIR: Hippies are just the idiotic stoners that they've portrayed them to be.
[01:29:18.56] DAVID FENTON: This was part of the whole cause influence. But I was assigned, for example, once a week I had to take care of three children from about right after dinner, and sleep with them, and wake up in the morning with them and change their diapers, and take care of them and soothe them. And I had never been around kids before. And that was an assignment once a week. You were in charge of the children, or you had to cook, or you had to watch the front desk, or you had to answer the telephone, or clean up certain areas. It was very complicated. But for long periods of time, I'd have to say, it mostly worked. Things were organized.
[01:30:01.93] JOHN SINCLAIR: As long as you got to do the things that you wanted to do in the [INAUDIBLE].
[01:30:05.76] DAVID FENTON: Well, you kind of just did them.
[01:30:08.46] LENI SINCLAIR: Let me explain how it started, how this communal child-rearing business started. Frank had a baby and when his wife split up from the commune or left, he became a single father. And at the same time, my husband was in jail and I was a single mother with two small children. And so Frank was the leader of the Up and the lead singer. They were an economic tool that brought money into the commune. So Frank was faced with the dilemma most single parents have. Do I go to work, or do I take care of my child?
[01:30:56.90] And there was a little baby. So sometimes Frank would take Una in a little bassinet, put her under the stage while he's onstage playing this loud, loud rock and roll music. After a while, we decided, this isn't going to work. So we started having other people help us take care of the kids while he went to work. And then that translated also to helping them with my kids. Pretty soon we had a chart. Two hour increments, you take care of kids, you take care of the cooking, you take of the front office. We had a front office that we would answer the phones. It was also a store. When Diane was asking how we supported ourselves, we were always making things. We were always making headbands or beads or candles or pillows or t-shirts or flags. We were always making things.
[01:31:50.27] In fact, we started a business called the Rainbow Trucking Company. We didn't have a truck, but we called it that. The Rainbow Trucking Company was distributing things that we made to head shops in southeastern Michigan. So we would give newspapers, buttons, bumper stickers, Free John Sinclair items, we would distribute them to the people who sold them. That was the Rainbow Trucking Company. Always, we had benefits. Bands always volunteered to help us out. Every band in town. This is something that is, I think, unique to Detroit and Michigan. The bands and their fans are so united. What band has not played a benefit for some cause? They all did, including Bob Seeger and Mitch Ryder. In fact, Mitch Ryder played so many benefits that when John got out of jail, he became his manager.
[01:32:58.92] So the people's music. And then, of course, we had Gary Grimshaw designing beautiful posters, flyers, and working for the Ann Arbor Sun. That is just one of the most beautiful newspapers. And everybody can see that now. freeingjohnsinclair.org, by the Ann Arbor Public Library, digitized every issue of the Ann Arbor Sun from those days. So if people are interested, they can follow week to week what was happening. A lot of shit was happening every week. You can tell by the ads and everything.
[01:33:43.48] And then when we got into community organizing, first we had a massive voter registration drive. We were all deputized as voter registrars. In fact, David Fenton's picture up there at the library shows me as a voter registrar signing up John to vote. When we registered enough people, we had a powerful contingent. The Rainbow People's Party and the Human Rights Party got together and re-elected two people to City Council in '73.
[01:34:25.35] PUN PLAMONDON: Two.
[01:34:26.90] LENI SINCLAIR: Anyway, by having three Democrats, two Humans, and four Republicans, we ruled this town. We ruled this town for two years. It was a golden age. We had money for daycare, we had money for free school, we had money for the people's ballroom, money for the tribal council.
[01:34:47.92] DAVID FENTON: Free clinics.
[01:34:50.82] LENI SINCLAIR: Like kind of a utopian society.
[01:34:52.90] DAVID FENTON: It was social democracy in Ann Arbor.
[01:34:55.33] LENI SINCLAIR: It was the golden age. And then after two years of that beautiful coalition, the Human Rights Party was infiltrated by some anarchists or infiltrators or government agents who split the party right in half.
[01:35:08.68] PUN PLAMONDON: [INAUDIBLE].
[01:35:10.58] LENI SINCLAIR: Republicans got back in office. No matter what they tried, they still never got rid of the $5 marijuana fine. They upped it to $50, but it's still only a misdemeanor.
[01:35:24.48] DAVID FENTON: I heard it was $25?
[01:35:26.19] LENI SINCLAIR: And the food co-op that we started back then, it's still going strong on 5th Street. Every time I come here, I try to go shop there.
[01:35:35.66] BRUCE: OK, we've got time for two last questions here. One over here, and one--
[01:35:43.01] JACK BRISBANE: My name's Jack Brisbane, and this question goes to Dick and Pun. This has to do with the Occupy Wall Street group. Do you think the Occupy Wall Street momentum can continue all the way into November of 2012 elections?
[01:36:00.77] DAVID FENTON: I do. I think it will. These kids aren't going away. They're not. And they're organizing online now, and they've already had a huge impact. I think it's going to continue and grow, I have no doubt about it. And there's another effort that's merging with it, which is called the American Dream Movement, led by a very charismatic guy named Van Jones. I think you'll be hearing a lot from them.
[01:36:31.55] JOHN SINCLAIR: Everybody gets their own house.
[01:36:32.97] PUN PLAMONDON: I was encouraged recently when I heard that some of the Occupy people are getting involved in the anti-foreclosure medicine movement, as well as the one that interests me the most, which I have the most affinity with, is squatters. People literally just finding old houses being foreclosed on and kicking in the door and setting up housekeeping. If you don't have nowhere to live and they've got an empty house, it's a no-brainer.
[01:37:06.00] BRUCE CONFORTH: Just because winter is coming in some areas doesn't mean that the Occupy is going to end. It's manifesting itself in a lot of different ways now, which is one of the most beautiful things about it. That it's branching out into so many of those other areas. We have time for one last question.
[01:37:24.41] ODELLE: My name is [? Odelle ?] [INAUDIBLE]. At this time in Europe, we had May '68, we had Czechoslovakia, we had China with Mao. How much were you influenced by international politics? Were you thinking about it? Did you discuss it? What place did it take in your movements? Thank you.
[01:37:47.19] DAVID FENTON: Leni's the European here.
[01:37:53.29] PUN PLAMONDON: I functioned not very well, but I still functioned as a so-called international news editor, which was really quite simple. I had the newspaper out of Cuba, the Granma. I had some socialist papers, and I had, like Fenton was talking about, the Liberation News Service. And I would just clip or circle whatever anything had to do on the international scale with young people or people in motion against their oppression. So I didn't do it very well.
[01:38:28.61] GENIE PARKER: You did, though, because one of the things that would happen was Pun would bring things up and tell us what was going on in different places and we'd get excited. We were like, wow, look, this isn't just us. This is all over the world. Things are happening and people are caring and trying to do things. So it was very inspiring to be able to see.
[01:38:48.00] PUN PLAMONDON: So like I was saying, I did a real good job.
[01:38:50.77] [LAUGHTER]
[01:38:59.15] JOHN SINCLAIR: Always quick on the uptake.
[01:39:02.11] ALAN HABER: Hello, I'm Alan Haber, Students for a Democratic Society.
[01:39:05.70] [APPLAUSE]
[01:39:13.49] ALAN HABER: So this is beautiful. You all are. What happened happened, and now here we are. Everybody here, somewhere, has been touched in this struggle. And this is really the time, and the people in the streets have seen it, that we need to take a next step. And one of those steps is really in thinking through what we have learned in these various experiences. Each of us has taken our life course. And as you may have calculated at least, this next spring will be the 50 year anniversary of the effort to make a political document, the Port Huron Statement
[01:39:54.58] And that's an effort from that generation and everybody since to revisit what we thought then and look forward to what is needed in the situation we are in now, and what the movement for Democratic society and those trying to promote this rethinking thinking together-- as Isaiah once said-- would be a good idea. If we think together and put our thoughts together, and maybe there are various thoughts. It's a manifesto we could maybe think is a many-fisto. There are many fists in this consciousness here. And I want to put out the plea that you each see yourself engaged in an effort now in the next months to think what you have been through, and join in participating in this project of gathering our thoughts and trying to focus.
[01:40:47.01] By next spring, to have a gathering. By next summer, the 50 years of Port Huron, to have a big convocation. Can we really think together and see what are our many fists? What have we learned? What have we distilled out of these agonies and ecstasies into a positive movement to transform this country? It is not a reform, it's a new system. People are saying it in the streets. We've discovered our dictator, like the Egyptians have, the Tunisians have, the Syrians have. Our dictator has its face in Wall Street, but it's in a system with its tentacles all through our lives. How do we expel this dictator out of our lives? That's the challenge now. And this panel is a good start in our own rethinking where we're all that. I wanted to say that. We're Seniors for a Democratic Society now.
[01:41:35.99] [LAUGHTER]
[01:41:47.40] ALAN HABER: Strugglers and seekers, survivors is one thing. But it's really, join up. We suffer for the lack of the continuity of the Rainbow People's Party, of the White Panther Party, of the Rainbow Party, of the Students for Democratic Society, of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating. This continuity of the movement that was in your face, direct action, tell the truth, we need it again. We need to join up. Find your organization, get connected, think together.
[01:42:20.22] ELI: OK, I'm afraid that's all the time we have. Thank you all very much for coming. A big hand for our panel. Thank you all for being a part of this. Be sure to check it out at freeingjohnsinclair.org.

Media

December 10, 2011 at the University of Michigan: Michigan Union Pendleton Room

Length: 1:43:00

Copyright: Creative Commons (Attribution, Non-Commercial, Share-alike)

Rights Held by: Ann Arbor District Library

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Local History
History
American Cultures