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Blue-Tail Fly, No. 10 Blue-Tail Fly, Inc., 1969- 400dpi TIFF G4 page images Lexington, Ky. : Blue-Tail Fly, Inc., 1969- Lexington, Kentucky 2010 2008ua008_1_10 These pages may freely searched and displayed. Permission must be received for subsequent distribution in print or electronically. This is the hi-resolution version of this text. Blue-Tail Fly, No. 10 Blue-Tail Fly, Inc., 1969- Lexington, Ky. : Blue-Tail Fly, Inc., 1969- Lexington, Kentucky. ?? This electronic text file was created by Optical Character Recognition (OCR). No corrections have been made to the OCR-ed text and no editing has been done to the content of the original document. Encoding has been done through an automated process using the recommendations for Level 1 of the TEI in Libraries Guidelines. Digital page images are linked to the text file. These drills are used in a form of surfaoe-mining known as augering... The Appalachian Tragedy, page 5 Harry Caudill; photos by Arthur Tress photographs: Dicran Derderian, pages 8-9 Yossarian is 47 years old now, page 10 Darrell Rice And the black lung fight continues, page 13 David Holwerk A fizzadelic report on the Governor's drug conference, page 14 Chuck the Trucker verse: Short Takes, by Anselm Hollo covers, front and back: photographs by Arthur Tress The blue-tail fly is published monthly by blue-tail fly, inc., P.O. Box 7304, Lexington, Ky. 40502. We still like to think of ourselves as a cross between the Sons of the Pioneers and the newsboys in "Mr. Smith Goes to Washington. " Conspiracy, vol. II By Jon Hillson SEATTLE (CPS)-Perhaps you've heard the new saying: "spread the word about Seattle," and wondered exactly what that word is. It rymes with Chicago. The Seattle conspiracy trial began on November 23 in Tacoma. On April IS, 1970, eight people were indicted by a federal grand jury and charged with conspiring, combining, confederating and agreeing together to commit offenses against the United States in violation of 18 USC 371, 2101, and 1361. The charges stem from a demonstration-riot held on February 16 in protest of the Chicago 7 convictions. Federal indictments"issued at the behest of the Justice Department"came over the protests of Seattle's local prosecuting apparatus. Since they were handed down, there has been a virtual news black-out of indictments, the trial, pre-trial defense and the history of the local movement upon which such heavy repression has fallen. To recapitulate, then, we go back to late January, 1970, on the campus of the University of Washington, in Seattle. WHAT WAS THE SEATTLE LIBERATION FRONT? Michael Lerner, at that time an assistant professor of philosophy at UW, soon to become one of the Seattle 8"at 27 a teacher and a veteran of the Bay Area radical movement"began reformulating the "new form" of radical organization. The autonomous collective, as it was called, was to serve as the arena for individual grcwth as well as the vehicle for socialist action. Lerner"since "not rehired" by his departmental colleagues"found early success in his classes. Action centered around » tax-incentive program in the general Seattle area, which has an unemployment that spans both blue collar and white collar working class and is estimated to be about 15 percent. Work on the tax incentive program centered on door-to-door campaigns, leafletting unemployment offices armed with coffee and donuts and talking to students, as well as pushing the program. Leadership emerged in the Sundance collective"each collective took names"a group composed of Lerner and a bulk of the others indicted for conspiracy. Among them"Chip Marshall, Joe Kelly, Jeff Dowd and Mike Abels"were cited for crossing state lines and using interstate commerce for the intent of inciting riot. The four"and several others"had migrated from Ithaca, New York, in December of 1969 to live and do political work in Seattle. Many of the "Ithaca people" had backgrounds in SDS" some in Weathermen"but left the group because of sharp political disagreements. The fledgling organization called demonstrations in protest of the conviction of the Chicago 7 on February 16. Reports on crowd size vary"the Seattle commercial papers, both arch-conservative, guessed 2,000, others cite 3,000. The crowd erupted as it neared the federal building as rocks broke government windows. Police, appearing from a nearby building, put on, according to many on the scene, an uncommonly brutal show, beating nonviolent demonstrators with vigor. Nona* of the eight conspiracy defendants were arrested at the demonstration. Eighty participants were, and the Seattle investigating grand jury reported that "at least half" or about 1,000 in their estimate, topk an "active" part in the melee. The massive demonstrations around the country varried in the amount of property damage exacted. While over 20,000 peaceful demonstrators marched in Boston, the Associated Press chose only to report the street-fight engagement blue-tail fly number ten W staff: Bucky Young, Guy Mendes, Darrell Rice, David Holwerk, Sue Anne Salmon, Julie Mendes, Irving Washington, Chuck the Trucker, Helen Roach, Rick Bell, Jonathan Greene, Don Pratt, Gretchen Mar cum Brown, Harold Gage, Diana Ryan, Phil Patton, Tony Urie, Larry Keilkopf, Eddie Smith, Margie Singler, Jim Stacey, Anne Deeley and many, many more. between 5,000 militants and Boston police. In spite of the report, the Boston demonstration gave Harvard Square its Baptism of fire. Demonstrations in numerous cities were larger than Seattle's, and in Berkeley and Boston at least, the intensity of combat and the amount of damage was higher than Seattle. Frantic SLF activity-inwardly and outwardly"followed. The Day After (TDA) demonstration Collectives developed rapidly, gushing young people"numerous UW students"into radical politics for the first time. The freneticism of events, the rapidity of action and growth manifest weaknesses and faults in the SLF. The most cutting aspect was male supremacy. Leadership soon took the familiar male dominated flavor; the swaggering, hip lifestyle of the Sundance collective veneered what many women began to see as an oppressive, machismo form. This contradiction would fester internally for months as women sought to personnally confront and work out the problem. In early April, the Federal Bureau of Investigation conducted a private press conference with the Seattle commercial media. More like a battle briefing, its ramifications perhaps will only be decided by the jury. Replete with international-conspiracy paranoia, the Seattle media began a hysterical campaign against the SLF"particularly through attacks on its self-proclaimed leadership, Lerner, Marshall, Dowd and Kelley. WHY A SEATTLE CONSPIRACY? Knowing that Seattle's TDA was by no means unique, why federal conspiracy indictments, over the protests of local prosecuting authorities? To begin with, Seattle, an isolated city, has been a testing ground for repression. Seattle's general strike during which workers shut down the city precipitated mass detention, deportation and busting of scores of militant socialist, communist and anarchist workers at the end of post-World War I recessions. Raids on trade unions, harassment and repression"minimized by the media"paved the way for then Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer to institute, shortly thereafter, similar escapades on a national level; the infamous Palmer Raids. Thousands of militant workers were deported and jailed"no knocks, of course-W a 24-hour period and broke the back of the trade-union's revolutionary wing. Seattle workers, expecting their general strike to move nationally, retreated in militant action: then-isolation set the pace for a dryrun, and Palmer took the experiment's results nationally. Three decades later, before few people outside of Wisconsin knew then"Senator Joseph McCarthy, local witch-hunt hearings went on in Seattle, as the red-scare was tested in the isolated Northwest. More than possibly, McCarthy had an eye not only to the Puget Sounds, but to reaction around the country. With "reds" scared in Seattle, and with a nation una wakened to the coming of its saddest days, McCarthy mounted a podium whose base had the mark of Seattle lumber. Thus, the Seattle Conspiracy trial not only fits into a general strategy of repression" from busting student body president moderates at Kent State to Black Panthers in Detroit"but into an historical pattern. State abortion law challenged Kentucky's abortion law, similar to those already struck down in four states, is being challenged as unconstitutional. Three federal judges were to rule on the constitutionality of K.R.S. 436.020 at a Dec. 10 hearing in Covington. Challenging the law is Dr. Yasuo 2/Number Ten Sasaki, a northern Kentucky physician. On Nov. 17 he was sentenced to a year in prison and fined $1,000 for violation of the abortion act. He is appealing that decision. The charge was filed by Kathleen Iatrides, whom Dr. Sasaki examined twice in August for pregnacy. Both tests proved negative. Later that month, he was called to the patient's home by her mother. Mrs. Iatrides was seriously ill, and an examination led Dr. Sasaki to believe she may have tried a self-induced abortion She was later admitted to a hospital and the charges against Dr. Sasaki were filed. This case led to the constitutional challenge. In a brief Dr. Sasaki's attorney, William Allison, argues that the law is unconstitutionally vague and indefinite and that it deprives patient and physician of first, fourth, fifth, ninth and fourteenth amendment rights. The law forbids abortion unless necessary to preserve the life of the mother. The brief argues that this provides insufficient warning to physician and court which conditions justify abortion. According to the brief, the law invades the privacy of the physician-patient relationship, places a legal liability on medical opinion and imposes a cruel and unjust punishment on the physician. It further argues that the law impinges on the right of women to choose whether to have children, as guaranteed by the ninth amendment. Four states"Maryland, the District of Columbia, Texas and Wisconsin"have already had abortion laws struck down as unconstitutional. Whatever the decision of the three federal judges, Allison believes the case will be appealed to the Supreme Court by one side or the other. It's treaty time BERKELEY (CPS)-Using the method of initiative, a group in Berkeley is planning to circulate petitions to place on next April's city ballot a proposal for a peace treaty between the people of Berkeley and the National Liberation Front of Vietnam The petition, which if passed by the Berkeley citizenry would become a city ordinance, first needs enough signatures to equal five percent of the entire vote cast in the last municipal election to make it on the ballot. At this time, that means approximately 1,800 signatures, which can easily be collected from the registered voters attending the University of California at Berkeley. The petition, in addition to authorizing five representatives of the city to become delegates to the NLF and Vietnamese people, demands that the United States withdraw its troops from Southeast Asia and cease to support the present South Vietnamese government. It also declares that no Berkeley citizen will serve in the war. If the proposal were to pass, Berkeley would have to secede from the Union. The U.S. Constitution explicitly prohibits the signing of treaties by any local government. On Charger! On Firebird! On Pinto! Liberation News Service In America, car is King. More people have jobs related to the auto industry than any other industry in the American economy. Thirty per cent of the nation's consumption of sheet, bar and strip steel goes for the manufacture of automobiles; the auto industry consumes 70% of the rubber, 50% of the lead, 45% of the malleable iron, 35% of the zinc, 12% of the nickel, 11% of thealuminum and 9% of the copper used in this country. The major share of oil and gas consumption also goes to automobiles. Auto production is woven into the entire fabric of this country. Many of the resources for production and use of autos must be obtained from Third World countries; 80% of the rubber used in the U.S. comes straight from Southeast Asia, where the U.S. is fighting largely to defend and expand its access to such resources as rubber and oil There is an interlocking directorship of corporations in the various sections of the auto industry and in nearly all other important sectors of the economy. The directors of GM, for example, sit on the boards of three major oil companies and four major steel companies. The auto giants also have enormous defense contracts. GM alone has a yearly business of more than $580 million in government military contracts. They make everything from fighter planes to diesel parts. GM turns out 230,000 M-16 rifles yearly, rifles that are used to kill Vietnamese and to fight other of America's wars. General Motors, the largest of the big three auto makers (the other two are Ford and Chrysler) produces one out of every three vehicles made in the non-socialist world. GM is an international giant who need pay no attention to national or continental boundaries. GM has assembly plants in Latin America, Africa and Asia. In South Africa, where GM has been since 1926, wage slavery is developed to a high degree. In a country with 11 million blacks and 3 million whites, cheap non white labor makes up the foundation of the South African economy. Blacks have no political or trade-union rights, they are forbidden by law to strike for better wages or working conditions, even though their pay averages less than one-eighth that of whites. Not only do the auto giants exploit labor abroad, they rob you at home. In 1966, GM took materials worth an average of $1400 and used factory labor to turn it into a vehicle that it could sell to a dealer for $2500. Of this $1100 difference, only $247 went to the workers in wages! The remainder goes to GM, to the yearly salary of GM's president, who makes $750,000 a year, and into advertising, the packaged sex appeal that get consumers to discard their old cars and go into debt to buy the latest model. When the dealer sells the car to you for about $3,000, that's a lot of money to pay out at once. So you borrow the money and pay it back in installments. Right now there is more than $35 billion out on loan to American consumers for car purchases, a full 40% of all consumer credit. And the cost of auto repairs has soared. Between 1955 and 1965 prices increased a good 60%. Insurance claims have nearly tripled, and the cost of parts have increased as much as 400%. The giants say in their P.R. that they care about pollution. But GM has put more smog, dirt and poison into the air than any other industry or corporation in the country. (By tonnage, GM contributes 35% to all pollutants in the air.) The auto companies spent $9 million over the period of 1953-1963 to control pollution. At the same time, the damage to the environment from pollution was exceeding $11 billion each year. (The 22 highest paid executives in the auto industry get a combined salary of more than $9 million a year, 10 times what was spent in that decade on pollution control.) Today GM claims to be spending $20 million a year on new methods of pollution control That's less than 10% of what they spend on advertising, and less than 2% of what they spend on model changes. The amount GM spends on controlling pollution is an amount equal to their gross sales for only eight hours on one day! (GM grosses $2.5 r.iiilion an hour, 24 hours a day, 365 days a year.) On a national scale, auto pollution contributes 60% of the waste in the air; in urban centers, auto pollution makes up as much as 90%. American cars are not designed for our safety. How can any product with planned obsolescence built in be safe? You take a chance when you buy a car-35-40% leave the factory full of defects, according to Consumer Reports. Once the car is taken into the shop, from 30 to 90% of the repairs requested are not made correctly. Ninety per cent of the cars on the road have faulty headlight aim; 50% have suspension and alignment problems, 25% have brake deficiencies. Each year, 50,000 of us die in car accidents. But our deaths do not cost the auto industry a cent. More heads at Morehead By Sue Anne Salmon The Student Mobilization Committee at Morehead State University during the week before Thanksgiving led students in a protest against restrictive women's dormitory hours. "Not many students at Morehead think about the war, but everybody has an opinion on women's hours," SMC president Bill Read said. At the paternalistically-governed campus of about 6,000 students, current dorm hours range from 11 p.m. for freshmen, sophomores and juniors on week nights to 2 a.m. for seniors on Fridays and Saturdays. Men students have no hours. Women in the SMC at Morehead circulated leaflets Wednesday night, Nov. 18, to all women living in the compulsory University housing units for undergraduates. The leaflets contained articles written by SMC women concerning discrimination against women, especially in regard to imposed curfews. Counter-dissent leaflets reportedly also were distributed to the women students. The leaflets, signed by the Student Council president and vice president and blue-tail fly/3 the student representative to the board of regents, urged women not to take action into their own hands. A walk-out might hinder efforts to "work through the system" in changing curfew policy, Student Council president Dudley Hawkey said. Thursday night, Nov. 19, at a campus concert given by the Association, members of the band, prompted by the SMC, urged students to protest the women's restrictive curfews. Panty raids had followed the two previous concerts this fall at Morehead and the SMC- 30 of whose 60 members are women"enlisted wide support from former panty-raiders and others to urge women to walk out of the dorms after the 11 p.m. curfew that night. Shortly before midnight about 400 male students made the rounds of the nine women's dormitories. As the men gathered outside, dorm mothers warned girls: "Close your windows, lock your doors, turn off the lights, stay down on the floors in the hallways!" Doors of the dormitories were guarded by campus police and members of a local fraternity. Yet approximately 50 women escaped. A main boulevard through the campus was barricaded by some men students who used construction materials from a campus building site. Rocks were thrown, breaking glass in windows and doors in three dorms. Police were not called Thursday night, but one high school student from Morehead was arrested by campus police. About 100 students gathered in front of the residence of Morehead's president Adron Doran, and yelled for him to come out. Student Council president Dudley Hawkey commented that the protestors "didn't even make enough noise to wake him (Doran) up." (The last time Morehead students marched to Dorans house was after the Kent State killings in May. Then Doran came out and led the students in a 40-minute prayer). Doran announced Monday night at a freshman basketball game that Thanksgiving break would begin at noon Tuesday rather than Wednesday afternoon The reason for the day and a half extra vacation, he explained, was because of the Morehead victory over Eastern State University in a football game Saturday. The last such recess at Morehead was a half-day break from classes two years ago when Morehead won the Ohio Valley Conference. After Doran's announcement Monday night, about 10 state police cars were dispatched from the Morehead post to the campus because the police "suspected trouble." The state police patrolled the campus and checked students for identification. CHANGES THINGS FOR HE AND SHE 151 S. LIME A rumor was circulated that state police were looking for a Weatherman trying to deliver explosives to someone at Morehead, according to the Courier-Journal. Two Morehead students, Charles Talbert Lovell and William Andre Farley, were arrested about 2:30 a.m. Tuesday as they were walking across the campus to get cokes at a nearby gas station, an SMC member said. They were arrested by the state police for "failure to disperse" and were not released from jail until 6 p.m. Tuesday. Although Morehead President Doran and Student Council President Hawkey pretended that the dissent was "merely a panty raid that got out of hand," Dean of Students Buford Crager said disciplinary action will be taken against an unspecified number of students. Acid's children SEATTLE (CPS)-Not chromosome damage and deformities but girl babies are the end result of LSD-taking pregnant women, according to a pediatrics professor. Dr. David W. Smith discussed his theories during a recent symposium sponsored by the University's School of Social Work. His findings came about as a result of a study completed by himself and Dr. John Aase (formely of Washington, now living in Alaska). In their research the two doctors studied 10 babies born to mothers who had taken LSD during pregnancy. As a control they also examined a group of 10 babies from mothers who had never taken LSD. Their findings showed that none of the 20 infants displayed birth defects, nor was there any discernible chromosome damage. The only outstanding difference between the two groups was that the "LSD babies" were all girls. 'The mathematical probabilities of that occurring by chance are rather slim," said Dr. Smith. "But that doesn't mean it couldn't happen." The first research which concluded that LSD might cause chromosome damage in human beings was done with white blood cells in a "test tube" situation. Pure LSD was placed directly upon the lymphocytes and the result was "chromosome breakage" in some of the cells. However, Dr. Smith explained that the same effect can be achieved with aspirin, caffeine and many other substances, Soon after this study a doctor in New York published findings which showed that, out of five babies whose mothers had taken LSD during pregnancy, two had signs of chromosome damage. "About two percent of all babies are born With some type of malformation anyway, Dr. Smith said. "Without a baseline (comparison between LSD babies and total number of babies observed) it is difficult to make use of this type of information." Dr. Smith said he became more interested in the results of his own study after he read an unrelated report on the offspring of schizophrenic parents. He said that in this study, all mothers who showed psychotic symptoms within one month after conception had girl babies. Because there are similarities between schizophrenia and the symptoms of having taken LSD, Dr. Smith said he thinks there may be a connection as to why they both cause the rejection of the XY (male) fetus. $$$ to the people ? Perhaps it's struck you as strange that the conservative and capitalist-oriented Wildcat is distributed free of charge on the UK campus while the radical blue-tail fly costs a quarter an issue. "How come?" you may have thought at some moment or another. The answer to this seemingly paradoxical situation lies in the murky area of advertising support and other forms of financial backing. Because the Wildcat caters to the interests of business owners (at least as they see it), they are being supported by them in the form of large advertising revenues. In addition, UK's student newspaper, the Kernel, hinted in a story appearing last month that the Wildcat may also be receiving substantial backing from powerful political elements in the state. The fly, on the other hand, is mainlyi able to sell advertising only to the relatively few businesses which are related to the youth culture. The money this brings in is insufficient to pay the costs of producing the paper. Some subscribers do make extra donations, but this still doesn't cover expenses. Thus, the quarter-an-issue price. Even this does not allow the fly to pay any salaries. The only people who do make money do it by selling papers. The Wildcat, though, has enough financial suppport to pay its staff more than the daily Kernel, which is no mean feat because the Kernel's advertising revenues are supplemented generously by the university. It's apparent that the Wildcat has access to funds. Just exactly whose hasn't been determined yet. An interesting corollary point to this arose at a Nov. 20 forum on "First Amendment Rights" sponsored by the Kentucky Intercollegiate Press Association at UK. Among the panel participants was Terrence Fox, leader of the Student Coalition"the campus political organization the Wildcat speaks for. Because of Fox, the panel discussion somehow degenerated into the question of which was more popular"the Wildcat or the blue-tail fly. Fox boggled the mind of btf staffer David Holwerk, who was also on the panel, by saying the Wildcat Was more popular than the fly because it has more money. Holwerk asked what that had to do with it. Fox responded by saying that "the people" had the money and the fact that they gave more of it to the Wildcat than to the fly was proof that the Wildcat was more popular with the people. BELLS & FLARES $6.39 -- $6.99 [ Mitch's Britches 1 Two new shipments just arrived 200 NEW CORDS & JEANS (BELLS) M-W-F 1-9; T-Th 12-9; Sat. 10-7 4/Number Ten The Appalachian Tragedy Harlan Miners Speak Report on Terrorism in the Kentucky Coal Fields by Members of the National Committee for the Defense of Political Prisoners. Reprinted by da Capo Press, 348 pp. , $12.50. Coal Mining Health and Safety in West Virginia By J. Davitt McAteer. West Virginia University Press, 689 pp. » $20. 00. H warlan Miners Speak, first published in the hunger-ridden November of 1931, is important for two reasons. It reminds a now affluent middle age of the horror of the Great Depression and preaches to the rebels of the Woodstock generation a powerful sermon on this country's capacity to punish and repress dissent. An American saga emerges from its pages. Harlan County, Kentucky, is the geographical heart of troubled Appalachia. Its name has passed into legend for the cruelties of its overlords and the bloody and protracted struggle of its underclass to free themselves This article originally appeared as a book review in The New York Review of Books. Reprinted with permission from The New York Review of Books/ copyright © 1970 The New York Review. blue-tail fly/5 and to secure at least a tolerable standard of living. To this day newspaper references to the county generally designate it as "bloody Harlan. " Harlan Miners Speak tells us how it acquired that somber sobriquet. There is probably no lovelier place than the Appalachian heartland, a wrinkled maze of steep, rock-capped, timbered hills. Harlan is different from the huge territory north of it because an unusual terrain feature, the Big Black Mountain, shoulders boldly across it. The Big Black, like the lesser Smokies, rises to 4,400 feet and looms in dark majesty above the hills nearby. The Big Black is significant for more than its beauty. Three thick veins of superb metallurgical coal run through it and with the beginning of the twentieth century the hill beckoned to industrialists and their hungry furnaces and power plants. The county--and the region around it--stumbled into tragedy by processes conventional American history has all but glorified. The territory was the home of scattered bands of Cherokees, Shawnees, and Choctaws who warred against ever-encroaching white settlers from the Fast. The first cabin builder was Elisha Wallins, and he and those who followed him brought the simplistic, Calvinistic, and ferocious backwoods mores and culture into the shadows of the Big Black. They cleared patches for corn, tobacco, beans, and squash, set up their whis- by Harry Caudill key stills, and preached the old-time fundamentalist religion. The hill people saw little need for schools and built practically none. When land agents from Philadelphia and New York began buying Appalachian minerals in the late 1800s they dealt with an illiterate people who virtually gave away the riches of the Big Black and its foothills. On Jone's Fork some tracts were "sold" for ten cents per acre. A mountaineer thought he had driven a shrewd bargain when he deeded 1, 000 acres of Black Mountain land to a Mellon for $500. There was little for the mountaineer to buy with his little hoard, but this soon changed as railroads were driven up the valleys in the twentieth century. Half a hundred "coal camps" sprang up in Harlan alone and in each of them the company store occupied the most prominent place. Its displays of enticing wares soon separated the mountaineers from their "coal money. " When the money was gone, men and boys of counties in Tennessee, Kentucky, Virginia, Alabama, and West Virginia came thousands of other highlanders to join them, and Harlan's mining era began. For a brief while during and after the First World War, wages reached a decent level, but by the mid-Twenties, Harlan faced serious trouble. There were too many miners and orders declined as hydroelectric plants and the oil industry attracted coal's customers. Coal had long been sick when the stock market crashed in 1929. Coal prices commenced a relentless erosion. Miners had never been much for joining, and unionism had taken little hold. The United Mine Workers of America, the principal "brotherhood, " was--as it still is--unimagin-ative and ultraconservative. Its fumbling organizing efforts were undercut by the miners' knowledge that a UMW representative seldom talked to a miner before he had seen the boss. The Great Depression found the miners divided and leaderless, while the operators were tightly united in the Harlan County Coal Operators Association. jLn the coal glut of the 1930s mining companies fought desperately to stave off bankruptcy, and always they resorted to the same weapon--cost cutting. Economies could be effected in only three areas: reduce electric power consumed by machinery, lower prices for the machinery, and lower wages. They were helpless to enforce either of the first two, so they embraced ever-diminishing wages as their salvation. From $5.00 a day in the middle Twenties, pay scales were systematically slashed to about $1.25 in 1931-32. Both the "Report" and McAteer document the madness which engulfed the hapless county. Though the market was awash with steadily cheapening coal, the companies could survive only by selling more; so they slashed wages and ordered their half-starved miners to the pits. The workday rose from eight hours to ten, twelve, and even fourteen. The men were put on "piece work, " in which they were paid 30 cents or 35 cents per ton produced, reimbursing the company out of that pitiable sum for all the costs they incurred in the process. They were hired on condition that they do all their buying in company stores, where prices were routinely double those in the nearby towns. Desperate miners entered the pits before daylight and emerged after dark, bone weary and gaunt with hunger. In their deteriorating shacks they found wives nearly always pregnant, and swarms of hungry children. The appalling "grub" on which they subsisted was potatoes, pinto beans, cornbread, and "bulldog gravy" made with flour, salt, water, and a little grease. Milk, butter, and fresh meat and vegetables became receding memories. The towns fell into squalor as painters and trash collectors stopped making their rounds. Hospital staffs were pared, and the captive population wallowed in poverty and disorder. In their indigence and disunity the miners and their families slipped into abject peonage. Not since the Middle Ages has a population been so dependent on its barons. Babies were born in company hospitals run by company doctors and nurses. As they grew up they attended company schools taught by teachers chosen by company managers. The only employment was in company mines. They traded in company stores, walked on company streets, and carried "scrip" (a form of company money) in their pockets. When they died a company undertaker carried their bodies to a company graveyard and the company supplied a modest tombstone, ir Ten photographs by ARTHUR TRESS As their homes deteriorated, their clothes turned to shreds, and their faces became pinched with'famine, and reddened with scurvy, the camp people became objects of detestation rather than pity. The operators scorned them as trash--as contemptible as the black strikebreakers they sometimes imported from Alabama and Mississippi. As starvation and outrage drove the miners to mutiny, the companies recruited an army of "thugs" to "preserve law and order." T JLhere was little hesitation in choosing between penniless coal diggers and their ragged women and children on the one hand and a huge industrial complex marshaled by Fords, Mellons, Insulls, Rockefellers, and lesser barons on the other. Judges, sheriffs, prosecuting attorneys, legislators, the governor, and the state attorney general closed ranks to protect property against the pro-pertyless. Kiwanians and Rotarians, the Chamber of Commerce, the churches and their fanatically "patriotic" preachers and priests, all were as one in their resolve that the order built by coal would be preserved regardless of its cost in human suffering. The Soviet Union was then just fourteen years old and America was in the grip of a prolonged anticommunist hysteria. Unlike the McCarthy years, the earlier redbaiting era had few voices to challenge the Ku Kluxers, the fascists, the racial bigots, the anti-evolutionists, the frightened industrialists, and the bankrupting businessmen who sought a scapegoat. In Harlan the scapegoat became "the reds": Anyone who wanted labor union labor, improved working conditions, and some check on the power of money was a communist. Out of the turbulence of the Anarchist movement had come a law against "criminal syndicalism. " The statute became a crown of thorns pressed down with unspeakable cruelty on the brows of the county's 11, 500 coal miners. Under John L. Lewis the UMW of A, too, was viciously anticommunist. It had a thirst for dues from miners who were too poor to part with even $Z. 00 a month. It consistently failed to support miners in the east Kentucky field when they struck for higher pay--though those nonunion miners had launched more than one sympathy strike to show solidarity with the UMW. The union was su- bhie-tail premely undemocratic, operating under emergency rules that permitted Lewis to appoint "provisional" district officers. This labor dictatorship had little appeal when it returned, with tacit industry support, to launch a new membership drive. The drive was a counter to organizing efforts undertaken by the National Miners Union in January, 1931. An offshoot of the American Communist Party, the NMU struck horror into the heart of the Harlan County estab-li shment. Under the banner of "industrial democracy, " the NMU organizers went to work along the smoke-darkened hollows, in the hunger-pinched camps, along the dusty tunnels of the mines, and wherever the haggard wives of coal diggers got together. The result was a surge of enlistments in both the NMU and its ladies' auxiliary. The companies and their allies reacted by creating a police state which, for all practical purposes, ignored both the Constitution and statutes of the United States. Sheriff J.H. Blair (a distant relative of this reviewer) appointed as deputies the scores of gunmen imported by the companies. They wore the badges of public lawmen but their salaries, jackboots, uniforms, motorcycles, and submachine guns were supplied by the coal association. Led by a subsidiary of United States Steel, the coal men fought a brutal battle against the NMU -- and later the UMW -- that lasted a decade and cost unnumbered lives. Blair was elected with association money in 1929. Circuit Judge D. C. "Baby" Jones had found a wife and ideological inspiration in one of the county's major coal families. Commonwealth Attorney William Brock's obsession was communist "literature, " which he was rabidly determined to keep out Of the hands of the miners. As jails filled with political prisoners, a few people paused amid their own troubles to consider the agonies of Harlan County. The chief of these was Theodore Dreiser, then widely acclaimed as the author of An American Tragedy. He conceived the idea of a National Committee for the Defense of Political Prisoners. Without power to intervene directly and effectively for victims of homegrown tyranny, the committee could nevertheless continued on page 12 fly/7 Dicran Derderian is a graduate student in photography at the Rhode Island School of Design. These photographs were taken with a one-dollar Japanese box camera.  By DARRELL RICE Recently, the House Internal Security Committee released a list of 65 subversive campus speakers; Joseph Heller was not among them and was indignant about the ommission. But, he told a UK audience, his spirits were buoyed somewhat by recalling a 1967 newspaper clipping. The news story told of the arrest of three antipoverty workers in Pike-ville, Ky. , on charges of conspiring to overthrow the county government. Among the subversive literature confiscated during the arrest, according to the newspaper clipping, were books by Lenin and Mao -- and a copy of Catch-22. Several hours later he asked some of us in a round-about way how controversial he would be considered hereabouts. He expressed genuine disappointment at not being considered a really provocative speaker even in Kentucky. "So this isn't Pike County, huh? " he said at another point, apparently still bothered. Perhaps he was mentally kicking himself for needlessly girding his loins in anticipation of being veritably dragged off the speaker's platform by the forces of local lawnorder. Or maybe he was ruefully mulling over just what extremes a middle-aged man would have to go to in order to merit such consideration. Heller's Nov. 19 talk consisted mostly of reading several extended passages from his novel and pointing out the influences in them of earlier writers such as Eliot, Tennyson and, especially, Shakespeare. Afterwards, he fielded questions from the Coliseum audience. He quit when his voice grew tired but stayed to talk with students who clustered about him at the edge of the stage. It was there that he began autographing the first of what was to be many varied objects before the night had ended -- numerous scraps of paper and paperback copies of his novel, an English survey book, a copy of William Burroughs' Naked Lunch, a piece of Canadian currency and a-bout 20 draft cards, one of them previously signed by Jerry Rubin ("Hell, you're going to burn these anyway, so why do you want me to sign them? "). Heller's visit to UK, which he said was only the fourth campus he had spoken at, quickly turned into a mini-odyssey. When the Coliseum officials chased everyone out, he walked with a mob of students to the Student Center Grille where he was grilled further by the students until the place closed at 11:00. Then the troupe trooped downstairs to a group of tables near the pool room to continue for another hour or so. While he was in the Student Center, he was continuously surrounded by a horde of students. There were un-^ ceremonious scramblings for chairs near his when we moved en masse from place to place. But Heller apparently doesn't suffer from claus- trophobia and appeared fairly at ease during the sessions. Afterwards, three of us were ostensibly driving him to his motel when someone proposed we go to an apartment instead for some quieter talk. He agreed, and we stopped at a booze store along the way to pick up a bottle of Scotch for him. But that part comes later. Heller was born in Brooklyn and still has a distinctive accent. He graduated from the City College of New York then went to Columbia and Oxford for graduate studies. He taught at the college level for a while but says he didn't enjoy it. While he was writing Catch-22, Heller supported himself by working as a promotional copy writer for Time. He has a daughter who is a college freshman in Illinois and a son, 14. Now he lives in Manhattan and knows a lot of other famous people, most of whom would fall in Spiro's "radiclib" category. There is something about Heller's manner which suggests a perpetual state of slight intoxication, even when he is presumably sober. It has something to do with his eyes. But he always seems to keep command of his wits, except maybe occasionally when he really is intoxicated. The first question Heller was asked after his speech (and a recurring one throughout the evening) was what he thought of "the movie. " First of all, he had nothing to do with the making of the movie version of Catch-22. He said he had seen it three times and expected to see it at least once more but that he always forgot after the first few minutes that it had anything to do with his book. "I can't think of another American movie I found as engrossing or uncompromising, " he said. Heller said he had expected the movie to have more comedy of a service nature and , more sex -- and was pleased that it didn't. He liked the casting of Alan Arkin as Yossarian but thought John Voight played Milo Minderbinder too simply as a villain. Another question frequently asked was if he was planning to come out 10/Number Ten with a second novel in the foreseeable future. There are those who wonder aloud if Joseph Heller isn't just a one-shot novelist, and he seemed slightly sensitive about the question. Since Catch-22 was published in 1955, Heller's only work of any length has been his recent play, We Bombed in New Haven, which, to use the inevitable phrasing, bombed in New York after 11 weeks. The idea for the play came from the half-finished novel he has been working on since 1965, Something Happened. The play is about the Vietnam war and deals with the issue of a father killing his son by "allowing" the war to continue despite the fact that he opposes it. It points out the unusual nature of a war which affords civilian society the questionable luxury of ignoring it as a day-to-day reality. "It's a tough play, " Heller says. "It's not a popular play, and a large part of the audience that goes to Broadway theater wants entertainment with a capital 'E'; they want to come out humming a tune and whistling, " he said with not very subtle bitterness . But back to the novel. A little as if proving to the skeptics that there was so another Heller novel in the works, he read a brief passage from Something Happened during his speech. The selection he read was written in the bitterly humorous style of Catch-22. The unfinished novel deals with a man who has reached middle-age and is successful but dissatisfied and who, like Heller, is "aware of his own eminent mortality. " Joseph Heller, after all, is 47 years old now. He was in his late 20s and early 30s when he was about creating Catch-22's catalog of true-to-life absurdities and exotic menagerie of insanely human characters. Yossarian grew out of Heller's even younger days as a bombadier in WWII and the author says he, like almost everyone else, identifies with him. So you might say Yossarian is 47 years old now, too. As such, he is still concerned a-bout the hazards posed to human flesh by bombs, bullets and war mentality. But the phenomenon of passing years has removed this particular mortality issue from his realm of the intensely personal and simply replaced it with another. Yossarian still is preoccupied about losing his life, but now, instead of the happenstance s of war, he ruminates over the implications of dying of natural causes. "I'm aware that I can expect only about ten more years of full-capacity existence, " Heller said in partial response to a question of whether there was anything he intended to write after Something Happened. Alloting yourself a mere ten more years and then looking them starkly in the face until they come to pass is probably even harder to come to terms with than having to fly interminable bomb- ing missions. They die of old age even in Sweden (though they usually make it a little past 57). In line with his striking statement about the condition of his psyche these days, Heller offered some insights into his method of writing. In brief, it's very slow which is why he said he doesn't count on completing more than one more novel if he doesn't live to be more than two score and 17. It took him seven years to finish Catch-22 and, at the current rate, he will have invested something like ten years in Something Happened. Of course, with all the money his first novel is bringing in, he doesn't feel any of the usual pressures to write fast. He says he never starts writing anything until after he has "thought it through to the end. " Working a couple of hours a day, he says, he averages three or four finished pages a week. Much of the conversation during his visit naturally revolved around Catch-22. He said some things about the novel that probably are at least of interest to English professors. "One night I had insomnia and Catch-22 came out of it, " Heller says. The first two lines of the book just more or less popped into his head, without him even knowing that they were going to have anything to do with war or the military. He said the book "is really about civilian society" and could just as well have been written about the Boy Scouts or General Motors (or something like that) as WWII. Asked if he would make any changes in the book if he had it to do over, he said he would make no major ones just three minor things. He would emphasize more that Germany was collapsing when Yossarian deserted ("even though I already said it about five times") and that Yossarian didn't expect to make it to Sweden, even though he said he did. Instead, he is to be a fugitive in Rome perpetually under hot pursuit but "still alive and healthy. " Heller couldn't remember the third minor change at the time. He said he had made Yossarian an Assyrian because, when he wrote the book, he thought the Assyrian race was extinct (and only found out later that there were still as many as 40, 000 somewhere). But if Yossarian had been the last survivor of his race, the finality of his prospective death would have been emphasized. A lot of people asked Heller about his politics. He in turn talked about them a lot, but it's still hard to say where he's definitively at. He's not a liberal, at least, as one might expect of a financially successful, middle-aged author. He didn't hesitate to tell the Coliseum crowd, when asked, that he thought attempts at working through the system were "doomed to failure. " He also said he thought the recent domestic bombings were probably having more effect than anything else. He expressed further interest in non- fatal attacks on property a couple of times during the evening. He seems .basically to identify with the New Left, whether out of commitment or fashion, but it's hard to say exactly what he does believe because, as he himself concedes, he makes rash statements. Once, be admitted, he advised a young .woman he had never seen before to go cut sugar cane in Cuba and didn't think any more about it until she wrote him saying she needed money to get home. He sent it. At some point during the small-group conversation in the apartment we ended up at, he expressed admiration for the political efforts of Jane Fonda and Vanessa Redgrave. Someone inadvertently put him on the spot by casually observing that "more famous people should do things like that. " Heller, somewhat inebriated for real by then, responded by saying he intended to use his remaining years to be as happy as he could possibly be. "I don't really care what kind of world my children get, and I don't think anyone else does either. " He had said earlier that he had intended no political implications when he wrote Catch-22. "I've never been particularly political until the last couple of years, " he said. "I'm slightly more political than I was, but I don't even know if 'political' describes it accurately. . .1 don't trust societies, any society. " He also said he doesn't expect a revolution in the U.S. because no revolution ever succeeds without the support of the army, and he could foresee only the opposite here. On the other hand, he says he doesn't expect a military dictatorship, although a police state is something he doesn't rule out. Some loose ends: On being a celebrity -- "For about a year I enjoyed being a celebrity --before I realized I was seeing the same people, going to the same parties. And I didn't want to break up my house by having affairs with second-rate models and third-rate actresses " it was getting pretty boring in terms of conversation. " On youth culture -- "There's much about the youth culture I like, but not all of it. " He thinks many of the big youth-oriented movies have been bad and questions some of the literary preferences -- Brautigan and Hesse, for examples. On a paraphrase of a Catch-22 quote which, in turn, was a paraphrase of a General Motors executive's quote Asked, "Would you say what's bad for the country is good for Joseph Heller? " he replied, "I_ think so. " As Heller was entering the student apartment for the last session of the evening, he encountered at the foot of the stairs a placard which said in big red letters, FUCK WAR AND PIGS. He hesitated slightly. The thought occurred that he might be wondering what the hell kind of place we were steering him into. We went on in-blue-tail fly/11 side and he gazed briefly but intently at the abundant psychedelia surrounding him in the dim light. He asked who had made the sign and was told that it was an SDS thing. "Oh, you have an SDS here? " Then he seemed to relax as he found himself a seat. Later he said he hadn't expected to "find anything like this in Lexington, Ky. " and remarked on his amazement at always seeming to be able to find "people like myself" no matter where he went. Even in Kentucky. There were only a total of seven people there and perhaps the crowd swelled to as many as 12 at various times, so informal conversation prevailed. Heller had some of the Scotch he had bought and also another more local intoxicant which most everyone else preferred. The conversation ranged widely: more about other writers and his own writing, whether computers could think or suffer (Heller said they couldn't), cops, politics, the guy who played his arm on the Johnny Carson Show, the nature of humor (Heller said it was an expression of anguish), the grass vs. booze issue, a hermaphrodite named Dennis, determinism (he believes in it), how many angels could dance on the head of a pin and so forth. It was here that Heller got acquainted with Shreveport, Louisiana's own Sam Mason, a true people's musician recently-turned-computer science-student, who is the writer, composer and performer of such legendary lyrics as "I Love You So Fucking Much I Can't Shit. " Sam told Heller how much he had enjoyed Catch-22 and added, by way of compliment, "Hell, I reckon I've only read four books in my life." Heller wanted to know how he had happened to read Catch-22 among the four. Sam explained that the first book he had read was given to him by a friend because it was about trains, and Sam liked trains. He read and liked it, so his friend asked if he liked planes. Sam did, so he gave him Catch-22. This was at the point when the first jet was due to come to Shreveport. Sam caught a train in Shreveport to take him to Texas, where he was to board the jet for the return trip. He took the book along and said he read it "between eating and digging on the train" then later on the short but historic plane ride. The other two books Sam said he had read were Ayn Rand's The Foun-tainhead (presumably because he also likes architecture) and something called Don Quixote USA. "Yeah, I really dug Catch-22, " Sam told Heller. "It didn't bog down in the middle like Ayn Rand. " Heller, who by this time was beyond his initial skepticism and laughing uproariously, said, "People in New York wouldn't believe what I'm hearing now. " Prior to coming to the apartment, Heller had said he would only stay continued on page 14 Caudill I publicize their plight and strive to arouse demands for justice and lawful procedures. The failure of Dreiser's first effort confirms the distrust of conventional liberals by today's New Left. He telegraphed a plea for assistance to Senators La Follette, Norris, Shipstead and Couzins, Harvard Law School Dean Felix Frankfurter, college presidents, editors and clergymen. Fach had impressive credentials as spokesmen for liberal causes. Fach was invited to accompany Dreiser to Harlan to investigate the disorders and determine what, if anything, could be done to protect American citizens from hunger, disease, unlawful imprisonment and murder. All who replied were sick or had prior engagements. But a few courageous souls did join him: John Dos Passos, Charles Rumford Walker, Bruce Crawford, Samuel Ornitz, Lester Cohen and Melvin Levy. In the hills they talked to coal operators, public officials, merchants, miners, wives of miners, newsmen and some personages who defy categorization. Their "testimony" was preserved in shorthand and from it emerge the tales od corruption, suffering and brutality that were published in the "Report" under review. They are without parallel in US history, The NMU had enrolled 8, 000 of the county's miners. Some gunmen recruited from the Coal and Iron Police of Pennsylvania had killed as many as five "union sympathizers, " generally by shooting them in the back. Scores of miners had been indicted for criminal syndicalism, but only one deputy had been charged. He was accused of the murder of an organizer by shooting him between the shoulders, but a jury of company executives and their clerical employees acquitted him. Twenty-eight gunmen were brought in on a single day, July 25, 1931. Most came from "bloody" Breathitt County and were callous killers. The standard payoff for a killing was $50. 00. Sixty -five uniformed deputies roamed the county and 200 others worked as undercover agents spying for hints of discontent. Some of these spies infiltrated locals, were elected to office in them and turned their records over to the police. Arrests occurred in wholesale batches. Commonwealth Attorney Brock asserted that the mere possession of an NMU membership application form or a copy of the Daily Worker were per se criminal syndicalism. Arrests "for literature" were made routinely, as were searches of houses and persons. Individuals who were found with "unpatriotic literature" or who were charged with speaking favorably of the NMU were seized, beaten and imprisoned. Judge Jones ruled that to advocate or join a labor union was a syndicalist act and a felony. Hand-picked grand juries ground out stacks of indictments against labor organizers, NMU members, reporters who wrote articles criticizing "constituted authorities" or supporting the miners and persons "aiding and abetting" such offenders. The indefatigable Judge Jones declared it treasonous to operate a soup kitchen for striking miners and their families and three of these humble facilities were dynamited by deputies who also shot d6wn two men who had "banded and confederated" to cook the food. But the judge, sheriff and commonwealth attorney were men of mercy. After a miner had cooled 20 or 30 days in the filthy jail on a diet of gravy, cornbread and beans, he was generally offered his freedom on a pledge to go straight, work hard and forget about union membership. Some, though, were compelled to leave the county or became informers under threat of rearrest. Two investigating reporters were, shot by snipers. A lawyer who came to defend incarcerated miners was met by the mayor and a carload of lawmen who informed him he could not enter the town. When he slipped in after darkness he was arrested, taken to a mountain top and beaten. The lawyer, Taub, testifies in the "Report" that the lawmen were accompanied by a coal company lawyer and by Herndon Evans, a local newspaperman. After he had been beaten into semiconsciousness, he recalled that Evans demanded, "Well, Taub, why don't 12/Number you make us a speech on constitutional rights? It is the last chance you will ever get to make a speech in Kentucky. . . " And what happened when punishment of these outrages was sought in the state capital? The governor refused to see Taub and the attorney general murmured, "There is nothing I can do. " Others did much, however, in the years that followed the publication of Dreiser's compilation. The NMU, off to such a promising start in 1931, withered and died. Its demise was due in part to the establishment's rigorous countermeasures, but another circumstance contributed even more. In 1932, the NMU took a delegation of miners to New York to a labor convention. There they were horrified to discover that communism is atheistic. They rushed home to denounce the NMU and switched their allegiance to the United Mine Workers. Lewis became a folk hero in a struggle that lasted through the agony of a bloodstained decade and saw the last mine in Harlan sign a contract in 1941. Three decades have passed since the thugs were disarmed and Judge Jones and Sheriff Blair passed from the scene. For two years during World War II Harlan had Kentucky's highest per capita income. Then in a new postwar depression scores of mines folded. The union dropped its members by the thousands. With a hundred million dollars in its coffers and as much in its welfare fund, it abandoned the hospital it had built for its crippled and sick. It never loaned a cent to jobless miners but bought a bank and made funds available to some of a hew generation of nonunion, labor-hating operators. The New Deal and the Great Society have poured hundreds of millions of dollars into central Appalachia to combat its poverty, but the old ills persist. Headlines proclaim that the Nixon administration fails to enforce the new mine safety law. Disabled miners picket pits in protest against UMW pensioning policies. A federal judge enjoins such action and dynamite blasts mining machinery. A watchman guarding a coal auger is shot from ambush. The hunt for persons implicated in the murder of UMW rebel "Jock" Yablonski continues and it still centers in Harlan County and in Tennessee. The number of persons on relief has increased by 35 percent in the last year. Coal prices have doubled in eight months, but wages are up only slightly. Outmi-gration has reduced the population of Harlan from 76, 000 to 30, 000 since 1950. "Criminal syndicalism" no longer sends miners to jail. In 1967 a couple of young antipoverty workers were indicted under the statute after a nocturnal raid on their home turned up a book by Mao Tse Tung. In due time, a federal court declared the law unconstitutional. Dreiser's report and Harlan's turbulent history illustrate how merciless and successful power can be, the tenacity with which the poor can struggle for escape and betterment -- and how success in the fight for freedom can lead to new failures and disappointments. T i JLhat the callous unconcern for human welfare that brought horror to eastern Kentucky in the 1930s still haunts Appalachia in what John Kenneth Galbraith has called the "affluent society, " is illustrated by J. Davitt McAteer's monumental Coal Mining Health and Safety in West Virginia. This carefully researched study is not history from a painful, bygone decade, but deals with the present-day suffering of the dust-blackened, battered men whose exertions give us the basic raw resource of hundreds of products ranging from electricity to synthetic fabrics to aspirin. In spite of innumerable Congressional hearings and reports, periodic editorial trumpetings, Presidential proclamations and, from time to time, the enactment of highly touted safety laws, the grim carnage continues in the coal pits. McAteer's work outlines the methods by which coal companies are permitted to treat coal lands as practically valueless until the coal is actually mined. This tax cheating keeps the tax base at rock bottom, depriving mining communities of schools, so that the average Ten West Virginia miner has completed only 8. 8 years in the classroom. His lack of education drives him into the pits and keeps him there. And in the mines death stalks him at every turn. The chances are one in six he will be seriously injured in a given year, one in 240 that he will be killed. And if his bones are not crushed by blundering machines or falling slate from the roof, it is a practical certainty that in 10 or 12 years underground his lungs win fill with fine dust consisting of particles of coal, slate and silica, and by age 50 or 55 he will be a wheezing, coughing human derelict whose miseries medical science cannot relieve even for a single moment by day or night until he reaches the grave. These statistics tell the story of coal's attitude toward its workmen: In 1904, 45, 492 miners were employed in West Virginia and 140 of them were killed on the job. In 1968, there were 41, 573 miners and 150 were slain. In 1948, a miner's chances of getting killed were one in 453. In 1968, his chances were one in 273. And outside the mine, as McAteer makes clear, the miner inhabits a drab community, little improved since 1931. He breathes air polluted by burning slag heaps and drinks water polluted by unsealed mines. His union affords no discernible assistance in efforts to improve the environment or render his hard life more tolerable. He does not suffer --as his father did --at the hands of Harlan-style gun thugs, and various welfare programs and improved wages give him better and more food. But coal is still the black brute of American industry and the young flee its domain. West Virginia's population declined 7. 2 percent in the decade before I960 and has dwindled by 2. 2 percent since. These two books should be read and carefully pondered by those imperturbable optimists who believe the age of computers and space travel has brought affluence and progress to all Americans. There remain, after all, the coal miners of Appalachia. AT THE CLAY COUNTY OPEN HEARING ON BLACK LUNG By DAVID HOLWERK Though the tragedy of the Appalachian coal fields continues, there are groups in the mountains trying to reverse the trends of the past fifty years in the area. One such group, the Clay County (Kentucky) Poor People's Association, held a public hearing November 21 on the subject of black lung benefits. Black lung is a generic term for respiratory impairments caused by inhalation of coal dust over an extended period of time. Control of and compensation for the disease is supposedly provided under the Coal Mine Health and Safety Act of 1969. but in reality things have not changed very much for men who now work in the pits or who already have black lung. Many miners who believe they have black lung have had applications for benefits filed with the Social Security Administration for over six months with no result. In Kentucky and West Virginia only 22% and 24% of black lung claims, respectively, have been processed, compared to a national average of 43% processed. Moreover, while only 20% of the claims processed nationally have been refused, West Virginia miners are being turned down at a rate of 32% and their Kentucky counterparts at the astounding rate of 57%. The blame for this lies in the tests which doctors are allowed to use to spot black lung, as well as the regulations of the Social Security Administration. SSA recognizes only X-ray and pulmonary function tests and stipulates that these tests must provide conclusive proof of the presence of pneumoconiosis. Pneumoconiosis, a particular disease of the lung, is very difficult to spot with either of these two tests, and particularly with an X-ray: a series of X-rays on a known pneumoconiosis victim, for example, may provide both definite positive and negative results. Then, too, not all pneumoconiosis victims are disabled, while many miners who do not have clinical pneumoconiosis are nonetheless totally disabled. Many mountain doctors are apparently unwilling to give miners benefits, as several people testified at the Clay County hearings. They are apparently loyal to coal interests, which have a reason for wanting the number of recipients of black lung benefits to be small: In 1972, the black lung program becomes a part of the Kentucky Workman's Compensation program, which means that the coal companies themselves will have to bear the burden of benefit payments. Not only are benefits hard to come by, however, but the preventive arm of the Coal Mine Health and Safety Act is also not producing much. A Kentucky Department of Health study recently showed that some miners are breathing up to 67 times the legal limit of air-borne coal dust. There have been more accidents in the West Virginia mines since the law went into effect than in the comparable period before its enactment. The hard reality seems to be that still nobody cares about the Appalachian coal miner. The Clay County Poor People's Association is trying to organize to get miners their rightful benefits. A petition is currently being circulated which asks that a number of changes be made in black lung diagnostic procedures. Included among these requests is one that the University of Kentucky Medical Center make its special respiratory diagnostic equipment available to black lung applicants. Anyone who supports the miners and would like to see the Appalachian Tragedy end should send his name and address to: Clay County Poor People's Association Theo Napier, Chairman Route 5, Box 619-A Manchester, Ky. 40621 blue-tail fly/13 Ahallucinogenic-paranoiac-schizophrenic report on the Governor's drug conference By CHUCK THE TRUCKER Come on in and cleanse your soul. Welcome to Brother Louie's combined drug abuse bizarre and downhome tent revival. We got faith healers, mystical signs, a cherubic choir, federal programs and all the straight-from-the-syringe info on the devil dope. It's an Orwellian mixed bag. If you get my drift. Before we get to twistin' things, we got this here film about some people called the speed freaks. They live in Haight-Asbury. That's near Stockwood, you know. Look at that woolybooger freakout. Yea, they're mean as all get out. Carry guns too. Ran across one in Monkey's Elbow last week. But let's get it from one who's been "There. " Folks over in this side room are ex-dopers. Sunk so low they had to get help from the Justice Department. Got 'em a place called Matrix House, right here in Louisville and Lexington, too. They'll tell you about their former lives as "dope fiends, " how they got curious and decided to try a little pot. That got 'em rollin' and they rushed on to the bigger kicks -- speed and then heroin. No turnin' back. They're takin" questions now, about what made 'em turn to dope. Here's a good one, from an Air Force ser- geant: "Was there any discipline system in your family, prior to age three? " This one's nice: "Is the craving for drugs biological?" Here's one about church attendence . . . another on family relations. Say, why don't you ask one about pre-natal care? That'd be gettin' right down to it. That shirt with the SOS insignia on it? Well, you might say that's our motto. Some say it means "Stamp out stupidity" and "Speak out sensibly. " But they can't fool me. I know what it really means. It means . . . "Save our souls. " Which reminds me, it's bout time for the revival to start. Brother Louie's callin' his sheep into the meetin' hall. And some woman's goin' to testify. Look at her up there, chantin' the Linkletter Me a Culpa. She's got 'em wailin' in the aisles. They're on their feet. Dadgum, a standing ovation. And here comes Rev. Herren. Listen to that: "We have just met courage face to face. " Ain't that the clincher? Must be time to proselytize. Yea, there's Brother Louie ascending the pulpit. Listen to those cameras whirr. He's got federal money and we're gonna get more agents and more education. And he's callin' on his followers to spread the word, to send their sons and daughters to the neighborhood rehabilitation centers for cleansing, so's they can go back to the factories and run the sacred drill presses and typewriters. Well, guess that's 'bout it. No, wait. The lights went out. There's a mock-up of the Commonwealth, dotted with rehabilitation center sites, rising majestically against a spotlighted curtain. Listen to that choir singin' "Bridge Over Troubled Water." And that preacher exhorting us to cleanse the land of the dope plague. And. . .my God . . .cherubims! Meetin's over now. Hey, what's your hurry? Want some words with you. I been readin1 through this dope literature they passed out. You been actin' kinda strange. Your pupils 'er kinda wide, your breath's kinda foul, and your clothes downright stink. You been laughin1 at things that ain't too funny. And I saw the look you gave that cop, kinda suspicious. Where you get your money from, anyway? You on dope, boy? You better come with me. I think you need a spiritual rebirth. Heller long enough for the proverbial couple of drinks. He had had many, however by the time he decided he wanted to be taken to his motel. It was nearing 3 a.m. He thanked everyone for the good time and left half a bottle of Scotch, saying we should "try it. " Then we went back down the stairs, where he signed the FUCK WAR AND PIGS sign with a John Hancock flourish. Then we made a dash through the rain to the car. Along the way, taking up the grass-booze question again, he conceded that, yes, it was true, as someone had argued earlier, that while one frequently sees "ugly drunks, " one almost never sees "ugly smokers. " He also observed that if Julie Eisenhower had a choice between spending the night with her husband or with Abbie Hoffman and picked the former, "she'd be crazy. " As we were letting him off, he shook hands all around and told us how he had never expected to have such a good time in Lexington and thanked us. He seemed sincere, even allowing for the effects of a good many drinks. Perhaps he was hoping he had said enough by then to warrant a special addition to the congressional committee's list. Or, at the very least, to the one they surely must keep somewhere in Lexington, Ky. CLOTHES WITH STYLE purple onion 216 S. Lime (One ad per person) BRING IN THIS AD AND RECEIVE $1. 00 OFF ON ANY $5. 00 PURCHASE 20% OFF ON ALL JEWELRY * smoking accessories * Jewelry * Incense * Posters * Books open from 1-6 Mon. -Sat. (usually) m S. tip?1 14/Number Ten SHORT TAKES by Anselm Hollo LOS SEDENTARIOS most of the time we sit down to write 'sitting down' down Mark Twain made a contraption enabled him to be funny in bed in writing Goethe and Hemingway risked varicose veins at the highdesk sitting down we get fat round the ass short poems not too frequent are the least fattening if you're sitting down while reading this now is the time to get up ELEGY VISITORS FROM TIBET A Cock Signifying Craving S Greed A Snake Signifying Wrath 6 Passion A Pig Signifying Ignorance S Delusion they just decided to drop in but i tell them all GETTAHELLOUTTAHERE'. The Western Way the laundry-basket lid is still there though badly chewed up by the cat but time has devoured the cat entirely THE RESEMBLANCE hey did you see the man who looked like a camel we saw in the zoo who looked just like a man we saw in the street who looked at you just like a camel? it is a poem but is it the trewf? says the daughter it is (he said somewhere inside) that so many things tho not here are true Battersea Power Station for instance and you the proof the trewf? in the thinking, the loving fire and heat and smoke and the light at the ends of the grid our fingertips touching lit up those days right now it is raining in Iowa City but it ain't rainin in my heart nor on my head because my head it wears a big floppy heart ha-ha it wears a big floppy heart ANSELM HOLLO is Finnish, but had lived for ten years in England when he bought a house on the Isle of Wight, which feat accomplished - he moved to Iowa City where he has been teaching, writing, translating, listening to the Incredible String Band for the past few years. 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