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Blue-Tail Fly, January 1970

Blue-Tail Fly, January 1970 Blue-Tail Fly, Inc., 1969- 400dpi TIFF G4 page images Lexington, Ky. : Blue-Tail Fly, Inc., 1969- Lexington, Kentucky 2010 2008ua008_1_4 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, January 1970 Blue-Tail Fly, Inc., 1969- Lexington, Ky. : Blue-Tail Fly, Inc., 1969- Lexington, Kentucky. 1970-01-01 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. A radical plan to curb population, page seven contents Edgar Tolson, American Folk sculptor, page 5 Rick Bell and Jack Lyne A plan for population control, page 7 Wayne H. Davis snaps: Arthur Tress, pages 8 and 9 Where I'm at--Cap'n Kentucky reports, page 10 Ed McClanahan Round and round she goes. . .a prospectus on youth, page 12 Bucky Young Alive and well; greetings from Canada, page 14 Joe Nickell Cover photograph by Arthur Tress The blue -tail fly is published monthly by blue-tail fly, inc. at 210 W. Third Street, Lexington, Ky. 40507 blue-tail fly January, 1970 vol. 1, no. 4 W staff: Guy Mendes, Rick Bell, David Holwerk, Jack Lyne, Sue Anne Salmon, Chuck KaehJer, Gretchen Marcum, Bucky Young, Nick DeMartino, Julie Mendes, Geoffrey Pope, Kevin Hill, Don Pratt and Doug Stewart. Business staff: John Simon, Jeannie St. Charles, Terry McCarty, Carol Bryant, Maria Chalk, Warren Ford and Becky Martin. tidings: Diary of a porno bust Since our last issue, we have been involved in our first legal hassle, centering around such questions as whether the btf is obscene and whether last issue's Snaps section was a picture of a woman playing with herself. The recipient of this nonsense was staff member DON PRATT. Pratt, who may be dragged off to jail any day for refusing induction, has by this time a rather practiced eye for the finer points of political criminality, as his following account shows. Time: December 12, 1969"'til December 31, 1969"'til January 28, 1970, 'til... Locations: Home"U.K. Campus"Fayette County Police Dept."Fayette County Court House (Juvenile Court)"City Police Court, to be. Cast of characters: A.T., C.H., W.L.-three young black men, ages 9-14, Sgt. Jacobs"Lexington's Jack Webb, now in stiff competition with Fryman, Sylvestro and Fred Wachs for 1969 Lexington man of the year, Det. Arnett"a Broderick Crawford xerox. Friday, Dec 12: * 'Twas thirteen nights before Christmas. The phone rang, and as usual, one of the gang was pleading his case for spending the night. Plans had already been made to attend "Weird Harold's" party at the Student Center but A.T.'s arguments continued during my explanation and an agreement was forthcoming. Being a couple of weekends since the last overnight visit, the green light was all I could see even though the thought of "Weird Harold's" party brought caution. I agreed to pick C.H. and him up as soon after the party as possible. That "soon after" didn't come that night so I went to bed with Saturday night on my mind. Sat., Dec 13, early morning, or at least early morning for "sleep laters:" Got up to go to work, grouting the space frame (an architectural research project), but thought it might be enjoyable to A.T. and C.H. to come over to 2 spend the day on campus. Stopped by their home and found W.L. over there too. Why not, and he came along. Grouted approximately 2xh hours while the three-man "gang" started out "exploring the land." Nothing unusual though, and they returned around noon, thinking of lunch ... Beginning of afternoon: Had to meet Guy at the btf office to work on subscriptions so we took off. Guy wasn't there, so we waited. A.T., C.H. and W.L., having sold papers for me (the obsolescent Lexington Leader), got excited about making some money and asked to sell btfs on campus. Obliged them and they got about IS apiece while I took about 100 for deliveries. On the way back to U.K_ C.H. began talking about the first issue and the words "fuckin* punk" which he had noticed or heard about, back in October. Laughingly remarking that "if they thought that was bad, then those people would react worse to this issue." I then told him about the center page, commenting that it was simply an art photo. C.H. had the greatest response when he said: "Some old man will want to hang this on his wall." Nothing more said (and no sex acts committed) we made lunch at the grill on hot dogs and cokes. I went back to grouting and they to hustling,' we finished out the afternoon. Four-thirty p.m. and we split for home, they having successfully sold their copies and me covered with cement. Back to U.K. (coliseum) toselj official "Wildcat" programs and nearing countdown. C.H., A.T. and W.L. all decided to sell more btf and the student line was my suggestion. Deciding to reap their afternoon rewards, they dropped in the Huddle to get hamburgers. Their notorious careers began. 8:30 Sat. night"Left the game looking for the gang who might still be around" not knowing that they had been kidnapped by the LPD. They were to have walked over to our house, a few blocks away, so, not finding them, I headed on home. They weren't there and I knew something was up. Called A.T.'s house and found out that it had happened. The gang, taken into custody, were rushed off for questioning, but mainly scaring them to death, the friendly neighborhood cop had done his job. C.H., A.T. and W.L. now were to be used, and they were released to their parents. The arrest: I knew that something would probably happen as my E.S.P. was up, so when two sets of headlights pulled up on the wrong side of the street in front of the house, I made my move for the door. I was right, one car and a paddy wagon, two plainclothed and two uniformed had dropped by. As they were surrounding the house, I interrupted their plans by opening the door. The uniformed policeman, headed to guard the back door, turned around and came back. The capture was a success. Later, the question about whether someone should come along got the response that after booking, I would be immediately released on my own recognizance. How absurd, surrounding the house for a "booking." I immediately invited them in only to be informed of my arrest. Asked if I had in my possession a dangerous weapon such as a knife, I responded "No." They checked. Outside, searched again, I noticed the cracks in the Venetian blinds of neighbors across the street. Didn't get to wave goodbye, as I was immediately locked in the back of the LPD wagon. The patrolman offered "light to illuminate the darkness" and with no objection, he gave it. I now could read my palms if I knew how but since I didn't, I just looked at them. Searched again upon arrival at the Fayette County Police Dept., I was then allowed to relieve myself, and 1 thought I'd- never get through. Finished and closing my fly, I returned to the tedious task of booking. No questions by Sgt. Jacobs was a strange phenomenon as they earlier insisted that I read the usual statement about my rights and how anything I said "could be used against me." While being booked, I was fingerprinted three times, which were on three separate sheets. Six times per hand, or a total of 60 fingers recorded. During such occasion I had the legal obligation of bouncing six "birds" for Jacobs and Arnett. Done with pleasure! At the "pig pen" Sgt. Jacobs took time to speak to Boobie and finding her emotionally high-pitched, he was thrown the question "why was the btf considered obscene?" He bluntly answered her that the woman in the photo was playing with 4 herself. Until Jacob's vulgar outlook explained that picture, I personally had not noticed that hand. Such an observation though, was just as absurd as my later-imagined idea that the nude model had 4-foot fingers and was playing with another nude mcdel standing behind her. "Relieved" and Released: I tried to relax by watching the replay of the U.K. ballgame. Fate had it that "Boobie," my wife, would demand a flick and such turned out to be a story of a perverted murderer. This woman raper was guilty of killing at least three women, one of whom was left hanging naked among the nude mannequins. Not only did he do that but he also went into the woman's restroom"right on TV!! Of course, he was disguised as an old woman, and it could have been a female stand-in, but the implication was there. That was nasty. I knew that somewhere in Lexington, somebody was thinking that men like "Red," the wo man-raper, murderer, detainer against wills, etc., probably started out by selling nude pictures on the street and that, had they caught him early, maybe his criminality would have been retarded. Poor Red died with his head on the pitcher's mound and what started out for me at a basketball game ended up in a baseball park. One more evening in the life of a draft re sister. First trial date, Wed., Dec 17: ACLU had acted quickly in taking the case so Bob Sedler was representing me. Court is always a bore so I had little interest in the proceedings. But what was notable on this day was the instructions in law Sedler gave, and the necessity of showing the prosecuting attorney what the charges should be. Originally charged with "contributing to the delinquency of a minor, causing to sell obscene literature" (3 counts), the charges were to be amended the following Wednesday. While we sat in conference, a patrolman had been sent out to find a copy of the evidence. He stepped outside the judge's chambers and into the courtroom where a friend, Pete, was selling souvenir copies. The cop, in a very serious tone, asked Pete, 24, to prove his age. Not asking it then, but wanting to later, Pete had this same question for the patrolman. January, 1970 That day ended with a preliminary hearing set to be held Christmas Eve and the trial New Year's Eve___oh, the season to be jolly. Prelim. Hearing, Wed., Dee. 24: Reduced charges"something to the effect that I had contributed to the delinquency of a minor by causing to sell for gain or reward matter that would cause unusual harm to the morals of youth. Their task to prove "unusual harm" as well as "gain or reward". This session extremely short, less than an hour. On my way out of the courthouse, with a new frame of reference (a detective's) in looking at nudes, I noted the "juvenile statue" in front of the court-, house. That young man was doing something mighty strange to the pole. Nasty! Trial, New Year's Eve, Dec. 31: More excitement, as the courthouse was full, everyone was waiting for the trial The proceedings included the LPD's star witness, Sgt. Jacobs, and I must admit I did enjoy seeing him cross-examined. When pressed, time after time, for the reason "why?" the newspaper and particularly the photo would "cause unusual harm to their morals," Sgt. Jacobs in a very decisive manner stated: "I would not show it to my sons." That was why. In another comment as to the obscenities of the btf Sgt. Jacobs emphatically stated that to "beat meat" didn't mean hamburger. The only other testimonies of any significance were those of C.H., A.T. and W.L. Each little man came through quite well and I want to commend them and their courage under such circumstances. "Acquittal" was the final decision with the addition "but with probable cause" which means that we could possibly go on to a higher court and a stiffer statute. Agnew's ghost By Ian Sven LNS"The radio speech was never broadcast"yet old show-biz Agnew got 14,000 letters of praise the next day. No one will admit who slipped. What happened was that UPI, a news service-also-makes-news tapes-used by-independent radio stations. A month ago they recorded a full hour of the usual hard hitting, always missing Agnew diatribe. The schedule said it was to be broadcast over dozens of stations on the week-end. But a foul up occurred"not a single station aired the speech. Just the same, come Monday morning, ââ€"  the UPI office was buried under a flood of 14,000 letters of fulsome praise. There was not a single letter criticizing the speech. Agnew was praised for once again exposing the effete intellectual snobs that marched in the. protest prades. 14,000 American citizens went zap over a speech they never heard. Only Spiro can get that. I know of three New York City TV stations that were forbidden by their management to air the story. Makes one think. Come to think of it, that's the same number of letters that Nixon had on his desk the day after one of his speeches. Makes one think. Mrs. Mitchell pulls a Spiro WASHINGTON, D.C. (LNS)-Emerg-ing from a strenuous gala at the Israeli Embassy recently, Martha Mitchell, the outspoken wife of the attorney general, settled into her limousine with Mrs. Gilbert Hahn, wife of the chairman of the city council of the District of Columbia. "Boy," sighed Martha, "I'm glad to get away from all those Jews." Mrs. Hah, herself Jewish, told the story to all her friends, then denied it when the newspapers began calling. Reporters at Newsweek and Time, and the Washington Post's gossip columnist Maxine Cheshire, wanted to write the story, but their editors quashed the news. Mrs. Mitchell made the news recently when she told a CBS reporter that she resented all the "liberal communists" who took over Washington on Nov. IS for the anti-war demonstration. blue-tail fly By Christopher Chandler College Press Service v It was 4:44 a.m. on the morning of December 4. The block on Chicago's West Side was cordoned off. Police stood guard on rooftops. State's Attorney's police were stationed at the tront ana rear or tne first-floor apartment, armed with a submachine gun and shotguns. There was a knock on the front door, and then the sound of more than 200 shots echoed through the early morning hour. When it was over, Fred Hampton, chairman of the Illinois Black Panther Party, was dead in bed. Mark Clark, a Panther member from Peoria, UL, was dead behind the front door. Four others were critically wounded, and three were arrested unharmed. One policeman was slightly wounded. State's Attorney Edward V. Hanrahan held a press conference later that day, displaying what he said was the arms cache recovered from the apartment (each bullet carefully placed on its end) and pronounced to the television earners: "We wholeheartedly commend the police officers for their bravery, their remarkable restraint and their discipline in the face of this Black Panther attack"as should every decent citizen in our community." He stressed the word "decent." Under normal circumstances, that would have been the end of it. Hanrahan, the key figure in Mayor Daley's 1968 election strategy, then man named to run the city's "war on gangs" last June, would ordinarily have enhanced his reputation as a tough-crime fighter and as the most popular Democratic vote-getter. But there are not normal times. The story did not end with that press conference, but grew into an international scandal The glare of publicity that focused on every aspect of that eight-minute raid illuminated the workings of Chicago's law enforcement machinery and we glimpsed momentarily, as by a flash of lightning, the face of repression. The story would not died, in part because of the stark imagery of the early morning raid by heavily armed police. "For those of us alive in the late '30's," said Professor Hans Mattick of the University of Chicago, "this brought back one of those nightmare images"the knock on the door at night, the Jews intimidated and dragged away." It would not die because the Black Panther Party opened up the apartment at 2337 W. Monroe Street for the world to see, and the evidence was inescapable: police had massed a heavy concentration of machine-gun and shotgun fire at one living room wall and into two bedrooms. There was little if any sign of return fire. It would not die because Hanrahan, distressed by what he said were the "outrageous" and "slanderous" statements made to the press, decided to try his case in the Chicago Tribune. But By whom ? evidence provided to substantiate his account of the raid turned out to be fraudulent, and the competing newspapers jumped at the chance to recover some honor by exposing the fraud. A picture purporting to show bullet holes where the Panthers shot at police in the kitchen turned out to be a picture of nail holes, and the bullet-ridden "bathroom" door turned out to be the inside of the bedroom door. It would not die because the coroner's office mis-represented Hampton's fatal wounds, because Hanrahan would not permit the FBI to interrogate his men in private. It developed that the FBI .was involved, having been wiretapping and tailing the Panthers, and the Justice Department itself had set up a special task force on the Black Panthers last August, a task force aimed at countering the threat to national security. Events had shaken the country's trust in the social order. Calls for a thorough and impartial investigation intensified to the point that there are now some eight bodies planning such a probe. But there is little prospect that findings of the investigations will convince any large spectrum of the population. The Panther Party would not have it otherwise. They are not interested in the findings of a "blue ribbon committee" or a "grand jury investigation" designed, or, in the words of Attorney General John Mitchell, to "put an end to rumors and speculation that surrounded this incident,." The Panthers' belief is that to restore confidence and end speculation is to mask the exposed face of a growing fascism. Last month's Chicago raid has given the party widespread new support for its viewpoint. Fred Hampton said last June, "I just went to a wake where a young man had been shot in the head by a pig. And you know this is bad. But it heightens the contradictions in the community. These things a lot of times organize the people better than we can organize ourselves." All of the investigations of the raid will be forced to sift through a mass of conflicting testimony. The police version, reenacted for CBS television in a special 28-minute program directed by the State's Attorney's office, must be rejected on the basis of the available evidence. One policeman in the reenactment, for example, describes three shots being fired at him as he enters the kitchen door, the film having been taped before those three bullet holes had been shown to be nail, holes. The Panther version may never come to light in its entirety. Defense attorneys for the seven surviving Panthers (charged with attempted murder) plan to retain their best evidence until the trial, and they may be in a powerful bargaining position to have the charges dropped. Panther officers have generally confined themselves to characterizing the raid as a "political assassination" and denying that any Panthers fired at police. The hard physical evidence is sparse, but heavily weighted toward the worst possible construction of the raid. * There are two bullet holes in the front door leading from a small anteroom into the living room. One is about heart high and was fired through the door from the outside while the door was slightly ajar. This shot probably killed Mark Clark, whose body was found in a pool of blood behind the door. A second hole in the door, about a foot and a half below the first, may have been made by a shotgun blast from the inside of the apartment into a far corner of the anteroom near the ceiling. The crazy angle of the blast suggests that Clark's gun may have gone off as he fell. * The right-hand side of the living room wall is covered with 42 closely stitched bullet holes, mainly from a machine gun. The shots were fired from the doorway and from the center of the living room, the shots from the center of the room penetrating the walls of two adjacent bedrooms. * The back door was forced from the outside. Two rear windows, in the kitchen and in Hampton's rear bedroom, were broken in from the outside. There is no sign of gunfire in the rear of the house except for the bedrooms, which are punctured with bullet holes. Standing in the entranceway between the kitchen and the dining room, you can see that four shotgun blasts were fired from that area three into Hampton's bedroom and one, penetrating two closets, lodging in the far wall of the middle bedroom. * Hampton was shot from above while lying in bed. According to art independent autopsy conducted by the former chief pathologist for the County Coroner's office and witnessed by three physicians, two bullets entered Hampton's head from the right and from above, at a 45 degree angle. Whatever happened in that apartment on the morning of December 4, it could not possibly have been the 20-minute "gun battle" that the police and the State's Attorney's office have described again and again. Clearly the State's Attorney's police went to the apartment heavily armed to do more than serve a search warrant for unauthorized and unregistered guns (a minor offense). But why now? Why the Panthers?_____- The answer furnished by many columnists and commentators"that the Panthers were an unpopular, probably dangerous group, and therefore the authorities may have overstepped the bounds of propriety in curbing their activities-does not hold up. The Panthers were and are a popular, successful group, and it is precisely because of that success that they have become the targets of a nationwide governmental campaign of control This fact presents us with a far more serious issue of national policy. Theoretically we believe that any organization (and particularly any political organization) is entitled to win as much popular support as its platform and leadership permit. Surely this is the democratic way. But we make exceptions to that rule, particularly during periodic "red scares." Then, any group associated with an "international Communist conspiracy" or, in the words of the Chicago Tribune, a "criminal con spiracy" are denied that basic right. So, with the rapid spread of Black Panther Party chapters across tht country in the past two years, and with the intellectual leadership that has made the Panther Party the ideological leader of most of the white radical left, and with the surprising organizational strength in cities from Hartford, Connecticut, to Peoria, Illinois, came increased governmental attention. When Mitchell took office last January, The New York Times relates, he officially labeled the Black Panther Party a subversive threat to the national security"thereby authorizing the FBI to tap Panther phones and bug Panther offices. In July, J. Edgar Hoover gave the Panther Party the distinction of being "the greatest threat to the internal security of the extraordinary step of setting up a special task force on the Panthers, made up of representatives from its civil rights, internal security and criminal divisions. The situation was similar at the local leveL The Illinois chapter of the Black Panther Party was founded in November of 1968 by Hampton and by Bobby Rush, the current chairman. Six months later, the Panthers had become the strongest organization in Chicago's black 3 community. Its influence extended beyond the ghetto to alliances with a variety of groups including the national office of the Students for a Democratic Society, an Appalachian white youth gang called the Young Patriots and a Puerto Rican gang called the Young Lords. The Panthers were respected because they spoke of carrying arms for self-defense (although they never publicly bore arms in the city), because they had a coherent socialist ideology and because they had a genius for organizing and administration. In the March special al-dermanic election they aided an independent candidate by stationing members outside of precincts where there were complaints of vote fraud. The candidate almost forced a runoff in one of the Democratic Party strongholds. In April, a party spokesman lambasted 5000 peace ...archers for not checking with the Panthers before conducting the march, and the march's leadership admitted its error. In May, they concluded an agreement with the Black P. Stone Nation, Chicago's most powerful teen gang, after having converted its traditional rivals, the East Side Disciples, to full Panther membership. Days later, Mayor Daley announced that the city was launching a "war on gangs," which would be headed by State's Attorney Hanrahan. Hanrahan listed the Panthers as prime targets in his campaign, and talked about soaring gang violence (although a study conducted by the Chicago Journalism Review revealed that gang-related youth crime had actually declined during the year). Fred Hampton soon had 25 criminal charges filed against him, but only one conviction"the somewhat strange case of assault in connection with the robbery of' $71 worth of ice cream. (Hampton commented: "I may be a big dude, but I can't eat no $71 worth of ice cream.") Despite the constant arrests and the repeated raids on their headquarters the Black Panther Party continued to grow in strength. Favorable articles about the party's free breakfast program for schoolchildren were carried in three of the city's five daily newspapers, embarrassing city officials into launching their own, hopelessly bureaucratic free breakfast program Plans were announced, funds raised and equipment procured for a free medical clinic, to be opened on the West Side. By October, Chicago newspapers did not find it unusual to quote Hampton's reaction to the "Weatherman" demonstration scheduled for down-town Chicago: he denounced them as "anarchistic" and "Custeristic" On November 4, the Black Panther Party, somewhat weakened by arrests and raids, was still the most powerful single independent organization in the city. Its program of putting socialism into practice had attracted wide support. Its policy of analyzing problems by reference to economic class, not race, was working to depolarize whites and Blacks during demonstrations, and erroneous descriptions of the members as "racists" or "Black power militants" in the local press were beginning to be corrected. The Black Panthers made the federal subversive list, they became a prime target for Chicago officialdom because of their success. I don't suggest that Mayor' Daley cynically set out to destroy the party because it might bring success to bis enemies at the polls"or that the Justice Department set out to crush the party nationally because it wanted to protect the country's big businesses against socialism Mitchell and Hoover see the Panthers as an arm of an International Communist conspiracy (has not Panther information minister Eldridge Cleaver visited Cuba and Algeria while in exile"even lavishing his highest praise on the North Korean government?). Mayor Daley views the Panthers as much of the rest of the population views them"as "Communists"; and worse still, young Black Communists who carry arms. (The Panthers are not reticent to express their views: they will explain patiently at a press conference that their political ideology is based on Marx and Lenin, and that they look to other revolutionary leaders, including Mao Tse-tung, for examples of how to translate ideology into political power.) Policemen all over the country see the Panthers as their explicit enemies. The Panthers called the police "pigs," and even talk of killing pigs. (To the Panthers, "pig" means most importantly the "pig power structure," and secondarily the "pig police" who enforce the will of that power structure on the country's Black colonies.) There is a "conspiracy" to get the Panthers, and it is a conspiracy tied t gether by the mutual convictions of JUST FOR THE HELL OF IT SALE Imported shoes Blacklite posters Incense Body Shirts Hand carvings Hookahs Jewelry Stationary Greek handbags Bell bottoms trade wind Come one and all 100 WEST HIGH ST. --1 TIL 9 WEEKNITES, 11 WEEKENDS policemen, local government and federal government. It is a conspiracy that puts the country's professed ideals to a hard test. Are we prepared to allow revolutionary Marxists"Leninists to campaign for public support and public office? Theoretically we are. Theoretically (at least according to a June 9, Supreme Court decision) we also cannot convict someone for merely advocating the moral propriety or necessity of using violence to overthrow the government. But in practice we are not prepared to view the Black Panthers as a political party. One might argue that the Panthers should disarm if they are serious about politics and about only using their weapons for self-defense. The bearing of arms may be a fetish carried over from the formation of the party in Oakland in 1966, when it was called the "Black Panther Party for Self Defense," and when its primary goal was to defend Blacks from police harassment. Undoubtedly, the very existence of arms does much to provoke the police. But there are problems' with this argument: there is nothing illegal about carrying arms; that right is protected by the U.S. Constitution, Twenty Panthers have died in gun battles with police around the country (although police have died also"two in Chicago just two weeks before the raid). The Hampton killing itself r ises the grim possibility that the Panthers, even today in Chicago, do need guns for self-defense. The State's Attorney's raid suggested another disturbing view"that this country is moving steadily toward the extreme political right. The proposed investigations of the raid provide an example of the extent of that shift. The FBI investigating? But the FBI has been involved in nationwide raids against the Panthers. The Justice Department? Attorney General Mitchell's approach to law enforcement is not reassuring. The main investigation is to be conducted by a special U.S. District Court grand jury in Chicago. A seven"man racially integrated team of federal investigators, headed by Assistant Attorney General Jerris Leonard, will present the evidence to the jury. Leonard, head of the civil rights division, last May explained to Jay Miller, the executive director of Illinois American Civil Liberties Union, why Bobby Seale had been included among the Chicago Conspiracy trial defendants. "The Panthers are a bunch of hoodlums," he said. "We've got to get them." * * *Copyright 1970 Harrison-Blaine, New Jersey, reprinted by permission The New Republic. Mr. Chandler is senior, editor of The Chicago Journalism Review. High school unrest seen as preview by Phil Semas "jv-"-Chronicle of Higher Education: (CPS)-During the past few months, student radicals on many college campuses have sounded a warning in virtually the same words: "If you think we're bad, wait until some of these high school kids get into college." So far during the present academic year, activism in the high schools has been even more widespread than in the colleges. Among the incidents: * At Bladensburg High School in the Maryland suburbs of Washington, D.C., more than 60 students were arrested after a series of demonstrations over demands by Black students. The students charged that Principal David L. Dean had refused to discuss their demands, but the school later decided to establish a Black studies course and to allow establishment of a Black cultural organization. * Balboa High School in San Francisco suffered two days of violent battles between white and Black students. There were no specific demands involved and Principal Harold Zimmerman put the blame on "pure hatred" between the races. * Students ran through hallways and broke some classroom windows at Riverside High School in Milwaukee in a protest over school regulations. * Several high schools and junior high schools in Detroit were closed after racial disturbances. * At Central High School in Little Rock, Ark."where National Guardsmen were called out to enforce integration 13 years ago"150 Black students staged a walkout, charging racist policies at the school All were suspended. There have been many other disturbances and many quieter, non-violent protests. During the 1968-69 academic year some of the worst disturbances occurred at schools in Los Angeles and the New York City area. All 18 senior and junior high schools in the predominantly Negro south central area of Los Angeles were hit by fires, assaults on teachers, picketing, rock-throwing, and windowbreaking. On one day 65 fires were set in schools in the area. The violence started after the arrest of a Black college student at one of the schools. A study of newspaper clippings by the Center for Research and Education in American Civil Liberties at Columbia University showed that from November, 1968, through February, 1969, there were 239 serious disruptions involving 348 high schools in 38 states and the District of Columbia. "In this short period, the number of dippings we have been receiving monthly has increased almost three-fold, indicating a sharp rise in the rate of conflict." says Alan F. Westin, director of the center and a professor of public law and government at Columbia. Mr. Westin's study involved only serious disorders such as "strikes, sit-ins, boycotts, protest demonstrations, and riots," but the extent of student unrest in the high schools is greater than that. A random survey of 1,026 senior and junior high school principals conducted by the National Association of Secondary School Principals found that some form of protest had occurred at 59 per cent of the schools last year. Unrest is most extensive in large urban and suburban schools, but even among small rural schools half the principals reported some form of unrest. "One of the surprises of the survey," says J. Lloyd Trump and Jane Hunt, the researchers, "was the fact that protest is almost as likely to occur in junior high schools as in senior high schools." Fifty-six per cent of the junior high schools reported protests. The extent of this unrest has caused some concern among federal officials. This fall James E. Allen, Jr., U.S. commissioner of education, sent special messages to high school principals and state school superintendents warning them of the likelihood of increasing high school unrest. Since high schools enroll two and a half times as many students as the colleges, "these younger secondary school students potentially are more volatile than their college counterparts," says Gregory R. Anrig, a U.S. Office of Education official who headed a study of high school unrest. In addition, he says, "high school disorders are usually more precipitous, spontaneous, and riotlike" than college protests. Students radicals in some cities have attempted to give more direction to high school unrest. High school student unions have been formed in San Francisco and New York and there have been attempts at coordination in Los Angeles and Philadelphia. So far, however, most attempts at organization have failed. A survey of 101 high schools by the Justice Department found only four with active SOS chapters, and witnesses at six days of hearings before the House Committee on Internal Security said SDS had failed to gain many converts in the high schools. The most common topic of protest in the high schools-reported by 82 per cent of the principals whose schools had protests"is against school regulations. These include rules on dress and hair length, rules against smoking, censorship of student and underground newspapers, student government, and even cheerleader elections. Racial issues are a less common topic of protest than school regulations, but protests over racial questions tend to be more violent. The Justice Department survey, which included only high schools with at least a 10 per cent minority enrollment, found that 75 per cent had experienced unrest. Some principals believe the colleges are partly at fault for racial protests in the high schools."Colleges are not Warning teachers for the urban school,"one principal told Mr. Trump and Miss Hunt. The content of the education students are receiving is the other major issue in high school activism. Mr. Trump and Miss Hunt said that 45 per cent of the principals they surveyed reported student un rest over the instructional program. January, 1970 EDGAR TOLSON, SCULPTOR by Jack Lyne Kentucky, the state that brought you strip-mining, KUAC, black conspiracy trials, and Owsley Stanley, Jr., has finally gotten itself out of Harm's way long enough to discover an artist. Yet, the artist in question hardly fits the Warholian stereotype, for 65-year-old Edgar Tolson of Campton, Kentucky (Wolfe County) is, if anything, a vintage redneck renaissance man. Locked somewhere in the closet of the collective psyche of every Kentuck-ian is the image of the bucolic folk artist, whittler extraordinaire, mouthing agricultural aphorisms from the county courthouse steps, fashioning, small, rigid fish and fowl to plop atop your trusty weathervane, windmill and/or mantle. True, this hypothetical rustic can normally be found in most small Kentucky towns, sitting among the shavings, enjoying community stature as some sort of nouveau village idiot. However, the sculpting and carving, indeed, the very life of Edgar Tolson tffc&nscend such limited, shallow categorization, for he is much, much more than an automated craftsman, a complex man who simply cannot be pigeonholed into what barefootin' down-home-you-all mould into which we are want to conviently exile the mountain people. Tolson would likely have evolved as an extraordinary man regardless of economic circumstance. As is, his life has been checkered with enough changes to flush Christine Jorgenson blue (pink? ) with envy. The rake-thin, razor-featured Tolson has turned in vocational stints as an electrician, carpenter, coal miner, concrete worker, farmer, cobbler, and building contractor. Rummaging through these myriad roles Tolson has somehow managed to muster the time, energy and libido to father 18 children through two wives, a fertility track record likely to make him the first man tried by the Planned Parenthood Association as a war criminal. Tolson's mercurial, ambivalent character is reflected in his convoluted relationship to the church, an institution that twists throughout the sometimes schizoid mountain mentality. While serving the past thirty-odd years as a self-ordained minister, Tolson has also been a very frequent tko victim in bouts with the bottle. Such innumerable mental interfacings seem occasionally merged in' the man for brief, fragile moments, hanging together in symbiotic alliance like huge breaking waves. Such contrasts seem fused in Tolson's rehashing of his exploits as an 18-year-old ecumenical Che Gue-vera. Tolson, a frequent churchgoer, found the pastoral pace too slow, too timid one summer night, and, together with another young compatriot, decided to enliven the proceedings "by just layin' a little dynamite under the chapel. " After lighting the fuse that sultry mountain night, Tolson and his partner in chaos trucked back to their pew post positions, piously uplifting their eyes as stain glass and rafters sailed around a rather startled congregation. Tolson revels in recounting his existential exploit, saying ''We had to go back in that chapel, you see. When it blowed all up with us in it, we knowed no one would suspect us. " Tolson's artistic efforts began as an unconscious reaction to the poverty that pervades his Breathitt County birthplace. Lacking playthings as an 8-year-old, he carved a cross-hatch tablecloth atop an old stump, later adding hand-crafted cups and saucers. bine-tail fly S Through the 57 years since, Tolson has built everything from barns to his own false teeth (the latter were constructed after Tolson persuaded his dentist to allow him to fashion his own false molars following some rather heavy imbibing by both doctor and patient. ) Walking through the current display of Tolson works in the UK Student Center (where they will remain through Feb. 7), one is impressed with the uniqueness of the finished product, each piece bearing a self-generated, encapsulated existence of its own. Tolson's touch produces an invariably original statement, though his work is almost arbitrary in its adherence to'the artist's own almost caricaturial view of reality, for Edgar Tolson has recreated what he knows rather than what he sees. His own particular perspective is apparent is his Noah's Ark, with streams of animals entering from below while the dove returns to Noah atop the piece, a time-space compression of forty days in a space of several inches. The consummate Tolson, though, seems to merge in his wooden army of pious, spiritual, rigid dolls, depicting farmers, preachers, train engineers, mountain women--the people with whom he has lived, their faces all decidedly reflecting the features of Tolson's English forebearers. His hand-carved dolls seemingly record the coalescence of all the contradictions of his life and the entire life-style of the eastern Kentucky mountains. The unembellished yellow poplar figures are at once frozen rigid in time, yet brimming with latent vio- lence, staring behind huge eyes agape with humanity, yet seemingly ready to flinch at the sight of life's nausea. The tens ion-filled figures seem at once both spiritual and visceral, filled with shadings of hatred and impotence, frustration and acceptance, reaching but never touching, mirroring with uncomfortable force the terribly fragile nature of triumph and tragedy. They seem to exist only through their terribly rigid carriage, as if relaxation and collapse would prove inextricable. Yet, the distillate of their suffering is pure and profound irony--an irony not of defense but of acceptance. Yet few of Tolson's dolls appear in his three-room home in Campton, for his involvement is too deep for them to remain. When on one of his frequent week-long benders, Tolson has a recurring dream of his hundreds of dolls: "They come in this room here and they gather all around me and point their fingers and say 'You made me. You made me'. " Tolson turns out his tiny figures with a simple pocket knife, sitting on an old dilapidated green couch, his long bony fingers leaping down yellow poplar boards in long, swimming strokes, his hands moving steadily when carving, though normally shaking noticeably. (Tolson carved primarily with his right hand until a stroke in 1955 partially paralyzed his right side. In his usual undaunted style, Tolson learned to perform his craft just as well with his left hand. Although he has since recovered full use of his right side, he continues to turn out southpaw stylings.) Tolson, like the mountains he loves, has long been badly misused. Just as faceless corporations gouge coal from the Kentucky hills, leaving only gaping, incurable wounds, collectors have for years exploited Tolson's isolated, anonymous situation, paying miniscule fees for his dolls, then carefully covering their artistic tracks, displaying Tolson's work but denying knowledge of the creator's identity, squeezing the air from the man's work, then pushing him back into obscruity. However, University of Kentucky sculptor and collector Mike Hall located Tolson recently after several years' worth of bad leads, including erroneous information that the strange Tolson dolls were the creation of some very mythical and very dead mountainwoman. (Of the latter rumor Tolson says, "Oh yes, that's true, but I come back as a man.so's ole Mike (Hall) could discover me. ") Hall, working with photographer Rick Bell, has finally revealed the scope and depth of Edgar Tolson in the current display, ranging from stone dogs and walking sticks to symbolic reenactments of the expulsion from the Garden of Eden. Within hours of Tolson's Lexington opening, all the current work of the artist was sold and enough orders had been filed to take Tolson's steel spinning through a redwood-size yellow poplar. Tolson even found himself autographing programs at his opening, faithfully inscribing each with the ri^icl scrawling "Edgar Tolson. Campion, Ky. " that labels many of his picees. It is doubtful that Edgar Tolson will ever again be pushed so rudely into the background, will ever again receive the artistic vulture's equivalent of thai Bethlehem Steel red-carpet-foot-in-the-face. Major museums throughout the country are currently dickering for Tolson's work, and brisk local sales seem a long-term cinch. Yet, it is doubtful Edgar Tolson will become jaded with his success. He is an extremely wily character, a master of the bucolic beau geste, beady eyes jumping like black magnet s while homilies drip from his thin lips. One moment he will be self-effac-ingly mumbling in the direction of one of the Jesus pictures that cling to the thin walls of his shaky home, bemoaning his latest work as "not worth a damn dime. " Ten minutes later he is surrounded by Camptonites in a small grocery, discussing the same piece. To the fawning tooops who until recently regarded him as the town degenerate, Tolson will say, head uplifted, "That there's the best piece I ever did do. " His fellow residents are amazed that his works will be on display "up at the university. " A survivor of the rages within him and without him, Edgar Tolson peeps warily from behind his owl-like spectacles, as hard and as human as any of his creations. A talented, complex man, an almost ignored, self-gene rated gem of a folk artist, he, like one Robert Zimmerman of Hibbing, Minnesota, is a small town boy done made good. 6 January, 1970 J A plan to control population by WAYNE H. DAVIS Finally some important people are beginning to speak up about the serious population problem in the United States. Although Presidents Kennedy, Johnson and Nixon have all expressed alarm about world population, I know of no high public official who has brought it home to the American people, where the most urgent population crisis has developed. Now two prominent members of the last Administration have taken public stands at home. Roman Catholic Robert S. McNamara, one of the most influential and respected men in the Kennedy and Johnson cabinets, was the first name on an advertisement in Time (Nov. 21 p. 11) saying, 'Whatever your cause, it's a lost cause unless we control population. " Stewart Udall, from a family of six and father of six, has written in the Reader's Digest (Dec. I9b9) of concern about the overpopulation of our nation. If Bobby Kennedy were alive, perhaps he would write; or maybe he would father another child. If all his descendents are as productive as he, the 1 1th generation will produce exactly 100 billion people, 27 times the number on earth today. We should revise all our laws which favor the production of children. The cost of child raising is now more of a burden on society than upon those who produce them. We should eliminate tax deductions for children; the federal government has no business subsidizing procreation. The cost of producing a third child should involve an annual excess child tax, in addition to the free market cost of a certificate. School taxes should be levied in such a way that those who produce children pay the major cost of educating them. We should change our social attitudes toward the career girl, the bachelor and the childless couple, endeavoring to make such life patterns more attractive. We should stop persecuting the homosexuals. Perhaps an article in the January issue of Pageant is a harbinger of unintentional progress on this as well as the population front. Entitled, "Now! Pick the sex of your child, " it says you can pick with 75 to 90% assurance. Since most couples prefer boys, we can expect a drastic shift in the sex ratio. This will lead to a rise in homosexuality in the next generation and to falling birth rates, Udall's article is sound except for one point. He clings to the outmoded notion that everyone should be allowed to produce an unlimited number of children. This concept must change. People are the most serious form of pollution the world has ever known; no one has the right to add another litter to the Earth today. We must establish a new basic freedom - freedom from those who are destroying the Earth and its ability to support life by excessive production of their own offspring. I'd now like to release my program for population control. I introduce it as a starting point toward a rational approach to an extremely serious problem which is still being ignored by our political non-leaders. Suggestions and amendments are welcome. My program is not original; it has been put together from the literature. It should be official policy that no one has the inherent right to produce more than two children and we should pay a bonus in the form of increased social security payments for those who produce less. We should have a marketable license for babies. Each girl, upon maturity would receive certificates allowing her to produce two children. She could have the children or sell her certificates to someone who wanted more than two. Not only would this control population but it would solve the poverty problem as well. Excessive numbers of children now assure the perpetuation of the poverty cycle. With the certificates for the rich to buy, they would have more children and become poorer while the poor would have fewer and become rich. Ellsworth Taylor because only females produce children. We should phase out the Aid to Dependent Children program. With our new program anyone desiring to have a child not only must present a certificate but must post bond for insurance to provide for the welfare of the child should tragedy befall the parents. Now for the poor and the welfare people. Before starting on them, I want to clear the air of some misconceptions. When I speak on population problems there are always those present who expect me to be a cham -pion for those who want to kick the unwed mother with the large brood, or the prolific blacks, or both. I favor justice and equality of opportunity and will neither advocate nor support any program which would pick on certain groups or classes of people. Although the poor and the black have larger families than the average American, cutting the birth rates among among these groups would not solve the population problem. By far the greatest portion of the population explosion in the United States is in the middle income group with their predominantly 3-5 child families. That's you, Whitey, and don't forget it. If you plan a population program for the poor and the black without taking care of your own excess procreation at the same time, you are looking for trouble and you will find it. Recent studies (e. g. , Science '65: 367, 1969) have shown that people desire the same number of children regardless of family income and that Negros want no more children per family than whites. Why, then, do continued on page 10 blue-tail fly 7 snaps: 3B»- fits «*, f | $3*&i£SC5S£8i& - mi.......in Arthur Tress In 1968 Arthur Tress made several trips through the Appalachian regions of North Carolina, Kentucky and Tennessee to collect artifacts from, and take photographs of this country for New York State Education Title III and for the Sierra Club. The results were the removal of an 8 foot long tapeworm in a small county hospital in Tennessee and these photographs. Some of the photographs shown here were exhibited at the Sierra Club Gallery in October, 1968 in a show entitled 'The Disturbed Land.' Jonathan Greene POPULATION CONTROL the poor have larger families? Indifference and lack of adequate contraception are probably factors. But the natural response of rational beings to our economic system of financial rewards and punishment is also an important factor. Few subjects create more emotional response among a middle income white audience than the subject of uncontrolled reproduction among unmarried women whose already large litters of children are being supported by public welfare. But I have no hard feelings against them for producing children, with the amount of payment being a function of the number produced. In Kentucky a woman may get about $50 a month for one child, whereas with 10 she would get about $300. Thus they seem to be cheaper by the dozen. Surely society must want her to produce children. Why complain when she does? The fault here lies not with the welfare mothers but with a society which developed and tolerates such a system. Aid to Dependent Children payments vary widely among states and in no case are they sufficient to provide a very high standard of living for the family. However, to a person who has nothing they look attractive and they encourage the production of children. I have seen social workers quoted in disbelief of the possibility that a woman would intentionally have another child in order to collect additional ADC payments. However, I know from personal experience during my days in the snake pit bars of Minneapolis that such behavior was commonplace. Perhaps it was influenced by the fact that at that time Minnesota had the highest ADC payments per child in the nation. For the middle income couples, on the other hand, each child is an additional financial liability. Therefore, they rarely produce the large families so commonly found among welfare clients. But because of their affluence and a tax system which subsidizes their production of children, the vast middle class has been reproducing at a rate sufficient to have caused the major part of our population problem. For the poor people and those on welfare I suggest a positive approach to population control. First, we should pay them not to have children, just as we pay farmers not to raise corn, not to raise hogs, and as we should pay the U. S. Army Corps of Engineers not to build dams and the Soil Conservation Service not to denude and channelize our streams. Surely if we contract to pay a woman $300 a month to produce 10 unwanted children, we should pay another woman at least this much not to have any. Remember that we do not solve any problems by raising her children. Surplus populations of unwanted children absorb resources, create crime in the streets, and reproduce themselves at near the biologically maximum rate. Next we should pay substantial federal bonuses for sterilization. Vasectomy is a very simple operation which does not affect the sexual behavior or desires of a man. Since it costs society about $18, 000 just to raise and educate one welfare child, let alone try to keep him out of trouble, we could well afford vast sums for this program even without touching the sacred war chest. 0ft f CLOTHES 9 SALE SALE SALE Sterilization is not so easily performed on the female. It can best be done at the time of childbirth when the oviducts are most accessible to the surgeon. Therefore a federal population control program should be established in the maternity wards of every hospital. It should involve a massive subsidy for sterilization or a smaller annual subsidy for successful use of contrceptives. It has also been suggested that a certificate of sterilization be required for a woman to get a new baby accepted for ADC payments. Let me make it clear that fertility control is absolutely necessary for the welfare of the poor as well as for the rest of society. The idea of rising expectations for the disadvantaged minorities is a cruel joke foisted upon them by the Establishment. Whitey's system of payments according to the number of children produced assures that there can be no possible escape from poverty except through crime. Poverty programs within this system are a farce. If we control reproduction then there is hope for the poor. An uneducated man with a wife and two children can be trained to repair automobiles or electrical appliances and he can climb into the middle income class. But if he has a half a dozen children the outlook is bleak; we might as well write him off as "cannot be saved" so as to concentrate our resources on better prospects. And if he has 11 children we could educate him through the PhD, get him a job as an associate professor of Zoology at the University of Kentucky, and his family would still be below Lyndon Johnson's official poverty line. As I have pointed out in a previous writing (New Republic , Jan. 1970) the population problem in the United States is the most serious in the world. In facing this problem we have a choice. We can limit the number of births by humane means: contraception, abortion, sterilization, social and economic rewards and penalties. Or we can do nothing and allow the nation to sink ever deeper into chaos as the population comes into balance due to increased death rates subsidized by wars, riots, murder, suicide, heroin overdose, and the battered baby syndrome, plus a birth rate depressed by drug addiction, prison confinement and mental derangement. AN INVITATION TO - REVOLUTIONARY YOUTH The Young Socialist Alliance is a nation-wide revolutionary youth organization which has a vision of the future. We envision a society in the U.S. and around the world which supplants oppression and barbarism with opportunities for the fullest development of mankind's cultural, economic and intellectual capacities. The YSA believes that a socialist revolution will be necessary to overthrow the capitalist society which enslaves us all. To accomplish this historical task we look to the ideas of such men as Marx, Engels, Lenin and Trotsky and to the traditions established by revolutionaries such as Sam Adams, Frederick Douglass, Eugene Debs, Malcolm X and Che Guevara. To all serious-minded youth, whether they be students, workers or GIs, we extend an invitation to find out more. Young Socialist Alliance P. O. Box 952 University Station Lexington, Ky. 40506 _ I want to join the YSA _ I would like more information. Name Address City_ State Zip_ 10 January, 1970 WHERE I'M AT Oap'n Kentucky reports BY ED McCLANAHAN Specifically, al this precise, particular instant in the inexorable advance of human affairs, even as certain of my brothers arc gunning one another down in rice: paddies in Vietnam and certain others are rotting away in American jails, as some arm themselves for revolution and others arm themselves to crush the revolution, where I'm at is smack in the middle of a th r ee -ac ¢Â«.¢ orchard --three acres of closely cropped bluograss feathered every twenty feel or so by a fledgling Chinese chestnut tree, forty-eight of them in al] according to my quick count, none standing taller than my head, each bearing about a hatful of pale green, spiky balls the size of walnuts, weird little green-porcupines, their first chest nuts --all this atop a densely forested bluff, a quarter of a mile (via an ancient wagon trace) above a large but perfectly secluded finger of Lake Cumberland; from where I sit it is three-quarters of a mile to the nearest blacktop country road, of which there is another four miles or so to Jamestown, population 612, Russell County, Commonwealth of Kentucky. From here I can see just three houses: two hundred yards off to my right and behind me, just at the edge of the woods, a neighbor's rarely-used vacation home: and perhaps twice that distance in the opposite direction, at the far end of the orchard, the family vacation home used on occasional weekends by my three Lexington brothers-in-law, Andy and Doug and Bill, and their various wives and kids and fiancees and friends and dogs; and here, across just twenty or thirty feet of bluegrass lawn directly in front of me, '.'my" house, the little two-room frame cottage my mother-in-law ordinarily keeps for her own use, her refuge (until she was kind enough to let me borrow it) from all the hubbub Captain Kentucky, a UK graduate now teaching at Stanford, returns to his native soil every now and then to recharge. He spent the fall months in Jamestown, Ky. and it prompted, among other things, these thoughts on Corporate America's war on the environment. Wnc-talfly of the holidaying young folks. Beyond the cottage, in the general direction of Jamestown, a long, broadbacked ridge saddled with gently sloping cow pastures, its spine a one-lane gravel road out to the blacktop; in all other directions, crowding at the periphery of the orchard, an unbroken iifty-foot-high wall of trees, a second-growth forest of elms and maples and beeches and pinoaks and some others I haven't yet learned the identities of, a living palisade that was a deep, solid shade of green until just three nights ago, when a sudden cool snap left a faint hint of autumn yellow and scarlet here and there. (It'll be an early fall and a hard winter, I'm told by the young farmer who comes every other week to mow the orchard. ) Above, a pale blue, nearly cloudless sky, a good warm sun, a fading jet-trail way off to the west, and everywhere a busy, vibrant silence, a silence filled to overflowing with what is in fact an incredible racket, bird calls and leaves rustling and distant cattle bawling and crows cawing and the raspy cacophony of twelve trillion c rickets. And spang in the middle of this pastoral idyll, sitting on a sawed-off stump before a small table beneath a sourwood tree, sitting here pecking dutifully away in sporadic little bursts on a rented electric typewriter attached by a thirty-foot umbilical extension cord to the cottage, sitting here all hairy and mustachioed and nearly naked, dappled all over by the sourwood's shade, a little bit too fat and far too freaky-looking to believe, (drumroll, maestro, if you please) the Ultimate Anachronism, the old thirty-six-soon -to-be-thirty-seven-year-old -married -college -English-teacher-father-of-three himself, (flourish of trumpets) Captain Kentucky! Yes, friends, even as Superman recharges his batteries by returning now and then to the planet Krypton, even as Antaeus drew his strength directly from contact with his own sweet Mother Earth, so has the old Cap'n come home to his native soil to get his head together and get some writing wrote. Now Kentucky is a curious place these days, rife with contradictions. And Jamestown (right here I gotta interrupt myself to announce proudly that the Kentucky experience is obviously doing something for me, because just this minute, for the very first timt in my entire life, I caught a fly! on the wing! in my quicker-than-the-eye hand! amazing! snatched the little bugger right out of the sunshine, I did!) . . . and Jamestown (as I was saying) serves in a good may ways as a microcosm of what is happening in--and to--the entire state. It*s a really lovely little village, with a classic towr square centered by a flagpole and a life-sized, fake-bronzed statue of a charging World War I doughboy wi'h a rifle in one hand and a grenade in the other and, at his feet, a memorial wreath of plastic flowers, and lots anc lots of really fine, unfuckedover country people on the streets and in th' stores. But it's also got an eightly-acre plot of farmland out on the edge of town that it insists on calling an Industrial Park, and the Chamber of Commerce is practically standing on its ear in a desperate attempt to attract some industry to set up shop there, even to the point of offering to give the land away and build the factory with Russell County's money. Meanwhile, the county already has one industrial operation, a sweatshop underwear factor operating out of Chicago or somewhere and employing some 600 people: and that same Chamber of Commerce is running frantic full-page ads in every issue of the local weekly paper begging those workers--the county's own citizens, mind you--to reject the Garment Workers Union's efforts to organize them. So here you have the. curious spectable of these fine upstanding local businessmen vigorously encouraging a bunch of Chicago shuck-artists to come in and exploit their own neighbors, to despoil the country-?,, side, the economy, and--most ruinoes of all--the community's sense of itself, its Wholeness, and then finally continued ori page Jv 11 This bein' sure nuff the start of a new year and a new decade and all, the major news media are preoccupied with assessing the future. Not to be outdone, the blue-tail fly hereby examines from a variety of viewpoints the possibilities of what Today's young people are coming to and where they're going. BUCKY YOUNG is the Master of Ceremonies--- a hip Ted Mack, you might say. Then again, you might not. . .dare we say it"Berkeley"and all that it symbolizes. --William F. Buckley Jr. ("On the Right") One of Buckley's recent syndicated columns unexpectedly dwelled at length on the grisly atrocities committed in the My Lai massacre. But he then proceeded to blame the slaughter not on the influence of militarism, but on the above. Underlying Buckley's relentless stream of death wishes (for us, not him), his central fear seems to be what he feels is a kind of mindless depravity on our part. He sees the Youth of Today as impudently deserting God, Country, Motherhood and Apple Pie and, as part of a frenzied fad, turning to drugs, anarchy and depraved bohemianism. Underneath it all, he seems convinced that our drug-mesmerized minds will be putty in the hands of totalitarian elements (on the left, of course). You might consider it--if you can take seriously anything coming from someone who, as a teen-ager, is known to have spread a mixture of honey and feathers on pews and placed "obscene" pictures in the prayer books of a church whose minis ter's wife, a real estate agent, sold a home to a Jewish family in Buckley's WASP neighborhood. 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'spjcputttis axqnop 'A^zaAod 'ssauxsnq Sxq 'saad-edsMau axqtsuodsa*^ 'Atixjof] -uxaI ^uaxTS axW 'Ayiyeyuaxu aat?J suuee Jt?axonu aq} *uopt?xndod-jaAO 'MauSy oaxdg 'uoxtj^ paBqax-g 'jbav xxrexnatA aq* 'uoxrinxxod osx"B * aSt«iax*d a^aa-e3ia ox;saxuop uoxuxuoa JtnoA--oj, snopjuztj-i ag Asy^ Sux^oxiig a^ajceSxQ ruox^meQ January, 1970 Let's make this shit real! --An anonymous participant in an East Village community meeting at the Fillmore East (as related by Rick Bell) What a passion to be real. But real was also brutal. And the acceptance of excrement as a standard? How extraordinary! Youth? Together with the idea of sexual potency? All this confused sex-excrement-militancy, ex-plosiveness, abusiveness, teeth-showing, apish howling. Like the spider monkeys in the trees, as Sammler once had read, defecating into their hands, and shrieking, pelting the explorers below. --Saul Bellow ("Mr. Sammler1 s Planet") Actually, these two quotes are completely unrelated concerning the point Bellow was making, but they were so uncannily related in syntax that putting therrTtogether was irresistable. Bellow's passage comes from his most recent novel, which is much more thoughtful than these lines, lifted out of context as they are, might indicate It credibly (for a change charges us with being raucous, overbearing, insensitive, shortsighted, superficial and near inhumane at times. We done ba where she stops no one knows bv BUCKY YOUNC ¢aTdosd aq; jo /Auiaug uh paaBjoap aq i\i/a. uiopspw punojojd jo astnS aq; ut 'ajois f^aaoojS aq; oj,,, : *suy 4§uxog noA" ajB aJaqAvu :uox;san£) ''S*a) sj3ays -ut* qy[!§ 8ux;;xtuqns auoAuy :3XON ¢;xau op pxnoqs aAv }HqAV apxaap ubd 3av os /aou^x o; paau sn jo ;saa aq; ' * ¢( jiuBqBjr) AxXTg 'noA ;ou }ng) ââ€"  ¢ 'asnBaaq * ' 'avo^; ;qfrg * * *.iadBd sxq; jo jo:ixpa-aq:i-o;-ja;;ax b ariTJAV pxnoqs noA" 'sj3msub axqB;daaoB Awes -jdAiun aub ssojdb auioa aABq o; uaddtq noA" JI ii 6^T HIT^ (Suxq;AuB jx) Suxop aq x pxnoqs TO,, 'P"V .1 6aJTI A«i jo (aub jx) asodand ' .' aq; sx ^Bq^u 'aapuoM o; aABq ;snf noA uaqAV »u»t} b saxxioo aaaqj, *;x ^jsb ;snx« AxqB;xAaux XX18 V* 2uPluJM* AU1B saop oqAv auoAUB ';obj ux *;x 5jsb o; }s jxj aq; suBaui ou Aq aaB jj aq; puB £ 3 ustj aq; puB aof Aj^unoQ- 41 xub oqA\ 13 bine-tail fly 3 Alive & well On A Page This is a note from across the border, or a song, say, here. There is your face in a sketch in the glass again: there, & there. Where is it that you are. Some star or other stone shifts from its precise place: Where. Where you are your face turns as if to ask, or look. My own turning (like a dying), here, is like some page in someone's book. This is a page then for a book. This is a last look before it turns, or burns, its places scribbled like a map. My fingers are held up before my eyes, like jail. Will you come, or write, or just send mail' Joe Nickell Toronto J. 69 . I am alive and well in the "North Country Fair". . . one of possibly 60, 000 American draft dodgers and deserters living in Canada. Accurate statistics are difficult to come by since Canadian customs officials do not ask American immigrants their reasons for coming. My decision to come to Canada was made in the Fall of 1968 when I received a 1-A classification from my local Christian Draft Board. My wife, Ruthie, and I were living in Georgia. I had just finished a year with VISTA working on a rural project with poor Blacks, and Ruthie had been working with poor Whites in a KKK-infested area of Atlanta called "Cab-bagetown. " After our marriage, we scraped together some cash, bought an ancient VW "micro-bus, " and with tears in our eyes, got ready to hightail it out of America. Here are some impressions by Ruthie on leaving/arriving: In August Joe and I decide, amid the growing panic, daily busts, and national paranoia, to Flee the Country. Hence, around 10 p.m. Under Cover of Darkness and an approaching thunderstorm, we begin loading our bus with books and records, Secret Documents, boxes of oatmeal, four silver spoons, an antique clock, bow and arrows, Kwan Yen, the fertility goddess, shoes, a crucifix Joe finds in a bush (good omen), childhood relics, ancestral portraits, three bananas, a bottle of oregano from somewhere. We have been living a- bove The Great Speckled Bird, Atlanta head-rag and gathering place, so many friends, freaks, bikers and subversive types are helping us load. The Green Hornet puts in an appearance. Two little black kids are sitting on the porch eating jelly sandwiches. There is a rain dance in the front yard. It thunders. We have a mattress piled in on top of all our stuff to sleep on: a Sagittarian-Libra circus gypsy caravan going to the promised land. Joe is in the house when the two big police drop by, and move in on the rain dance. I feel them wanting to get somebody; like, they're going to bust us for having the bus doors open, or maybe shut, or whatever. I start praying, conjuring, fading into the side of the bus. I can see us being detained until the FBI arrives. Sheer mindless panic as I actually begin to merge with the metal door. I realize how incredibly suspicious a car with a mattress in it must look. "You comin' or goin1" rumbles Police. ". . . goin'..." I mumble. Well, he say, he guess he let us go if we're going away and good riddance, and make it fast before he change his mind. But don't come back. Jesus, I'm such a coward. All I want to do is get-away. I need a break from this constant fear. I'm very chicken-shit scared is what I am. So far the Atlanta scene has been VERY TENSE. Open warfare would be a relief. But if freaks me hovering on the brink of it like this without my Invisible Shield of middle-class appearance, waiting. I can smell the fear in the air until the Atlanta P. D. takes off. We are also taking off. The goodbyes are quick and quiet. I know I love these people and will never see them, live with them, fight with them again. My family. . . my house. . . marsh and river by our yard. . . more familiar, known things. I am an exile; my husband is an exile. I begin frantically impressing faces on my mind. I try to touch hands again as the bus starts. No fear now, only bitterness. Bitterness makes me too numb to cry, as we turn the corner. It begins to rain. We come into Canada on a ferry from Sandusky, Ohio, to Pelee Island, Ontario. It takes five hours, but feels really safe putting 5 0 miles of water between us and the U. S. Marines (evil spirits not being able to cross water etc. ). There's an old jukebox on the boat and we play Pis raeli Gears and jump up and down in celebration of our Hegira. We get to Pelee Island, covered with flowers and sunshine and flowing with milk and honey. Everybody looks kindly--it's a resort for kindly old ladies who seem blind to one's skull-and-c ros s-bones tattoo or marijuana pills, or whatever. Everybody looks happy and has a golden aura. This is called Escape Syndrome. It lasts forever. Jesus lookit all the flowers. Lookit the Canadian flag ! ! Lookit customs inspectors ! ? !. . . Joe is still paranoid and dreams of being turned back: maybe the customs man has Lyndon Johnson for a tribal deity. . . maybe his totem is the American eagle. . . maybe he's a CIA agent. , . Joe tells me to stop shrieking and laughing and dancing around and BEING OBVIOUS, since we are "just visitors, " as he tells the man, and-l'are. g_o.ing- to., return in two weeks" (to the border to get landed immigrant status), and love God and our country and want to go back etc. (so naturally I must stop looking relieved and escaped. . . ). The customs man, assured we have no liquor or firearms (because Joe told him so), wishes us a Good Trip. Yeah. Wow. There is this wonder-full sign that says in a polite voice, "BUMP IN THE ROAD. " And there it is ! ! We ride into our country. Canada. Jesus; My mother opens National Geographic back in South Carolina and bursts into tears: Icebergs, Icebergs, Icebergs everywhere. And glaciers. Polar bears eating people. Eskimos eating blubber. But as far as my eyes can see there are only flowers. That was on September 8. A couple of days later we crossed into continued on page 15 When Joe Nickell graduated from UK in 1966, he was one of the better young poets in the country. He worked for VISTA in Atlanta and while there worked for The Great Speckled Bird in its early days. With the draft at his heels he went to Canada in the fall of 1968. Currently, besides writing poetry, he has been producing television shows for the CBC (on James Earl Ray and Houdini) and is occasionally performing as a professional magician. 14 January, 1970 the States at Detroit past a nasty, suspicious customs official and reentered Canada at Asaenia as we were counselled by TADP to do. (TADP, nicknamed TADPole, stands for Toronto Anti-Draft Programme. ) The Nice Man passed us right on through with lots of rubber stamping and telling us how we'd like Canada. We've been here almost a year and a half now, and he was right! What one applies for is "Landed Immigrant Status. " The fastest way of handling this is by applying at the border. One may apply from the U. S. or Canada, but this takes several months and it is illegal to work in Canada without this status. (For info on draft dodging, write TADP, 2347 Yonge Street, Suite 14, Toronto 315, Ontario, Canada. The Draft Dodgers Manual can be obtained from TADP; its price is between one and two dollars, including cost of mailing. ) A few months ago there was a furor over immigration procedures regarding deserters, immigration guidelines allowed consideration of an American's draft status. Draft dodgers were rarely turned down if otherwise qualified, but deserters were. This meant the best course of action for a deserter was t.o come into Canada and apply for Landed Immigrant Status from within, facing all the disadvantages mentioned above*. For an impoverished deserter this was a tremendous handicap. I was part of a letter-writing campaign aimed at changing immigration policy. Here is an excerpt from one of a few letters I received from Members of Parliament regarding this: "After a great deal of consideration, I finally came to the conclusion that in the rather special cimcum-stances winch exist today, Canada should not refuse to accept military deserters if otherwise well qualified for Canadian Citizenship, and accordingly, with a number of other Liberal Members I urged the Minister to apply the same practice to deserters as were being applied to those who were merely evading military service. As indicated in the enclosed statement of the Minister, this principle has been accepted. " Two of the three leading Toronto dailies also supported the admission of deserters and that policy was soon adopted --much to the relief of us all. I am pretty much in exile from the exiles as there is a good deal of squabbling and political in-fighting going on. However, I have worked a good bit with the Union of American Exiles --an organization which provides emergency aid, such as housing, for dodgers and deserters. J am familiar V e Toronto scene only, but it is one of the large centers of anti.-draft immigration and appears to be typical. This much is clear: there is no stereotype of either the draft dodger or deserter. Draft dodgers vary from clean-cut computer.programmers to long-haired revolutionaries, "nonviolent" and otherwise --though most have had at least some college and many have degrees. Deserters are of course neatly cropped, at least on arrival, and tend to be younger and to have less--or no -college. Too, there are many--neither dodger or deserter --who are in a sort of self-imposed exile, motivated in varying degrees by the War in Vietnam. As appearances and backgrounds vary; so do life styles. Many are filtering into the Canadian way of life and would not return to the U.S. in the event of a declaration of amnesty. These people will take out Canadian citizenship after five years residence. Others--and perhaps these are the ones who most stick together as a group--are biding their time:, sonic: happily and some net, until they can return. Much of the squabbiihg and in-fighting I mentioned earlier is due: to these different attitudes. Semantical debates--"exile" vs. expatriate- -are persistent. In any case, large demenslrations, such as the recent Moraterium activities here, still manage to attract. most Americans. AJ1 of us know the war still ge;es on and on. , . WHERE I'M AT to haul the; profits--you know, the real money, not just the leavings --of their depredations off tcj Chicago, where the:ir avaricious country cousins will never lay hands on a penny of it. Pre)bably it's too much to expect of these small-town greed-heads and progress fre:aks that they realize that the wejrking people ef Russell County aren't likely U) be: any happier about getting screwerl by the Bosses than working peejple anywhere have ever been, and that therefore the only realistic and sensible way te keep unions out of the county is to keep industry out of it too. That kind of insight requires more selflessness than most folks can muster. But wouldn't you suppose that at least they'd have learned by now, what with all the talk in the papers and on tv about our ravaged environment, that if industry does come to Russell County it will almost instantly begin to destroy the very things that make life here about as good as life can get nowadays, I mean the ecological and social balance, the tranquility, the sense and spirit of true community? Not bloody likely. Yet if Jamestown wants an object lesson (as of course it patently does not) in the horrors that industrialization will inevitably loose upon it, it has only to look ninety miles to the north, at Lexington, a beautiful little city until about twenty years ago, when it fell victim to its own greed and began to peddle its flesh and heritage to the highest bidder. Now, gorged and bloated with a population that has nearly doubled in fifteen years, its weary old innards swollen almost to blue-tail fly bursting with an unbelievabley turgid flow of automobiles and the flatulence of their noxiems fumes, its' once-lovely face: painted garishly with neon which fails utterly to mask the festering pocket-slums that scar it everywhere, it puts me in mind of nothing so much as one of these worn-out old bawds who alftrays inhabit Tennessee Williams plays, the ones who used to be beautiful, high-born southern belles until they fell on evil days and were obliged to spend twenty years on their backs in some New Orleans whorehouse. Williams, of course, always makes it quite clear that these faded flowers are actually insatiable nymphomaniacs who revel shamelessly in their own corruption--which perfectly completes the analogy. Lexington is a living example of my friend J. D. Smith's dictum, which holds that "you can shit in your nest for just so long, and then you are nesting in your shit. " But as I said, Jamestown isn't the least bit interested in illustrative examples; it's far too busy warming up for the race to its own destruction to bother with the fretful whining of wind-kissing outsiders the likes of me. Well, what the hell, it hasn't happened yet, and I don't reckon it's likely to begin between now and Christmas, which is as long as I'll be here. Mean- while, I'll sit tight and do (ugh! hate-ful phrase) my thing, writing a lot and reading a -little (Tolkien at last!) and swimming nekkid in the lake every afternoon as long as the weather and local Christian vigilance permits, digging the first real autumn I've had a chance to look at in almost fifteen years, learning to do for myself the things I've been letting others do fer me for lo these many years, having myself a little drinkypoo before supper every evening (same old Cap'n) and watching the sunset and missing all the good groovey California people a whole lot more than you might ever imagine. And that, goodbuddies all, is where I'm at. Considering all the awful shi that's coming down these days, Jamestown, Kentucky, may well net be the sort of place an honorable man ought to be hanging out in. But right now, at this precise, particular instant, with the good sun hot on my back and the orchard fairly abound with merrymaking grasshoppers and the lake, cool and green and placid, awaiting me just beyond the forest's rim, I can't think of any way in the ajj world to avoid admitting I'm god damn glad to be here. So, as Wendell Berry would say, let it happen, Cap'n. HYPNOSIS fflÂ¥ffiLW2KEK ARCHIE L. LEVELL- ââ€" CONSULTANT for control of: smoking, weight, insomnia, study habits, fears, sleep, nail biting , stuttering, drinking, relaxation, habit control, tensions dial 254-3214 or 255-1503 15 Anonymous X:,., ,,.. The Hlue-tail Fly lii free rhythm ifHgggj Unison11"'1" Minstrel Song i a Unison'1"'1" »» rT. F . I .When I w.xn yutitii; I used to wait On man - ter," anil Onr d.iy In* utile a - round tin* farm, The flies ho nunV-rnus » M ' limln. * 31p§i i r?J^ m^£^rg jjivn him his plat-, And pass tlir. w,i - ter when he got dry, And they did swarm ¢ One chanced to bite" him on the thigh. The .;^..L=^.-J--^"-r=l Vr------ J. i 1 Cliomrs (faster) ft X brush a - way the bluo - t.iil fly dev - il take the blue - tail fly I (Mel.) Jim - my crack corn and X ââ€"  r Jim - my crank mrn and 1 don't care, My maa-tcr's gone a - way. ¢ I t F F\* lf.f';f-:pf M p-Ifl ¢'I. The pony run, he jump, he pitch, lit' throw my master in Uio ditch, lit' tlictl, and the jury wondered why " The verdict wan, "The blue-tail fly." ( Chorus) 4. They laid him under a 'simmon tree, Ilis epitaph i* there to see : -"lleneath Uiis stone I'm forced to lie, Victim of the blue-tail fly." ( Chorus) Right on, Jimmy There's only one problem: man cannot live by corn likker alone. Neither can a newspaper. The message--it's here somewhere--is that the blue -tail fly has to increase its income or it won't survive much longer. Since birth last October, it's barely made it from issue to issue. , Several things can be done. We have to get more of them out across the state; if you know someone in another city who could sell them' (we send them a stack, they sell them and then send us. back a dime for each issue sold) or any bookshops, head shops or what-have-you, please plug us into them, or vice versa. We're also raising the subscription cost from $2 to $3 a year. I mean, what's a dollar these days anyway? If you don't have a subscription yet, you can use the blank below. And if you have a small surplus at the moment and can possibly send more than three (like five or ten), please do and you will automatically become a Patron of the Fly. And if you have any suggestions about how to sustain the fly, please pass them on to us. Thanks. See you next month. i---------------------------n I would like a one year's subscription (approximately eight issues) to ââ€"  the blue-tail fly. Enclosed is my three dollars. i ââ€"  NAME______ I ADDRESS______ I I CITY_._STATE__ZIP Mail this to the blue-tail fly. 210 W. Third Street, Lexington, Kentucky 405 07

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