Among the possessions I recently reclaimed from storage is a painted cardboard box. It’s pastel green and dates from the 1960s, when I went away to college. I guess my parents painted the box in an effort to strengthen it.
Inside were many copies of Rolling Stone containing articles of mine I’ve not read since I wrote them in the 1970s.
But there also was this (above), a piece in Life magazine about student protestors, including a picture of me being escorted out of an occupied building by the cops, under arrest.
We had been occupying the Washtenaw County Building in support of local “welfare moms,” mostly black, who in our view were being denied a decent level of benefits at the time.
It was 1968 and the campuses were erupting with similar protests, mainly over civil rights or anti-war issues. This was one of the times I mixed my nascent role as a journalist with political activity, and wouldn’t you know, it ended up criminalized and memorialized by Life magazine.
Of course, at the time, I was proud of what I’d done. I wrote about it in the Michigan Daily. The charges of trespassing on public property, to which I pled, carried no actual penalty beyond a day’s labor in a local park.
But once there, I and my fellow convicts refused to cut down the trees as we were instructed to do, as an environmental protest. Thinking back on it, we must have been one big royal pain in the ass for the authorities.
They chose to ignore the fact we didn’t serve our sentence, turning instead to more pressing matters, such as the bombing of the local CIA office, which led to the indictment of John Sinclair, and that brought John Lennon to Ann Arbor to sing in his support.
One thing led to another for me and within a few years I was editing pieces Lennon and his wife Yoko Ono produced for SunDance magazine out in San Francisco.
A few more years and I was a reporter at Rolling Stone.
At the bottom of the files in the old box was my FBI file, which I obtained under the Freedom of Information Act. The Bureau kept track of me starting with that arrest in college and my work for an underground paper in Ann Arbor. It tracked me as I relocated to San Francisco to work at SunDance and through the years at Rolling Stone.
Much of the information in that file is blacked out in the classic way the FBI redacted files prior to releasing them under the FOIA, but there was nothing in there of any consequence as that welfare protest was my only arrest. I hope agents enjoyed reading my many articles criticizing their COINTELPRO tactics.
There’s also non-FBI items I saved in the old box such as a note from Jann Wenner thanking me for sharing some of the FOIA information with him after I’d left Rolling Stone in 1977.
Many other letters, clippings, files and memories pored forth out of that old cardboard box painted pastel green. I’m pretty sure my parents never imagined that that box would end up with the stuff it did.
And neither did I.
(I first published this one a year ago.)
LINKS:
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Inside a Georgia Prosecutor’s Investigation of a Former President (NYT)
No political figure has owed so much to television as former President Donald Trump. HuffPost's Paul Blumenthal takes a look at America's various "Trials of the Century," and the parallells to the O.J. Simpson case. [HuffPost]
Hawaii wildfires are a reminder: Natural disaster risks are everywhere (The Hill)
Elon Musk keeps getting creepier (The Verge)
Appeals court embraces abortion-pill limits, sets up Supreme Court review (WP)
Judge blocks Internet Archive from sharing copyrighted books (AP)
Watch: Police Raid Small Kansas Newspaper, Seize Computers (WSJ)
State investigators will probe police raid of Kansas newspaper office (WP)
Kansas prosecutor says police should return computers and cellphones seized in raid on newspaper (AP)
Publisher of raided Kansas newspaper ‘vindicated’ by prosecutor’s decision to return seized items after backlash (CNN)
In late July, the board of the Campbell County Public Library system in Wyoming voted to terminate Terri Lesley, its longtime director. For two years Lesley stuck by her beliefs that a diverse collection of books is integral to a successful library. [HuffPost]
The World Isn’t Ready for the Next Decade of AI — Mustafa Suleyman, cofounder of DeepMind and Inflection AI, talks about how AI and other technologies will take over everything—and possibly threaten the very structure of the nation-state. (Wired)
Google's AI-Powered Search Can Now Summarize Web Pages for You (CNET)
Google's AI model Gemini to power Bard, enterprise and cloud products - report (Seeking Alpha)
How Blockchain Can Solve the Music Industry’s AI Problem (Variety)
How to Prevent an AI Catastrophe (Foreign Affairs)
Today’s cutting-edge artificial intelligence is based on neuroscience from the ‘50s and ‘60s. Imagine what A.I. could do if it incorporates the latest breakthroughs (Fortune)
Embracing The AI Revolution (Forbes)
Ukraine war: Ship leaves Odesa despite Russia Black Sea attack fears (BBC)
Women in Afghanistan: From almost everywhere to almost nowhere (UN Women)
"Our dreams were shattered": Afghan women reflect on 2 years of Taliban rule (CBS)
Bread, Work, Freedom—Afghan Women's Two Years of Resistance (Newsweek)
The Islamic State’s rise in Afghanistan (GZero)
New data: Global wealth rises, inequality falls (Axios)
Mom Asks Art Museum Docent Where The Nice Paintings Are (The Onion)
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