xt75x63b013f https://exploreuk.uky.edu/dips/xt75x63b013f/data/mets.xml Blue-Tail Fly, Inc., 1969-   newspapers 2008ua008_1_6 English Lexington, Ky. : Blue-Tail Fly, Inc., 1969- : Lexington, Kentucky. Contact the Special Collections Research Center for information regarding rights and use of this collection. Blue-Tail Fly Blue-Tail Fly, No. 6 text Blue-Tail Fly, No. 6  2010 true xt75x63b013f section xt75x63b013f 
UK
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Number Six
§ 9     25 cents
fly
The struggle at Muldraugh
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contents
The Conspiracy Trial, page 5 Jeff Shero
The struggle at Muldraugh, page 6 Bucky Young and Nick DeMartino
photographs by Bill Luster, pages 8 and 9
Sayings and Doings, page 10 Wendell Berry
14 ideas on Charlie Manson, page 12
flicks:  Z and Zabriskie Point, page 15
cover:  photograph by Nick DeMartino
The blue-tail fly is published monthly by blue-tail fly, inc. at 210 W. Third Street, Lexington, Ky. 40507.
blue-tail fly
Vol. 1, no. 6 W
staff:  Guy Mendes, Rick Bell, David Holwerk, Jack Lyne, Bucky Young, Nick DeMartino, Sue Anne Salmon, John Simon, Julie Mendes, Gretchen Marcum, Chuck Koehler, Don Pratt, Ralph Brown, Doug Stewart, Kevin Hill, Geoffrey Pope, John Beckman, Bonnie Cherry, Paul Genin, Tony Urie and Becky Martin.
G3(o]8®s
Repression, Tennessee-style
, KNOXVILLE - Since the arrest of 22 people on January 15 at the University of Tennessee, continued and escalating police harassment has radicalized thousands to the reality of 1984 and to the necessity of fighting it now.
"It's war", remarked Governor Ellington a week before the bust. "We want every long-hair in jail or out of the state".
To realize the goal, the state arrested 22 at a peaceful demonstration in a carefully set up bust. Hours of film were taken and the three thousand people present that day have been told that they are subject to arrest any time within the next three years on the basis of that film. Their crime would be participating in an assemblage of three or more people in which acts of violence occur (the cops beat heads) or the threat of violence was present. It is a felony that reads nearly verbatim to the law the Chicago 5 were convicted on and carries up to ten years in the penitentiary.
The state intends to use the law and the film to silence anyone who becomes politically active about any issue. So far, additional indictments include (among others) Robert Schiffer, a member of the Faculty-Student Committee on ROTC and Barry Bozeman whose father is a judge of the Tennessee Supreme Court and the only sympathetic judge in the area.
Schiffer* s indictment followed a series of three letters he had written to the school newspaper criticizing the behavior of John Baugh, Secretary to the Board of Trustees and member of the ROTC Com-
mittee "A" in charge of legal agreements between the Defense Department and the University. He is also chief legal counsel to the University. On the day of the demonstration, he was frantically threatening students and professors alike and promising bloody confrontation. He revealed the "Brown list" of the University which contains the names of political activists to be arrested at the earliest convenience for whatever reason possible. January 15 netted 22 from the list.
Barry Bozeman was indicted six weeks after the incident. His father, C. Howard Bozeman, is a Democrat and an interim Justice on the State Supreme Court. The night before his son was arrested he was phoned by the Nashville Tennessean and told, "It has just come over the wire that the Republicans in Knox County have indicted your son". Bozeman may have been the judge to hear the suit filed against the state to test the constitutionality of the law. Now he is effectively eliminated from the case, at the expense of ten years of his son's life.
The University is not limiting itself to this law alone to clean up Knoxville. Drug busting gets heavier by the day. Chief victims are those who come to demonstrations and the bands who provide the community with music.
Another form of repression has come down on Bob Madell, a math professor who has been outspoken in the past. On January 15, he was threatened with arrest by John Baugh' and since that time his contract for the coming year is in jeopardy.
As the community grows aware of the nature of Facism, the struggle against it accelerates. A mass "Southern March Against Repression" is scheduled for April 12. We will assemble in Nashville to
march on the capital to protest the repression from Kentucky, North and South Carolina, Virginia, Alabama, Georgia, Mississippi and Tennessee. The day before, there will be a conference on southern strategy. Speakers and bands are being arranged. For details contact: Up Country Revival, Box 8590, U.T. Station, Knoxville, Tennessee 37916.
A trip
to the graveyard
By BUCKY YOUNG
"And it's one, two, three, what are we marching for?" (apologies to Country Joe and the Fish) or
"We're only ii\ it for the symbolism"
(same to the Mothers of Invention)
FRANKFORT - On Saturday, March 7, we made a trip to the graveyard.
In fact, we made the graveyard, too. It was all symbolic. It could only be symbolic.
An antiwar demonstration in Frankfort, Ky., cannot be anything other than symbolic. There could be no illusions that our march was going to stop the war, as if any march could.
The mourning, too, was only symbolic. There was a silent death contingent carrying somber "Another Kentuckian Killed" signs and there were white cardboard crosses to mark the symbolic graves of the 900 or so Kentuckians killed in Vietnam.
But the march through the sedate streets of Frankfort under the eerie haze of a solar eclipse in a cloudless sky was
not conducive to mourning. The good people of Frankfort lined the streets and gaped in perplexity at the exotic invaders of their fair town and oh my gosh, Marge, would you look at that one.
We were aware of the death and senseless human agony we had come to raise our voices against, but even as we were keeping up the strains of "Give Peace a Chance," we could not keep our minds fixed on war and death, not even when we had formed our graveyard and were lying on the hillside with crosses on our chests. The cloudless blue sky overhead, the green grass beneath us, the warm breeze that made the crosses bend and sway were life, not death.
It was a peaceful day and a peaceful march, but there were confrontations. Symbolic confrontations.
There were "Jesus Freaks" passing out newspapers proclaiming "the world's greatest revolutionary" and trying to start conversations ('That's a Roy Rogers button you're wearing... You know, he's on our side ...").
And there were the Red Flags with their revolutionary rhetoric who were constantly wary of being co-opted by anyone and everyone. A couple of them held their flags instead of crosses in the graveyard and were asked to lower them for the benediction and started to comply but didn't when one of them shouted back, 'The revolution never laid down for religion before and it isn't going to start now" but at least partially relented when asked again. It was a crisis in principles for them and it was not impossible to sympathize with their dilemma even if some of them had called you a capitalist an hour or so before because you were selling the "fly".
The same sort of controntation came
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Personalities Dept.
Meet Lexington, Kentucky's most distinguished narks. On the left is Frank "That's My Name, Ask Me Again and I'll Tell You the Same" Fryman. Just recently he was named as Lexington's top cop. On the right is Jay "Call Me Hip" Sylvestro. Notice the wire-rims, pastel shirt and groove-burger sideburns. Far out. He's doing his Jimmy Olsen impersonation. Fryman's doing Frank Fryman.
This photograph was taken at a panel
discussion last month on dope and the law sponsored by the University of Kentucky SDS. About two hundred souls attended, most of them heads. Fryman said he was their to "bridge the communications gap" and to prove it he brought along the Sonny Bono anti-grass film, in which a fella hits up with a puff or two of marijuana, looks in a mirror and sees himself turn into a grusome monster. After the show, at least one local dealer
was mumbling about getting "some of the stuff that dude was using."
Sylvestro didn't say why he was there. He just grinned real nice and started with, "My friends ..." He was asked right off whether he ever used or sold dope when he was a student at Transylvania College. Most of us knew the answer and knew it would serve as further credibility measurement. He evaded it at first, was asked "yes or no?", looked around a bit and said, "Mmmmmmmmmmmm, no."
Not too long ago Sylvestro told one of his bustees that he was for legalization too, but that he was working from inside the system.
Fryman was asked about the amount of time between announcing their presence at a body's door and busting down said door. "We take 'em like they come." "Does that mean you can announce yourself while barging in?" "Just about."
Question: "Can an undercover agent smoke pot with a person before he arrests him?" Answer: If the undercover agent is in a positon in which the case is in danger, he can fake it. (A guy next to me says: 'This nark I turned on took more than I did. And did he get blasted!")
Question: "Have you ever smoked, dropped or shot?" Answer: "A doctor working with poison does not use it to see if it kills."
After this question a tray of water glasses was passed among the panelists (a lawyer and a law professor also took part). The audience grinned a collective shit-eating grin and both Fryman and Silvestro passed up the water.
At one point, Fryman told the crowd that the police didn't have the time or funds to do as much drug sleuthing as they'd like, that "drug efforts are special efforts." After he was recently named as Lexington's top policeman, he was given his own brand spanking new narcotics division. So Frank Fryman's headline grabbing marijuana busts will probably be stepped up"as will the steady flow of heroin that really fucks people up, some of whom haven't been out of Lexington's narcotics hospital for 20 minutes. The police know about the smack, but it's not the stuff headlines are made of. You can't bust many students that way And it won't ever get you to be chief, or president.
up shortly afterwards when the speeches began. The confrontation was drawn most sharply by a young woman active in organizing the GI movement and by a Kentucky poet.
Susan Schermerhorn, who has been jailed twice and attacked by a vigilante mob in response to her work with the Muldraugh Coffeehouse, sounded the call to "fight back."
She was persuasive, not because of eloquence, but because of the reality of the situation. When the army, the elected officials and the lobotomized townspeople all are out after your ass with no relief in sight, your peaceful options don't seem very convincing. Especially when the same kind of thing is happening all across the country.
"It's cool to say 'give peace a chance,'" she said, "but we've got to fight and get something done."
She was followed by Wendell Berry, who offered us a vision of an ephemeral, personal kind of peace. A kind of peace only slightly related to foreign policy and political concepts.
He condemned the war and all that, of course, and with good words. But he also criticized those who take up "a noble cause" only to be corrupted by self-righteousness.
"I will call no one a pig or a redneck," he said. "For I have no doubt that people who think or talk in those terms only further the problem. I would not want to degrade their humanity, for I would be degrading my own."
He said he was taken aback by those who act out of panic and other emotions in their search for peace and who adopt the "postures and melodrama of right-I eous warfare."
He said "I am troubled by the young people who have worked so hard for peace and have given up or turned on to violence."
He said that we should have known that attaining peace would be difficult.
He said a mouthful. He was urging us to recover the ideals which had brought us into the Movement in the first place and which seem to be getting lost in the struggle.
The issue comes down to this:
Would not another revolution based on violence actually be counterrevolutionary? Or, is not a nonviolent revolution in the face of overwhelming violence a delusion?
Other speakers, briefly:
Joe Cole, one of the Ft. Jackson eight " a group which was thrown into the Ft. Jackson stockade for 61 days for organizing antiwar meetings among GI's at the base " said "Nixon has a plan for withdrawal " if it takes the next hundred years."
Bruce Sawyer, a former Marine 1st Lt. ââ€"  who served in Vietnam, gave a first-hand account of day-to day atrocities in Vietnam and how the Marines brutalize and indoctrinate recruits at Paris Island into hating Vietnamese. Sawyer, now a UK student, began his speech by saying, "People, you're looking at a murderer right now."
He estimated that his platoon of SO men alone was responsible for the deaths of 200 people during its tour in Vietnam. "You should have seen what we did to them," he said of the treatment U.S. servicemen gave Vietnamese civilians.
Kathie Pratt, of Lexington Women's Lib, told how women relate to the war " not just because the war takes their husbands and sons " but also because it requires that women be exploited economically to sustain the war machine.
Gene Mason, a UK political science professor, noted that Nixon's election to the presidency reflected the American people's rejection of the Johnson-Humphrey war policy. "How they were tricked, double-tricked and triple-tricked by Tricky Dick," he said, pointing out that the war is producing more casualties now than before.
Dr. Mason described the brutal treatment accorded Vietnamese civilians under official U.S. policy and cited information showing that the reaction of most Americans to the My Lai slaughter was similar to that of the Germans to the genocidal killing of Jews during WWII.
"One of these days we are going to wake up with a big hang-over from this whole Nazi trip," he said.
There was at least one part of the march which wasn't symbolic. Six young men turned in their draft cards to serve notice they would no longer cooperate with the Selective Service System. Those six people are taking on a very real fight against a very massive adversary. All power to them.
Back in Louisville, we pulled up behind a lady with a "Back Nixon for Peace" bumber sticker on her car.
At least we did come back from the graveyard. No thanks, lady, to Richard Nixon " the Man with the Plan.
Hair and the courts
The "hair" issue cropped up recently in three widely-seperated parts of the state, with a couple of cases causing hairballs in officialdom's stomachs and more promising to do so in the future.
In Northern Kentucky, an unexpected ally emerged.
U.S. District Court Judge Mac Swin-ford " a man of 70 " has warned at least
one local school board and its administrative employees that it cannot impose conformity on the students " especially as it relates to such things as dress codes.
"I'm not sure if those of us who seek to be conventional have a right to demand it of everybody else," the Cynthi-ana judge said. "Those who flaunted convention often brought about desirable results."
Covington attorneys Stephen T. McMurtry and Patrick M. Flannery, who together form the closest thing to a local civil liberties law firm, filed the first hair suit in the Covington court late in February.
John Alfred Fey Jr., 18, a junior at Newport High School, went to the attorneys after he was suspended from school because of his Jesus-length hair. The school dress code says men's hair cannot extend below a line behind the head connecting the two ear lobes. (All students without shaved heads or a bad case of ringworm would he in violation.)
The judge granted the youth a temporary restraining order immediately (although the board chose to ignore it) and a permanent injunction after a hearing. Theoretically, Fey is free to attend classes unmolested. Passing may be the hangup.
Two Erlanger Lloyd High School seniors, suspended last fail because they refused to shave their sideburns to the bottom of the ear lobes, moved into the picture next.
They had filed suit before liberal judge Robert Lukowsky in Kenton Circuit Court after their suspensions, but the judge ruled hair length was proper subject for "reasonable regulation" by the school officials. The suit was taken to federal court after the Fey ruling.
Because the law forbids the federal court to act as a reviewer of the local court, Judge Swinford refused the two any injunctive relief, and is likely to dismiss the case.
On the same day, however, he granted attorney McMurtry and client Jon Redell, 17, Alexandria, a restraining order against the Campbell County High School authorities. Redell also was suspended because of long hair, according to the suit. Unless something unforeseen surfaces, the Judge will again rule against suppression when the case is given a hearing.
Down state in Central Kentucky, Georgetown's City Police Judge Roy Beatty told a Georgetown College student he could either submit to a haircut or face a 20-day jail sentence for not having a $10 city auto sticker on his Ohio-licensed car. The student, Dave Cope, paid an $ 18.50 fine and took the hair cut rather than go to jail. A few days later about 80 Georgetown students marched to the county courthouse to protest " sort of. Their main tactic was the singing
of the song "Hair." The judge, who watched it all, was quoted as saying afterwards that "It wasn't a bad march, I had expected a lot more." He also said he's had several similar cases and "no one has ever gone to jail."
In Fulton County, in the extreme western part of the state, the principal of Fulton County High School threatened eight black students and one white student with suspensions because he determined that they were in violation of the school's brand new personal appearance rules.
He had previously suspended the eight blacks (along with one other brother) for not shaving, but U.S. District Judge James Gordon of Louisville ordered the students readmitted with excused absences because the school had no official personal appearance code. (The students had been out of schools since February 2 when the judge ordered them back on March 11.)
One week later, Fulton High Principal Bobby Childers had his "official" code and was ready to suspend eight of the nine blacks " the ninth's moustach was "not obvious," the principal decided " and one white student who has long hair.
Louisville attorney Robert Delahanty, who works with the Kentucky Civil Liberties Union, was ready to take up the case should the students be thrown out again.
Foranus Tyrannosaurus
CHICAGO (LNS)-U.S. Attorney Thomas A. Foran is contemptuous of the Chicago 10. Speaking before an enthusiastic group of 200 Loyola Academy Boosters Club members in Suburban Wilmette on Feb. 26, the prosecutor vented 90 minutes worth of four and a half months of frustration.
"Bobby Seale had more guts and more charisma than any of them," Foran said. "And he was the only one I don't think was a fag."
See related story, page 5
The run down on the deviants went as follows: Abbie Hoffman is "scummy but clever;" Dare Dellinger is a "sneak" who "uses people like a ventriloquist;" defense attorneys Bill Kunstler and Leonard Weinglass are "mouthpieces" who "have no sense of professional responsibility. They were incredibly (unprofessional, and they deserved what they got."
What they and the other defendants got was an unprecedented total of nearly 15 years in contempt sentences. Bill Kunstler's 4-year, 22-day sentence is the
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harshest sentence for contempt in this country's history.
Referring to the defendants and Seale, who was severed from the trial early on contempt charges for attempting to conduct his own defense, Foran said "They used that kid as though they were masters of the plantation. They used him so grossly and so callously that I can't see how the news media couldn't see it."
Foran seemed particularly worked up about press coverage of his cross-examination of Rennie Davis, the apex and glory of his vindictive career: "It was the hardest cross-examination I've ever had.. That kid is as smart as a whip, but after two and a half days, I got him to admit that he had come to Chicago to discredit the government."
Meanwhile, the media was eminently unimpressed. "It never got in the papers or on TV," Foran whined. "Instead all they wrote about was Norman Mailer, who took the stand next."
"Mailer is a jackass," rasped Foran.
Foran told of the "superhuman effort" it had taken him to withstand the taunts and teasing of the defendants, particularly Rennie. "I was his man," Foran said. "He'd sit near me and keep whispering insults to me all day about my sexual prowess."
In his. closing statement to the assembled school group, Foran called for action on the part of the parents of the younger generation.
"We've lost our kids to the freaking fag revolution and we've got to save them. Our kids don't understand that we
IF YOU WOULD LIKE TO PEDDLE BTF'S IN THE LOUISVILLE AREA, CALL; PAUL GENIN AT 636-4940 j OR NICK DEMARTINO AT i 451-5853. REMEMBER, YOU KEEP A DIME ON EACH PAPER SOLD.
don't mean anything by it when we call people niggers," he concluded.
"They look at us then like we're dinosaurs when we talk like that."
Test bust in Mississippi
JTTA BENA, Miss. (LNS)-On Feb. 10, a handpicked posse of 58 black policemen arrested 894 black student demonstrators at Mississippi Valley State College (MVSC) and herded them into buses bound for the state penitentiary at Parchman.
It was the largest mass arrest of students in the nation's history. It was also the first bust ever pulled off with the advice and assistance of the U.S. Department of Justice.
Yet the incident went largely unnoticed. It went unnoticed for a lot of reasons, most of them bad. It went unnoticed because the demands of the student body did not appear on the surface to have much radical content, because few people recognized the significance of the federal government intervention, because MVSC is a small black college in the south rather than one of the well-known elite universities.
In other words, the government knew what it was doing, knew that MVSC was a good place to try out their new apparatus without a lot of adverse publicity and knew the importance of a student struggle that student activists in other places could shrug off as reformist or liberal.
Five days before the mass bust, the entire student body of MVSC had gone out on strike to enforce a list of 30 demands presented to the administration more than a month before. The demands ranged from elimination of dress regulations to improvement of the faculty"as a whole they struck at the very core of the educational system of which MVSC is a prime example"separate and unequal education. ,
As in all black, state-supported colleges in the South, the main duty of the administration is, to paraphrase Ralph Ellison, "to keep the niggers running." Or
The store announces Reverse Discrimination Week, April 1-7.   Thirty percent discounts on everything to blacks and freaky-looking people. Just bring along this ad. . .
We have just received some nice leather goods and have a nice selection of candles, aviators' sunglasses, Russian Revolution posters and "Peace Flags" (below) in patches, 2x3 cloth flags and window decals. 157 8. lime
1969 S.B.S.
at least quiet and out of sight.
That, of course, rules out any real education, because everyone know that an educated man is dangerous, particularly if he is black and lives in Mississippi
Naturally, MVSC has no programs involving students in efforts for change within the black community. Such programs, if effective, would bring a strong reaction from the local powers-that-be, and then* displeasure would quickly be communicated to the legislature. Moreover, students would have the experience of growing intellectually while simultaneously working for the welfare of their people and maintaining then ties with the community.
Every effort is made to isolate the student from his background and his environment. Students are taught to dress "well," to speak "properly," and to appreciate "culture" so that they will be strangers when they return to the shacks and streets from which they came.
Courses emphasize theory over practice"the arid and academic over the vital and practical. One learns about the American two-party system rather than political reality in the one-party south. One analyzes the blood relationships of medieval royalty not of the families that control LeFlore County. One learns about taxation without representative in the Thirteen Colonies in 1776, not in Mississippi in 1970.
First-class living conditions on a campus not only cost money but they might also give students first-class ideas about themselves. A shoddiness around the edges pervades the MVSC campus. Building maintenance is slipshod. Classroom windows don't close. Laundry faculties are inadequate. Stalls in the restrooms have no doors; showers have no curtains. There are only two telephones in each dorm"one pay phone and one extension. Landscaping in minimal, and inadequate drainage turns lawns into swamps when the rains come. Second-class facilities for second-class citizens.
Student demands for improvement of the physical plant, for extension of dormitory visiting and curfew hours for young women and abolition of rules regulating dress may sound frivolous to the initiated but they strike at the heart of the system of indoctrination.
And nobody knows this better than the administration of the school. So when the situation started to get out of hand they turned for help to the biggest powers around, the federal government. They turned to the Justice Department's Law Streets Act of 1968 and empowered by President Nixon to give "technical assistance" in local suppression of "campus disorders."
LEA A officials in Atlanta and Washington came up with the idea of using black policemen to pull off a quiet bust and scoured the state of Mississippi to come up with the 58 cops who did the job.
When it was all over, officials involved with the bust at the local, state and national levels were very pleased with themselves. Smug statements were issued from offices in Mississippi, Atlanta, and Washington, while over one third of MVSC s 2500 students were getting bailed out. And the administration of MVSC announced a policy of "selective admissions" to weed out the more active students from the campus.
Santa Barbara's student ghetto
By Mark Aulman and Floyd Norris
SANTA BARBARA (CPS)-The National Guard has been almost completely withdrawn from Isla Vista and the campus community here, and people are wondering why Santa Barbara, of all places, exploded into violence.
For years the University of California campus at Santa Barbara, which has its own beach, has been known as a party school. Politically conscious students did not go there.
Hints of change appeared last month as over half of the campus's 15,000 students signed petitions backing Anthropology Professor William Allen, a popular professor who is being denied tenure for unspecified reasons. Students generally believed his radical politics and failure to keep "professional distance" from the students were responsible for the dismissal
Massive demonstrations on campus failed to produce any change in the administration's position that the issue was settled, and an open hearing, called for by the student's petition, was held in violation of University rules. Nineteen students were arrested following the demonstrations.
There were no demands involved in the recent violence, which included the burning of a Branch of the Bank of America, because the riots were essentially a leaderless socio-political phenomenon.
The riots were concentrated in Isla Vista, a one square mile area next to the campus in which 10,000 students are housed. The student newspaper, EI Gaucho, calls Isla Vista a "student ghetto" and many students believe the riots were analogous to ghetto riots in big cities.
Isla Vista is controlled by several realty companies, which, with the Bank of America, are seen by students as symbols of excessive profiteering and exploitation of minority groups, including the students themselves.
Isla Vista does have many characteristics of a ghetto such as absentee landlords, rents and prices which are disproportionate to living conditions, lack of community services except police, occupation by .a single social class which lives there solely out of economic necessity, economic domination of the area by outside interests, social-cultural-physical isolation and a growing level of dangerous crime.
El Gaucho remarked that residents of Isla Vista finally reacted to their ghetto "in the same manner - that Blacks in Newark reacted to theirs."
Many politicians have blamed Chicago Seven Defense Attorney William Kunstler for the riot, ignoring the fact violence began the day before he spoke on the UCSB campus. Gov. Ronald Reagan has demanded an investigation which he hopes will lead to Kunstler's arrest for crossing state lines with intent to incite to riot, the same crime five of the Chicago Seven were convicted of.
Students generally laugh at that theory, saying politicians want to avoid facing the realities of the situation in Isla Vista.
on
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Number Six


 
The Conspiracy Trial
By JEFF SHERO
The U.S. ended the trial of the Conspiracy Eight with all the subtlety of a bludgeoning.   Despite the messy close and the muted cries of the professional observers in the press gallery, the defendants' demise came by club rather than through rapier thrusts.   But then there is something to be said for the club.   It's effective.
Judge Hoffman's trial procedure is the judicial equivalent to Mayor Daley's handling of peaceful assemblies:  they forsake surgical neatness for slam-bang thoroughness. The strategy of Lincoln Park, and
lized character don't produce messy emotional reaction.
But it's clear the liberal's day is passed.   The stench of the Empire's decay begins to waft into the nostrils of its children and the lines are drawn.   The Kings and Kennedys are killed.   Their replacements, the Nixons, Mitchells, Reagans, and Hayakawas, aren't concerned with style, only results.   The government didn't treat it's number one political trial lig'htly.   It was with some care and forethought that Julius Hoffman was selected Judge.   No slip-ups; they wanted a judge and an executioner.
That's what they got.
ing for the defense on the grounds that the testimony would be "irrelevant. "  But the real gutting of the defense rested in the continued sustaining of the prosecutor's objections to lines of questioning and admittance of evidence.   Working in tandem, the government team of prosecutor and judge prevented important testimony from being heard. In many cases defendants took time in jail in the form of contempt in order to get information to the jury. Rennie Davis received six months for contempt because the judge continually admonished him to keep his testimony brief and "to the point. " Without daring and disruptions the defendants would have played their
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the Federal Courtroom is the same as Vietnam:  Overkill.   Bomb them back into the Stone Age.   Get those leaders out of the streets and into the jails.   By any means necessary. The sides are drawn:   The Empire or revolution.   All the participants understand.   The cops come down hard;  the defendants' peers answer back in the streets of twenty-five cities.
Only the observers fail to understand.   As with Vietnam, they don't question the government's ultimate aims, they protest the messy way the deed is carried out. The critics prefer the clean kill, the rapier thrust, or, better yet, a silent poisoning.   Social engineering over guns, channeling instead of punitive law, pacification instead of confrontation - methods whose civi-
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This wasn't a trial of pretension; there were a dozen reversible errors. Beginning the first day, the judge never really questioned the jury as to whether they had pre-trial knowledge or prejudice.   At the end it was revealed that one of the two male jurors, John Nelson, thought the defendants should have been shot down in the park, and one middle-aged woman