Kate Braun

     As "Joyce Braun"(my legal name due to adoption; thirty years ago I began uncovering the facts and found my birth name:  Lillian Katherine Lindsay -- hence, Kate, my name of preference) I was a shitteworker aka typist for The Rag from fall of 1968, I think, until Greenbriar School became a reality in fall of 1970 or thereabouts and I shifted my priorities to alternative education.  Where they stayed for the next 15 years.  Until I got totally burned-out on meetings!  The Rag gave me a place to discover more about myself and led me to a friendship with Mariann Wizard that I cherish more with every passing year.  The Rag was also the connecting link to Greenbriar School, which I will always consider the most and most intense political activity of my life.  For my time, money, blood, sweat, anger, and tears, there's nothing more political than the way our children's minds are formed/influenced.  But don't get me started.

     After Greenbriar I worked a retail sales job for about 8 years, then segued into the realm of professional psychic-ness, thanks to much prodding by Pat Cuney, where I continue to follow my Generational Directive to help people (Pluto in Leo in a natal chart sets the Generational Directives; most people born between 1936 and 1956 have Pluto in Leo).  Now that I've been my own boss for about 15 years, I wouldn't have it any other way.  Those interested in exploring their connection with Spirit should feel free to contact me to discuss the possibilities, either by phone (512-454-2293), e-mail (kate_braun2000@yahoo.com),  through my website (www.tarotbykate.bigstep.com), or in conversation during Rag Reunion Weekend.

     I tend to remember "oddities" and this Rag-memory is one of them.  It was a warm day, sunlight streaming into the Rag office on 23rd St.  I don't remember who besides me was there, we were all occupied with what each of us was doing -- in my case, typing/justifying an article.  The screen door opened and this guy came in.  No one I knew, no one I noticed much. But the conversation he had with whomever he had it with remains a fond memory and this is it:

          Ragperson:  Hi.
         The Guy:  Hi.  Is Thorne Dreyer here?
         Ragperson:  No.  He's out of the office right now.
         The Guy:  Well, how 'bout that Gary Thiher.  He here?
         Ragperson:  No, he's out, too.
         The Guy (triumphantly):  I knew it!  There's no such people.  They're all made up names!

And he went away, letting the screen door slam behind him.  We laughed.  I still get a good giggle out of this memory.   [Top]

Thorne Webb Dreyer (Houston)

     I was conceived in Houston during a creative collaboration between a newspaper journalist and an abstract expressionist.  So I guess I always knew I’d become a Funnel.

     My parents gifted me with the following premises: question everything no matter the source, treat all people with dignity, be true to your beliefs; ignore the ridicule of the small minded, and do it all with a little style.. So I came to Austin primed, tilted to the left, committed to the core, and possessed of an evolving sense of social justice.

     In Austin’s counterculture and especially among the sds crew, I met folks whose thinking went deeper then one dimension and whose lifestyles grew directly out of their beliefs and perceptions. They embraced freedom and individuality, not as concepts but as guidelines.

     I found a teacher and dear friend in Gary Thiher and a special soul mate and muse in Carol Neiman.

     I was wired and inspired.

     The Rag was a unique experience:  Something palpably historic was happening.  And we were granted the opportunity to be a part of it, even to help shape it. Carol and I not only lived The Rag, we lived in The Rag office.  We all threw ourselves into the process and learned as we went along.  Remember, we’re talking pre-history here.  For us, “cut and paste,” meant, well, “cut and paste!”  The smell of rubber cement still lingers.

     We learned as we stumbled along – surviving manic extended work sessions with a kind of goofy comraderie.  And the result was a scrappy imperfect “little tabloid that could” -- and damn well did!  The Rag gave voice to a diverse bag of cultural rebels and political rousers, reported news no one else did or in ways no one else dared, raised the hackles of the old birds in power, and helped coalesce a community of interest into a community of resistance.

     What was not to like.

     After The Rag I worked with Liberation News Service in New York and then helped start Space City News (later Space City!) in Houston and was a broadcaster and programmer at KPFT (Pacifica). In my later efforts I was lucky enough to build upon the skills I developed in those Rag days and, in my work, to remain true to my core beliefs. I worked some in theater for which I’ve had a life-long affection; I studied acting in Houston with Cecil Pickett and in New York with Bill Hickey. I wrote for Texas Monthly and others. I worked in community development for the City of Houston. I ran a public relations business, working mostly for progressive political candidates, arts institutions, entertainers and charities. I produced large scale events, booked jazz musicians.

     I have worked as a bookseller and am a collector of books and art.

     In the early seventies the Space City! offices and my peacenik mom’s art gallery were targets of the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan.  The Klan’s bullets and car bombs and weaselly proclamations didn’t stop us.  I have also survived confrontations with a sneaky foe of a rather different sort, chronic depression, and intend to outlast that paper tiger as well.

          Alas, that Spring should vanish with the Rose!
     That Youth's sweet-scented Manuscript should close!
          The Nightingale that in the Branches sang,
     Ah, whence, and whither flown again, who knows?

     Just keep your eyes on the prize. Don’t lose touch with your Buddha nature. And keep the whole damn thing in perspective!

     Best nutshell I’ve got to offer.   [Top]

Gavan Duffy  gavan.duffy@gmail.com

     Just after I dropped out of the University of Houston, I gravitated to Space City! during the Spring of 1969.  I was in the office when a Klansman tossed a pipe bomb through the front door.  It shattered every window and jangled every nerve.  Paul Spencer happened by the next day and suggested that I move to Austin to sing in the rock band he was forming.  Comparing the prospect of a rock band to the prospect of more pipe bombs, I jumped at the opportunity.   The band dissolved when Paul, hearing of his Chuckwagon indictment, blew town, but Paul had meanwhile already recruited me for The Rag.

     I served on The Rag off and on from 1969 to 1973.  I spent part of this period back in Houston, working with the prior (1966-1968) generation of Rag staffers at Space City! and/or at KPFT (Pacifica Radio).   Mostly I participated in layout and sales for The Rag (sales often served as his sole source of income).  I also wrote several articles, the most significant of which was a cover story – “Millennium ’73” in the November 26, 1973 issue – covering the Guru Maharaj Ji spectacle at the Astrodome.  It argued that the Guru was a fraud.  The success of this article meant much to me, as it provided me the confidence to pursue writing further, first as a journalist and later as a scholar.

     Returning to Houston, I worked mostly at KPFT from 1974 to 1976, serving as its news director for two years.  I returned to the University of Houston in 1976 and entered MIT in 1979, where I secured a doctorate in political science.  From 1982 to 1985 I researched at the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory and at Northeastern University.  In 1985 I returned to Austin to serve on the faculty of the UT Government Department.  In 1989, I was lured away to the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs at Syracuse University, where I remain today.  My main academic research interests include international affairs and the development of qualitative research methods.   I still sing and play guitar.   [Top]

Cam Duncan          Rag Memoir, 1969-75     camduncan@igc.org

     My connection with the Rag began in 1969, after helping to launch Houston’s ‘underground’ paper, Space City!, earlier that year.   One of my jobs was to deliver Space City! to about 20 outlets in Houston – newstands, bookstores, head shops, Liberty Hall, Of Our Own, and other watering holesfor the city’s small but growing radical activist community.   Occasionally, our Rag comrades would send down a few bundles of Rags, and I would take both papers along on my delivery route.  Half of the Space City! collective had worked previously on the Rag, and our ties with Austin ran deep.

     I moved to Austin in 1972 to enter graduate school, and to do solidarity work with activist movements in Latin America.   A project of student activists, the Latin America Policy Alternatives Group (LAPAG) was one of many forces in Austin’s counterculture that were given a voice in the pages of the Rag.  In organizing rallies to denounce UT’s Institute for Latin American Studies for giving a platform to apologists for the Chilean military government, in reviewing films from the Third World Film Series, or announcing fundraising benefits for victims of repression in Latin America, we always had access to the Rag...if we had the patience to sit through an interminable, chaotic Rag issue meeting.   I only wrote a few stories for the Rag, but for Austin activists of the 70s, the Rag gave us asense of solidarity and purpose, a way to focus the anger and profound sadness we shared as victims of the same policies that devastated Vietnam, Chile and other Third World countries.

     This attribute of the Rag, Space City! and other alternative papers was pivotal to the development of political movements in the Vietnam era, and to my own political activism.   The youth of Texas protested the Vietnam war and acts of racist violence and sexist oppression in part because theircollege and underground papers were accurately reporting the reality of what was happening in Vietnam, in acts of G.I. civil disobedience at places like Ft. Hood, and in minority neighborhoods in their own cities.

     I’ve worked in the labor movement for most of the past 30 years, first in Puerto Rico, then in Washington DC, where I now live – except for a five-year stint campaigning against NAFTA for Greenpeace.   I’m fortunate to be able to continue doing labor education and promoting workers’ rightsand solidarity among trade unions in the Americas in my job with the global union federation, Public Services International (www.world-psi.org).  And I still promote subversive media, only now it’s by editing a PSI newsletter on public employee union campaigns in N and S America.   [Top]

Chris Durden drdn@mail.utexas.edu

     Chris Durden did occasional typing, layout and pasteup on the Rag between fall of 1968 and spring of 1973. Maybe a few unsigned  sidebars were written. Some facts were checked and some were  provided. He served as a naturalist-guide at many RagStaff events  answering the inevitable insect questions.

   When Jim Franklin designed the opening poster for the Armadillo World Headquarters, Durden provided the quadruplet baby armadillos and Bill Walsh provided the "quarters".

      Chris has since traveled to South and Central America, Europe and Africa collecting insects and fossils which he has researched at Texas Memorial Museum. He was "butterfly wrangler" on the Paramount film "Leap of Faith", where he was assisted by Bea who lives in Helena, Montana. Chris guided some natural history tours and hosted a transgendered support group in the nineties. In the oughties he is retired, observing nature, writing, photographing and helping out.  Like most who came to Austin he has not left.   [Top]

Lars Eighner (aka Larry Nader)   lars@larseighner.com http://www.larseighner.com/index.html

I first became aware of the Rag sometime in 1968, or thereabouts. At any rate, the Rag was still in the old YMCA at 22nd and Guadalupe, where I went at first for an SDS meeting and thereafter for meetings of the Worker-Student Alliance, which was the public face of Dick Reavis's Friends of Progressive Labor. Now it seems to me there was something about borrowing telephone service from the Rag, or else the Rag was borrowing telephone service from someone else. In any event it involved someone with a screwdriver making informal wiring arrangements after dark. Occasionally our meetings were interrupted so that someone in our group could make those adjustments, and so I learned the Rag had offices in the Y building.

At that time, we were not supposed to regard the Rag as an entirely desirable or reliable instrument of social change. It didn't really have what you would call a class analysis or a proletarian perspective. There was stuff in it about drugs and rocknroll. There is a story yet to be told about the Worker Student Alliance and the Friends of Progressive Labor, and this is not the place to tell it. But in short, Progressive Labor and all of its subsidiaries were very stern Marxist-Leninints, and having fun was not on the agenda, so I had nothing much to do with the Rag, except reading it, until these organizations were disbanded in Austin, and I was fairly disillusioned.

So far I as know, I began gay literature in Austin with a rather rambling, semi-fictional rant which today might be titled "Brokeback Housing Co-op" that ran to four episodes begining the July 5, 1971 Rag. I remeber nothing about it. (Of course a Ginsberg interview had run in the Rag in 1967, and there had be plenty of imported items, including news briefs in which I first read Huey Newton's statement about gay people and first got news of Stonewall, but I mean something written in Austin by someone gay in Austin about being gay in Austin.) I was living in The Campus Guild men's housing co-op at the time and I wrote under the name of Larry Nader, which was a nom de guerre I had acquired in WSA.

I left Austin for a couple of years during the disaster I often refer to as my first "marriage," and when I returned Austin had changed considerably. The Rag still existed and I contributed a couple of articles, but by that time Gay Austin (followed by Gay Texas and Connections) had begun to happen and that was the path I took, still using the Larry Nader name, until I realized the time had come to start writing seriously.

Lars Eighner (aka Larry Nader)   [Top]

Hunter Ellinger    hunter@ellinger.org    hunter.ellinger.org

     When the Rag was founded, I was a math/science teacher in Nigeria (Peace Corps), but I started reading it as soon as we got back in mid-1968, then taking it to the printer from 1969 on (my first trip was 1/26/69, the day that my second child was born). My work with the editorial group was from 1972 until about 1975, when I became a full-time single dad, which I loved but absorbed all free time for several years. When I resurfaced, the Rag had dissolved.

     While I felt quite at home in the ragstaff, I was atypical in several ways. I was a red-diaper baby, whose parents had come to Texas as union organizers in the late 1930s; I was a techie (physics and software); I was already in a well-paid non-student job; and I was a parent (four kids). This last distinction I shared on the ragstaff only with the mother of these kids, Mary Birdsong, who wrote city-oriented articles until she went off to medical school (after surprising people with a 40% vote in the 1973 city council race).

     The writing niche I found was Last Week’s News, which gave me a chance to concisely point out how complex and ephemeral events can be understood in terms of a handful of unified and enduring principles (very like science teaching, actually). But of course I was also always happy to add my voice to the continuing arguments such as electoral politics (I’m a Fabian Democrat).

     The operating-procedures changes during my ragstaff time included the switch to honor-system vending racks rather than street salesmen (resulting in more copies distributed but less money collected), as well as the internalization of the process of making press negatives for the issues, which cut printing expenses in half but added ragstaff labor that reduced the time available for writing.

     My political trajectory after the Rag has been into co-ops (mainly Wheatsville), education (community college trustee and annexation elections), and grass-roots Democratic Party politics. But this tame resume does not reflect any repentance for leftishness, and I disagree with the often-expressed opinion that the most important current trends are rightward and that the generation-ago actions of which The Rag was a part didn’t move things forward substantially. That’s what a lot of people in the fifties thought about the thirties – until the sixties hit.   [Top]

Alice Embree   alice@nuevoanden.com

     I was there at the beginning - typing, pressing down headlines, and hand lettering mastheads.  The first office was 2506 Nueces (where we plotted a women’s sit in at the draft office).  The next one I remember was 910 West 26th.   I would “borrow” an IBM selectric from my straight job to type Rag copy into the wee hours of the morning.  I didn’t write an article until November 1967.  Frank Erwin had canceled the UT Chilean Exchange program because of “that Embree girl” and I wrote my side of the story.

     In the spring of 1967, Frank Erwin put six UT students on disciplinary probation for giving a speech in an unauthorized location (the west mall).  I was among the five who were both card-carrying SDS members and Ragstaffers.  The Rag provided the first hand accounts of the free speech fight that ensued. I left Austin in August of 1967 and was in New York until December 1969.  I worked with the North American Congress on Latin America (NACLA) and with RAT newspaper. The women’s movement was emerging as a major political force.  When I returned to Austin in 1970, I did street theater with a “Women’s Cranky.”  I chopped vegetables at Saatva and the Delta Diner where we fed striking shuttle bus drivers free and featured menu items like “Smash the State Casserole.”  The Rag, still the vehicle for political debate, had been transformed by the feminist movement.  Women like Judy Smith didn’t take a back seat to anyone and everyone typed their own articles.  I wrote one of my first poems after Janis Joplin died and it was printed in The Rag, then borrowed by Space City and the Texas Observer.

     In SDS, I was inspired by the concept of participatory democracy – the revolutionary idea that people should participate in decisions that affect their lives.   This led to direct action and the Rag was an extension of this.  If the straight media didn’t cover the important cultural and political issues, then create new media.  So, we did.  The underground press was the connective tissue for what we called “the movement.”  It spread ideas.  It was how Austin activists learned about the strike at Columbia, People’s Park, the Black Panthers, Timothy Leary and it was how the rest of the country found out about Gentle Thursday, Austintacious, armadillos, the Oleo Strut, and UT’s excesses.

     Post Rag, I lived on an Ozark commune; I met Carlos Lowry through the Austin Committee for Human Rights in Chile and married him.  We have two kids - a son, 23, and a daughter, 21, both college seniors.  I was a printer at Red River Women’s Press, a clerical worker at UT; I finished my abandoned B.A. and a Master’s degree; I worked for 16 years as a child support planner at the Attorney General’s Office.  I’m still paying my union dues to the Texas State Employees Union, but I retired in October 2004 in time to have double knee replacement surgery and work on the Rag reunion.   [Top]

Bob Erler’s Memoir including his spouse Mary and their children Susannah and John:

      In 1966, Mary and I, along with our baby Susannah, moved down to Austin so I could enter the graduate program in Philosophy at UT.  From 66 to 69, Mary, who was working on her PhD in English at the University of Chicago taught classes at both UT and Huston-Tillotson College. Both Maryand I had been involved in social action groups as undergraduates. I had been intrigued by the anarchist vision of people such as Paul Goodman and Dorothy Day, and so when the SDS started up at UT, I became involved and moved on to The Rag.  I did various office boy tasks such as picking upGilbert Shelton’s cartoons and getting them to the Rag office in time for the printing.  I also did a few reviews. Mary did some art work and together we did a column on good but cheap places in Austin to shop and eat.  Our son John was born in Austin in 68.

      In fall of 69, we moved to Racine Wisconsin, where for two years, I was chair of the philosophy department at a small college now defunct.  In 71, we returned to Austin to start, along with several other Rag folk, the Greenbriar Free School. We left Greenbriar in 73 and I studied library science at UT and a librarian at Travis County jail. In 1980, we all ended up in the Bronx, Mary a professor at Fordham and Bob a librarian at various colleges but also active in anarchist activities, such as a monthly forum on social and political topics and a walking tour of historic radical sites.

     Susannah returned to Austin and has been active in various areas including producing radio shows on public radio. John returned to Austin for graduate study in classics but has moved on to being a comedian in The Sinus Theater and on KOOP.   [Top]

Dennis Fitzgerald    denfitz@dccnet.com

     I was privileged to be in the delivery room at the birth of The Rag.   “Breathe, breathe, breathe!”   It was a long, hard labor. But what a beautiful child she was.  For just over a year, I changed my share of dirty diapers and delighted in watching her first tentative steps.  And then we both had other places to go.  

     The Rag was where my friends and I tried to figure out who we were.  We were hardly more than kids, taking our own first steps into the “real” world, and trying to make sense of the fact that there was so much there that affronted our ideals.  Things were a lot meaner and shallower than they were supposed to be.  That wasn’t anything we were prepared to conform to, nor, given our idealistic bent, anything that we could in good conscience ignore.  

    We were a group that found each other and clicked because we shared a common, albeit kind of fuzzy, notion about what was right and what was wrong and what was really important.  But we didn’t have a home for all that; we fit with each other, but we didn’t seem to fit anywhere else. 

    The Rag was our owner-built home, a place of safety and purpose, where we could define who we were and get on with the job of saving the world from itself.

    Since then, more or less sequentially, I have been: staff member at the SDS regional office in San Francisco; sales manager for a small import company; co-founder of Space City!; communard in Arkansas; assistant city editor at the Houston Chronicle; editor of a rural community newspaper near Vancouver, British Columbia; carpenter; sawmill worker and union representative; freelance journalist; social and environmental policy manager for a multinational forest company; retired sophist.  I have been supported and challenged in all this by two feisty women, two beautiful daughters and many, many cherished friends.   [Top]

Nick Hopkins     nhopkins@mailer.fsu.edu

            I first came to live in Austin in 1958, straight out of Texas A&M and into the Austin beatnik scene, the counterculture movement of the day (see Ted Klein's forthcoming "The River").  By 1960 I had finished my MA studies in Linguistics and had been hired to work on a University of Chicago research project in Chiapas, in southern Mexico.  I spent the next two years in Chiapas documenting varieties of Tzotzil (a Mayan language), and came back to Austin to finish writing my MA thesis in the spring of 1962.  I rented an apartment in "The Ghetto," a run-down apartment complex near 29th and Guadalupe, said to be one of the places Janis Joplin had lived while I was gone.  From there I was off to Chicago for graduate studies in Anthropology, including a year (1964-65) in Huehuetenango, Guatemala, documenting another Mayan language (Chuj).  With a Chicago PhD in hand I returned to Austin as an Assistant Professor in 1966.

            Shortly thereafter, I was attracted by the activities of the Free Speech Movement on the UT campus.  This was the precursor of the anti-war movement in which people learned to confront authority with massive popular demonstrations.  It melded quite smoothly into the anti-war movement as things developed over the next year or so. 

            Anyway, about 1967 I was beginning to see things in a different light and look for actions I might take.  I made a stab at working for the McCarthy campaign, but discovered that cold calls on the telephone were not for me...  By about 1968 I was working for the Rag.  I went in on weekends to do mainly page layout, or whatever needed to be done.  I think the Rag was one of the most important things that was happening.  Its very existence created a feeling of community; there was somebody else out there that wasn't lock-step orthodox.  It supported a lot of street people as well.  For me, one of the most important lessons was that a bunch of ordinary people – including street people, speed freaks, acid heads, academics, intellectuals, ideologues and bomb-throwing revolutionaries – could get together and work towards a product. 

            I worked first in the basement of the Y Building at 22nd and Guadalupe, and then moved to the 24th (?) street location, above a drugstore.  I painted the Rag logo on the windows.  One of my favorite memories there is the night Steve Russell, then the music critic, came in with the first Santana album and played it all night. 

            I was one of the few faculty members of SDS (which meant, at that time, I attended meetings), and I participated in the national meeting of SDS that was held in Austin.  As I recall, that was the year Dick M/F and his New York motorcycle gang moved to Austin, and I remember them bathing (naked, what else) in the fountain across from the Newman Center, where SDS was meeting.

            All this probably cost me my job.  In 1970 I got married (to Kathryn Josserand) and went to Milwaukee for a year, returning to go up for tenure at UT.  I was nominated for tenure by unanimous vote of the department, but was turned down at some higher level, at the beginning of 1971.  When I tried to find out what was going on, I was stonewalled by the administration, who wouldn't even tell me where (much less why) the decision had been made.  It smelled.  In retrospect, I'm sure I was on a list of subversives.  I knew from a friend in Campus Security that my name had come across their desk as a probable dope dealer, since I "made frequent trips to Mexico."  In any case, it was time to move on. 

            There was a presidential campaign going on, and we put our energies to organizing (and ultimately carrying) our precinct (and the county ) for McGovern.  The Watergate hearings were underway, and we swore to my mother-in-law that if Nixon won, we were leaving the country.           

            In 1972 Kathryn and I took positions in Mexico, working for an agency of the Mexican  federal government to train Mexican students to work with indigenous languages (the Centro de Investigaciones Superiores del Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia, aka CIS-INAH).  We did field studies all over Central Mexico, visiting remote locations, interviewing and recording speakers of Otomi, Mazahua, Nahuatl, Totonac, Mixtec, Popoloca, etc.  We immigrated, that is, we went through a multi-year process of moving from Tourist to Visitor to Immigrant to Immigree status, finally achieving permanent residency after nearly ten years.  We ran an apprentice program, giving short courses as needed and taking students to the field, educating them about dealing with people of another culture (even Mexican anthropologists tend to see Indians in economic terms, as peasants, not in cultural terms, as people who have a different view of the world).  I eventually moved on to a faculty position in a metropolitan university (Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana – Iztapalapa).  In both institutions, our students were mostly from the Mexico City middle class, the kind of people who would end up in government jobs.  It took us some time to realize that we were training the oppressors, not the oppressed.  But we also got to train a lot of Indians along the way, and we were instrumental in the foundation of an MA program in "ethnolinguistics" for Indian-language speakers that has now trained several generations of students.  

                In 1976 we happened to be in Austin when Linda Schele was giving one of the first of her Maya Workshops, and realized we had contributions to make to the decipherment of Maya hieroglyphics, which we had both studied years earlier.  We began a research program on Chol, one of the modern languages most closely related to the language of the Classic inscriptions.  We still get back to Austin every Spring for the annual workshops, and we have traveled around the country giving weekend workshops of our own at museums and other institutions (about 70 so far).  We also introduced Linda to the Guatemalan Indian linguists in Antigua, did the first glyph workshop for them with her, and return periodically to do short courses for them.  They have come to use the Mayan hieroglyphs as a symbol of their cultural heritage, and many activists have taken Classic Maya names as pseudonyms (especially useful during the years of violence).     

            In 1982, when the politics and the pollution finally got to be unbearable, we left Mexico City and returned to the US to look for academic jobs.  Unfortunately, in that period, nobody over 30 could expect to be interviewed, much less hired.  All academic positions were staffed at the lowest possible level.  So for several years we lived off of research grants, gifts from my father, and the income from a lecture and tour company we founded (Jaguar Tours); we still lead tours to Maya archaeological sites and villages, and have a faithful clientele of intelligent, educated non-specialists who had sense enough not to go into academics as a profession.      

            In 1991, Kathryn got a university job in Florida, and we (God bless us) have been in Tallahassee ever since.  This is a state that ranks near the bottom in almost any measure of educational investment other than football.  For more than ten years I have been teaching as a part-time (Adjunct) professor (without benefits), and have finally reached the age of "retirement" (can you retire if you didn't have a job?).  I'm now drawing Social Security and working on a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship to digitize and archive our field recordings of indigenous languages from the 1960s to the present.  We have three years to go before Kathryn can retire, and it's going to be a hard struggle to make it.  There is a top-down management style in the state and university that is extremely oppressive (kiss ass up, kick ass down).  And of course for us it's Bushes all the way up.  Jeb! (that was his campaign slogan, "Jeb!" – that should tell you something) has privatized everything he could, so that critical state services are badly managed and over budget, and former career civil servants are working for lower wages for the companies that replaced them.  If someone offers you a job in Florida, just walk away from it.  It's a nice place to visit, but you wouldn't want to live here.

            We're not active politically except in the sense that living is a political act.  I still think that the workers should own the means of production, but I don't see that happening any time soon unless it's through the stock market.  On the other hand, once the menace of the Soviet Union was out of the way and it was safe to talk about it, Marxist theory has surfaced in academia, and a lot of students just learn it as basic economic theory, not politics, so maybe these ideas will survive.  In the 60s I was no fan of the doctrinaire left because of the elitist anti-democratic maneuverings (begging the pardon of the many to whom this doesn't apply), but it was nothing compared to working in Mexico, where all acts are political acts, and politics overrides any other considerations (like morality, ethics, truth, etc.).  At one point we discovered that the Mexican anthropologists were opposed to ethnicity, since if you identfy youself as a Tzotzil or whatever, it gets in the way of your class consciousness; so the best thing to do for the Indians is to reduce them to an amorphous rural proletariat, and then you understand how to deal with them.   

            So I despair that good ideas can be warped into bad actions, and that people of good faith can fuck each other over and feel righteous about it.  On the other hand, I am encouraged by the memoirs that show that people have carried on in their own ways and that the Movement had positive effects on individual lives.  I happen to believe that it was one of the major factors in ending the war in Vietnam.  Just think of what it would have been like if there had been no movement against the war and all that it stood for.  With all due respect to the Vietnamese, it ended a lot sooner because of what was happening in America. 

            So, that's my story and I'm sticking to it.  As a Sartrean existentialist, having done at every point what I thought was right, all things considered, I don't regret a moment of it.  (Although it sure could have gone better!!)

            May the Intelligent Designer Bless You All, and Keep On Truckin',

           Nick Hopkins              [Top]