Transcripts for Parts of Speech

Speaker 1: Whenever you’re ready.

Speaker 2: "A religious cult in Guthrie may have had connection with David Koresh in the Branch Davidians sect in Waco, Texas," a Guthrie police official said Friday. The official, who asked not to be identified, said he received inquiries from federal agencies about a possible connection between the Samaritan Foundation, located in the old territorial jail at 214 West Noble, and the Branch Davidians.

He said the inquiries came before the spring standoff in Waco between federal agents and Koresh and his followers. The Samaritan Foundation’s existence became public knowledge Thursday during an emergency child custody hearing in the courtroom of Logan County Associate District Judge Penny Howard.

Jonathan George, 42, of Somerville, Massachusetts, was in Guthrie to regain custody of his two children, Leila Malini George, 7, and Rami Michael George, 4. The children’s mother, Nelli George, 40, had brought them to Guthrie on September 2nd. The Beirut, Lebanon, native told her husband she wanted to spend ten days in Guthrie at a seminar. He said she described it to him as ‘the chance of a lifetime.’ Jonathan George said that once the children’s mother arrived in Guthrie, he had difficulty reaching her or the children by phone and could only leave messages on an answering machine belonging to Linda Greene, head of the Samaritan Foundation.

He said he had spoken to the children a total of 12 minutes since they arrived in Guthrie. Nelli George testified she decided she did not want to go back to her husband and filed for separate maintenance. Jonathan George, a contractor who said he does the fine finish work for the television show This Old House then sought help from Massachusetts state courts. A judge there granted him temporary custody of the children on October 5th. He came to Oklahoma to get the children.

Howard ruled Friday that the children were to return to Massachusetts with their father because the state had jurisdiction and because it is the children’s home state. During the course of the hearing that began Thursday, the children’s father said he was afraid for them to remain in Guthrie because of his wife’s bizarre behavior that began 18 months ago.

That was about the time she began receiving literature from the Samaritan Foundation, he said. He said she began swinging a pendulum over things, including the children, to remove evil. He said she would place a circular drawing under groceries because the foundation’s writings said the Universal Price Code, also called a bar code, was evil. ‘She placed the same drawing under the children’s pillows,’ he said.

Jonathan George said the literature his wife had received was signed with the name Linda Greene. It referred to zombies, vampires, and the Antichrist. ‘Much of it was violent in nature,’ he said.

The Oklahoman obtained a copy of the writings, which caution believers not to talk on the telephone because vampires can gain access to them. Another describes President Clinton as ‘an animal-mutant zombie,’ First Lady Hillary Clinton as ‘a three-virtue type zombie’ and Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein as a ‘five-virtue zombie.’ Jonathan George’s attorney, Richard L. Weldon of Chickasha, said Greene claims in her writings that she is Christ because she ‘willingly gave her soul so that all of yours could survive.’

Claire Carbone, Jonathan George’s sister, said of her sister-in-law, ‘That woman is not Nelli. Nelli is a sweet, beautiful mother. She must be hypnotized.’ Carbone said Nelli George is very bright, speaks Arabic, French, and English, and is an accomplished potter. Nelli George testified Thursday that she and the children were living at the former territorial jail at 214 West Noble. She said she shared living quarters and meals with at least seven other adults and two children.

She described Greene and Greene’s husband Dennis as her friends, and said she came to Guthrie to see them. She denied Linda Greene was her teacher and denied being a member of the Samaritan Foundation.

In court Friday, Nelli George said she moved on Thursday to the Greene’s home, 909 Mockingbird, which is for sale. She said she and the children planned to live there in exchange for taking care of the house. She said Dennis Greene travels and Linda Greene now lives at 301 2nd Street. After the judge gave her husband permission to take the children back to Massachusetts, Nelli George vowed, ‘They’ll be back with me soon.’ Ellie Sutter, October 16, 1993.”

[End of Audio]

Speaker 1: We were everywhere.

Speaker 2: Political rallies, political protests—smaller, weirder shit.

Speaker 3: City council meetings.

Speaker 1: High school reunions.

Speaker 4: Art openings.

Speaker 5: Disaster prep.

Speaker 4: Half the time, we didn’t even know who we were working for. Gina had signed these NDAs.

Speaker 1: Getpeople.org. Background casting, like the crowd scenes in movies.

Speaker 3: Secret dramaturgy, Gina called it. A dramaturgy of the apparatus.

Speaker 4: Gina got asked to do a political rally. Some foreign government wanted positive buzz for a barely elected human rights abuser at the UN General Assembly. The whole thing was arranged through front companies, very lucrative. So Gina sent a diverse bunch of us over there with signs and T-shirts: "We love so-and-so!” and “Finally so-and-so!" I didn't even know his name.

I don’t actually remember being at that one. But the photographic evidence says I was, and that was the main point. A lot of the time the protests were a pretext, a photo op. We were there to be captured by the cameras.

You learn so much about yourself from a surveillance photo. I remember the first time I saw myself in a surveillance photo. I was like, "I was in Grand Central?" Like, I remember passing through Grand Central, but I don't actually remember being in Grand Central.

Speaker 5: That night on a subway back home I saw this dude who was totally deflated, like poured skin. I got closer. He was an inflatable, like they use for crowd scenes in movies before they learned to do it with digital. I was like, "Who left their inflatable person on the Coney Island–bound F? And what are they trying to tell me?"

Speaker 4: It was like, with Gina time was always passing in reverse. The more history moved in one direction, downtown, gig economy, freelancing, the more Gina moved in the other, midtown, five-year lease. And suddenly all of us were on salary, with benefits. It was like she was pulling us through time on a dolly zoom. The weirdest part was the lectures.

Speaker 5: Was the lectures. Once we got uptown, Gina started reading us chapters from her Ph.D. thesis. “Zellig as Tartian subject.” I didn’t understand a word of it. None of us did. It was like an AA meeting in there. She kept saying it was an ethics, a discipline. No one asked if we wanted to devote our lives to a discipline, because we were on salary and health insurance. That is the discipline. Like sure I’ll join your cult, beats the exhilarating freedom in economy of TaskRabbit.

Speaker 4: She was the insert in every lucite photo cube sold in the ‘70s. My parents didn’t even bother to take her out. I thought she was a relative. Imagine, she was in tens of thousands of American homes and then poof, vanished. She took her finger out of her mouth, turned and walked away. No one ever saw her again.

Speaker 3: Gina said the camera was like a magnifying loop passing over the things of this world. As it passed over humans, it drew demons out of them like a magnet. For a moment it pulled these qualities forward and made them dance. It bent you like the eye of God. And when the camera passed on, you snapped back into shape and resumed your rounds.

Speaker 5: The person of interest in these photos isn't the subject. The subject is simply the one being made to dance by dent of being in the camera's eye. The person of interest is the photographer, because they're unseen and therefore unaccountable. And then to prove a point, she sent me out into Grand Central wearing Google Glass, a Fitbit, a police-issued body cam, and a shoe phone and told me to be inconspicuous. Then she'd say, "Be the medium through which the world passes." Okay. And then when she aggregated the data, the only blank spot on the map was me. It was beautiful. It was sublime.

Speaker 4: Sublime.

The rest of the time she'd send us out to that strip on 53rd and 5th, the one all the street photographers used to cover in the '60s, and she'd have us drift through people's B-rolls and tourist selfies, do the most discrete and subtle photobombing. "We're making a story," said Gina, "and this story will be inlaid, entwined, and established over decades. And someday, some enterprising researcher will say, 'How? How is this guy in this person's photo at 3 in the afternoon here, but then in this totally unrelated woman's photo at 7 in the evening here?' And they will be overcome by a sense of dread."

Speaker 3: I made my way up 5th Avenue, past where Winogrand took that picture and past where Freed Leonard took that picture, past the window Holly Golightly stared into. The avenue was empty. It was summer. Everyone was on vacation. Lone persons would approach, casting long shadows in the sunset, and as they passed me, they raised their hats and I was like, "Hats?"

It's the 21st century. It was gaslighting, I'm sure of it. Someone hired those people. In a derelict phone booth on 59th and 5th, I saw casting notice for a show called Imposters. The series follows Maddie, a con artist who gets involved in relationships with men and women before leaving them robbed and taken of everything including their hearts, seeking background of all types. Must bring wardrobe, non-union.

[End of Audio]

[Applause] I'm a sick man. I'm a spiteful man. Are you a good person? Deep down, do you even really want to be a good person? Or do you only want to seem like a good person so that people will like you? Can the decision to be less selfish ever be anything other than a selfish decision? What you'll realize is that you actually enjoy feeling like there is no escape, that you'll never really change anything. Even if you could, you do nothing because perhaps there's nothing actually there for you to change. The reality is that it is better to do nothing. This is my conviction. [Laughter]

You know, at some point in our lives we all wake up and stand before the insatiable chasm of meaninglessness. How do we confront this chasm? We want to feel we can make a difference in the world, make a dent in the universe, but even an intelligent man cannot become anything he wants to. Only fools can become anything they want. And why is that? Because a fool always finds a greater fool to listen to him. I couldn't become a fool if I wanted to. I couldn't even become an insect. Honestly, I've tried many times to become an insect. [Laughter]

They say that man only does dirty things because he does not know his own interest, and that if he were enlightened, he would at once become good and moral because he would see his own advantage in caring for the good for all. But this is a golden dream of an innocent child. What is to be done with the millions of facts that prove people have knowingly acted against their own interest? They’ve preferred to rush headlong down a dangerous path, compelled by nobody and by nothing simply because they dislike the beaten track.

What if, on occasion, our real prophet comes from desiring what is bad for us? Maybe we love suffering just as much as we love wellbeing. As for my personal opinion, to love wellbeing alone is somehow vulgar. Whether it’s good or bad, it’s sometimes great to smash things. I’m not taking a stand here for suffering or for wellbeing, I stand for my own whim, my own independent choice.

People everywhere and at all times have preferred to act as they chose, even when it was contrary to their own interest, and sometimes they absolutely should. And that is my idea. One’s own independent choice, however wild it may be, is that most advantageous advantage which we have overlooked. While I’m alive and have desires, I would rather my hand shrivel and fall off than overlook my independent choice. You believe in building a perfect world, a crystal palace that can never be destroyed, but I’m afraid of your ideal system because I’m not allowed to criticize it. I can’t even stick my tongue out at it. And I don’t say this because I love sticking my tongue out at things, but I resent systems that stop me from doing so.

Go ahead, stick your tongue out at me. Come on. I'll do it back. [Laughter] We all want to feel important, feel unique. We think we can feel significant by making more money or by being more spiritual, but the fastest way is violence. They say that Cleopatra was fond of sticking gold pins into her slave girls' breasts and derived pleasure from their screams and writhing. You can try to explain it away by saying those were barbaric times in Egypt, but these are barbaric times too. Pins are still stuck into people all the time. [Laughter]

[Whispers “Oh my god.”] We will never renounce suffering because suffering is the sole origin of consciousness. Consciousness is a disease. The reality is that it is better to do nothing. This is my conviction. “Then why have you said all this,” you're probably thinking, shaking your head with contempt. You're thinking, “You talk nonsense and you're pleased with it. You may have really suffered, but you have no respect for your own suffering. Out of vanity, you expose your sincerity publicly and disgrace yourself in the marketplace.” And maybe you're right, perhaps I'm only imagining an audience in order to feel more dignified as I stand here in parenthesis. [Silence, then applause]

[End of Audio]

President Hatcher, Governor Romney, Senators McNamara and Hart, Congressmen Meader and Staebler, and other members of the fine Michigan delegation, members of the graduating class, my fellow Americans. It is a great pleasure to be here today. This university has been coeducational since 1870, but I do not believe it was on the basis of those accomplishments that a Detroit high school girl said, "When choosing a school, one must decide whether they want a coeducational school or an educational school."

Well, we could find both here at Michigan today, although perhaps at different hours. I came out here today very anxious to meet the Michigan student whose father told a friend of mine that his son’s education had been a real value to him. It stopped his mother from bragging about him.

I have come here today from the turmoil of your capital to the tranquility of your campus to speak to you about the future of your country. The purpose of protecting the life of our nation and preserving the liberty of our citizens is to pursue the happiness of our people. Our success in that pursuit is a test to our success as a nation.

For a century, we have labored to settle and to subdue a continent. For half a century, we called upon unbounded invention and untiring industry to create an order of plenty for all of our people. The challenge of the next half-century is whether we have the wisdom to use that wealth to enrich and elevate our national life, and to advance the quality of our American civilization.

Your imagination, your initiative, and your indignation would determine whether we build a society where progress is the servant of our needs, or a society where old values and new visions are buried under unbridled growth. For in your time, we have the opportunity to move towards not only the rich society and the powerful society, but upward to the great society.

The Great Society rests on abundance and liberty for all. It demands an end to poverty and racial injustice, to which we are totally committed in our time. But this is just the beginning. The Great Society is a place where every child can find knowledge to enrich his mind and to enlarge his talents. It is a place where leisure is a welcome chance to build and reflect, not a feared cause for boredom or restlessness. It is a place where the city of man serves not only the needs of the body and the demands of commerce, but also a desire for beauty and the hunger for community.

It is a place where man can renew contact with nature. It is a place which honors creation for its own sake, and for what is adds to the understanding of the race. It is a place where men are more concerned with the quality of their goals than the quantity of their goods. But most of all, The Great Society is not a safe harbor, a resting place, a final end. It is a challenge constantly renewed, beckoning us toward a destiny where the meaning of our lives matches the marvelous products of our labor.

So I want to you today about three places where we begin to build the great society. It’s in our cities, in our countryside, and in our classrooms. Many of you will live to see the day, perhaps 50 years from now, when there will be 400 million Americans, four-fifths of them in urban areas. In the remainder of this century, urban population will double, city land will double, and we will have to build more homes, highways, and facilities equal to all those built since this country was first settled. So in the next 40 years, we must rebuild the entire urban United States.

Aristotle said, "Men come to cities to live, but they remain together in cities to live the good life." Well, it is harder and harder to live the good life in American cities today. The catalog of ills is long. There is decay in the centers and despoiling in the suburbs. There's not enough housing for our people or transportation for our traffic. Open land is vanishing, and old landmarks are violated. And worst of all expansion is eroding the precious and time-honored values of community with neighbors and communion with nature.

The loss of these values breeds loneliness and boredom and indifference. Our society will never be great until our cities are great. Today, the frontier of imagination and innovation rests within those cities and not beyond their borders. New experiments are already going on. It will be the task of your generation to make the American city a place where people want to live—and not just come to live, but to live the good life. And I understand that if I stayed here tonight in Michigan, I’d find that you students are really working hard to live the good life. This is the place where the Peace Corps was started, and it is inspiring to see how all of you living in this country are working so hard to live at the level of the people.

The second place where we begin to build The Great Society is in our countryside. We have always prided ourselves on being not only America the proud and America the free, but America the beautiful. Today, that beauty is in danger. The water we drink, the food we eat, the very air that we breathe, are threatened by pollution. Our parks are overcrowded and our seashores are overburdened. Green fields and dense forests are disappearing. A few years ago we were greatly concerned about the ugly American. Today, we must work to prevent an ugly America.

For once that battle is lost, once our natural splendor is destroyed, it can never be recaptured. And once man can no longer walk with beauty, of wonder at nature, his spirit will wither and his sustenance be wasted.

A third place to build The Great Society is in the classrooms of America. There, your children’s lives will be shaped. Our society will never be great until every young mind is free to scan the farthest reaches of thought and imagination. We are still very far from this goal.

Today, 8 million adult Americans, more than the entire population of Michigan, have not finished five years of school. Nearly 20 million have not finished eight years of school. Nearly 54 million, more than one-quarter of all of America, have not even finished high school. Each year more than 100,000 high school graduates, with proved ability, do not enter college because they cannot afford it. And if we cannot educate today’s youth, what will we do in 1970 when elementary school enrollment will increase by more than 5 million than in 1960? And high school enrollment will rise by 5 million? College enrollment will increase by 3 million.

In many places, classrooms are overcrowded and curricula are outdated. Most of our qualified teachers are underpaid, and many of our paid teachers are unqualified. So we must give every child a place to sit and a teacher to learn from. Poverty must not be a bar to learning, and learning must provide an escape from poverty. But more classrooms and more teachers are not enough. We must seek an educational system which grows in excellence as it grows in size. This means better training for our teachers. It means preparing youth to enjoy the hours of leisure as well as their hours of labor. It means exploring new techniques of teaching, to find new ways to stimulate the love of learning and the capacity for creation.

These are three of the central issues of the great society. While our government has many programs directed at these issues, I do not pretend to have the full answer to these problems. But I do promise you this: we are going to assemble the best thought and the broadest knowledge from all over the world to find the answers to these problems. I intend to establish working groups to prepare a series of meetings and conferences at the White House on the city, on our natural beauty, on the quality of our education. And from these meetings and from this inspiration and from those studies, we will move toward the great society.

The solution to these problems don't rest solely on the programs in Washington, and nor can they rely solely on the strained resources of local authority. They require us to create a new form of cooperation, a creative federalism between the national capital and the leaders of local communities. Woodrow Wilson once wrote, "Every man sent out from his university should be a man of his nation and a man of his time." Well, within your lifetime powerful forces already loosed will take us toward a way of life beyond the bounds of our imagination and most certainly beyond the bounds of our experience.

For better or for worse, your generation has been appointed by history to deal with these problems and to lead America to a new age. You have the chance never before afforded any other people of any other age. You can help build a society where the demands of morality, and the needs of the spirit, can be realized in the life of the nation. So will you join in the battle to give every citizen full equality, which God enjoins and the law requires, regardless of his belief, race, or the color of his skin? Will you join in the battle to give every citizen an escape from the crushing weight of poverty?

Will you join in the battle to make it possible that all nations live in enduring peace as neighbors and not as mortal enemies? Will you join in the battle to build a great society, to prove that our material progress is only the foundation under which we will build a richer life of mind and spirit? And there are those timid souls, I know, they will say this battle cannot be won, that we are condemned to live a soulless wealth. I do not agree. We have the power to shape the civilization that we want, but we will need your will, your labor, and your hearts, if we are to build that society.

Those who came to this land sought more than just a new country. They sought a new world. So I have come here today, to your campus, to say that you can make their vision our reality. So let us from this moment begin our work so that in the future, men will look back and they will say, "It was then, after a long and weary way, that man turned the exploits of his genius to the full enrichment of his life." Thank you. Goodbye. [Applause]

[End of Audio]

—rendering one's arrogance and pride in the face of divine revelation and what have you. But there are ways of acknowledging our finitude and our fallibility. I want all of the rich historical colorations to be manifest in talking about our finitude. Being born of a woman in stank and stench, what I call funk. Being introduced to the funk of life in the womb and the love push that gets you out. [Music plays] And then your body is not just death but the way Vico talks about it— here Vico was so much better than Heidegger— Vico talks about it in terms of being a corpse. See, Heidegger doesn't talk about corpses. He talks about death. It's still too abstract. Absolutely. Read the poetry of John Donne; he'll tell you about corpses that decompose. Well, see, that's history. That's the raw, funky, stanky stuff of life. That's what bluesmen did. See, that's what jazzmen did. See, I'm a bluesman in the life of the mind. I'm a jazzman in the world of ideas. Therefore, for me, music is central. So, when you're talking about poetry, for the most part Plato was talking primarily about words, [Orchestra plays] whereas I talk about notes. I talk about tone. I talk about timbre. I talk about rhythms. See, for me, music is fundamental. A philosopher must go to school not only with the poets; a philosopher needs to go to school with the musicians. Keep in mind, Plato bans the flute in the republic but not the lyre. Why? Because the flute appeals to all of these various sides of who we are, given his tripartite conception of the soul, the rational and the spirited and the appetitive. And the flute is—appeals to all three of those, where he thinks the lyre with one string only appeals to one and therefore is permissible. Now, of course the irony is when Plato was on his deathbed, what did he do? Well, he requested a Thracian girl to play music on a flute. [Flute music] I'm a Christian but I'm not a Puritan. I believe in pleasure. And orgiastic pleasure has its place. Intellectual pleasure has its place. Social pleasure has its place. Televisual pleasure has its place. I like certain TV shows. And my God, when it comes to music, whoa. Beethoven's 32nd sonata, opus 111. Unbelievable aesthetic pleasure. The same would be true for Curtis Mayfield or The Beatles or what have you. [Jazz song plays] There's a certain pleasure of the life of the mind that cannot be denied. It's true that you might be socially isolated because you're at the library, at home, and so on. But you're intensely alive. In fact, you're much more alive than these folks walking the streets of New York in crowds, which is no intellectual interrogation and questioning going at all. But if you read John Ruskin or you read a Mark Twain or Herman Melville, you almost have to throw the book against the wall because you're almost so intensely alive that you need a break.

[Inaudible comment from audience]

Exactly. It's time to take a break and get a little dullness in your life. You know? Take Moby Dick and throw it against the wall the way Goethe threw Von Kleist's work against the wall. It's just too much. Goethe—it reminded Goethe of the darkness that he was escaping after he overcame those suicidal impulses he saw as a young brother in the 1770s and made his move to a neoclassicism in Weimar. There are certain things that make us too alive almost. It's almost like being too intensely in love. You can't do anything. It's hard to get back to Kronos. It's hard to get back to everyday life. You know what I mean? That kairotic dimension of being in love with another person; everything is so meaningful you want to sustain it. You just can't do it. You know? You've got to go to the bathroom, have a drink of water and shit.

[End of Audio]

Interviewer: Can you hear me? Okay, we should be pretty much set to go. The Panthers have gotten a lot of publicity in Chicago because of the fact that Bobby Seale is on trial with the rest of the Eight for the conspiracy. But we’re finding out, especially today, that you have a lot more problems than just Bobby Seale being on trial for the conspiracy.

And I think maybe it’d be interesting to find out, since we’re doing a thing on Chicago, exactly what some of the specific problems are right now in Chicago. We know a little bit about the lunch thing and about the health clinic, how that was shut down, but especially you, Fred, because you’re the leader, you’re the chairman here for Illinois, is that—

Fred Hampton: Right.

Interviewer: Yeah. And so maybe if you could just rap some of the stuff that you think is really specific that—especially to Chicago—and then in general, whatever, but maybe we could start with that.

Fred Hampton: Right, we got a lot of problems in Chicago. Our Deputy Minister of Defense Bobby Rush is out on two appeals for gun charges. I’m out on appeal for trumped-up robbery, and we got around nine people still locked up in jail. We have two people still locked up in jail from a July 30th shootout we had with the pigs and we have around four or five more still locked up from the last ambush of the office on . . . a week ago Saturday, I think.

These people are people that work hard for the party here in Chicago and the main thing that we believe ‘caused the leads the event going off leads right back to what you were talking about the chairman being in Chicago, you know. People came into the office and pile up the health—the supplies for the health clinic and burned it in the middle of the floor, this showed some type of megalomaniac tendencies that these people have because they’re obsessed and they’re crazy with power. They came into there and they ripped the brothers out of the office and then beat them brutally when they got him outside the office.

The brothers did not shoot at them like they claim they did. They said that somebody in the block was sniping and these drunkard bastards went up in the office and burned the whole office down because—so-called because some people were shooting at them. The main issue is the chairman’s down there at the federal building, the chairman’s being tried illegally.

We don’t think that old people have a right to try the chairman. We don’t think that this judge, he’s too old, he’s too outdated, he’s too outmoded, he’s too decrepit, he’s too senile, he’s too stupid, and he’s too racist, and he’s too imperialistic to try our chairman. He’s got too many fucked-up traits. And so the issue now is that we organize the people around some of these bad traits, some of these illegal traits that this man has, some of these traits that would not allow him, whether you want it to or not, to be able to give our chairman a fair trial.

You see, when you get that old you don’t do what you want to do, you do what you have to do, you know. And even if he did get some type of good feeling about wanting to try our chairman and prop him out, it wouldn’t even be possible. He doesn’t have enough strength in his body to try to withstand any type of attacks that the press would launch on him if he gave our chairman a fair trial. We want him out of the courtroom and we want our chairman released because the chairman is not a criminal.

As a matter of fact, he’s just the opposite of a criminal. He’s just as far from being a criminal as that judge is from being a teenager because he’s a father of our breakfast children program, he’s the father of our free health clinic, and if this is criminal then we all want to be criminal. If it’s criminal to feed children, the hungry, if it’s criminal to start a program that says the only prerequisite that people have to have to involve themselves in this program is to be hungry then that, we’re gonna to continue to be criminal.

If it’s criminal to say the only prerequisite that people have to have when they want free medical aid is that they be sick, then we intend to continue to be criminal because we think that this shows the contradictions of that slaughterhouse down there, that what they call a Cook County Hospital where they take people and experiment on them and they got these gaping apes down there that are waiting to launch some type of physical attack on people and rip and rip them off, take intestines, anything else that they need for some of their relatives and we know about all of these maniacs because this Dr. Bernard was a maniac.

We call him the fastest knife in the west, and he’s ripping black people off and all these fascists ripping black people off is a racist tendency. These people don’t have any right to determine when black people are gonna die. They don’t have any right to be able to lay a black man down and say that we think he was close enough to death that we should take his heart because these motherfuckers we know where they at and we know they want some—everything off of us. They like some of our sex organs, they like some of everything, some of our brains, and arms, and everything and we’re not gonna allow these motherfuckers to rip us off.

We know with the way this fascism’s going, it’ll be around three weeks and you won’t be able to go in and get a physical checkup. Every time people go in there they’ll come out and he just died and he had a common cold, anything and the motherfucker, he just died and he just happened that another person was in there who needed a heart and we took his heart and gave them to this other man. We think there’s too much racism, there’s too much fascism, there’s too much imperialism to allow these people to play with our lives in general and play with our chairman’s life in specific.

This man has no right and this is what the people have to understand, we out here trying to educate, trying to inform, trying to organize, and trying to teach the people some revolutionary political power and have them arm themselves. We know that once the people are armed those people cannot be oppressed and they cannot be repressed without any type of retaliation, and retaliation is the only thing in the world that’s ever gonna stop fascism. It’s not a question of nonviolence or violence. The question is between resistance to this fascism either nonexistence within fascism.

Interviewer: Talking about retaliation then, when they do bust in and shoot up your office and burn the money and do the things that have been pretty well-documented I guess that they do do, what do you do? ‘Cause you can’t call the police, you know? Like, you can’t have the pigs to come in to check on the pigs, right?

Fred Hampton: No. You don’t need to call the police. If you read the papers you find that there are a whole lot of policemen that end up in the hospital and we just found out something, you know, the people just found it out maybe, policeman react the same way from .357 magnums and shotguns that the people do and anybody else. And we know how to ward these frantic fascists off, that we have to defend ourselves. We intend to defend ourselves.

We did so in the past and we’re gonna do it today, and the day after that, and the day after that, because only through this proper example of self-defense, and the proper example of retaliation, and by letting these people know that we move for some basic laws, that anything that goes down on the oppressed people on the part of the oppressor, it should be reciprocal. And in plain English and in workers’ language, it takes two to tango. As soon as these motherfuckers go, we go.

Interviewer: You know what, I just—how do you go about—a lot of people that are outside of the black community who haven’t been harassed ‘til now, or even people in the black community that don’t really know where the Panthers are at or haven’t for a while, you know—and even the suburban people, how do you tell them that you are defending yourselves?

All they hear—like they see Black Panthers’ violence, just like they see maybe hippies and violence, or SDS and violence, and they think that like that’s all you want to do is get guns. Like even an education program, what are the Panthers into as far as that? Black people in the ghetto don’t have to be educated, I know that. But there are a lot of people who should be and maybe you could get to those people. Are you trying?

Fred Hampton: I don’t think there’s anybody trying any harder in their attempts have been any more successful than the Black Panther Party. I think that Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale should be called Professor Newton and Professor Seale because when it comes to educators I think that they’re some of the best educators that the world has ever produced.

As a matter of fact, I would go on to say for people who think that the Black Panther Party is wrapped up in complete metaphysical bullshit about some of these other people like Mao, and we respect Mao, but I said that Chairman Bobby and Huey P. Newton and the Chief of Staff, David Hilliard, also are the most profound Marxists in the world living today and they’re writing some of the most profound Marxist, Leninist ideas and dealing with some of the most difficult problems and difficult times under the difficult repression of the most repressive force, the most capable people of repressing a people in the world.

And I think they’re doing the job beautifully. We’re out there every day and educating. People learn by example. I don’t think anybody has an argument with that. I think that when Huey P. Newton said that people learn basically by observation and participation, I think that everybody caught on to that. So what we’re saying there simply is that, if they learn by observation and participation, that we need to do more acting than we need to do writing.

And I think the Black Panther Party’s doing that, that we didn’t talk about a breakfast for children program. We’ve got one. We’re not gonna tell you how many kids we intend to feed and speed in Chicago. We’re feeding 3,000 to 4,000 every week already and I don’t know how many all around the country. We’re not talking about beginning to think about treating people for free when they need medical services. We’re opening a free health clinic in the city of Chicago in less than three weeks.

These are the type of examples that people can relate to. The Tribune or the Daily News, the Sun Times, no other establishment press that is a tool of these fools can belittle what we're doing because the examples are right there. They're concrete, just like the old saying goes, "One picture's worth a thousand words and you've got to believe what you see." The programs are there, people have to see them, and the only people that don't see them are people that shut their eyes and fight knowledge.

And people that fight knowledge will never be any good to the revolution anyway. But those that accept knowledge, those that are thirsty for knowledge, those that are aggressive about attaining knowledge, and even those that are lazy about obtaining knowledge, they’ve got to see what the party’s doing. Those that are aggressive will come and see it. Those that are not aggressive, before they know it, will have a program right next door to their house and they’ve got to see it then if they come out of the house. And if they’re too lazy for that, we’ll have one in their bedroom. They got to go to bed.

Speaker 3: [Crosstalk]

Speaker 4: I know, I know.

Interviewer: Let’s see, what was the other thing that I—

Speaker 5: What about the weatherman’s action this last week, what are your feelings about that?

Fred Hampton: We have a lot of feelings about that. I think the first thing, you know, that I should say, being egotistical, is that I was right. They were a bunch of anarchistic, Custeristic, mullet-head, scatterbrain fools, you know. And we call them Custeristic because they’re people who lead people into slaughter and you can never tell them anything. We think that this type of action is criminal, you know.

We think that it was premature, and when we saw it we thought it was on the brink of anarchism, and when we saw the plans we thought it was on the brink of anarchism. When we saw it in action we knew very clearly that that’s what it was. It was anarchism, it was a lot of spontaneity, a lot of things that some leaders have gotten together and fronted the people off, led them into situations and premature confrontations, confrontation that there’s no way in the world that these people can deal with.

People were locked up, astronomical bonds were set. Money will have to be spent that could have been spent for revolutionaries who haven’t been locked up and if they were allowed to be bonded out they would be back on the streets engaging in a constant revolutionary struggle of day-to-day, month-to-month, year-to-year struggle in order to benefit the people. But what we have to do instead, because of these megalomaniacs then we have to see people that have money that would donate something to the movement giving these people money.

These people in SDS very clearly show that they had all types of wrong tendencies—organizational chauvinism and racism and opportunism and everything because it’s opportunistic to use the Black Panther Party as the vanguard when it benefits you, but then when the Black Panther Party as the vanguard tells you that a move that you’re making is ideologically, politically, and organizationally incorrect move and you refuse to accept that basic Marxist living theory that they give you, then that proves then that you only believe that the Black Panther Party is the vanguard when it’s beneficial to you.

That is the definition very clearly of an opportunist and that’s what they are, they’re opportunists. We say this: that there’s a difference between the vanguard and the people whether I like it or you like it or anybody else like it. The definition says that we are supposed to educate the people and teach them the correct way to carry out a revolutionary struggle. Now whenever these fools get to thinking that they’re the vanguard then they’re out of their mind because they have to be the people.

The first move to commit to proving yourself that you understand you’re the people is to listen to the vanguard. They refuse to do that, they refuse our knowledge. We call them some know-it-alls who get a smattering of knowledge and move out on a premise that they think revolution is a game. We think revolution is far from that. Revolution is a discipline, art, that people have to perfect. And if they don’t perfect it then what they’re doing in fact is, you know what they’re doing, Weatherman and people like Weatherman are setting up a situation.

They’re planting some counterrevolutionary. They’re planning some opportunistic and some anarchistic, they’re planning some individualistic and some chauvinistic and some Custeristic seeds in the ground now. Then when these seeds come up, these seeds will have vegetation on the end of them that will frighten people. It will have horror that will horrify the masses and terror that will terrify the masses. Why this ain’t a premature confrontations by which the pigs, the reactionary ruling class will be able to destroy the whole movement. That’s counterrevolutionary and that’s—we have to define it.

We said that they were wrong and they were a bunch of mullet-heads, we’re going to criticize them educationally, we try to set examples and show them some discipline, education, and demonstrations instead of all this heehawing and funny-tickling and jumping up and giggling down the federal building and turning flips because these are nothing but a bunch of acrobatic counterrevolutionaries and nothing but a bunch of fools.

Interviewer: You’re talking a lot and I can see what you’re saying about the anarchy and the whole trip about that with the SDS and yet, you and the people around you seem to be always in danger. You know, you could be killed as you walked out of here ‘cause it’s happened to a lot of people in the Black Panthers and all the black movements. And can you be sure that your movement—are you strong enough now do you know that are you gonna go on? If you go, if you are killed, will the breakfast program go on just on a day-to-day type level?

Fred Hampton: We, last year we started three breakfast children’s program and this year we gave those three to the people and they’re running those breakfast children already.

Interviewer: Oh, the people are?

Fred Hampton: Right, right, right, and our whole program’s geared toward educating the mass of the people and the free health clinic that we have, the people in the community going to run that clinic. And after a while we’re gonna give them that clinic and we’re gonna move onto high levels ‘cause we understand the difference between the vanguard and the people. We’re not gonna practice materialism, we’re gonna keep out there, setting up some new examples, some new revolutionary programs that the people can basically relate to because basically people are progressive and basically people are revolutionary.

We’re not worried about them killing anybody because I think that—they jail Huey P. Newton and they ran Eldridge Cleaver out of the country and they jailed Bobby Seale and we got David Hilliard up there now who’s very capable, most capable of running the Black Panther Party and they can just take all of them they want to. We’re always gonna have someone to fulfill that position ‘cause that’s the type of organization the Black Panther Party is.

We don’t produce buffoons, we produce leaders. And everybody in the Black Panther Party and any type of cadre he’s becoming a leader. Our deputy minister of health in the state of Illinois can run the Black Panther Party and so can anybody in this cadre so all that they’re involved in is an excursion in futility because anybody that tried to deal with wiping out the leadership of the Black Panther Party is dealing with a time waste, and it’s a futile effort to seize some type of power that can never be seized because it’s a type of flowing power and it’s a type of unending flow of its power.

Every time somebody moves we’re just producing more and more people, you know. And you know how the story goes, you know, they had a chance at wiping out powers is what got them in the mess they’re in now. Wiping out power is what—that’s what got the Black Panther Party on their asses, you know, because they’ve wiped out so much power so I think they’re about tired of wiping out power. They wiped out Martin Luther King and they wiped out Malcolm X, you know what I mean?

And they wiped out all these people, and these people were produced. So I think that in the near future you'll see programs initiated by the government that they'll probably have the CIA protecting people like us because when they wiped out Huey P. Newton, Eldridge Cleaver popped up. I know very well that they said, "We wish to God that we had have kept Huey P. Newton on the scene because this motherfucker's out of his mind." [Laughter]

Speaker 3: Right on, right on, right on, shit.

Fred Hampton: [Crosstalk]

Interviewer: Somebody rapped early about going on to higher levels and then you just said it again. And then you qualified it by talking about new programs, but what about higher levels? What are higher levels right now? What would you like to move on to besides what you’re doing now?

Fred Hampton: Well, the first thing we want to move on, we’re moving on it already is the decentralization of the police.

Speaker 3: That’s right.

Fred Hampton: We need to—you see a lot of people, you know, one basic hangup we have with some people in our Ten Point Program is they say, "I just can't understand why y'all want all those people let out of jail. And some of them are crazy and some of them will rape people." So what we want to do is, we want to lock up some of these so-called insane people on the streets and get them out of the community, you know. And a lot of people make jokes. They say, "Well, every time you go by a mental institution they're hollering at you saying, 'You're crazy.'"

I don’t know if that’s incorrect on the part of those people, you know. See, it’s a difference, you know what I mean, you have priorities. If you had a maniac that had to be loose, I’d rather have him on the streets walking around every day than running the country. Now we had a maniac with Lyndon B. Johnson who started all kinds of wars, you know what I mean. That’s a megalomaniac and you can look—Webster says that. I didn’t write the dictionary. That’s a megalomaniac. They pronounce it megalomaniac, but I like to say megalomaniac.

Now then you’ve got Nixon now who’s a fascist megalomaniac himself. He’s on the streets loose. Attorney Mitchell is a maniac. There’s a pig who’s stealing all those guns is a maniac. All these maniacs, look what all, look what they’re doing. They control the destinies of people’s lives. So let’s say that let’s let some of these small-time maniacs out in order to lock up some of the big-time maniacs, you know. And so we’re not worried about any of that.

We’re talking about—we say move to a higher level, we’re moving to a level whereby the people are going to take over control of their destiny, they’re gonna take over control of their community, and the first way of doing this is dealing with the most integral part of the fascist three-way oppression, we said demagogic line politicians and avaricious, greedy businessman and we say fascist pig cops. But the one that’s most evident, the one that’s the closest, the one that’s more clear, the one that’s more defined in the black community, is those fascist pig cops.

So what we’re saying is if the people can deal with these fools then we will have taken a revolutionary step, revolutionary leap I should say. So that’s the program that we think is gonna move things to a high level. It’s going to raise some contradictions and gonna cause some antagonistic contradictions. We’re prepared to deal with them and we think the people are prepared to deal with them. They like to say that our people are not armed, but we’re not worried about that.

And if you don’t think they’re armed, go down to Presbyterian St. Luke and ask all of them pigs laying up there that—I don’t know what happened to them, if they were shot with BB guns or slingshots or what, but there’s a whole lot of them in the hospital. You ought to go down there and talk to them. And I talked to one today, and he verified what I’ve been saying for years. He said the black community’s armed and they’re tired of us pigs.

Interviewer: What are your feelings about this trial and what’s the significance for the black community?

Fred Hampton: I’m gonna say, the trial is gonna be significant in that it gives people a chance to organize around fascism before it wipes us out. I don’t think that we should get into too much of a habit of calling this a trial. It’s nothing but a hiccup, you know. There’s no sense in using words we’re not supposed to be using, you know. We know better than that. We wouldn’t call this bottle here a cup because that’s just not what it is. It might be close to that.

Now they do have a jury. They have the holiness bullshit in the courtroom, but that doesn’t make it a trial, if you understand what I’m saying, you see. Just because people drive cars, if you put a monkey in a car and he’s driving a car, that doesn’t mean he’s people, does it? That means he’s just a monkey in a people’s car and that’s all that shit is is just some bullshit in the people’s courtroom and that’s why we’re gonna move to a level to get that shit out of the courtroom because it’s improper, it’s irregular, it’s illegal, it’s ill-timed, and it’s uncouth. It’s every bad thing that a person can think of.

Now anybody knows that you see—what they should do is go in there and reestablish and rearrange the whole thing because we know very well that the main objective is locking up our chairman. We think that Hoffman, the first move that should be made is that Hoffman should be tried to see whether or not he’s mentally capable of trying anybody. You see, people gonna get this old you know yourself, that if a person’s that was that old and if he had a job and a laundromat, just getting soap and water for people, that they were gonna investigate him.

You know how after every now and then when it gets old they give you a new driver’s license test, he needs to be tried again to see if he still has common sense. And I think, you know what I mean, that I could be in that case what you call or what they call them, a—

Speaker 3: Examiner.

Fred Hampton: No, they call them a professional witness, a expert witness, that’s what they call them. I could be a expert witness in that case and Chairman Bobby could be an expert witness because we have facts to prove—

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