Editors’ Notes

by

Fifth Estate # 65, October 31-November 13, 1968

Apparently Detroit’s two daily papers didn’t believe our interview in the last issue with the person who bombed the CIA office in Ann Arbor.

The News ran a front page synopsis of the interview and the next day both papers carried stories of the “authorities,” denying that it was authentic and the Free Press even accused us of taking it from other papers.

The only thing we can tell you is that it was real. We think many people read our paper because they feel they can find something approaching the truth on our pages—that is an obligation we want to live up to. The News and the Free Press have made a profession of lying and distorting the news and this instance is no different. They have to explain away how a bunch of beatniks can get an interview with a guy who the FBI and the police from three counties can’t run down.

The Free Press story said that we took our interview from the South End, but anybody who read the two papers could tell they were done by different people They also cite the fact that the same Interview appeared in the East Village Other on Oct. 11. Apparently they never heard of Liberation News Service. All underground papers received the interview at the same time. However, we were the only paper close enough to Ann Arbor to check and see if it was real.

Unfortunately, we were not able to print it until our Oct. 17 issue. E.V.O. is weekly.

Speaking of bombings, maybe we can act to prevent one. We received a call from a person who identified himself as Joshua Newton and told us of his next target. It is a 1968 Buick Riviera, license number FG 8998. According to Josh, the driver of this vehicle and its passengers were seen to have vandalized an anti-war sign on the exterior of the offices of the Detroit Committee to End the War in Vietnam.

The election choices are easy this year—don’t vote or vote for Eldridge Cleaver and Larry Hochman on the New Politics Party ticket if you are addicted to voting or go piss in the booths the way Eldridge suggests elsewhere in this issue. Never has the fraudulence of electoral politics been more clearly illustrated as this year’s. Both the candidates and the electorate point this out.

The average voter is a white, 42 year old, urban male. That’s who is going to elect the man who will have life and death power over us and the rest of the world for the next four years. This man who has the voting power is nothing like us; our power is in the streets, not the voting booths. The three major candidates are a joke. Anyone who can justify voting fur Hubert Humphrey, a man who qualifies as a mass murderer by his role in our criminal war in Vietnam, probably should cancel his subscription to this paper and go back to reading Time Magazine. The Democratic Party is the Death Party and support for any of its candidates, local or national, is to give your vote of approval to the policies of Lyndon Baines Johnson and what he has done in the last four years.

We must be doing something right—subscription cancellations have reached a record peak. That’s our motto—something to offend everyone.

The San Francisco Mime Troupe was here and did their thing and those of us who saw it probably won’t be the same for quite a while. Special thanks to Barry Kramer at Mixed Media and the WABX staff for their help in making the show. A Detroit radio first occurred when the Mime Troupe visited Dave Dixon at ABX Friday night after the show, but for the sake of the station we’ll leave what was done unmentioned. Hope you dug it.

Well, folks, here’s the latest for you subscribers who took advantage of the free ESP record album offer with each new subscription.

After having sent in all of the forms and expecting ESP Disks would then send out the selected album to each subscriber, the record company shipped all of the records to us, apparently assuming we would handle the mailing of them,

This is impossible for us. We have neither the packaging material nor the money, nor the time to become a record mailing house. We are going to call ESP in New York to see if a different arrangement can be made, but in the meantime, people in the Detroit area can drop by our office and pick up their records.

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