http://www.lacitybeat.com/article.php?id=4098&IssueNum=164
John Sinclair
The poet, activist, and counterculture impresario on weed,
Black Panthers, and the death throes of America the Beautiful
American culture has closed up around John Sinclair. There's
just not enough freedom in it any more – not enough free
time, not enough outrage, not enough difference between one
place and the next, not enough high culture or genuine
bohemia, not enough Sun Ra or Dylan. Anyone who didn't live
through his era – or, more particularly, through his life
– might not know what he's talking about. Poet, founder of
a 1960s arts collective called the Detroit Artists Workshop,
and manager of the proto-punk rock band MC5, Sinclair
co-founded the White Panther Party in 1968 after one of his
heroes, Black Panther Party leader Huey Newton, said in an
interview that the best thing white people could do to
support their struggle was to start such a thing. So he did.
And paid the price, serving a couple years of a
nine-and-a-half-to ten-year prison term for marijuana
distribution after police started swarming the group.
He was released after John Lennon and others put on a
concert in his defense, but that probably wouldn't happen
today. The White Panther Party credo of "rock 'n' roll,
dope, and fucking in the streets" is completely impossible
in a world where only millionaires are considered real
artists and Americans happily embrace domestic wiretapping
and corporate spook culture. Well, hell, it was impossible
back then, too. But the difference is: Sinclair and a
million other beautiful dreamers believed it.
– Dean Kuipers
CityBeat: Why did you move to Amsterdam in 2003?
John Sinclair: I just can't stand it here anymore. And plus,
the positive part: I love it there. It's a kind of place
where I want to live in my old age. No one's armed. They
have a social structure where they take care of people who
don't have any place to live, if you don't have any money.
If you get sick, you can get healed. And then, they don't
care if you get high. If you've got six euros, you can get a
gram of the best fuckin' weed you ever smoked in your life.
What changed here? It's not just the war on drugs, right?
No, but it's just the downward trend that that represents.
The venality, the hypocrisy. Everybody knows the war on
drugs is a shuck. But still and all, they're all profiting
from it. Musicians and those in the record business; they
know it's all horseshit, but they're all groveling to keep
milking it. And that this guy Bush could take the election,
and then they believe anything he says, and nobody says
nothing about it, so he's got us in perpetual war. Finally,
I concluded: there's nothing for me. I'm 64 years old. I
lived in New Orleans for 12 years, and I got evicted. I
thought: Jesus Christ, this is humiliating! And I thought:
If I'm going to starve, I could starve in Amsterdam just as
easily.
(((etc etc moan groan etc)))
