True Anon Truth Feed - Episode 282: Fighting Times
Aired: 2023-04-10
Duration: 01:24:45


=== Peaches and Mario Voices (05:46) ===

[00:00:00]  Someone tweeted that you and I should have done the voices for Mario and Peaches.
[00:00:05]  Peaches?
[00:00:06]  Peach.
[00:00:06]  Peaches.
[00:00:07]  Peaches.
[00:00:08]  No, it should be peaches.
[00:00:09]  Me doing the voice for peaches.
[00:00:11]  Yeah, you should do it.
[00:00:12]  Can you do it for us right now?
[00:00:13]  We've been singing a lot in the intros lately.
[00:00:17]  I don't remember the song.
[00:00:18]  Wasn't it just the teachers of peaches to do the same thing?
[00:00:24]  Liz, actually, I would prefer.
[00:00:26]  Yeah, don't say that.
[00:00:27]  That's all I'm saying.
[00:00:28]  Yeah, I'll do it.
[00:00:30]  No, please don't do it.
[00:00:31]  I'll do it.
[00:00:31]  Suck it.
[00:00:31]  But do it in.
[00:00:32]  No, no, do it in Mario voice.
[00:00:34]  All right.
[00:00:34]  Where is it?
[00:00:35]  Oh, no.
[00:00:35]  This is the Peaches song by Lyrics Peaches.
[00:00:37]  What's the teach?
[00:00:38]  What's this?
[00:00:39]  It's Teachers of Peaches.
[00:00:40]  Suck the pain away.
[00:00:41]  Oh, that's it.
[00:00:42]  Sucking.
[00:00:43]  Wait, I can't do it.
[00:00:44]  What's Mario's voice?
[00:00:45]  It's a me.
[00:00:46]  It's a me.
[00:00:47]  My apologies to any members of our guest family who had to listen to that intro.
[00:01:18]  Yes.
[00:01:18]  But we actually do.
[00:01:19]  A lot of people don't know that me and Liz actually do vocal warm-ups before we record.
[00:01:23]  And we usually sing.
[00:01:27]  Yeah, we usually sing peaches.
[00:01:29]  That's what it is.
[00:01:30]  We spend about 45 minutes singing peaches.
[00:01:33]  And Brace spends the first 30 minutes of that 45 minutes Googling the lyrics.
[00:01:38]  Yes.
[00:01:38]  And a lot of the times before we record, too, I try to do one push-up.
[00:01:42]  And this can take anywhere between two hours and I don't know, like 30 seconds or whatever.
[00:01:48]  But that's because you're really focusing on the decline.
[00:01:50]  I'm focusing on decline.
[00:01:51]  Really slow it down.
[00:01:52]  And I do what's called a diamond push-up.
[00:01:55]  And then I start thinking about diamonds.
[00:01:58]  And I go, that drives me.
[00:01:59]  You know how I get it on Jules.
[00:02:01]  I go crazy.
[00:02:01]  Yeah, you go crazy around jewels and other, I mean, just general shiny things.
[00:02:05]  Gold?
[00:02:07]  My thing is this.
[00:02:09]  It's 1320, right?
[00:02:12]  And someone, it's the year 1320.
[00:02:14]  Okay.
[00:02:15]  Someone gives you something made out of gold.
[00:02:18]  I would do anything to get more of it.
[00:02:21]  You know, it's fucking, it's, it's not, it's 1848, right?
[00:02:26]  So I'm over here in Boston, and someone's like, dude, there's gold in water in California.
[00:02:32]  Instantly, instantly, I'm taking a boat all the way down around South America to go to San Francisco.
[00:02:37]  Are you saying you're crazy for gold?
[00:02:39]  I'm just saying I get that it may, I, I, yeah, yeah, I am.
[00:02:43]  Yes.
[00:02:44]  I have gold fever.
[00:02:45]  Oh my God.
[00:02:46]  Terminal case.
[00:02:46]  Hello, my name is Brace.
[00:02:48]  I'm Liz.
[00:02:48]  We are, of course, joined by producer Jank Chomsky.
[00:02:51]  And this, it's true and on hello.
[00:02:53]  Hello.
[00:02:55]  We have with us today a guest.
[00:02:57]  We do.
[00:02:58]  It's.
[00:02:58]  I think this is what you would call a cozy episode.
[00:03:01]  Absolutely, I was gonna say that very cozy, cozy scale one to ten.
[00:03:06]  Uh, let's put it a seven seven well, eight.
[00:03:10]  Yeah, this is what i'm saying.
[00:03:12]  It's like a.
[00:03:13]  This is a, a monday evening cozy episode.
[00:03:17]  Yeah, I think so.
[00:03:19]  I I gotta tell you I love this book.
[00:03:22]  We were talking about this after we finished finished recording.
[00:03:25]  It is a, and we, we talk, we talk with our guest, Jonathan Melrod uh, about a lot of things, a lot of stories, but it doesn't even touch how many are in this book.
[00:03:34]  So, don't worry, this doesn't spoil any of it.
[00:03:37]  Yeah, the book is fighting times, organizing on the front lines of the class war, and we talk about what, everything from Washington Dc, Washington Dc which I didn't say to him because I didn't want to, you know, you want to offend a sense of please totally um, to GOSH, University OF Madison, being there, the SDS, the fracturing of the SDS, the United AUTO Workers Union, I mean so much more.
[00:04:04]  Yeah, a lot going on in here.
[00:04:06]  So uh, you know what?
[00:04:07]  Let's sit back.
[00:04:08]  Let's put this piece on the line and then watch it go by without working.
[00:04:27]  Goes the hammer of the auto worker.
[00:04:32]  Goes the wrench.
[00:04:34]  And above all of the din in the auto factory, a lone nasally voice cries out.
[00:04:43]  I I need to speak to the manager.
[00:04:46]  And that voice, ladies and gentlemen, is Jonathan Melrod, the oldest Jewish person we've had on this show, a friend of mine and uh, I am thrilled to have you Jonathan, the author of Fighting Times organizing on the front lines of the class war uh, as sort of autobiography, I guess, mostly focusing on his years uh, as an activist in the UAW and in the American auto industry.
[00:05:11]  Um Jonathan, welcome to the show, thank you very much.
[00:05:14]  And i've been uh, through my children uh, my two sons, i've been a fan, so i'm finally getting to get.
[00:05:22]  We're so excited.
[00:05:23]  And shout out to your kids, by the way.
[00:05:25]  Tell them thanks for listening.
[00:05:28]  Who's the sons?
[00:05:29]  Eli and Noah.
[00:05:30]  Yeah, they're the ones that introduced me to Truanon and introduced me to Grace.
[00:05:35]  So you named your sons Eli and okay.
[00:05:38]  Well, that makes sense.
[00:05:42]  Jonathan, Liz and I have read your biography.

=== Student Radicals and SDS (15:04) ===

[00:05:46]  I mean, you sent me a couple of copies.
[00:05:48]  Big, big fan of the book.
[00:05:50]  And I got to tell you, we have a lot to talk about today.
[00:05:54]  And I think I kind of want to open up with, you are from Washington, D.C., right?
[00:06:00]  That's right.
[00:06:00]  That's right.
[00:06:01]  So to raised in a middle-class background, middle-class Jewish household.
[00:06:05]  And I want to talk specifically because there's one incident from the book that I find very sweet on behalf of the Chinese government about your political awakening.
[00:06:16]  And can you tell us a little bit about that?
[00:06:18]  Well, do you want me to start off with DC?
[00:06:20]  Because really DC laid the groundwork for who I became.
[00:06:25]  And one of the interesting things about writing the book was it forced a self-examination.
[00:06:31]  In other words, I said to myself, how did I become political?
[00:06:35]  Because my parents weren't.
[00:06:37]  You know, they were at best Jewish progressive or liberal Democrats.
[00:06:42]  But growing up in DC in those days in the 50s was really like growing up in an apartheid-like city.
[00:06:50]  And it was just might not have been obvious to most kids, but when I was 10, the amusement park we used to go to, Glen Echo in Maryland, some stewards from Howard University, the all-black university in D.C., picketed it to integrate the amusement park.
[00:07:08]  And they wanted to integrate it and integrate the swimming pool.
[00:07:13]  And the white rednecks from the area just came out in force and full-on violence in an attempt to stop the integration of the park.
[00:07:24]  And in the end, the racists dumped bleach in the pool.
[00:07:28]  Nobody could swim in the pool.
[00:07:30]  The park was shut down.
[00:07:32]  And as a kid, I can remember to this day thinking to myself, it's 110 degrees in DC.
[00:07:38]  It's muggy.
[00:07:40]  And why can't black kids swim along with us white kids?
[00:07:44]  And now none of us can swim.
[00:07:46]  And so in a kid's mind, you begin to like piece together these differences.
[00:07:51]  You know, we'd be driving through Virginia and there'd be a chain gang, all black in stripes with big white guards on horses with shotguns.
[00:08:01]  And, you know, it's just a kid's curiosity.
[00:08:04]  What something's not adding up.
[00:08:07]  Something doesn't feel right about this picture.
[00:08:10]  And that's kind of what got me initially thinking about, you know, the racist system that we live under.
[00:08:20]  And it laid the groundwork for what became one of the two pillars of my organizing through my life, which were one, the issue of racism and white supremacy.
[00:08:35]  And the other was sexism and misogyny.
[00:08:39]  And fought those both in my university days and later for 13 years in the factory where you had to take on both the union and the company over those same issues.
[00:08:50]  Yeah, you mentioned too that your sort of first introduction to formal politics as politics is you read Edgar Snow Red Star Over China, which I have read fantastic book, and wrote a letter to the, which I believe you actually reproduce in the book, a letter to the Chinese government asking about what's going on there.
[00:09:13]  Yeah, I was a high school student, and it was about— What year is this?
[00:09:18]  This would have been about 1965.
[00:09:22]  And, you know, the country was in an uproar.
[00:09:25]  I mean, there was both a generational rebellion going on among young people.
[00:09:29]  You know, just to have, to grow your hair made you part of the rebel class.
[00:09:36]  And, you know, among people of color, there was a, you know, huge uprising in urban areas.
[00:09:43]  And so we used to talk a lot.
[00:09:48]  And I said, you know, I read Red Star over China.
[00:09:51]  Seems kind of cool.
[00:09:52]  You know, seems like this socialism thing has got to be.
[00:09:57]  Let me write to Chairman Mao.
[00:09:58]  So I wrote a letter, Dear Chairman Mao, I'm a high school student in the United States.
[00:10:04]  I don't really agree with the Vietnam War.
[00:10:06]  I don't really agree with the system.
[00:10:09]  And could you send me something to read a little bit about socialism?
[00:10:13]  And four months later, in a brown bag, like they used to send out pornography or whatever, came the four volumes of Chairman Mao's selected works.
[00:10:25]  And I still have them on the shelf.
[00:10:29]  So that's where it all began.
[00:10:31]  You know, shortly after, you graduate high school and then you end up going to university in Madison, right?
[00:10:37]  That's right.
[00:10:38]  I looked for the epicenter of the student rebellion, and that's where I applied to go to school.
[00:10:44]  Did you really?
[00:10:45]  You did that on purpose?
[00:10:46]  Absolutely.
[00:10:46]  I applied to two places.
[00:10:48]  Columbia, because they had just the year before had taken over the university to protest the building of a gym in the black community.
[00:10:58]  And they didn't accept me because I wasn't a very good student.
[00:11:01]  So I got into the University of Wisconsin-Madison, probably for the better.
[00:11:05]  Yeah, and it's there you joined the EXO, University of Wisconsin.
[00:11:08]  So for those who are not American and for maybe people who don't know a ton about really like one of the big sort of crucial spots in the 1960s, University of Wisconsin-Madison was essentially for some, I have no idea why, even though I've read several books on it, this epicenter of essentially the student movement, that in like Berkeley and Columbia, like you said, in the 1960s, but really is known for being a hotbed of SDS students for a democratic society,
[00:11:38]  of which you yourself pretty much immediately joined.
[00:11:41]  That's right.
[00:11:42]  Actually, when you used to register for your classes back in those days, there were no computers, obviously.
[00:11:51]  So you had to get in these long lines to get the class you wanted.
[00:11:55]  And at the end of it, they assigned me to my ROTC class.
[00:11:59]  And I'm like, what's up with this ROTC class?
[00:12:03]  And they said, it's mandatory for all men who are freshmen.
[00:12:08]  And I went to an SDS meeting and I said, I got to go to this ROTC class.
[00:12:15]  I mean, that's where they're churning out these second lieutenants for the Vietnam War.
[00:12:19]  Yeah.
[00:12:20]  So they said, well, if you want to be in SDS, go to your first class, get up, take on the second lieutenant and disrupt it.
[00:12:28]  So a week later, I go to the class.
[00:12:32]  I just stand up in the middle of the class and I turn to the second lieutenant and I said, I started giving him a lecture on how the French had lost in Diem Bien Phu in 1954 and how we were entering the wrong side of a civil war.
[00:12:47]  And then I said, I said, and you know something?
[00:12:50]  He goes, what?
[00:12:51]  I said, do you know why so many second lieutenants get shot in the back in Vietnam and fragged?
[00:12:59]  And he goes, no, why?
[00:13:00]  And I said, that's because nobody wants to be there and you're the ones telling them what to do.
[00:13:05]  And at that point, about 30 or 40 students walk out.
[00:13:08]  I mean, SDS was big and amorphous in those days.
[00:13:12]  And we walked out and it turned into a campus-wide issue.
[00:13:16]  The students voted to end mandatory ROTC for freshmen.
[00:13:21]  And we were actually able to kick it off campus, which was a real blow because a lot of the protests in those days were very symbolic.
[00:13:30]  They weren't really attacking the institutions on the campuses that were supporting the war effort.
[00:13:38]  So we really evolved quickly to identifying three institutions.
[00:13:46]  And quickly, it's important because Land Tenure Center was doing research to suppress revolutions in Latin American countries.
[00:13:57]  And in fact, they did the research that led to the killing of Che Guevara in Bolivia.
[00:14:05]  So they were directly part of the U.S. war machine.
[00:14:08]  And then there was the Army Math Research Center, which was doing research for Vietnam on how to make bombing the most effective.
[00:14:16]  How can you kill more people with a good carpet bomb than a bad carpet bomb?
[00:14:22]  And so those were our targets.
[00:14:24]  So we were organized and we said those got to be taken off campus to end the Vietnam War.
[00:14:31]  I want to talk about that for a second because, I mean, I think that's something that young activists or people with, you know, burgeoning political sensibilities still have a hard time with today, where they see all of this supposed like energy and activism out in the streets or whatever.
[00:14:48]  And yet it has this kind of symbolic, it doesn't really go anywhere, right?
[00:14:54]  I mean, it's all very symbolic because it's not really focusing on these like, you know, pain points or these identity being able to identify these, you know, little, these hinges where pressure can be applied in order to actually, you know, exert some sort of, you know, some sort of gain, something, you know, from an institution.
[00:15:17]  Yeah, I think you're really, you're right.
[00:15:19]  And it's a, it's a problem because we have all these flare-ups of activity and then they seem to die away.
[00:15:26]  And one of the differences was when we were in SDS initially, we were very programmatic in our approach.
[00:15:37]  If you were a dorm organizer, which is what I was, you had to go into the dorm two or three nights a week and bang on everyone's door and talk about the Vietnam War, why it was part of a, you know, imperialist system of expansion by the United States, and what were the actual institutions that were supporting that effort.
[00:16:02]  Because it doesn't mean that much to symbolically protest and then go home and party, you know, or go home and do whatever you're going to do.
[00:16:10]  So you're right.
[00:16:10]  I mean, it's understanding and doing the analysis.
[00:16:13]  There was a guy named Jim Rowan who did the analysis for a couple of years on the Army Math Research Center.
[00:16:21]  And they tried to make it secretive.
[00:16:24]  No publication of their yearly report.
[00:16:27]  He found one line in one report that referred to the University of Michigan study on something to do with armaments.
[00:16:35]  Through that one lead, he traced it back to they were doing endless research for the military.
[00:16:42]  That's the kind of work that leftists have to do to be able to really challenge the system and carry on protracted struggle to make a difference.
[00:16:53]  So I have a question about SDS stuff because from sort of the popular understanding is like there was this great mass of students who were like in SDS who might pay lip service to socialism, but it was like a student movement thing, you know, it was like kind of of the time.
[00:17:09]  And then there were these core groups, these different sort of factions within SDS that were much more organized that functioned like sort of like caucuses or like parties within this organization, right?
[00:17:19]  Like, you know, you had Revolutionary Youth Movement, Revolutionary Youth Movement 2, Progressive Labor Party.
[00:17:26]  And how did you find yourself?
[00:17:28]  Because, you know, you talk about, you know, reading Chairman Mao in high school and stuff like this.
[00:17:33]  You're in college at this point.
[00:17:35]  Are you like, I am a communist and I am, you know, I am trying to achieve those goals via this organization?
[00:17:44]  Or like, are you, are you finding that the level of political consciousness among your peers, you know, varies so widely?
[00:17:51]  Like, what was that experience like?
[00:17:54]  Yeah.
[00:17:56]  I think that one thing is that in Madison, we were not sectarian.
[00:18:03]  So SDS was a big umbrella.
[00:18:06]  In fact, in 1969, when the school year started, my second year, we had planned and planned for the first SDS meeting.
[00:18:14]  It was called Monster Meeting, you know, to kick off the school year.
[00:18:19]  And 800 students came to that meeting.
[00:18:23]  And we had this really well thought out plan of presenting those three demands I talked about, ROT C and, you know, Land Tenure Center and Amy Math Research Center.
[00:18:34]  And unfortunately, the weather people had gotten word of the meeting and they believed in sort of instantaneous revolution by deed.
[00:18:46]  So after 15 minutes of the meeting, they marched in, 10 or 20 of them.
[00:18:52]  They got up on the stage and they started yelling, if you're a real communist, let's go out into the street right now and start trashing buildings.
[00:19:00]  Let's not just sit here like a bunch of bullshit students.
[00:19:03]  Let's take real action.
[00:19:06]  Well, that's not how you build a mass movement.
[00:19:10]  And we were about building a mass movement.
[00:19:12]  Now, we had pre-thought out this problem.
[00:19:15]  And when they were talking in the front of the room, we cut the mics and we had mics in the back of the room.
[00:19:21]  So we told all the students, turn your chairs around and the meeting's going to be conducted from the rear of the room.
[00:19:26]  But they had deflated the spirit.
[00:19:29]  You know, young people who had come didn't want to see sectarian argument going on.
[00:19:34]  And it was, you know, unfortunately, it set back organizing efforts.
[00:19:40]  And that was a real struggle was, do you believe in organizing large numbers of people to make historic change?
[00:19:49]  Or do you believe that a few individuals can do deeds, blow up a building that will change the world or bring about the revolution?
[00:19:58]  And I was obviously of the former thought.
[00:20:02]  Now, your question is a great one on how did my political evolution evolve.
[00:20:07]  Most of us in those first couple years, 68, 69, looked at ourselves as student radicals.
[00:20:16]  Yeah.
[00:20:17]  Chairman Fred Hampton came to speak twice, the leader of the Black Panther Party from Chicago, who was murdered in December 1969.
[00:20:30]  I think so, yeah.
[00:20:31]  And he was really a tremendous, inspiring leader.
[00:20:37]  And he had, in fact, worked at the International Harvester Plant, I believe, in Chicago.
[00:20:42]  So he had this working class background and his family had also, I think his father had worked at the Harvester Plant.

=== Fred Hampton's Influence (09:03) ===

[00:20:51]  But he was a great speaker.
[00:20:53]  And we used to pack the hall, one of the big lecture halls when he came.
[00:20:59]  And he looked out at you.
[00:21:00]  And it was a remarkable experience because you felt like he was looking at you individually.
[00:21:07]  And he challenged us.
[00:21:10]  If you believe in change, if you believe in liberation of black people, if you believe in liberation of all people, you've got to make a revolution.
[00:21:21]  And in my book, I write that Chairman Fred Hampton turned many students who consider themselves radicals into revolutionaries because his message resonated.
[00:21:35]  And then, of course, they killed him because they knew that he was one of the most influential leaders in the country.
[00:21:42]  And Jagger Hoover had just issued a memo saying, we cannot allow the rise of a black messiah to lead the black people in this country.
[00:21:53]  So the FBI and the Chicago police drugged him and killed him.
[00:21:58]  Yeah, that's sort of, you know, in every basically account I've read or heard of or listened to of how Fred Hampton gave speeches.
[00:22:07]  I mean, true, like a really fucking captivating speaker and really on message too.
[00:22:12]  And that's something that like I've seen, and I'm sure that many of you listeners have as well.
[00:22:20]  I've seen a lot of people give political speeches in my time.
[00:22:23]  And most of the time, they are a fucking snooze.
[00:22:26]  They're meandering.
[00:22:28]  You want the person to just leave the stage as soon as possible.
[00:22:32]  They're mostly just consist of like ums and then like kind of like, you know, shuffling around or somebody who's just like clearly rehearsed and sounds like somebody, I don't know, in their first, third week of acting class or something like that.
[00:22:46]  But Fred Hampton was a guy who could like really stay on message and had a really concise and really clear message that many people could understand.
[00:22:54]  And I think that's like a really important thing that basically not that many people have learned from, including myself.
[00:23:01]  I could be all over the place, but I don't give a lot of political speeches.
[00:23:05]  And yeah, that's extraordinary.
[00:23:07]  Well, it's a skill.
[00:23:08]  I mean, it's a really, it's a skill and it's rare too.
[00:23:12]  It's a, you know, you're able to kind of combine that kind of discipline and charisma.
[00:23:18]  It's and also the kind of consciousness that that's required of, you know, building that kind of movement.
[00:23:26]  I mean, that quote that you, that you just said, John, about if do you want to make a revolution, even just the use of make is so great because it implies that, yeah, we're you're building something together, but also there's necessary steps, yeah.
[00:23:41]  But you have to commit to the process.
[00:23:43]  It's all baked in just into that one word.
[00:23:45]  Well, and you know, you're really right.
[00:23:47]  It is a skill to speak.
[00:23:50]  And I was often a speaker and I started out like Brace describes as, you know, whatever.
[00:23:58]  And then I started listening to speeches of Dr. King, of Malcolm X, of Fred Hampton.
[00:24:07]  And I actually was able to teach myself how to deliver a good speech on point and how to modulate my voice.
[00:24:18]  I mean, I actually used to put little underlines in certain words as I was trying to learn to bring the audience in.
[00:24:26]  And if you're not watching the crowd, you could just drone on forever and not realize that nobody's paying attention, you know?
[00:24:36]  So I've become very attuned at watching the audience or whomever, because your job is to inspire them.
[00:24:43]  It's not to get up and lecture them.
[00:24:45]  They can go to like the university for that.
[00:24:49]  Yeah.
[00:24:50]  But if they're out there and they want to be inspired and they want to be inspired to fight and in some cases, inspired like Chairman Fred said, to put your life on the line, you got to believe in what they're saying.
[00:25:02]  And so that's, you're right.
[00:25:04]  I mean, it is a skill and it's a skill that comes from the heart.
[00:25:08]  Yeah.
[00:25:08]  I mean, I've listened to a lot of sort of self-proclaimed communists speak at public events.
[00:25:13]  And oftentimes I find myself thinking, would I die for what this guy's talking about right here?
[00:25:18]  Especially the way he's talking about?
[00:25:20]  Probably not.
[00:25:21]  But in the general sense, I guess I would.
[00:25:23]  You know, I think we're not sending our best.
[00:25:25]  We're not sending our best.
[00:25:26]  But, but, John, so, okay, SDS, right?
[00:25:31]  It's splitting into these factions.
[00:25:33]  And you find yourself in revolutionary youth movement two, right?
[00:25:37]  That's right.
[00:25:39]  And that through that, eventually in the revolutionary union.
[00:25:45]  And so can you tell us a little about the genesis of that?
[00:25:47]  Because that really leads on to the next sort of part of this and to actually joining the workforce here.
[00:25:52]  Yeah, once SDS really split apart, unfortunately, the campuses became rather disorganized because SDS had been in a sort of an amorphous grouping of people.
[00:26:04]  And we did a lot of study on different political trends that were developing.
[00:26:13]  And RIM2 held to two primary principles.
[00:26:18]  One was support for the Black Panther Party.
[00:26:22]  The second was a belief that we had to leave the campus to go into the army to oppose the Vietnam War and to go into work in factories to organize the working class.
[00:26:36]  Because it was clear that without growing the movement beyond campuses where we sort of had our own communities and that was cool and fun, but you had to go out there among the people to really learn from them and to organize them.
[00:26:53]  And that's what we really devoted ourselves to and started studying Marxism as a means to be able to learn how to do that type of theoretical organizing of working class people.
[00:27:10]  So RIM2 developed.
[00:27:13]  And then there were those of us who said, well, let's look for a national organization that seems to embody similar principles.
[00:27:21]  And at the time, the Bay Area Revolutionary Union was really the most dynamic of any of the organizations on the left.
[00:27:29]  And sometimes it's not given historical credit, but there were probably a good thousand people who joined the RU.
[00:27:38]  And they had the first papers that went out.
[00:27:41]  I worked on the first paper, actually.
[00:27:43]  In 69, the summer of 69, I went out to Oakland to work with the RU and worked with them in Richmond, California on their first working class newspaper, People Get Ready.
[00:27:56]  So I came back with those experiences and imparted them to the other people in Madison.
[00:28:02]  And eventually, basically 30 or 40 of us who had been active together all went to Milwaukee to work in industry.
[00:28:10]  So that's something that has really always fascinated me about the different sort of directions that people went after the student movement.
[00:28:16]  Because you had a lot of people who, I guess, the popular narrative now is that kind of everybody cleaned up their act and became corporate lawyers and got Barack Obama elected as president.
[00:28:28]  Right.
[00:28:28]  Right.
[00:28:30]  Or went into marketing.
[00:28:31]  Went into marketing.
[00:28:33]  Exactly.
[00:28:33]  Yeah.
[00:28:34]  Yeah.
[00:28:34]  Or just became like burnout kind of Abby Hoffman types or whatever.
[00:28:39]  But Sierra Club.
[00:28:40]  Sierra Club, big one.
[00:28:42]  Yeah.
[00:28:44]  But I will say that the thing that has always sort of set Rim 2 and certain different other individuals apart is what's known, I think, popularly now as the factory turn is when people left college and left the student movement and started joining the actual proletarian workforce as opposed to being like, well, maybe I can take over father's business and support the Red Cross every month with some money.
[00:29:10]  And it was that, so I mean, you're saying 30 or 40 of you joined it.
[00:29:13]  That's no small number of people.
[00:29:15]  And so you guys made a specific decision to enter these industries.
[00:29:20]  Did you choose like, because you joined the audio industry?
[00:29:24]  Did you guys choose like, all right, well, five of you go here, five of you go here?
[00:29:28]  Like, was there an overarching plan?
[00:29:30]  Or was this done like, all right, well, we're all going to do this and sort of see where we end up?
[00:29:33]  Yeah, I have to admit that it was more, let's all do this and see where we end up.
[00:29:38]  I mean, that's fair enough.
[00:29:40]  You know, it's my first job was not in auto.
[00:29:43]  And the only reason I mention it is it had a tremendous impact on my life.
[00:29:47]  I was working in a factory that made all the paint trays for Sears and Roebuck.

=== Gloves and Hidden Plans (07:36) ===

[00:29:54]  And when a punch press stamps out a metal tray, you put oil on the metal beforehand so it doesn't stick to the dye that, you know, creates the impression of a tray.
[00:30:07]  Well, that oil has to be burned off of the metal.
[00:30:12]  And it used to run through a pit that I didn't know what was in the pit, but it looked like a witch's cauldron, you know, coming up out of the bottom.
[00:30:21]  You know, you couldn't see through it.
[00:30:23]  And one day my straw boss, Latino guy, says, hey, Juan, I got a buena good job for you today.
[00:30:32]  And I'm like, what's that, bro?
[00:30:34]  And he says, you got to go down and clean out the pit.
[00:30:38]  And I look over at the barrel of chemicals and it's got like this big major skull and crossbones on it.
[00:30:46]  And I'm like, okay, dude, where's my PPE equipment?
[00:30:49]  You know, my breathing equipment, my gloves.
[00:30:52]  He says, no, no, no, no.
[00:30:53]  Juan, that's for sissies.
[00:30:55]  Are you a sissy?
[00:30:56]  Damn.
[00:30:57]  Well, you know, I mean, good point.
[00:31:00]  So I got in.
[00:31:01]  And, you know, within 30 seconds, I was overcome by its trichlorethylene.
[00:31:09]  And it's similar to alcohol poisoning when you become so dizzy and so disoriented that you can't even sort of grab it, understand up, down, where are you going?
[00:31:23]  So I had to jump out every 30 seconds, get fresh air, jump back in and clean out this pit.
[00:31:31]  Well, later in life in 2004, I was diagnosed with terminal pancreatic cancer and given only six months to a year to live.
[00:31:43]  And the doctor wrote on the diagnosis slip that it was due to exposure to trichlorethylene and tanning solvents.
[00:31:52]  I had also worked in a tannery.
[00:31:54]  Yeah.
[00:31:55]  Now, he only gave me six months to a year, but I told him that no way.
[00:32:01]  I said, I got kids that are seven and 10, and I'm not going anywhere.
[00:32:06]  So that prognosis doesn't work for me.
[00:32:09]  And he said, well, Mr. Melrod, all I can say is you got to put your affairs in order.
[00:32:13]  And I said, not going to do it.
[00:32:15]  And I'm going to beat him.
[00:32:17]  That's another long story that if people want, there's 85 pages of it on my website.
[00:32:22]  It wouldn't fit in the book.
[00:32:24]  And the website is jonathanmelrod.com.
[00:32:26]  But I described the battle against pancreatic cancer using alternative treatments, you know, setting my mind that I was not going to let this disease kill me.
[00:32:38]  And, you know, I'm glad to say that it's been more than a year.
[00:32:43]  Oh, no shit.
[00:32:44]  Yeah.
[00:32:45]  Amazing.
[00:32:46]  I want to mention, you know, you had a workforce around this point, but you also, you know, realize that you're being spied on by the FBI as part of, I believe, what could kind of colloquially be called here Cohen Telpro.
[00:32:57]  I don't know if it's officially a part of it.
[00:33:00]  When were you made aware of the fact that the FBI was sniffing around old Jonathan Melrod?
[00:33:06]  Well, it was actually years before I became definitively aware that that's what they were doing because I had to request my, through a Freedom of Information Act request.
[00:33:16]  It took four attempts.
[00:33:18]  You know, the first one came back 25 pages all blacked out.
[00:33:21]  And, you know, I'd appeal it and I appealed it and I appealed it until finally I got almost a thousand pages with a lot of it you could read.
[00:33:30]  Although we were never able to really figure out who the infiltrators were.
[00:33:36]  But it was clear before then that we were already under the government's scope.
[00:33:44]  I mean, in Milwaukee, there's just one incident.
[00:33:48]  I was driving in the dead of winter, which in Milwaukee can be cold, below zero.
[00:33:53]  And the Red Squad, which was part of the tactical squad of the Milwaukee Police Department, pulled me over.
[00:34:00]  And they never left their car.
[00:34:01]  It was too cold.
[00:34:02]  And they're like, out of your car, put your hands on the trunk of the car.
[00:34:08]  Put my hands on.
[00:34:09]  They said, take off your gloves.
[00:34:12]  Took off my gloves.
[00:34:14]  Went to put my gloves back on.
[00:34:15]  They said, take off your gloves.
[00:34:16]  So I'm like, my hands are freezing.
[00:34:18]  You know, it's bare metal and it's below zero.
[00:34:21]  And they said, we want your license.
[00:34:23]  So they left me there for an hour.
[00:34:26]  You know, my hands were turning numb, but they just wanted to make it clear they knew who I was.
[00:34:32]  They could stop me when they wanted.
[00:34:35]  And they could, in fact, you know, harass me.
[00:34:39]  But where I really first encountered the intersection of the police and the FBI was I was in charge of coordinating sales of the Black Panther Party paper in Milwaukee.
[00:34:56]  And my house, I was living in a mostly black neighborhood at that time.
[00:35:01]  You know, you didn't need any references if you were white moving into a black neighborhood.
[00:35:06]  You know, the landlord was like, oh, please come home to me.
[00:35:11]  And the house got broken into.
[00:35:14]  So when I got home from work, the TV was lying in the doorway and a lot of stuff was stolen.
[00:35:22]  And I went through this really difficult back and forth decision.
[00:35:26]  You know, do you call the police?
[00:35:27]  They're not your friend.
[00:35:29]  Well, you know, maybe I better call the police because the person could come back.
[00:35:35]  So I called the police and in come these big, beefy white, you know, Milwaukee cops and like, oh, he's a white guy.
[00:35:42]  So they're like, really, yeah, yeah, we're going to find these guys.
[00:35:45]  And they got their flashlights.
[00:35:47]  They're in the alley behind the house trying to find the guy.
[00:35:50]  And all of a sudden they look over and there's a two-foot stack of Black Panther Party papers with like Huey Newton on the front with like a shotgun or whatever.
[00:36:01]  And they point it out to each other and they start nodding, nah, you know.
[00:36:08]  And they went into my roommate's room and they found a nine millimeter, which they took and wouldn't give us a game.
[00:36:17]  They took his gun?
[00:36:18]  Took his gun and they wouldn't give us an evidence slip, which was a bit intimidating because, you know, you hear about when they throw the gun out to blame the murder on somebody.
[00:36:27]  Yeah, yeah, they're going to go plant.
[00:36:28]  Yeah.
[00:36:29]  So I kept writing endless letters to the DA.
[00:36:32]  We want our gun back.
[00:36:34]  And they didn't, they didn't come into my room.
[00:36:40]  I actually had a shotgun in the closet and they left.
[00:36:45]  And unfortunately, the guys who did rob the house came back that night at two in the morning and broke the windows to get in.
[00:36:53]  And it was one of the worst moments of my life.
[00:36:55]  It's, you know, I believe in your right to self-defend your to defend yourself.
[00:37:01]  But when there's a guy coming through the window and you're standing there with a shotgun and I chambered a shell and I said, look, bro, don't come in because I got to do something if you do.
[00:37:13]  He took off and ran.
[00:37:15]  But, you know, it's like I say to people, you know, if you're going to go into a factory and you got to clean a pit with trichloreethylene, and if you're going to go into a neighborhood that's not like gated, you got to be ready for, you know, the real world.

=== Factory Survival Stories (15:01) ===

[00:37:30]  And it's not so, you know, it's not so, it's not a tea party as Mao said.
[00:37:36]  Yeah, I'm curious too.
[00:37:37]  Like, obviously, there are real reasons to go make the factory turn after being a student, right?
[00:37:45]  I struggle with the fact that many people on the left still don't really understand the need to be among the people rather than just like an observer of the people or a supporter of the people to actually go toil alongside, you know, if that's not already your life, to go toil alongside them, to actually like organize them and to be one with them rather than be a part of them and just be like a supporter of the people.
[00:38:09]  Was this like the explicit framing in your head here?
[00:38:12]  Like, well, we're these student guys, we're sequestered on campus.
[00:38:15]  We actually got to get out there.
[00:38:16]  And if we want to create a mass movement, we got to get to actually where the industry is.
[00:38:21]  Yeah, I mean, that's that's pretty much the game plan, you know.
[00:38:25]  I mean, and you know, it wasn't the easiest thing to go from being a student where you can skip class to working on an assembly line, humping the line eight hours a day, one car, one car a minute, and uh, putting the same eight bolts in the taillights in every car.
[00:38:45]  Um, so, you know, I did that until I got off my probationary period and I was in the union.
[00:38:53]  And this is UAW.
[00:38:54]  I was in the UAW, very strong local of the UAW.
[00:38:58]  We went back to the old days before Walter Ruther kicked the socialists and the communists and the anarchists out of the union.
[00:39:05]  So we had a right to strike over every grievance.
[00:39:08]  We had one steward representative for every 35 employees, and each steward only had to work half hour a day on a job.
[00:39:16]  And we had a right to all voluntary overtime.
[00:39:19]  So we lived in the days of where unions had power on the shop floor.
[00:39:25]  And like the second day after I got off probation, the supervisor didn't give me a break in the morning.
[00:39:32]  And of course, all my fellow workers started yelling, hey, Melrod, don't you got any balls?
[00:39:38]  Take your break.
[00:39:40]  You know, you're a company man.
[00:39:41]  You scared to take a break.
[00:39:43]  So I'm going, damn, you know, I've only been in the union two days.
[00:39:47]  You know, what am I supposed to do?
[00:39:49]  And finally, I decided, hey, you got to throw down if you want to be a radical.
[00:39:53]  So I took my taillights, threw them in the trunk of the car, went into the cafeteria, lit up a camel, and sat there.
[00:40:00]  And then the supervisor came down red-faced, running down the aisle, and he yelled, Melrod, you're fired.
[00:40:07]  And he said, you don't do that on my line.
[00:40:10]  You didn't complete your job.
[00:40:12]  And the steward was right behind him.
[00:40:14]  And the steward came up and said, here's the contract.
[00:40:17]  Melrod had a right to take his break.
[00:40:19]  Go back on your job, Melrod.
[00:40:21]  And I said, that's what I want to be, a blue-button steward who has the power to tell the worker, go back to work.
[00:40:29]  The foreman doesn't tell you what to do.
[00:40:31]  And of course, when I got back, people were cheering and I had sort of sunk my roots as a radical, which defined me from that day on as somebody who had the guts to stand up to the company.
[00:40:44]  But it took a lot of razzing and initiation challenges before I took that step.
[00:40:50]  But that's part of life in the factory is that sort of hazing of each other to, you know, force each other to, you know, stand up and be strong.
[00:41:12]  Let's talk a little bit about the UAW, right?
[00:41:15]  Because you were involved in the union for a long time.
[00:41:18]  And some of our listeners are probably familiar with them because they're back in the news with a lot of like graduate school workers organizing.
[00:41:28]  They just had a pretty big vote that is changing some things.
[00:41:33]  We were talking a little bit about it before we started recording, but maybe you can walk us through a little bit about the union and your time there.
[00:41:42]  Yeah, I mean, I progressed as time went on from being elected as a steward to a chief steward over a department of 800 people on two shifts, four on each shift,
[00:41:56]  to a department chairman where I led union meetings for the department, to a member of the education committee where I set up seven-week labor school that 235 stewards and activists attended every week, learning how to be really good stewards or good militant activists and how not to rely on sort of business unionism, writing a grievance and pushing it up to the international.
[00:42:25]  Wait, hold on, hold on.
[00:42:26]  Explain to our listeners what business unionism is because this comes up a lot in union circles, but I think people outside of that might not know what that is.
[00:42:33]  What is business unionism?
[00:42:34]  Right.
[00:42:35]  Let me contrast what we called combat unionism to business unionism.
[00:42:40]  Combat unionism is where you exert your collective power on the shop floor.
[00:42:47]  So, for instance, we had a horrible, horrible supervisor who at one point picked up a 35-pound air gun and threw it at a black worker.
[00:42:58]  And he said, you're nothing but a lazy MF N-word, you know, which I use in the book, by the way, because there's a disclaimer in the book that, hey, if you don't want to read the real language that goes on, this may not be your book.
[00:43:12]  But I believe you've got to tell it the way it comes out in the most racist, sexist language that is used by management.
[00:43:21]  So he did that to this black worker.
[00:43:23]  Then he went up to two young black women, put his finger like a gun with his thumb up in the back, and he said, bang, bang, two dead blackbirds.
[00:43:32]  And then went up to one of them and said, you know, I like you, but I'd like you more if you weren't so flat chested.
[00:43:38]  And he went up to another Latina woman who happened to ask him, can I have a stick of gum?
[00:43:45]  Because he was chewing gum.
[00:43:46]  And he said, yeah, if I can have a bite of your tits.
[00:43:49]  And she was on probation and she just broke down in tears, afraid that her husband would find out about it and come in there and shoot the supervisor.
[00:43:59]  So we took a guy like that and we went after him.
[00:44:02]  We had our newsletter fighting times.
[00:44:04]  We called him scab of the month.
[00:44:07]  Scab, for those who don't know, is a strikebreaker, somebody who breaks the picket line and takes the job of a striking worker.
[00:44:14]  And that column became part of the DNA of the workforce.
[00:44:18]  People would send us letters.
[00:44:20]  People would write up stories about bad foremen.
[00:44:23]  So this one particular foreman who I mentioned, Stevie Freeman, we decided we're going to go after him.
[00:44:31]  So we made up thousands of stickers, three inch round stickers, Stevie Freeman, scab of the month.
[00:44:38]  And he looked like a pumpkin.
[00:44:39]  So we put a stem on it.
[00:44:41]  Okay.
[00:44:42]  And they were everywhere.
[00:44:43]  They were on the back of his shirt.
[00:44:44]  Well, the guy physically looked like a pumpkin, so you made a pumpkin caricature.
[00:44:48]  Okay.
[00:44:49]  He looked like a pumpkin, which I got to fit in the story of the pumpkin head.
[00:44:54]  Okay.
[00:44:55]  Because you can't go by without knowing that story.
[00:44:58]  But in any event, you know, so then what we did is we put out the word.
[00:45:04]  If an hourly worker wrote up a supervisor for so much as picking up a screw, he was doing or she was doing union work and you'd get paid an hour.
[00:45:16]  So we called that bounty hunting and we put out the word, bounty hunting is open today.
[00:45:22]  So people would be writing him up wherever Steve Freeman went.
[00:45:26]  If he like did so much as move something, he'd get written up for an hour.
[00:45:30]  At another point, seven stewards followed him around for eight hours, wouldn't stop dogging him.
[00:45:36]  And one of them threatened to took out a knife and said, if I catch you doing any more union work, I'm going to cut your testicles off.
[00:45:45]  Okay.
[00:45:46]  So at a certain point, the company cut their losses and they fired him.
[00:45:52]  Now, to jump ahead, just because it's fun story, he, among with five other supervisors, was surreptitiously funded by the company to file a defamation lawsuit against us, charging us with having maligned them through the scab of the month column, getting them discharged.
[00:46:13]  They were really good supervisors and we ruined their careers.
[00:46:16]  We ruined their lives.
[00:46:18]  We ruined their marriages.
[00:46:19]  We made one into an alcoholic.
[00:46:21]  Another one smoked marijuana.
[00:46:23]  I mean, all the evils that one can imagine were attributed to our newsletter.
[00:46:27]  Okay.
[00:46:28]  Good job.
[00:46:28]  Yeah.
[00:46:29]  So we were in court and the judge is clearly for the company.
[00:46:36]  He's siding with all of their motions.
[00:46:38]  And I said to myself, you know, you're only going to win this if the jury backs you.
[00:46:44]  And we had been really conscious of picking a jury of our peers.
[00:46:50]  Every person on that jury, if you read the book, you'll see, punched a clock or was a secretary on an hourly wage.
[00:47:00]  So picture this.
[00:47:02]  Steve Freeman's attorney is up questioning me.
[00:47:05]  I'm on the witness stand.
[00:47:06]  And he says to me, Mr. Melrod, you claim that everything you wrote in the Fighting Times is true.
[00:47:15]  Yes, absolutely true.
[00:47:18]  And did you ever exaggerate?
[00:47:21]  No.
[00:47:22]  There was veracity to every story.
[00:47:24]  He said, well, let me ask you a question.
[00:47:27]  And he holds up one of these stickers of Steve Freeman with the pumpkin head stem coming out of the head.
[00:47:33]  And he said, Mr. Melrod, did you make this sticker?
[00:47:36]  I said, yeah, I did with a lot of other people.
[00:47:39]  And he says, well, if you always tell the truth, can you tell me, does Steve Freeman have a stem coming out of the top of his head?
[00:47:52]  And the lawyer was standing in front of Steve Freeman.
[00:47:55]  So I said, could you just move to the side so I can answer the question?
[00:48:00]  And the entire courtroom burst out in laughter.
[00:48:03]  The jury is cracking up.
[00:48:05]  The judge is slamming his gavel on the table.
[00:48:11]  And Mr. Melrod, you're out of order.
[00:48:13]  You're not the attorney.
[00:48:14]  You're here to answer the questions.
[00:48:17]  So we made the trial into like a Chicago 7 conspiracy trial where we were sparring with the judge through the whole two and a half weeks.
[00:48:26]  Even though the judge found that we had libeled two of the plaintiffs, two of those suing us as a matter of law, the jury came back and awarded zero monetary damages.
[00:48:36]  Then the National Labor Relations Board sued the company and they had to pay us $320,000 for legal fees and lost wages.
[00:48:45]  I will say too, they sued you guys for like $4.2 million.
[00:48:48]  That's a lot of money, you know, back then or today.
[00:48:52]  But I do want to say, contrast that with, you know, what we're talking about, business unionism here is you guys had a lot of problems with the international.
[00:49:02]  And the international of the UAW is fairly notorious in not just labor circles, but also political circles too, for being, I don't even want to say conservative, but for being like authoritarian and dictatorial.
[00:49:19]  Dictatorial, but just also like, so accommodating to the companies.
[00:49:23]  That it's.
[00:49:24]  It's almost like they function as as as an appendage of uh, of the of the car companies.
[00:49:30]  Yeah, I was going to say real quick, can you break down some of that structure for our listeners so they can understand a little bit of how that works?
[00:49:37]  The structure of the union.
[00:49:38]  Well, just the, the relationship between, like Brace is saying of, between the international, international okay, excuse me and the locals.
[00:49:45]  Yeah yeah, business unionism that's an easier way to get into.
[00:49:49]  It is sort of defined by when the power gets taken away from the shop floor, and that even means taken away from stewards and, in many cases, the local president.
[00:50:00]  So when you go into a contract negotiation, for instance when I was in the steel workers, nobody from the union participates in the negotiation.
[00:50:09]  It's only the business rep and the lawyer from the international and the international representative.
[00:50:15]  So the people in the shop floor don't have any idea what's going on.
[00:50:19]  What are the issues being negotiated?
[00:50:21]  Are we going to go on strike?
[00:50:23]  Should we start preparing to go on strike?
[00:50:25]  So what you get is a very complacent, unmotivated rank and file.
[00:50:31]  They don't know what the fight is about.
[00:50:34]  On the other hand, if you start from the base, from the rank and file in our case we used our newsletter to do that.
[00:50:43]  But we held department meetings where if there was a racist chief steward which there was in my department before I became chief steward we called on people to come out and confront him.
[00:50:54]  At a department meeting, 70 people out of the department showed up after work and just tore him apart for being a racist and he had to leave with his head between his knees.
[00:51:06]  You know I won't be a racist, but we took action right there to get the problem resolved.
[00:51:13]  You know, if we didn't have a fan and it's hot in the summer on an assembly line, we'd harass that foreman right there until he got a fan installed business union.
[00:51:25]  You file a grievance.
[00:51:26]  Two years later it comes back and said there's no money for fans.
[00:51:30]  Okay yeah, yeah.
[00:51:31]  So what you're seeing is there's a trend and it's very true, it's Starbucks.
[00:51:36]  I work with a lot of young Starbucks organizers who've gotten my book and we've become very close as I helped sort of consult with them on how to organize.
[00:51:45]  You know, if they find a discriminatory, you know, racist foreman, they'll walk out.
[00:51:51]  In Boston, they walked out and struck for two months.
[00:51:54]  They were camped out in front of the Starbucks.
[00:51:56]  That's old school unionism.
[00:51:58]  When you take matters into your own hands, that's the opposite of business unionism.
[00:52:03]  So that's why so many young people, I work with another group at the Trader Joe's who just marched on the boss in Oakland to hand in 70% of the people that signed cards, union cards, calling for an election to vote for a union.
[00:52:19]  You know, they don't even want to be part of an official union because they don't want to be part of the bureaucracy.
[00:52:25]  They don't want to be told to be what be told what to do.
[00:52:28]  So I hope that explains a bit of the difference.
[00:52:30]  No, absolutely.

=== Voting For Union Officers (11:52) ===

[00:52:31]  Yeah.
[00:52:32]  But the point you're making about the UAW is really very germane to today because in 1983, in our local, we started a campaign that had actually happened a couple of times before in history to be able to vote for all officers in the union.
[00:52:50]  The local memberships don't vote for the officers.
[00:52:53]  They're voted for by the delegates who get elected to the convention, who are usually the hacks in the union who go to party in Las Vegas, right?
[00:53:02]  Yeah.
[00:53:03]  So, so I mean, literally, with the UIW Palm Springs.
[00:53:08]  Let me say how literal it is.
[00:53:09]  When I was at the convention in Dallas, they told people, be careful of the hookers.
[00:53:13]  What kind of announcement is that to make at a union convention?
[00:53:17]  There's undercover cops posing as hookers.
[00:53:20]  Well, what are you doing on a union convention going to see a hooker in the first place?
[00:53:24]  Okay.
[00:53:25]  Yeah.
[00:53:25]  Yes, good question.
[00:53:27]  Yeah.
[00:53:27]  So we took up a campaign nationally to organize people to fight for one member, one vote, to democratize the union.
[00:53:36]  And that went back to Ruther in the 40s, kicking the leftists out and forming what he called the administration caucus.
[00:53:45]  That was the caucus that was loyal to the leadership, whatever, after Ruther, it was others, but they were the loyal minions of the international and they did the dirty work.
[00:53:56]  Yeah.
[00:53:57]  So we got, we spent $100,000 in those days.
[00:54:02]  So that was in 1983, the convention, organizing unions from all over the country, their convention delegates to support the fight for one member, one vote.
[00:54:13]  And it was right after the concessions had been taken place at 4GM and Chrysler.
[00:54:17]  So a lot of those locals were angry as hell at the international because they attributed the concession bargaining to the international.
[00:54:25]  And so we managed to gather 32 resolutions from locals.
[00:54:32]  And I was the one who got up on the floor of the convention to argue for the one member, one vote resolution.
[00:54:40]  And, you know, they've got these international reps, 300 of them who are a part of the administration caucus, booing me, trying to harass me.
[00:54:49]  And in the end, Fraser, who was president of the union then, called for a vote and he said that we lost, which we probably did.
[00:54:58]  But Fraser went to the press and he said, these guys put up such a fight.
[00:55:02]  I've never had to organize like this before at a convention to defeat a motion.
[00:55:07]  And I think that laid the groundwork for this last year when the membership finally did get the opportunity to vote in a one-member, one-vote election.
[00:55:18]  And reformists were elected out of many of the locals, I mean, for many of the regional directors.
[00:55:26]  And now the test will be for them to go back to the rank and file and organize a movement that can take on the big three auto companies to get rid of such things as two-tier wages.
[00:55:38]  Young guy next to you is working, making no pension, where the older guy gets a pension.
[00:55:43]  Just not acceptable in a union to allow those kind of divisions.
[00:55:47]  Well, that's the thing with UAW is, you know, you mentioned this concessionary bargaining, right?
[00:55:52]  And for so long, I mean, I'm sure that many of our listeners know the general story of the U.S. auto industry, but for so long, the UAW essentially played ball with anything that the companies asked for, right?
[00:56:06]  And so they like, you know, really back themselves into a corner, getting smaller and smaller and smaller as the workforce gets smaller, you know, not being able to organize new plants, failing to organize new plants, really excluded from the electric vehicle plants.
[00:56:23]  It's really extraordinary.
[00:56:24]  I mean, I know there is a new leadership, but there's also, you know, like we talked about before we started recording, a really entrenched bureaucracy.
[00:56:30]  And, you know, this was not, this is not, I mean, my experience has been with the ILWU, which is a pretty different union than the UAW, but I've dealt with a lot of union bureaucrats in other, especially at the Labor Council in San Francisco.
[00:56:46]  And I mean, it can be like, it's oftentimes worse than dealing with your direct political enemy.
[00:56:52]  I mean, oftentimes people, union bureaucrats will be your direct political enemy.
[00:56:57]  And it can be extremely frustrating.
[00:57:01]  You know, something that I really took from your book and that I have learned from my own experience organizing an industrial workplace is that really it pays to have the right balance between being the most annoying motherfucker possible and also being able to get along with as many people as possible.
[00:57:24]  You talk about coming from this student background, Jewish background, and then entering into this definitely majority Goy, but also majority born and bred working class factories and having to get along with people that you might have spent your college years hanging around with these fucking guys who with Sheikh Guevara posters on the wall,
[00:57:45]  maybe smoking a little dope from time to time, although I don't know if RIM2 was that kind of group, but to having to get along with a broad mass of people, including people whose beliefs that you might find yourself diametrically opposed to or even abhorrent and actually having to get along with them in a union context and trying to awaken some amount of political consciousness within them,
[00:58:10]  because that's something you talk about in the book frequently is that, and I'm sure anybody out there listening who is all organized in really any industry is the low level of political consciousness among so many coworkers and how frustrating that can be.
[00:58:27]  And one thing that I think a lot of young workers who read this book should understand is that, you know, it's not, like you said, it's not a dinner party, like Mao said, it's not a dinner party, right?
[00:58:38]  Like you're going to have to, you're going to have to rub shoulders and get beers with maybe a lot of people that you wouldn't normally hang out with.
[00:58:44]  And that actually has to be your crowd.
[00:58:46]  Like that has to be the people that like, you know, you go to their house and like, you know, you invite them to your barbecue, even if you don't really like, you know, you, you might not otherwise hang out with them.
[00:58:56]  And that's really the most important thing that I think, you know, in aggregate taken from your book is that you actually have to become one with the masses.
[00:59:05]  Well, that's, that's very, very true.
[00:59:07]  And it was, I mean, I went in knowing that that was going to be my, the way I integrated myself.
[00:59:17]  And sometimes you'll find it's pretty surprising.
[00:59:19]  I mean, one of the first black guys that I got close with who joined our caucus invited me over to his house.
[00:59:26]  So I'm at his house and I look at his bookshelf and there's Das Capital by Marx.
[00:59:31]  So I go, whoa, bro, you know, where'd you pick up Das Capital?
[00:59:35]  He says, well, you know, when I got back from NAM, some brothers on the base had a study group and, you know, this was kind of hard stuff, Mao, you know, I mean, I said, yeah, yeah, it's pretty hard stuff, but you know, damn if it isn't true.
[00:59:49]  And he's, yeah, you're right.
[00:59:50]  So you'll find out that not everybody is like typical, what you envision a quote worker to be, you know?
[01:00:00]  And, you know, I spent my life bowling team, softball team.
[01:00:05]  And I was always in right field, you know, like the ball's going to die.
[01:00:10]  Believe me, only position I've ever played.
[01:00:14]  So, you know, but that, but that's really important.
[01:00:16]  I mean, people don't want to see you.
[01:00:18]  There's nothing people resent more.
[01:00:20]  There were some, quote, socialist groups that used to get out in front of the factory and they'd sell a socialist newspaper.
[01:00:27]  That's the way they thought they'd get socialism to the working class.
[01:00:31]  Well, you know, people said, well, who are these idiots standing out here, you know, selling this paper?
[01:00:36]  You know, we don't know who they are, but that doesn't mean that those same people are adverse to discussing political ideas when you're with them every day, facing the same difficulties, hardships, harassment, you know, that they are.
[01:00:51]  Yeah, that's that's something I learned is that like you actually have to be a good worker and you actually have to be normal to people.
[01:00:56]  You don't want to walk around with like a hammer and sickle on your forehead being like, hey, I mean, we had some, and I'm sure many people listening also have, has had some bad experience with Spartacists at my workplace who when we when we when we announced our union campaign, they showed up to some of the events and started haranguing members about, I don't even know what their problem was because I wouldn't let them talk to me.
[01:01:21]  And I was like, guys, don't don't talk to those guys.
[01:01:23]  I'm not like that.
[01:01:24]  I'm a different.
[01:01:25]  I mean, none of everyone knew my politics or whatever.
[01:01:28]  I was like, I'm a different, I'm not like that.
[01:01:30]  Don't, those are just kooky guys.
[01:01:33]  But yeah, I mean, I think another important thing too is also just like, you know, you talk about the contract so much in this book, right?
[01:01:41]  And how essentially all of these like industrial actions, not all of them, but mostly industrial actions that you're able to take to activate your coworkers and organize them more effectively are based on a close reading of like exactly what this contract says.
[01:01:55]  And I think that's like, I know that's such an important thing, especially for people who live or excuse me rather, who work in a union workplace is to really study your contract closely and to actually be able to use that as a method of organizing your coworkers.
[01:02:12]  Because a lot of the times, you know, you might have a shop steward who like, he doesn't know his shit or he doesn't really care or he's some bureaucrat who's just like, you know, wants to hang out in the fucking break room with the managers and stuff like that.
[01:02:24]  And so, you know, I think it's really incumbent on everybody who works under a contract to actually know what that contract says and to become a real fucking rules lawyer with it.
[01:02:33]  Because, you know, like I'm saying, if you want to get political work done, you got to be a little bit annoying.
[01:02:38]  And nothing annoys bosses more than actually having a like knowing what that contract says.
[01:02:44]  When we were organizing at Anchor, our bosses kept telling us like, you know, there's no union craft breweries.
[01:02:51]  Like this actually isn't like a, you know, a good fit for the company.
[01:02:55]  Anchor, of course, is owned by Sapporo, a massive multi-international brewing company who has union shops everywhere in the world except for their one American shop, which was ours.
[01:03:10]  And so I was actually able to get the union contract that our same company signed with the Teamsters in Canada at their plants.
[01:03:17]  And I was able to write to the Sapporo union workers in Japan at their plants and get a letter back from them.
[01:03:23]  And I brought those to the all-hands on deck meeting.
[01:03:27]  And they were telling us, like, well, you know, the company can only pay this much and this much and this much.
[01:03:31]  And I open up the contract and I say, how come this guy doing the exact same job that I do in fucking Canada makes almost three times as much as I do?
[01:03:40]  You know, he's also a machine operator.
[01:03:43]  Like, how come he gets as much as much as I, or excuse me, so much more than I do?
[01:03:49]  And they really do not like that.
[01:03:51]  The guy quit pretty much right after we got the union.
[01:03:58]  Yeah.
[01:03:59]  But, but yeah, that was another thing, too, you talk about in the book, you know, talking to the Renault workers, or however the fuck you pronounce that, Renault, Renault, Renault.
[01:04:09]  You know, we, we, we, I had some of those same, we actually had a Japanese rail workers union write to us and we're like, listen, we're willing to do whatever it takes if Sapporo fucks with you guys.
[01:04:21]  And we're like, I don't think you guys need to do whatever it takes.

=== U.S. Soldiers in the Philippines (07:28) ===

[01:04:24]  I think we'll be all right.
[01:04:25]  But then we were also told by some other people, like, those guys are like, they might have killed some people in the 80s or a little nuts, but they seem like really good, you know, good people.
[01:04:35]  Yeah.
[01:04:35]  And so, you know, you spent about 13 years in the UAW, correct?
[01:04:40]  That's right.
[01:04:41]  And then eventually.
[01:04:43]  Well, with some breaks in between, I was fired a couple of times and disciplined and what have you, but yeah.
[01:04:49]  And then eventually the years roll by and AMC, the plant that you work at, it closes.
[01:04:57]  Correct.
[01:04:57]  Yeah.
[01:04:58]  In 1985.
[01:05:00]  And you decide to go to law school at Hastings, which I know a couple of graduates in there.
[01:05:06]  And since then, you've been working with a lot of refugees, things like that, but you also have been involved in activism in the Philippines, which, as you know, is very also close to my heart.
[01:05:15]  Yes, we've talked about it.
[01:05:16]  Yeah.
[01:05:18]  I mean, you want to tell us anything about that?
[01:05:20]  Like, what about that interest you?
[01:05:23]  Well, yeah, I should preface it by saying that my wife's Filipina.
[01:05:29]  And before I met her, she was active in the Philippines.
[01:05:34]  She's also a TV and movie star person.
[01:05:37]  So that helped.
[01:05:38]  But I became active because the movement in the Philippines is really quite dear to my heart.
[01:05:47]  We started working with political prisoners and I've been in quite a few of the jails where they're holding political prisoners in the Philippines.
[01:05:57]  And one of them in the book, there's a picture of us meeting with a group of about 20 or some women prisoners where we would come in and bring these huge meals and help them set up a library.
[01:06:16]  We collected books because they were doing what the Philippines does if you're a political activist is they charge you with possessions of weapons and bomb-making equipment.
[01:06:25]  Because both of those are non-bailable defenses.
[01:06:28]  You can't be bailed out for those offenses.
[01:06:30]  So they want to keep you there as long as they can, for life if they can.
[01:06:35]  And, you know, it was a tremendous experience.
[01:06:39]  I mean, they started on toilet paper writing down like, you know, cards for the books to be taken out by different prisoners to read.
[01:06:48]  And at the end, they sang, they found they had a guitar and they brought it out and they sang the internationale, you know, the solidarity song of the workers worldwide.
[01:06:59]  And we also have been really, really active with the struggle of the indigenous in, particularly from Mindanao, the Lumads.
[01:07:09]  And when I first got there, we went to visit the Lumods who were living in a refugee camp in a church backyard of a church.
[01:07:20]  And we developed this rapport, particularly with this woman, Bybi Beyond, who's really world famous.
[01:07:26]  She must be in her 90s.
[01:07:28]  Nobody really knows her age.
[01:07:30]  But she's got a death warrant on her by the army because she has killed so many soldiers falling into those pits with bamboo spikes and her bow and arrow.
[01:07:40]  She says, just let me at them with my bow and arrow.
[01:07:43]  I don't care how big their guns are.
[01:07:45]  So she's been in hiding in Manila for many years now.
[01:07:50]  But just an example, this particular tribe, their land has valuable lumber and mining resources.
[01:08:00]  The army and the alamara, the alamara are indigenous people who've gone over to the side of the government, have bombed them, have come into their villages shooting, and have driven them off out of their ancestral homelands.
[01:08:17]  So we did a workshop in Manila at Christmas for the kids.
[01:08:21]  And luckily we picked up chickens at the fried chicken store or they would have just had rice for Christmas.
[01:08:29]  And Isabel, who's also an artist, she asked them to do drawings for art therapy.
[01:08:36]  Out of 20 kids, every one of them drew a picture of military planes dropping bombs, their animals like their goats and their pigs being killed, blown up, of their parents running with them under their arms to get out of the jungle to get to safety.
[01:08:55]  And so we've continued that relationship.
[01:08:58]  In fact, we did a movie on Bay Bibillon that we hope to release in the future.
[01:09:04]  But I've continued my activity.
[01:09:06]  And the greatest part of it was that in January, we released the Philippine edition of Fighting Times, Organizing on the Front Lines of the Class War.
[01:09:17]  And I had written a preface talking about the role of Filipino farm workers in the United States, building the farm workers movement.
[01:09:26]  Because many people don't know that before Cesar Chavez ever thought of calling a strike, Filipino farm workers had started the strike movement in Delano in the grape vineyards.
[01:09:39]  And so that was added to the book.
[01:09:42]  And about 80 books were sold on that one night, which was really rewarding to, you know, engage with people across culture, you know, to discuss these commonalities of what we all face.
[01:09:57]  And Brace and I actually know many of the same people in the Philippines.
[01:10:02]  Yeah, yeah.
[01:10:02]  Well, when I was out there, actually, it was about a month after the new Bataan massacre.
[01:10:07]  And, you know, where five, there's these things called Lumad teachers.
[01:10:12]  It's like people who will go out and try to open these schools in rural areas.
[01:10:18]  So the Lumad people were killed or were assassinated there, massacred there.
[01:10:25]  And, you know, these things, it's just insane.
[01:10:28]  They happen all the time.
[01:10:29]  But that was a pretty big one because this sort of well-known figure in the Philippines was killed.
[01:10:34]  Can I say one last thing about the Philippines?
[01:10:36]  It makes it very important.
[01:10:38]  Absolutely.
[01:10:38]  Is as the United States, and you read about it every day, ratchets up tensions with China, the U.S. has moved back into the Philippines for its army bases.
[01:10:52]  There are now nine bases in the Philippines that are designated for U.S. soldiers to be stationed on, which is really beating the war drums with China.
[01:11:03]  You know, there's no other way to talk about it or to interpret it, except that there's one base in Mindanao, which is where the New People's Army, which is an insurgency that's gone on for 50 years, are very active.
[01:11:19]  And the U.S. Special Forces is active in the struggle to try and suppress that liberation struggle.
[01:11:26]  But in the future, the Philippines is going to be very important because you're going to be seeing U.S. soldiers shipped over there to prepare for eventual confrontation with the Chinese, be it over Taiwan or the South China Sea or whatever, or be it over computer chips.

=== Organizing For Change (06:27) ===

[01:11:53]  Well, John, before we wrap up, I have one last question for you, which is that, I mean, you mentioned speaking with, I don't want to say kids.
[01:12:01]  I don't know why I want to say kids.
[01:12:02]  It's because now I'm older.
[01:12:04]  I always say this, but with people organizing at Starbucks, at Trader Joe's, at, you know, other places like that in the service sector.
[01:12:12]  I mean, there's so much like young energy that we've seen over the past, you know, I don't know what, let's say like six, eight years that's been like kind of piling in, trying to organize in places that haven't been before, right?
[01:12:27]  And I think, I mean, there's been plenty of books written about the, I don't even know what's called the bureaucratization of the unions, of the big unions, or the kind of like, I don't know, even hollowing out of the unions or just becoming basically not places or centers of radical politics anymore.
[01:12:49]  And that's been happening all over.
[01:12:50]  I mean, it's not just in the U.S., right?
[01:12:52]  It's like all over you really see it.
[01:12:55]  And I'm curious, because I think your book, kind of sitting next to some of those histories, is interesting, right?
[01:12:59]  Because this is a bottom-up kind of history of that as well, of, you know, how kind of squaring that, right?
[01:13:07]  You see these sort of like hollowing out of these, what were big political arms, right?
[01:13:13]  And at the same, and people now looking for other places to organize.
[01:13:17]  And I'm wondering kind of what you're seeing there.
[01:13:20]  Yeah, I think it's, let me answer it in two ways.
[01:13:23]  I think it's really inspirational that the young people at places like Trader Joe's and REI and Amazon and Starbucks are organizing because one of the things that I've learned is that their view of the union is way broader than what the union was in my day.
[01:13:43]  They see the union as fighting the existential environmental threat.
[01:13:49]  They see the union as taking up the fight for transgender rights.
[01:13:53]  They see the union as being involved in all aspects of society.
[01:13:58]  And that's a great thing because just like these kids in Tennessee who were occupying the state capitol yesterday when they fired the black legislators, you know, they have a much broader vision of what needs to be changed in the world.
[01:14:14]  Now, as much as I admire and respect the young people going into the Amazons and the Starbucks, I have to say that a lot of the contacts I have now are in the industrial Southeast.
[01:14:26]  The ones that Brace was talking about earlier, where, you know, there's EV auto plants, EV battery plants, there's EV electric bus plants where I'm working with a young worker.
[01:14:39]  You know, and he says to me, why can't you get people, if they want to quote, the word is salts, go into organize, not a word I like, but go into organize.
[01:14:50]  Me either.
[01:14:50]  Yeah, go in to organize.
[01:14:52]  Why can't you get them to come down south?
[01:14:55]  And he's done a study.
[01:14:56]  And, you know, he's a factory worker, but quite an intelligent, intelligent, intellectual guy.
[01:15:04]  And he said, look, there's two industrial powers in the world today, the U.S. and China.
[01:15:08]  Well, this is still an industrial country.
[01:15:11]  And that industry is being concentrated in the Southeast primarily, not exclusively.
[01:15:17]  And that's where people have to go to organize because that's where the industrial proletariat is located.
[01:15:24]  And maybe this will anybody listening here who's looking about where they want to go, send me a text on my Facebook site and I'll give you a tip on where to go because that's where we got to be organizing in the future.
[01:15:39]  I mean, listen, any of you motherfuckers out there who just listen to this podcast as you deliver Uber Eats or whatever, there's nothing in the future for you.
[01:15:48]  You can't, there's nothing.
[01:15:49]  What are you going to get a promotion there?
[01:15:51]  No, you should move down there and work in an EV plant.
[01:15:55]  Why not?
[01:15:56]  Eventually, you get a union.
[01:15:57]  It's a pretty good job.
[01:15:59]  Nothing else you got going on.
[01:16:01]  Anyways, that was my thinking when I did it.
[01:16:04]  Jonathan, thank you so much for joining us.
[01:16:07]  I loved the book.
[01:16:08]  I was great.
[01:16:11]  It's very, yeah, what's our Liz, what were you saying?
[01:16:14]  No, there's just, there's so many stories that obviously we don't have time to even get into.
[01:16:18]  And we shouldn't, because then it'll, you know, we don't want to ruin the spoilers for the people out there that are going to pick up the book.
[01:16:25]  But really, there's some extremely colorful, very inspiring and hilarious and upsetting and all the all the great and terrifying emotions that goes into being a human in this life stories in this book.
[01:16:41]  Well, I appreciate that.
[01:16:42]  And I just want to say that right now, the book is on sale at 40% off.
[01:16:48]  So if you do go to my website, jonathanmelrod.com, on the landing page, it'll give you the code fighting, and you'll go right to the PM Press, the publisher, and you'll get it for 40% off up until May Day.
[01:17:02]  So I'd encourage people to get it.
[01:17:04]  And I really appreciate what you just said about it.
[01:17:06]  It makes somebody feel like it's worth the work it went into.
[01:17:10]  It took 15 years.
[01:17:11]  It is 100%.
[01:17:13]  Absolutely.
[01:17:14]  I just love to fight.
[01:17:16]  This whole book is about fighting, which is a big, big plus for me.
[01:17:20]  I will say it ends on one of my favorite quotes and a quote that serves to me as sort of a guiding light, which is this quote from Eugene Debs: to stir the masses to appeal to their higher, better selves, to set them thinking for themselves and to hold ever before them the ideal of mutual kindness and goodwill based upon mutual interest is to render real service to the cause of humanity.
[01:17:42]  And I really thank you for ending the book on that quote.
[01:17:45]  I mean, it's a fantastic just, I don't know, it really sums up so much of what I believe I guess a good person is supposed to do in this world.
[01:17:57]  Well, thank you all for having me.
[01:18:08]  Now, one thing I got to say about our guest that I actually meant to mention during the interview is that, unfortunately for Jonathan Melrod, Melrod is such a good name to yell in an angry voice.
[01:18:19]  It's so good.

=== Pink Hair and Principal Trouble (05:26) ===

[01:18:20]  Melrod!
[01:18:22]  Yeah, it sounds like I mean, you just hear, you hear an angry mom screaming.
[01:18:27]  Then you hear the angry boss screaming it.
[01:18:30]  Get in here.
[01:18:31]  The principal.
[01:18:32]  The principal is going to go ham on Melrod.
[01:18:36]  What's the deal with when did vice principles come out?
[01:18:39]  Like, when did the vice principal become the thing, the character as opposed to the principal?
[01:18:45]  Yeah, because I've never been.
[01:18:46]  That's a really good question.
[01:18:47]  The principal wouldn't even give me the time of day.
[01:18:49]  I've been, I've had to talk to so many fucking vice principals in my life.
[01:18:52]  Oof.
[01:18:54]  They didn't send you up top to the big guy.
[01:18:56]  They didn't send me up top to the big guy.
[01:18:57]  I once wore a shirt that, in retrospect, I was, I've been, I've been in trouble at school twice for shirts.
[01:19:03]  One is there was this band called MDC Millions of Dead Cops, and I wore their shirt in seventh grade, which had like a Klansman and a cop sort of bisected with a gun.
[01:19:14]  And they're like, you can't wear that at school.
[01:19:15]  And I was like, it's my beliefs.
[01:19:18]  And they made me turn it inside out.
[01:19:20]  And then when I was entered ninth grade, I wore a shirt that said Gigi Allen.
[01:19:26]  It said, drink, fight, and fuck.
[01:19:27]  And they're like, don't, you can't wear this at our school.
[01:19:29]  And it's like, GG Allen passed out.
[01:19:30]  And I was like, this is what I believe in.
[01:19:32]  This is my way of life.
[01:19:36]  And my parents had like got me into this like special school for special kids.
[01:19:40]  And they kicked me out first day for wearing that shirt.
[01:19:43]  I was excited.
[01:19:44]  Oh, yeah.
[01:19:44]  Yeah.
[01:19:45]  It was nice.
[01:19:45]  I got in trouble for dying my hair crazy colors and wearing fishnets.
[01:19:48]  Wait, you were a dyed hair person?
[01:19:51]  Yes, absolutely.
[01:19:52]  Oh my God.
[01:19:53]  Yeah.
[01:19:54]  How many, how many pink?
[01:19:56]  Pink was the one when I was like probably like 14, 15.
[01:20:02]  Light pink, baby pink.
[01:20:05]  And then, but I could only do it during the summer because we couldn't have a natural hair color during the year.
[01:20:10]  But then I so then I had because you know you have to bleach it before you dye it pink, right?
[01:20:17]  And so then right before coming back to school, I tried to dye it just like regular brown, but it obviously didn't turn out right because it's on top of bleach and pink.
[01:20:24]  Yeah, and so it was this like crazy, like ugly, which I didn't care about because I was like, I'm a punk, it's going to be ugly.
[01:20:31]  Yeah.
[01:20:32]  And Miss Walkter, oh God, which is a crazy teacher name.
[01:20:38]  Yeah, she wasn't a teacher.
[01:20:39]  She was, it wasn't like she had some horrible like lady school marm name title.
[01:20:47]  Um, but she was like, You can't, you can't have that.
[01:20:52]  And I was like, but it's my hair.
[01:20:53]  Like, I don't know what to do.
[01:20:54]  And she's like, you need to like go to the hairdresser and change it.
[01:20:57]  And I was like, but I just do it from Dwayne Reed.
[01:21:00]  Anyway, that's not an exciting story.
[01:21:02]  But I definitely was crazy hair dye person.
[01:21:05]  I've dyed my hair once in high school.
[01:21:07]  I try to dye it.
[01:21:08]  This is an eighth grade.
[01:21:09]  I try to do leopard print.
[01:21:12]  No, because wait, I think I no, it was bad.
[01:21:18]  It was like.
[01:21:19]  Have I seen photos of this?
[01:21:20]  Yes.
[01:21:21]  Yes.
[01:21:21]  I lasted for a very short period of time because I saw it on like a casualty CD or something, like a guy in my hair.
[01:21:28]  I know exactly what you're talking about.
[01:21:29]  But, but I didn't realize that you had to have like a like a fucking basically a buzz cut for that to make any sense.
[01:21:34]  And so I had hair, like, you know, my hair is.
[01:21:36]  It's long, wild, and free.
[01:21:39]  But I had like short hair, but not a certainly not a buzz cut.
[01:21:42]  And my friends and I dyed it what we thought would be leopard print.
[01:21:45]  And I ended up just with the most freaky ass frosted tips that you could ever imagine.
[01:21:54]  It was horrible.
[01:21:55]  And even like my punk friends who did like other like stupid eighth graders were just like, dude, this is not.
[01:22:01]  That's the first time I shaved my head after that.
[01:22:03]  Yeah, you got bad leopard hair, hair dye job.
[01:22:06]  I've got bad pink hair dye job.
[01:22:07]  We're like the worst no-doubt cover bands.
[01:22:09]  Yeah.
[01:22:10]  Yes.
[01:22:10]  Yeah.
[01:22:10]  You should dye your hair pink now.
[01:22:12]  I'm okay.
[01:22:14]  I, you know, I had it green not that long ago.
[01:22:17]  What?
[01:22:18]  Yeah.
[01:22:19]  What?
[01:22:20]  What?
[01:22:20]  Like, probably like eight years ago.
[01:22:22]  Oh, okay.
[01:22:22]  I was like, nine.
[01:22:24]  Because I don't really notice women's hair often.
[01:22:27]  You know how this is.
[01:22:28]  Well, you're colorblind, too.
[01:22:29]  Yeah, but that's like, I was like, did she do this?
[01:22:33]  That's, yeah, that's interesting.
[01:22:35]  That was like when you had your septum piercing stage, too.
[01:22:38]  That was like when you were there, was a moment.
[01:22:40]  Yeah, that was that was crazy.
[01:22:41]  SJW Liz was not.
[01:22:45]  Yeah, she was always her tumbler.
[01:22:48]  You should have seen it.
[01:22:50]  I was suit punk.
[01:22:51]  Yeah.
[01:22:52]  Fuck.
[01:22:52]  That's a trend that annoys me: adding punk to everything.
[01:22:56]  Yeah.
[01:22:57]  Now those things are punk.
[01:22:59]  Well, they are now.
[01:23:00]  Yeah, that shows you how cool punk is.
[01:23:03]  All right.
[01:23:03]  Shout out to Punk Rock.
[01:23:06]  Let's end this motherfucking episode.
[01:23:08]  I'm Liz.
[01:23:09]  My name is Bray Speldin.
[01:23:12]  We are joined, of course, by my personal steward, Young Chomsky.
[01:23:20]  What?
[01:23:21]  I was just like, oh my God, are you doing Gourmand?
[01:23:24]  Oh.
[01:23:25]  No.
[01:23:26]  It's been a while.
[01:23:27]  It's been a while.
[01:23:27]  Well, the thing is, the Gourmand hibernates.
[01:23:30]  Well, because have you seen what's happening in Paris?
[01:23:32]  I know.
[01:23:33]  They're burning down La Rotund.
[01:23:37]  What?
[01:23:38]  He's hiding in the wine cellar.
[01:23:42]  La Rotund?
[01:23:44]  That's the Gourmand's favorite establishment.

=== Sucking Bones Underground (00:58) ===

[01:23:47]  The Gourmand treats every morsel like it is the most succulent hordelin, where he drapes his head in the finest silk napkin and eats as if he was a dog bent over a bowl.
[01:23:59]  Any type of pâté they have available in Paris.
[01:24:03]  And since these rax scallions have been burning every patisserie and bakery and luncheonette in Paris, I've been forced to go underground to the catacombs and I've been sucking on the bones of the fattest men of the 1700s.
[01:24:21]  Every single deceased aristocrat who grew with their massive rib cages, eating all the meals meant for the peasants.
[01:24:29]  I've been sucking on their bones and eating the barrel out with the teeniest little spoon.
[01:24:34]  It's like the spoon version of an oyster fork.
[01:24:38]  My tongue is six feet long.
[01:24:41]  And the podcast is called Truanon.
[01:24:43]  We'll see you next time.
[01:24:44]  Bye-bye.