Bob Levis - Air date: 08-12-08

Bob Levis. I've been an activist most of my adult life. Having grown up in privilege I easily jumped into the New York corporate world after graduating from the University of Wisconsin in 1963. The button- down pyramid structure of the media companies I went to work for (NBC, Westinghouse Broadcasting and Time Magazine, Inc.) was way too confining for me. I began to experiment with a variety of classes in the evenings and hooked up with a couple of different theatre groups. Eventually, I headed out to San Francisco, having read about the Haight-Ashbury counter culture. There I co-founded a theatre and also a film company that produced several socially relevant documentaries and a rollicking anti-establishment feature "GOLD." From there I worked briefly but intensely with the United Farmworkers, which was my seminal political experience in organizing. Later I moved to England with my co-vivant and we were at the center of the squatting movement that resulted from the impossibly high prices for living spaces. Our daughter was born there and we returned after four years and settled into Oakland, California. My Better Half started a community newsletter, which we built into a bona fide tabloid, advertiser- supported newspaper "GLAD RAG." I was elected President of the merchants' association.
I continued supplementing my income with a variety of sales jobs and working on a multitude of social justice issues. A series of political events brought me back to my roots in Wisconsin to challenge the incumbent Republican F. James Sensenbrenner for the fifth congressional district of Wisconsin. I went to school fifty years ago with Sensenbrenner, and I have watched him become more and more disconnected with the voters and connected with only the money interests that rule Washington.

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[Byrne42]

this movie messed me up

[hypnofan35]

People are strange, the status quo can become very adverse and destructive and remain normal and legal. My own father was a a mortal enemy of truth, but was never able to shmooze so he remained a peon. The difficulty with this, was he became a mortal enemy to his family as well. Metaphorically he was like a slavemaster who only knew how to use a heavy stick with a deadly spike at a psycho conceptual level. He was the kind of teacher who would best be avoided in any circumstance. The way it was.

[hypnofan35]

In any society the upper class is constantly perpetrating crimes of class on the lower class. It is not "my friends" as excessively repeated by McBrain! That should be an extremely offensive phrase. It is to me. They try to keep the lower classes in an enslaved state. It is a bit of a game to them. Everyone fights for status and normal is generally very weird. The big deal with humans is not to get caught doing dastardly damage or at least know what damage can be managed in plain sight.

[hypnofan35]

Wisconsin has some good and some bad. For me it was like an internment camp, starting in the first grade when i was declared a traitor to the "cause" by my teacher. Society had adverse factions at that time. Probably it would have been more thoughtful and a little less adverse if someone had the insight to blow Joe McCarthy's McBrains out. Torture and condemnation can be considered status quo if it is done with hierarchal adversity, as in 1954. Hide under your desk, the commies will bomb today.