In June 1968, the San Francisco Diggers gave away their ultimate gift to the universe, The Digger Papers, a twenty-four-page anthology of their writings and graphics that was simultaneously published as issue 81 of Paul Krassner’s The Realist. Among the pieces included in the collection was a four-page text headed simply “A Speech: Dialectics of Liberation.” No author was identified.

The speech had been delivered the previous summer at the International Congress on the Dialectics of Liberation, held at the Roundhouse in London from July 15 through July 30, 1967. The congress brought together an extraordinary collection of radical thinkers, writers, artists, and activists, including R. D. Laing, Gregory Bateson, Herbert Marcuse, Stokely Carmichael, Paul Goodman, Allen Ginsberg, Julian Beck, and Emmett Grogan (co-founder of the San Francisco Diggers with Billy Murcott). The event was conceived as something more than an academic conference. As Benjamin Serby writes, its organizers envisioned a nonauthoritarian environment in which “the planned environment would both prefigure a liberated society and give birth to the ideas necessary to its construction” (Serby 2025, 240).

Among the papers of Emmett Grogan at the New York Public Library are two identical thirteen-page typescripts of the speech that later appeared in The Digger Papers. One is unmarked; the other contains extensive corrections, deletions, and additions in Grogan’s hand. NYPL has cataloged the piece as Grogan’s work. The presence of the two manuscripts in Grogan’s papers, together with his extensive editing of one of them, makes that attribution understandable. But comparison with a surviving transcript of the Dialectics of Liberation Congress establishes that the speech itself was not Grogan’s. It was delivered by Allen Ginsberg.

The July 27 Transcript

The crucial document is a twenty-page transcript headed “CONGRESS — DIALECTICS OF LIBERATION / Allen Ginsberg — 27th July 1967.” Preserved in Peter Davis’s Villon Films archive, it records Ginsberg’s July 27 address at the Roundhouse. I will refer to it here as the Villon transcript. Benjamin Serby independently identifies Ginsberg’s July 27 lecture and cites another audio transcript of it in the Joseph Berke Archive.

The Villon transcript preserves considerably more of Ginsberg’s address than the typescript in the Grogan Papers. It begins with Ginsberg talking about the strange effect of hearing his voice electronically amplified through the Roundhouse. He then reads at length from William Burroughs’s Nova Express. The NYPL typescript does not contain this opening material. It begins later in the speech.

The point where the texts come together is revealing. On page five of the Villon transcript, Ginsberg turns from Burroughs to the congress itself and begins reflecting upon the anxieties, paranoia, terror, and conflicting images that had manifested themselves during the preceding days. The NYPL typescript begins at essentially this point. From there, the two documents follow the same address through discussions of consciousness, language, conditioning, Flower Power, interpersonal relations, communal organization, and finally the activities of the San Francisco Diggers.

One of the most distinctive correspondences occurs almost immediately. Ginsberg recalls Gregory Bateson discussing what he calls the “scientifical apocalyptic” dimension of contemporary anxiety. He describes the accumulation of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, a possible rise in global temperature of five degrees, the melting of the polar ice caps, and the consequent inundation of the continents by as much as 400 feet of water. The same remarkable passage appears near the beginning of the unedited NYPL typescript.

This is particularly useful in identifying the speaker. The combination of Bateson, carbon dioxide, rising global temperatures, melting polar ice, and 400 feet of sea-level rise is too distinctive to be coincidental. The Villon transcript places those ideas directly in Ginsberg’s speech. It also preserves an intriguing instance of the developing scientific concern over atmospheric carbon dioxide entering countercultural discourse in 1967. The identification is reinforced throughout the transcript. Ginsberg moves through Hindu and Buddhist ideas, Chuang Tzu, Black Power, the Dalai Lama, African proverbs, shamanism, LSD, conditioning, the OSS, Hitler, J. Edgar Hoover, private fantasy and public behavior, and Flower Power. These are the same unusual subjects, appearing in the same general progression, in the NYPL typescript.

There is another independent textual witness. In 1969 Joseph Berke, one of the organizers of the congress, published Counter Culture, a collection of material associated with the event. It included “Consciousness and Practical Action,” explicitly attributed to Allen Ginsberg.

At first glance, Berke’s published text and the unedited NYPL typescript do not look particularly close. The Villon transcript resolves the problem. Berke’s “Consciousness and Practical Action” and the typescript in the Grogan Papers are different edited witnesses to the same longer Ginsberg address. Berke omitted substantial portions of the original—including the entire carbon-dioxide discussion—while retaining other passages, sometimes nearly word for word. Benjamin Serby similarly describes the Counter Culture text as an abridged version of Ginsberg’s lecture. The Villon transcript also resolves what might otherwise appear to be evidence against Ginsberg’s authorship. Near the end of the NYPL typescript, the speaker refers to “Allen Ginsberg” in the third person. In the Villon transcript, Ginsberg describes treating another human being simply as a person rather than as a social category: not as a role, uniform, policeman, capitalist, communist, Maoist, “Allen Ginsberg,” or self. Ginsberg was including his own public identity among the categories that he believed interfered with direct human relationships.

Grogan’s Editorial Hand

The second NYPL typescript, an exact duplicate of the unmarked copy but bearing Grogan’s handwritten edits, shows what happened to Ginsberg’s speech on its way into The Digger Papers. Grogan worked through the text with a pen, crossing out whole passages, substituting words and phrases, and adding material of his own. The manuscript in Grogan’s hand is therefore not evidence that he composed the speech. It records his work as its editor.

His most conspicuous technique is deletion. Grogan removes much of Ginsberg’s discussion of Hinduism, Buddhism, Chuang Tzu, Black Power, African proverbs, shamanism, and LSD. He heavily cuts the discussion of psychological conditioning, German youth, the OSS, and Hitler. Later he eliminates substantial digressions involving James Bevel, Vietnam, and Martin Luther King. The cuts greatly reduce the wandering, associative character of Ginsberg’s spoken performance.

What Grogan retains is equally revealing. He preserves much of Ginsberg’s argument about manufactured public identities, interpersonal relations, the danger of treating people as images or roles, Flower Power, communal living, and practical action. The result is not a different argument so much as a concentration of one strand already present in Ginsberg’s speech.

The editing becomes particularly interesting when Ginsberg begins moving toward action. Grogan works over the transition into the Flower Power discussion, introducing such formulations as “social action + plans,” “in AUTONOMY,” and “praxis—practical plans.” “Psycho-political action” belongs naturally to Ginsberg’s lecture and to the radical-psychiatric setting of the congress. Grogan’s praxis, social action, and autonomy move the passage toward the vocabulary of the Diggers.

This is where another surviving document becomes unexpectedly important. Peter Davis’s archive preserves a transcript of the July 22 panel in which Grogan appeared with Ginsberg, Stokely Carmichael, R. D. Laing, and David Cooper. In Grogan’s own remarks, five days before Ginsberg’s lecture, he describes young people discovering “a power—that power is autonomy,” followed immediately by the assertion that standing on a street corner waiting for no one is powerful. The conjunction is significant. In the anonymous Digger sheet “Term Paper,” autonomy is explicitly traced to Gregory Corso’s poem “Power,” the source of the image of standing on a street corner waiting for no one. Thus the connection among power, autonomy, and the street-corner image can be securely associated with Grogan independently of his handwritten emendations to Ginsberg’s typescript.

That is significant because the same language recurs throughout the early Digger writings. One of the first Digger Papers asks when Timothy Leary will stand on a street corner “waiting for no one.” Another turns the dismissive phrase “fool on the street” into the repeated declaration that the public is any fool on the street. “Term Paper” eventually joins the two formulations: the public is any fool on the street, while power consists in standing on a street corner waiting for no one. These recurring phrases amount to literary breadcrumbs. None alone proves authorship of an anonymous sheet, but together they reveal a recognizable vocabulary of autonomy, public space, action, and power.

“Term Paper” is especially suggestive. It identifies autonomy as fundamental to the Digger idea, speaks of “autonomous activity,” urges groups to pool their resources, emphasizes action and individual creative power, and ends by joining the “fool on the street” and “streetcorner waiting for no one” formulations. The convergence with Grogan’s authenticated language—both his July 22 remarks and his handwritten alterations to Ginsberg—is striking.

The handwritten conclusion of the Ginsberg manuscript provides an even stronger control sample. Grogan crosses out the typed ending and substitutes a conclusion built around “PRAXIS,” “the pooling of our resources,” individual activities, and the “autonomous boundaries of our Free City of the Now.” Here Grogan is no longer merely shortening Ginsberg. He is rewriting him.

Yet it is important not to attribute too much to Grogan. The complete July 27 Villon transcript establishes that Ginsberg himself had already spoken explicitly about the Diggers, free food, Communication Company, free stores, decentralization, and ecological consciousness. He had already argued for creating new forms of social life without waiting for some future revolution. Grogan did not introduce the Diggers into Ginsberg’s argument. He compressed, sharpened, and translated an argument already sympathetic to Digger practice into a more distinctly Digger idiom.

A Speech Moving between Two Worlds

This relationship helps explain why Ginsberg’s address lent itself so readily to Grogan’s editing. The Diggers were themselves engaged in an unusual intellectual project during 1966 and 1967. At the same time that Free Food, Free Stores, street events, Communication Company, and other forms of Digger praxis were being constructed on the streets of San Francisco, Emmett Grogan, Peter Berg, and Billy Murcott were attempting to formulate an intellectual framework through which those actions could be understood.

They were not writing a common political program. Their literary methods were strikingly different. Berg, a playwright with the San Francisco Mime Troupe, thought theatrically. In Trip Without a Ticket, the street becomes theater, social roles become roles that can be abandoned, and guerrilla theater creates liberated territory in which people can become “life-actors.” Murcott’s Mutants Commune works differently. Its type-poetry, invented compounds, fragmentation, repetition, and visual manipulation of language are themselves part of its conception of mutation and communal transformation.

Grogan’s characteristic mode appears more discursive and aphoristic. Ideas recur through concrete images: the fool, the street, the street corner, waiting for no one. Around these images cluster autonomy, action, power, people, resources, and now. Grogan’s acknowledged authorship of Post-Competitive, Comparative Game of a Free City, his claim in Ringolevio to having formulated and named the “ideology of failure,” his July 22 remarks at the Roundhouse, and the words visibly inserted in his hand into Ginsberg’s speech provide points of comparison for other anonymous Digger writings, particularly Term Paper.

What emerges is a picture of Digger ideology being formulated in dialogue with practice. The theory did not precede the street experiment as a program to be implemented, nor were the writings merely retrospective explanations of actions already completed. The street generated ideas; the writings articulated them; and those formulations in turn suggested further forms of action. Theory and praxis were being constructed simultaneously.

Ginsberg’s July 27 address intersects with that project at precisely this point. He had watched the congress descend at times into struggles over authority and control. His response was to turn toward interpersonal conduct, decentralization, autonomous organization, and practical experiments already taking place in San Francisco. Serby notes that Ginsberg specifically named Grogan as a practitioner of this form of decentralized democracy. When Grogan subsequently edited Ginsberg’s speech, he was therefore not working with an unrelated text. The passages he retained and the language he introduced brought Ginsberg’s argument into still closer alignment with ideas already being worked out within the Digger experiment.

From the Roundhouse to The Digger Papers

The surviving documents permit a fairly clear reconstruction. On July 27, 1967, Allen Ginsberg delivered a long, improvisational address at the Roundhouse. A twenty-page transcript survives under his name and the date of the speech. The Villon Films archive independently identifies the document as the transcript of Ginsberg’s July 27 lecture. A typescript preserving a substantial portion of that same address came into Grogan’s possession.

We cannot yet say exactly how the two transcripts are related. The thirteen-page NYPL typescript may have been excerpted from a longer transcript, independently prepared from a recording, or derived, like the Villon transcript, from an earlier transcription. What can be established is that they preserve the same spoken performance.

Grogan then edited his copy extensively. The shortened and reshaped text appeared anonymously the following year as “A Speech: Dialectics of Liberation” in The Digger Papers. Meanwhile, another edited version of the same July 27 address followed a separate path through Joseph Berke and was published in Counter Culture in 1969 as “Consciousness and Practical Action,” correctly attributed to Allen Ginsberg.

There remain questions the surviving documents do not answer. We do not know who prepared the typescript that ended up in Grogan’s papers, exactly how Grogan obtained it, or whether it derives directly from the surviving twenty-page transcript. Nor do we know who decided to omit Ginsberg’s name when the edited speech appeared in The Digger Papers.

The authorship of the underlying speech, however, is no longer seriously in question. The evidence does not depend upon stylistic resemblance or the later attribution in Berke’s Counter Culture. A contemporary twenty-page transcript identifies the speaker as Allen Ginsberg and dates the speech July 27, 1967. Its text contains the distinctive passages preserved in the NYPL typescript at NYPL (cataloged as Grogan’s but which we now know is Ginsberg’s)—from Bateson and atmospheric carbon dioxide through conditioning, Hitler, Hoover, Flower Power, communal life, and the Diggers.

What the Grogan Papers preserve is not a speech written or delivered by Emmett Grogan. They preserve something in some ways more interesting: a record of one of the Diggers’ principal ideologues working editorially upon Allen Ginsberg’s words, recognizing their convergence with a developing Digger philosophy, and reshaping Ginsberg’s reflections on consciousness and practical action for their anonymous appearance in The Digger Papers.

---

Bibliography

Archival and Manuscript Sources

Ginsberg, Allen. “Congress — Dialectics of Liberation: Allen Ginsberg — 27th July 1967.” Transcript, 20 pp. Peter Davis/Villon Films, Dialectics of Liberation Collection, 1967. Villon Films transcript record

Ginsberg, Allen. “Allen Ginsberg, July 27, 1967.” Audio transcript. Box 4, Folder 14, Joseph Berke Archive, 1960–2003. Planned Environment Therapy Archives and Special Collections, Toddington, UK. Cited in Serby, “‘A Setting Where Things Can Happen,’” 253 n. 85.

“Dialectic of Liberation: A Speech.” Typescript, 13 pp. Unmarked copy. Emmett Grogan Papers, New York Public Library, New York.

“Dialectic of Liberation: A Speech.” Typescript, 13 pp. Duplicate copy with extensive handwritten corrections, deletions, and additions by Emmett Grogan. Emmett Grogan Papers, New York Public Library, New York.

Davis, Peter. “Group Panel.” Transcript, July 22, 1967. Dialectics of Liberation Collection, Villon Films. Panel with Stokely Carmichael, Allen Ginsberg, R. D. Laing, David Cooper, Emmett Grogan, and audience participants.

Published Primary Sources

Ginsberg, Allen. “Consciousness and Practical Action.” In Counter Culture, edited by Joseph Berke, 172–81. London, 1969.

[Ginsberg, Allen.] “A Speech: Dialectics of Liberation.” In The Digger Papers, 4–7. San Francisco: Diggers, 1968. Also published in The Realist, no. 81 (August 1968): 4–7. Originally published anonymously.

Grogan, Emmett. Ringolevio: A Life Played for Keeps. Boston: Little, Brown, 1972.

Secondary Source

Serby, Benjamin. “‘A Setting Where Things Can Happen’: The Dialectics of Liberation Congress and the Politics of Knowledge in the 1960s.” Modern Intellectual History 22 (2025): 231–63. First published online November 26, 2024.

Digital Archival Collections

Davis, Peter. Dialectics of Liberation. Villon Films Archive. Collection of film, transcripts, photographs, and other materials documenting the 1967 Congress on the Dialectics of Liberation.

Noble, Eric, ed. “Digger Writings.” The Digger Archives. Collection of Digger broadsides, manifestos, and related writings, 1966–68. Digger Writings

The Digger Papers at the Digger Archives
Digital reproduction and transcription of the 1968 publication, with historical information concerning the Free and Realist editions.

“Term Paper.” Digger broadside, San Francisco, 1967. Originally published anonymously. Reproduced in Noble, ed., “Digger Writings,” The Digger Archives.

---

Koret Auditorium, SF Public Library, July 28, 2026

The Angels of Light Free Theatre was a radical communal performance troupe that emerged from the Kaliflower Commune within a queer milieu of gay liberation, acid-drag, and gender-fuck. They were one of hundreds of Bay Area communes linked through the Kaliflower intercommunal network in the early 1970s. Their shows featured extravagant costumes and sets, live music, and free food for the audience. But the Angels were more than a performance collective: they were a creative family who lived communally, making theater and daily life inseparable. This combination of performance, communal life, and gift-giving placed the Angels within the tradition of the San Francisco Diggers, whose radical anarchist social vision helped shape the counterculture of the late 1960s.

This event at the San Francisco Public Library brought together Angels of Light veterans Beaver Bauer, Tahara, and Greg Cruikshank for a discussion moderated by August Bernadicou of the LGBTQ History Project. Presented in conjunction with the publication of Devour Me Again: Collected Poems and Song Lyrics by Bambi Lake, the event combined personal testimony, communal history, reflections on free theater, and a sometimes difficult assessment of Bambi Lake’s life and legacy. The discussion was less a chronological history than a collective act of remembrance, with the panelists moving between political context, theatrical practice, communal life, humor, affection, disagreement, and grief.

Cristina Mitra, program manager of the James C. Hormel LGBTQIA Center, introduced the evening as a celebration of both the Angels of Light and Bambi Lake. She described the audience as “a room full of friends, lovers, just family in all kinds of ways,” establishing the program as a gathering of an extended community rather than simply a formal historical presentation. August Bernadicou framed the discussion in explicitly contemporary terms: “The world’s falling apart, and we need to know history.” He characterized the Angels as a troupe devoted to “free theater, communal living, and dedicating themselves to their craft.”

Gay liberation, antiwar activism, and the search for an alternative life

The opening discussion situated the Angels of Light within the political upheavals of the late 1960s. Tahara recalled arriving in San Francisco from Texas during the Summer of Love and becoming involved almost immediately in early gay liberation activity in Berkeley. He described participating in a provocative street performance outside the student union and, a week later, a public “kiss-in” involving men kissing one another. The response to the first performance, he remembered, was stunned silence. For Tahara, these actions marked “the beginning of gay liberation in Berkeley,” occurring in the same period as similar movements in New York and Los Angeles.

Greg Cruikshank placed his own development within the antiwar movement. Arriving in San Francisco at approximately sixteen, he had already been active in Students for a Democratic Society. Young men faced the possibility of being drafted for Vietnam while being denied the vote until age twenty-one. He remembered protest as a unifying force and cited the influence of figures and movements including Angela Davis, Eldridge Cleaver, Stokely Carmichael, Mario Savio, the Black Panthers, and the Free Speech Movement.

For Greg, joining the Angels was therefore not simply an artistic choice. It represented an alternative to incorporation into the social and political establishment and to becoming “fodder” for the war. The Angels “romanticized” the possibility of another way of living and, in his words, “gave us a sanctuary.” The formulation is important: the troupe was not only a performance collective but also a refuge for young people attempting to escape war, compulsory masculinity, family expectations, and the prescribed course of adult life.

Beaver Bauer’s discovery of a creative family

Beaver Bauer gave the most extended account of what joining the Angels meant personally. She described herself as “a lost kid” who had dropped out of college and could not imagine how she fit into the available world. After meeting Rodney Price on New York’s Lower East Side, she hitchhiked to San Francisco with two friends and her dog, arriving with almost no money and no stable place to live.

Hibiscus (George Harris) was the main catalyst for the formation of the Angels of Light. Beaver described her first encounter with Hibiscus as transformative. Seeing him coming down the street, she remembered feeling “like the air around me changed,” as though there were “crystals in the air.” Hibiscus immediately invited Beaver and her friends to become the “Flory Dory girls” in a show. Beaver recalled: “I was ready. I signed up. I wanted it all.”

What she found in the Angels was “my creative family”—a setting in which drawing, costume, dance, scenery, performance, and self-invention could be explored without rigid boundaries. One could decide, “One day I’m going to be this,” and the next day dress as something else. Drag and costume were therefore not simply visual embellishments; they were techniques for discovering previously unexpressed dimensions of the personality.

Beaver described this process as one of transformation:

“It was really a lot about transformation and the ability to transform yourself, learn from that transformation, and share it with other people.”

The aspiration was not merely individual self-expression. By performing transformation publicly, the Angels might encourage audiences to recognize their own freedom to change. Beaver also emphasized that the distinction between theater and daily existence disappeared: “The area between live performance [and the] street was seamless. There were no edges to it.” The Angels became, in her assessment, “the singular most complete expressive voice I ever had.”

Free theater as an anti-capitalist practice

When asked what issues mattered to the Angels, Greg identified their refusal to charge admission as foundational. The goal was “to make free theater and not charge at the door.” Free performance constituted a direct alternative to the establishment because it demonstrated that “there could be something for nothing.”

Greg stressed that the Angels wanted the audience to be astonished not only by the spectacle but by the fact that the spectacle had been produced and offered freely. “You could do a lot with the back of a refrigerator carton and some glitter,” he said. Beneath the extravagant theatrical surfaces was a social invitation: audiences could imagine joining an alternative community and separating themselves, at least partially, from the mainstream.

Beaver expanded the meaning of “Free” beyond admission prices. The Angels taught free classes in their studio and welcomed people into productions if they appeared consistently and rehearsed seriously. Members exchanged instruction in tap dance, African dance, mime, Bharatanatyam, martial arts, and other forms. The company’s openness was not synonymous with carelessness: rehearsals were long and disciplined, and people were expected not to arrive intoxicated.

She associated these activities with the principle of selfless service—serving others without claiming personal credit or directing attention toward oneself. Programs often omitted dates and individual credits. Beaver explained that the members “weren’t there to seek individual fame,” and she found the resulting anonymity liberating.

This discussion revealed a significant tension that reappeared later in the treatment of Bambi Lake. The Angels’ collective ethos discouraged personal ownership and individual fame, while Bambi, according to the panelists, possessed an intense lifelong desire to become famous. That difference was not directly analyzed during the event, but it provides an important context for understanding Bambi’s later ambitions and frustrations.

Kaliflower, Irving Rosenthal, Hibiscus, and the underground commune network

Asked about Kaliflower and its relationship to the Angels, Tahara gave an informal history of the post–Summer of Love communal milieu. He described the Haight-Ashbury scene as having collapsed or gone underground as the original street culture deteriorated. Many people moved into more stable communal households.

Tahara connected Hibiscus to Irving Rosenthal’s commune and printing operation. He described Irving as a former New York Beat associated with Allen Ginsberg and Peter Orlovsky, as well as the author of Sheeper. Irving brought a printing press to San Francisco and began publishing a newsletter for the commune community. Tahara also connected Hibiscus’s theatrical development to Irving’s unfinished film Ona Toy and to the influence of filmmaker and performance artist Jack Smith. In Tahara’s account, the film’s costumes and theatrical play helped stimulate Hibiscus’s experimentation with drag. Tahara’s remarks conveyed the essential relationship between Beat culture, communal living, underground printing, psychedelic experimentation, and the emergence of the Angels’ theatrical aesthetic.

Beaver later returned to the larger intercommunal network. She described the Free Food Family with Hunga Dunga Commune distributing food to the communes according to need rather than strictly according to each household’s contribution. Communes pooled resources and experimented with vegetarianism, veganism, and alternative food practices. The Kaliflower Commune distributed the intercommunal newspaper of the same name by hand. Kaliflower carried a heterogeneous mixture of information—recipes, sexual advice, practical hygiene, and reviews of Angels performances. Beaver called it “a really, really profound way of sharing.”

Tahara summarized the period by saying that after the Summer of Love, San Francisco “went underground.” For artists, he said, it was “like being in Paris in the ’20s”—an intensely fertile and magical creative environment.

Creativity, collective intimacy, and the effect on audiences

Beaver described the Angels as a place where she could exercise every part of her creative imagination. A member might paint scenery, choreograph a number, invent a dance, write dialogue, construct a character, and perform. “What a lucky thing to be able to make things up for your life,” she reflected.

She believed the shows used comedy, irony, exaggeration, and absurdity to communicate meanings deeper than their surfaces suggested. Their “over the top and preposterous” quality did not make them frivolous. Rather, ridiculousness provided a means of delivering poetic and political messages without being preachy.

As evidence of the performances’ emotional power, Beaver recalled an audience member attending Holy Cow with the ashes of a deceased friend. The person later told her that the performance had created an extraordinarily happy moment. Beaver was deeply moved by the idea that the show could become part of someone’s grieving and remembrance.

Greg emphasized that the force of the Angels came from the combination of their individual energies and from the fact that they knew one another as family. An audience was not merely seeing a theatrical production but witnessing “something very intimate.” The boundary between observer and participant remained porous: someone might join a show or become drawn further into the communal world surrounding it. He summarized what an Angels performance communicated as “a sense of community, a sense of creativity, and a sense of magic.”

Revolution as living outside prescribed boundaries

Asked what “revolution” meant within the Angels, Beaver answered in personal and cultural rather than narrowly institutional terms. Revolution meant “living outside the lines of life that were set down to us.” Relationships did not have to conform to inherited definitions; they could become “anything” and still be “valid and beautiful and wonderful.”

She also celebrated the Angels’ resourcefulness. They were “scrappy,” making spectacular theatrical worlds out of scavenged materials: “You didn’t have to have a lot of money. You didn’t have to have all the resources in the world. If you had a desire to do it and the energy to do it, you could make it happen.” The transformation of cardboard into India became a metaphor for the larger project: “Anything could become anything.”

The communal household extended the same principle into daily life. Members dumpster-dived, shopped at thrift stores, and maintained a communal drag room. Before performances, people from throughout the city might arrive to borrow clothes, including people the household did not know. Garments circulated freely and did not always return.

The house also fed approximately thirty people on some evenings. Members and visitors sat in a circle and took turns serving food to one another. Beaver described caring for others as “a real point of pride.” The free theater, communal wardrobe, shared food, and open household were therefore not separate activities. Together they constituted an integrated practice of collective life.

Family, belonging, and the costs of leaving conventional life

Greg returned repeatedly to the importance of substitute family. Many members had taken a major step by coming to San Francisco and joining the counterculture. In doing so, they risked losing relationships with families who would not accept them.

The Angels provided an alternative kinship structure: “You had a community, and you had a good time. You had an abundance of food, and we had family, and we nurtured children.” For a time, this world existed outside the establishment while sustaining “an amazing amount of creativity and humor and love.”

This description complicates conventional accounts that treat the Angels principally as a drag or theater troupe. The panelists represented them as a household, a school, a family, a free cultural institution, and a refuge. Their performances were public expressions of relationships and practices already being enacted in everyday communal life.

Ralph “Fifi” Sauer and the role of humor

Beaver and Tahara paused to remember Ralph Sauer, known as Fifi, as one of the Angels’ most inventive and comic performers. Beaver described him as even funnier at home than onstage. He knew show tunes, created masks and costumes, and devised absurd visual effects, such as appearing with numerous arms attached to his back and a baby-bottle nipple on his bare stomach.

For Beaver, this exemplified the Angels’ ability “to take everything and give it a little turn.” Tahara credited Ralph with appearing in women’s clothes while retaining a beard and mustache even before Hibiscus and praised his verbal humor, including such titles as “Turban Renewal” for one of the Angels’ shows.

Greg added that the presence of someone like Ralph helped members feel that they were not “doing the wrong thing.” Humor normalized their departure from conventional behavior and relieved the emotional burden of separation from family and mainstream society.

The creation of Parasites Under the Bourgeoisie

Greg offered Parasites Under the Bourgeoisie as an example of how an Angels production developed. Set against a fantastical version of the French Revolution, the show emerged from constant meetings in which members attempted to determine how to embody revolutionary ideas theatrically.

One element involved an approaching plague. Looking back, Greg found the motif disturbingly prophetic: the production imagined a community preparing for a plague without knowing that an actual epidemic would later devastate their world. Although he did not name AIDS directly, the historical reference was evident in his observation that the plague would “impact everyone for quite a while.”

Tahara described the show as fundamentally anti-capitalist. Its revolutionary message was conveyed through extravagant comedy: Adrian Brooks appeared as Countess Flushett wearing a giant toilet on her head, while another costume incorporated a statue of a small boy urinating into the Countess’s headpiece. The absurdity required extensive collective planning. Greg recalled that they had needed many meetings to determine how to accomplish it.

The story demonstrated that the apparently spontaneous chaos of an Angels production rested upon rehearsal, deliberation, technical ingenuity, and choreographic discipline.

Bambi Lake: talent, reinvention, ambition, addiction, and pain

The final section of the evening’s discussion shifted to Bambi Lake and was markedly more difficult and contentious. August presented a video he had created as a student at the University of San Francisco, featuring Bambi singing “Jaded Lady,” and read the lyrics to her “The Golden Age of Hustlers.” The panelists then attempted to reconcile Bambi’s artistic gifts with the instability, addiction, mental distress, and interpersonal conflict of her later life.

Tahara remembered Bambi’s early years in the Angels as those of a “sweet, kind person”—a capable singer, dancer, and performer. During a European tour with Hibiscus, Rodney, Beaver, and Greg, Bambi remained in Berlin and began living openly as a woman. Tahara’s account emphasized work in strip clubs, subsequent prostitution, methamphetamine use, and a severe personal decline. [Note: August subsequently clarified that, according to Bambi’s autobiography, she went to Europe twice with the Angels. She stayed in Berlin the second time, not when she went with Greg and Beaver.]

Greg corrected parts of Tahara’s narrative. He said that Bambi worked in Berlin with the well-known performer Romy Haag and that obtaining hormones and developing breasts were connected to the seriousness with which Bambi pursued female performance. Greg stressed that Bambi’s gender history should not be reduced to a simple or complete medical transition.

Beaver argued for a more encompassing view. She described Bambi’s life as composed of “huge swings” and “incredible dichotomies.” The proper film about Bambi, she suggested, would have to include the struggles, the aspirations, the glories, the vulgarity, and the refined artistry.

She remembered the young performer first known as Johnny Dancer as “the most slender, ethereal” figure, with a beautiful voice and an elevated, almost Kabuki-like manner. She also remembered Bambi holding Beaver’s infant son and singing “Angel Baby” to him on stage. These memories existed alongside later encounters with someone whom friends might avoid on the street or fear would arrive at their workplace.

Beaver therefore called for recognition of the “whole round story” of Bambi Lake—not an idealized icon and not simply a collection of scandalous anecdotes.

A generational divide over Bambi’s meaning

Tahara identified a revealing generational difference. Younger people, he observed, often see Bambi as “an iconic rebel” for whom boundaries did not exist and for whom everything was immediate and authentic. Members of Bambi’s own generation, by contrast, may view the story more tragically—as a life marked by failure, damage, and unrealized promise.

Greg responded by emphasizing Bambi’s severe psychological suffering. Because of their shared history and affection, friends could tolerate behavior that might otherwise have signaled an urgent need for intervention. He suggested that communities must recognize when a beloved person’s conduct reflects serious mental or behavioral-health problems and help find “an avenue” for someone presenting such a “conflicted,” “painful,” and “confused persona.”

Tahara clarified that the criticism was not directed against Bambi’s transgender identity but toward the pain of the individual person. Beaver agreed that Bambi’s life could be instructive for others experiencing pain and confusion: “It isn’t always a walk in the park.” Bambi, she said, “hit every note that could possibly be hit,” and therein lay the profundity of what her life might offer the world.

Fame desired and fame deferred

The panelists repeatedly returned to Bambi’s longing for fame. Beaver said that Bambi wanted to be “famous, famous, famous, famous”—a household name. Greg’s final story illustrated both Bambi’s talent and the obstacles that repeatedly frustrated her ambitions.

While living in London, Bambi informally attended classes at the London Institute of Fashion and learned tambour work, a technique for applying sequins to cloth with a hooked needle. She created a beautiful sample panel and planned to show it to Barbara Hulanicki’s Biba organization in the hope of obtaining bespoke work. Bambi traveled across London to present it, only to discover upon arrival that she had left the panel on the Underground.

For Greg, the incident encapsulated the difficulty of Bambi’s path toward fame: formidable ability and ambition were repeatedly undermined by disorganization, instability, or circumstance.

August added that Bambi had been sober during the final four years of her life and had begun performing again. Tahara, however, remembered her during this period as burdened by self-hatred and afraid to leave home because she believed people despised her. The contrast between renewed performance and profound isolation was left unresolved.

An audience member, Austin Kevin Roach, closed the remembrance on a more intimate note. He recalled sewing and beadwork with Bambi and regretted not having provided her with new dresses when she lacked performance clothes. He resisted dismissing her as merely “weird,” insisting instead that she was “a very, very talented person” whom he missed personally.

Principal conclusions

The discussion portrayed the Angels of Light as far more than an experimental theater troupe. In the panelists’ recollections, the Angels constituted:

• a sanctuary from war, homophobia, conventional masculinity, and family rejection;
• an alternative family built through communal residence, shared food, collective care, and the raising of children;
• a free cultural institution offering performances, instruction, clothing, food, and creative participation without monetary exchange;
• a laboratory for gender, costume, relationship, and personal transformation;
• an artistic expression of the broader Kaliflower intercommunal network;
• and a disciplined collective whose extravagant theatrical effects were created from scavenged materials, prolonged rehearsal, and continuous meetings.

The panelists did not present a romanticized picture without contradiction. They acknowledged alcohol and drug use, conflict, instability, domineering personalities, and the psychological costs endured by members. Yet even these darker recollections reinforced the importance of the communal structures the Angels attempted to create.

Bambi Lake’s legacy exposed the deepest tensions in the evening. To younger admirers, she may represent uncompromised rebellion, gender freedom, and artistic authenticity. To those who knew her over decades, she also represented addiction, mental suffering, frustrated ambition, and the limits of what friendship and communal tolerance could repair. Beaver’s demand that people remember the “whole round story” supplied the most balanced conclusion. Bambi’s talent, tenderness, excess, pain, aspiration, destructiveness, and survival cannot be separated without falsifying the life.

Taken as a whole, the event was an act of living communal history. Its value lay not in producing a single authoritative account but in preserving the differences among people who shared the experience. Beaver spoke primarily of transformation, creativity, and care; Greg emphasized political context, family, collective intimacy, and psychological complexity; Tahara supplied irreverent anecdote, historical detail, and blunt judgment. Their disagreements were themselves evidence of the continuing life of the Angels of Light—not as a settled legend, but as a community whose members are still determining what their experiment meant.

I thought the discussion added an important dimension to the history of the Angels that is often missing. The surviving photographs, programs, and reviews convey the extraordinary visual spectacle, but the memories of Beaver, Greg, and Tahara revealed the lived experience beneath it: the Angels as creative family, communal household, sanctuary, school, and practice of Free. Performance and daily life were intertwined. Their discussion helped explain not merely what the Angels did, but what the Angels were.

Prepared by Eric, August 1, 2026

R. G. Davis, founder of the San Francisco Mime Troupe, jumped stage from this plane of existence on the Summer Solstice.** Ronnie was one of a kind, impossible to replicate, impossible to forget. His ideas, his actions will live on in our memories and in the countless ways he shaped our lives.

Ron was one among a group born in the 1920s and 30s that were at the forefront of the Sixties Counterculture. I’m thinking of Allen Ginsberg the poet visionary of the Beats who liberated a generation and revived the Avant-Garde amidst the wasteland of the Fifties. I’m thinking of the radical pacifists who went to prison during World War II and became the core group protesting the nuclear age in the Fifties and beyond. Ron brought his passion, his intellect, and his vision to theatre. As one who had been schooled in classic mime but who also had a materialist historical perspective, Ron combined the avant-garde and the radical political. That is the uniqueness of the Mime Troupe. It is out of that cauldron that so many were activated. Ron wrote an essay in 1966 titled “Guerrilla Theatre” that became the blueprint for social change. The Diggers were the epitome of guerrilla theater — “teach, direct toward change, be an example of change.”

Ron and the Mime Troupe were catalysts above all. Ron’s arrest in 1965 for defying the capricious whims of the social elite in the person of the San Francisco Recreation and Parks department inspired a series of events that were crucial in the formation of the new Bohemia that emerged in the Haight-Ashbury. In this sense, the cover of Ron’s history of the Mime Troupe is especially apt. (See image below.) The creature appears as a griffin chained but giving birth to a new generation of baby griffins that are flying away under the banner “Engagement, Commitment, Fresh Air.” A perfect analogy of the role that Ron and the Mime Troupe performed in giving birth to El Teatro Campesino, the Artists Liberation Front, and the Diggers (most directly) and to numerous radical theatre groups (indirectly).

Word Cloud for Ron’s 90th

For Ronnie’s 90th birthday celebration, Joseph and I produced a two-sided 17″ x 22″ poster featuring a word cloud compiled from the names of people, groups, shows, concepts and events mentioned in Ron’s history of the SFMT.

Actor’s Workshop -> Mime Troupe -> Diggers -> Yippies: Radical Inheritance

In conversations I had with Ron Davis about the Diggers, he repeatedly returned to a problem of lineage: how radical movements acknowledge, deny, or rewrite the sources from which they emerged. A conversation we had in 2021 was especially illuminating because Ron linked the Diggers’ relation to both the Yippies and the San Francisco Mime Troupe. His argument was not that later groups were merely copies of their predecessors. Rather, he insisted that new formations could become quite different while still owing something real to the institutions, people, and practices that made them possible.

Ron’s basic point was that the Yippies were a genuine offshoot of Digger ideas, but not simply “the Diggers in New York.” He recalled that Abbie Hoffman came to San Francisco wanting to speak with Peter Berg, who told him, “No, go away, you ruined an idea.” Ron understood that East Coast activists had adopted the name “Diggers,” drawing on San Francisco practices such as free food programs, free stores, and the Free City mutual aid model. When the San Francisco Diggers objected, the East Coast group dropped the name and, as Ron put it, “they got together Jerry and Abbie and Krassner, and they came up with Yippie.” For Ron, “that’s the transition there”—but also “another spin-off.”

At the same time, Ron was emphatic that the Yippies developed within a distinct political milieu. He contrasted the Diggers’ anarchistic, local, theatrical, and communal practice with the Yippies’ more national, antiwar, media-oriented, and international political orientation. The East Coast figures, he said, “were international political; they were not anarchists,” whereas the Diggers were something else altogether. Yet he believed that historical distinction did not erase descent: “the idea of some of the ideas of the Diggers in San Francisco was used by the people in East Coast,” even though they were “quite different politically.”

Ron’s comparison with the Mime Troupe clarifies what he meant. The Diggers themselves were, in his view, one of the many formations that emerged from the San Francisco Mime Troupe’s generative milieu. He recalled that “80% of the people came from the Mime Troupe,” but that some participants immediately responded, “‘No, fuck the Mime Troupe.’” Ron did not take this repudiation at face value. “You can’t deny the spin-off,” he said. The point was not that the Diggers were reducible to the Mime Troupe, but that their theatrical methods, personnel, and political sensibility had roots there.

This was the larger historical pattern Ron wanted to expose. Groups break away, create something new, and then often deny their formation in order to claim total originality. As he put it, “each one, there’s ego involved,” producing the familiar declaration: “We did our things, we were independent, we didn’t learn anything from you, and you didn’t learn anything from them.” He called this a particularly American habit: “everybody’s got to be an individual, they have no history, they didn’t work anywhere else.”

Ron saw this tendency not merely as vanity but as a falsification of history. He cited former Mime Troupe members who went on to establish other companies and projects while minimizing or denying the troupe’s formative role. In contrast, he insisted on naming his own debt: “where I came from was the Actors’ Workshop. Without the San Francisco Actors’ Workshop, I wouldn’t have been here today.” For him, that recognition did not diminish later achievements; it made their development intelligible.

His anger about Tom Weinberg’s handling of the Chicago Conspiracy footage belonged to the same argument. Ron believed Weinberg presented himself as the person who had discovered and publicly revealed the material, despite Ron’s requests concerning the edit and introduction. Ron saw this as another act of appropriation: collective history or inherited material being treated as the private possession of the person controlling its circulation. In that sense, the dispute over the footage was not separate from the Digger–Yippie or Mime Troupe–Digger questions. All involved the same struggle over who gets to narrate origins, claim credit, and define what counts as the history.

Taken together, Ron’s argument is a defense of continuity against the mythology of pure originality. The Mime Troupe helped produce the Diggers; the Diggers helped furnish ideas and practices that the Yippies adapted; and each subsequent formation developed its own style, politics, and identity. But none of these movements emerged from nowhere. Ron’s insistence was that one can acknowledge both difference and descent: the Yippies were not the Diggers, and the Diggers were not simply the Mime Troupe, but each was shaped by the ground from which it arose.

Links:

1. Guerrilla Theatre, Ron’s essay that defined the form.
2. Have You Heard of the San Francisco Mime Troupe? A film by Don Lenzer and Fred Wardenburg, narrated by Paul Herlinger (1966)
3. Conspiracy 8: R.G. Davis Interviews the Chicago Seven
4. Ron’s obituary in the San Francisco Chronicle.

* Brighella was one of the principal zanni, or servant-trickster figures, of commedia dell’arte. He was neither a naïve innocent nor a harmless clown. Quick, watchful, verbally agile, and often sharp-edged, Brighella survived by wit, improvisation, and an ability to turn the pretensions of masters, soldiers, merchants, and officials against themselves. He could be a servant, innkeeper, fixer, schemer, or sometime rogue: socially subordinate, yet often the most capable person on the stage. Where Arlecchino was hungry, impulsive, and acrobatic, Brighella was more calculating—a practical strategist of disorder, alert to power and adept at exposing its absurdities. R.G. Davis played Brighella on the day he was arrested in 1965 for defying the San Francisco Recreation and Parks Commission after they revoked the Mime Troupe’s permit to perform in the parks.

** June 21, 2026. Winter Solstice in the southern hemisphere, as I’m sure Ronnie would have wanted me to clarify.

This video is a recording of a presentation I gave at the Book Club of California on February 2, 2026. I was invited to speak about the Diggers and the archive assembled over the past half century. The talk approaches the “Digger movement” as extending beyond the original Haight-Ashbury moment to include the Kaliflower network of communes, which carried forward the legacy of Free. [Click the image to view the video.]

Note: the following post lists sources that I referenced in the talk.

This is a sheet I handed out for the talk February 2, 2026 at the Book Club of California, “Digger Do: Excavating a Social Movement Through Its Print Ephemera.”

1. Roots of the Movement

• English Diggers 17^th century
• English Digger Writings
• San Francisco Mime Troupe
• Guerrilla Theatre
• Artists Liberation Front

2. San Francisco Diggers (1966-67)

• Overview
• Digger Writings
• Free Feeds in the Panhandle
• Free Store
• Digger Bread/Free Bakery
• The Invisible Circus
• A Brief History
• Les Diggers de San Francisco (film)

3. Communication Company (1967)

• Overview
• Chester Anderson’s Archive
• Catalog of Com/Co broadsides

4. Free City Collective (1967-68)

• Overview
• Free City Magazine (#1, #2)
• Free City News
• Digger Papers 1968
• NOWSREAL (film)
• Free City Bank

5. Free Print Shop & Kaliflower (1968+)

• Overview
• Angels of Light Free Theatre
• Free Print Shop
• Free Print Shop Catalog
• Deep Tried Frees
• Kalflower Covers
• Selections from Kaliflower
• Apostles of Free: A History of Kaliflower

Link to the GoFundMe: https://gofund.me/b5046cccf

The Angels of Light Free Theatre were one of the most dazzling offshoots of the San Francisco counterculture. Emerging in 1970 from the spirit of the Diggers and Kaliflower communes, the Angels dedicated themselves to creating free theater for the people of the city. Their shows were kaleidoscopic pageants of color, costume, and imagination—part Greek tragedy, part acid vaudeville, part street carnival—performed in parks, warehouses, lofts, or wherever an audience could gather. The Angels believed that art should never be sold, only shared. Their performances, given without charge, invited everyone present to step into a world of collective joy and transformative possibility.

Debra “Beaver” Bauer was one of the core members of the Angels of Light. Aside from her skill as a performer and designer, she has been the guardian of the Angels’ creative legacy. For decades, Beaver has carefully curated an extraordinary archive: photographs, drawings, costumes, scripts, music, sets, masks, props, programs, posters, announcements, and the lived stories of a communal troupe that redefined what theater could be.

Recently, Beaver uncovered a rare treasure: six Super 8 film canisters shot by fellow Angel Brian Mulhern between 1972 and 1979. These reels contain living history—performances, gatherings, and glimpses into the communal magic of the Angels of Light—that have never been seen outside their circle. One of the main goals of this GoFundMe is to digitize these films at the highest 1080p resolution, ensuring their survival for future generations.

We also want to help Beaver continue her curatorial work. She has been relying on a ten-year-old computer that is now on its last legs. A new computer will allow her to preserve, catalog, and present the Angels archive in ways that match the brilliance of the material itself.

This project is sponsored by The Digger Archives, which has long been dedicated to preserving and sharing the legacy of the Diggers, Kaliflower, and the many free cultural movements that sprang from them. Supporting this campaign means helping to keep alive one of the most visionary communal art experiments in San Francisco’s history.

The Angels of Light taught us that beauty and generosity can change the world. With your support, Beaver can continue to safeguard their vision and make it accessible to artists, historians, and dreamers everywhere. Please help us honor this extraordinary legacy. Every contribution brings the Angels’ shimmering, communal light one step closer to being preserved for all time.

Thank you for your support.

P.S. In the photo collage at the top of this page, that’s Beaver in the upper right corner wearing red and purple, costumed and radiant as ever, embodying the spirit of the Angels of Light.

What We’re Raising Funds For

1. Digitization of six Super 8 film canisters (footage by Brian Mulhern, 1972–1979)
   – Cost: $691.40
2. External hard drives to safely store and back up the digitized films and archival materials
   – Cost: $130.32
3. A new MacBook Air to replace Beaver’s ten-year-old computer, giving her the tools she needs to continue curating, cataloging, and sharing the archive
   – Cost: $1,954.16

Total: $2,775.88

If we are fortunate enough to raise more than this goal, the additional funds will be set aside for future Angels of Light archival projects—ensuring that more of this remarkable history can be preserved and shared.

Link to the GoFundMe: https://gofund.me/b5046cccf

Tracing the Digger Movement Through Them That Lived It

This is the program for a talk that I presented at the closing event for the Our Commons Are Free exhibition at Fort Mason in San Francisco last month (August 9, 2025). The booklet was printed “fan-fold” style and measured 4-1/4″ x 5-1/2″.

“These are the times that try our democracy”

A Digger Paper

On the Summer Solstice 2025, at the Our Commons Are Free exhibit at Fort Mason in San Francisco, the Diggers distributed a new Digger Paper. It was a fan-fold booklet similar to a street zine. Here is the text and the images of each page.

Fellow citizens and netizens,

Our country stands on a knife’s edge. What was once a noble experiment to establish stable self-governance now teeters between farce and catastrophe. We are beset not by foreign tyrants but by domestic demagogues who wrap their ambition in the flag, speak of freedom while silencing dissent, and claim the mantle of the people while serving the wealthiest few.

Let it be plainly said:

A government that permits billionaires to purchase lawmakers, that rolls back voting rights while expanding corporate rights, that attacks science, justice, and truth—is no government by the people. It is a counterfeit of democracy.

The Founders warned us against monarchy, and yet we flirt again with rule by strongmen. We see courts stacked, laws twisted, and public trust sold off piece by piece to the highest bidder. This is not “politics as usual.” It is a campaign against the common good.

The crisis is not one man, but a system that shields the powerful and punishes the poor. A system where schools crumble and hospitals close while defense contractors and oil companies grow fat. Where the working majority is told to tighten belts as billionaires blast themselves into space.

The hard-won victories of the civil rights era are under siege. The right to vote—bought with the blood of Black Americans—is being hollowed out. Women’s autonomy is rolled back by courts that ignore precedent and scorn equality. And LGBTQ+ citizens, once emerging from the shadows of criminalization, now find their rights to healthcare, expression, and even existence debated anew. What was once enshrined as progress is now dismissed as excess. This backlash is no accident. It is a calculated effort to reverse the freedoms that millions marched, fought, and died to secure.

The earth itself is under assault. Protections fought for by generations—clean air, safe water, wild lands preserved for all—are stripped away for short-term profit. Polluters are rewarded, climate science denied, and natural disasters met with indifference or opportunism. The sacred balance between humanity and the planet is treated as collateral damage in the pursuit of endless extraction. This is not progress. It is plunder. And it leaves our children a diminished world—hotter, harsher, and more unjust.

And where immigrants—who labor in our fields, care for our children, and enrich our culture—are demonized, detained, and deported in the name of fear. The promise etched at the base of the Statue of Liberty is betrayed daily by policies of cruelty and exclusion.
Is this the liberty we were promised?

Let us return to first principles.

No monarchy.
No ruler above the law.
No government without the consent of the governed.
No justice denied because of wealth, race, gender, or belief.

We need not accept corruption as fate. We need not live under permanent emergency, culture war, or oligarchic rule. Power can be reclaimed. The soul of a nation is not for sale.

We must declare independence from cynicism. From fear. From lies. And affirm again our allegiance—to democracy, to community, to truth, and to one another.

Do not wait for saviors.

Be the revolution.

Join the movement to rebuild the Republic—free, fair, and for all.
Now is the time. Not later.

Not after the next election.

NOW.

“A long habit of not thinking a thing wrong gives it a superficial appearance of being right.”— Thomas Paine, Common Sense, 1776

Cover image: Thomas Paine, a corset maker from England, immigrated to Pennsylvania in 1774 at a moment of rising revolutionary fervor. His 1776 pamphlet Common Sense laid out a plainspoken argument against monarchy and for democratic self-rule. Published at a time of low morale, it became an instant sensation, electrifying the spirit of resistance that resulted in the Declaration of Independence six months later. By the end of the Revolutionary war, one in five Americans owned a copy of Paine’s catalytic essay.

Ben Kinmont arrived at my doorstep in 2022 asking to see the Digger archive. Ben is a project-based artist, and out of that first encounter emerged Our Commons Are Free. The initial iteration took place in a Santa Rosa park later that year, where Ben set up a Risograph—a stencil-based duplicator similar in spirit to the old Gestetner mimeograph machines used by the Communication Company and Free City—to print copies of A Short History of the San Francisco Diggers (and the movement they spawned) for anyone passing by.

Since that first production, Ben has taken Commons to Italy, to Paris, and most recently to the Wigan Festival in England. Now, this celebration of the Diggers is coming home. Beginning June 21, Fort Mason will host the latest iteration of the project. Ben has added new dimensions to the exposition, expanding its reach and resonance. Here is a link to the Fort Mason announcement.

Peter Coyote posted a message on Facebook this morning that struck me with the same force as when I first read Thomas Paine’s Common Sense. For those who may have forgotten their American history, Common Sense was the spark that resulted in the Declaration of Independence six months later. (More about Paine and his pamphlet later—it sold 500,000 copies in a population of just 2.5 million.) But first, read Peter’s words. Share them far and wide. In this moment, Peter Coyote is Thomas Paine incarnate.

Quieting the Canaries (by Peter Coyote)

There are some spectacles, like staring into the sun that are so overwhelming they become destabilizing. They strip our sense of norms and proportion which might buttress any conventional reality. As a Zen priest who has meditated for over 50 years, my own mind and its projections, I would like to share my perceptions of this current moment as a source of  possible clarity.

An entire class of people, powerful because they are wealthy—conservative billionaires funding Christian Nationalists and other varieties of anti-democratic upheaval; tech billionaires who’ve concluded their mathematical talents should exempt them from social responsibilities and any consequences for the feral and deliberately addictive Social media they’ve unleashed on the Nation. This list would include C-suite Executives so fixated on share price, corporate bottom lines and bonuses, that the disintegration of our National life is collateral damage.

This cabal has concluded they’ve reached the zenith of their possibilities and would like to freeze their advantages where they are. They have successfully strategized how to loot the Nation of every form of its wealth, simultaneously exempting themselves from every social and legal responsibility to the majority of its citizens.

There is no other way to appreciate the self-benefit they’ve designed into the current Republican Administration budget—its tax-cuts for them alone, imposing on every citizen, business, and national event, the exorbitant interest costs of a $9 Trillion dollar National debt (about a Trillion a year). It’s an inconceivably large number. A thousand seconds is about 16 minutes. A trillion seconds is 32,000 years. 1,000 pennies would fit in a small jar. A trillion pennies would make a cube the size of a football field. $9 Billion dollars represents nearly 30% of our entire 2025 GDP of  $30.34 Trillion. It’s an amount larger than our current military budget and will constrict economic possibilities and policies, public investment for research, innovation, public health services, Medicare and Social Security for generations.

The current abandoning of medical and scientific research, once among America’s greatest contribution to the world: the cancellation of aid, food and medicine to the world’s poorest people, the decision to end the global detection and cure of pandemics for our own early warning, the refusal to acknowledge climate crisis or diminish the amount of oil, diesel and jet fuel that we burn, or to acknowledge our failures to protect our citizens of color and non-standard gender definitions from vastly unequal treatment is a public announcement by bullhorn from this class to the rest of us, that their value system includes nothing but their personal empowerment beyond which nothing is worth a moment of their consideration.

This is an entire class of people, the real enablers of the Trump Republican agenda. It includes every Republican official, State, Local or National who have surrendered their Constitutional right to legislate and control the spending of our revenues. They deny the Constitutional birthright of Congress itself and in this regard are equally culpable to the mob that invaded the Capitol on January 6th.

Stories of brazen arrests and attacks on public officials advertise over mass media which people do and do not count to them, which ones are exempt from regulation and law and which are not. In the face of this daily insult to our body Politic, our news media takes delusional cheer celebrating unenforceable Court decisions, convincing ourselves that we are not in a “crisis” because “the judges are on our side.” This is the self-delusionary myopia that lulled thousands of Americans to their deaths and spilled our blood and treasure into the dirt, sand, and rice paddies of Vietnam, Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan.

TV rakes in ad revenues from describing the chaos as the entire Nation is dismantled in front us by this lawless class, supported by a majority on the Supreme Court, whose flagrant public corruption would embarrass a hypocritical tele-evangelist.

The political class has sat idly by for decades allowing money unrestrained rule over our every political and cultural institution. They have pawned our public airwaves off to the corporate sector and the public never noticed it. Until we begin serious deliberations to curtail that power—Universal or Mandatory voting, prohibition of corporate contributions to politics, fully funded National elections—we will do nothing but continue to witness and chitter about the catastrophe amongst ourselves, like pet canaries, at day’s end as the night cloth is draped over the cage, stilling our song.

—Peter Coyote (May 13, 2025)