Publicity Clerkin' At New American Library Revisited: (23)

 Around the time I was publicity clerkin' at New American Library [NAL], the WUO published its Prairie Fire book and some kind of Prairie Fire Organizing Committee [PFOC] above-ground Movement organizing group was formed in the New York City area. But at that time not ever bumping into any of the PFOC organizers on the NYC streets during the time I was working at NAL, the opportunity to then link-up with the PFOC in New York City never developed for me at this time.

So, aside from occasionally attending a Workers World Party [WWP] event-- and picking up the weekly newspapers of the various U.S. left-wing sect groups and the [now-defunct] independent radical left U.S. Guardian newsweekly, at a bookstore on St. Mark's Place on the Lower East Side/East Village neighborhood, or buying pamphlets or journals that were then sold at the pro-Maoist China Book Store or at the pro-USSR book store, below 23rd Street in Manhattan, or at the small pro-Soviet CP Jefferson Bookstore, near Union Square--I can't recall having much personal out-of-work actual contact with the U.S. Left Movement of the 1970s, while I worked at NAL.

Could be, though, that it was around this time that I attended a talk by some white antiwar Movement woman activist who, after returning from a visit to South Vietnam, described the horrific conditions that imprisoned political opponents of the U.S.-backed Thieu regime were experiencing in their tiger-cage cells, in a meeting at NYU's Loeb Student Center by Washington Square Park, perhaps?

Being moved emotionally by the talk of this antiwar woman, who seemed to be in her late 20s, I actually stopped by the antiwar Movement office where she worked one weekday after work, to perhaps offer to do some volunteer work on the campaign to expose the tiger-cage cell conditions of political prisoners in South Vietnam around that time.

But, perhaps because she was unaware of how experienced a Movement activist I had been in the 1960s, she seemed to somehow think it strange that I would follow-up hearing her talk about the this issue by, unlike others in the audience who had attended her NYU student center talk, showing up at her office to volunteer; and I was not encouraged by her to get involved politically with her campaign in my spare-time.

So I thus, in turn, dropped the idea that she was an antiwar Movement person I could work with politically in a politically productive way in the mid-1970s, despite her ability to give a good talk about the tiger-caged cell political prisoners of  the U.S.-backed  Thieu regime in South Vietnam.