It was while I was publicity clerkin' at the New American Library paperback publishing firm that the heiress to the super-rich Hearst Dynasty's excess wealth, Patty Hearst, was taken hostage in Berkeley, California by the Symbionese Liberation Army [SLA[ racially-mixed urban guerrilla group.
Led by an ex-California prisoner named "Cinque" a/k/a Donald DeFreeze, the SLA demanded that the family descendants of 20th-century media baron William Randolph Hearst/"Citizen Kane"--who in the 1970s still controlled many newspapers, magazines and U.S. television stations--both disseminate the SLA's revolutionary communiques and set up a "food-for-the-poor"/"serve the people" program.
Soon after the SLA grabbed Patty Hearst and her then-boyfriend--a guy named Steve Weed (who apparently had previously been somewhat politically sympathetic towards the U.S. antiwar movement as a student), some folks in U.S. left circles and U.S. underground press circles were already speculating that both the Red Brigade urban guerrilla group in 1970s Italy and the SLA were "agent-provocateur" groups set up by police agents to grab headlines and discredit left-wing movements.
But, like Bernardine and the Weather Underground (who issued an open letter to the 1970s underground press which, while criticizing the SLA for previously killing an authoritarian Black school superintendent in Oakland, noted that "for two generations, the Hearst newspapers have wielded their power" and "the guerrillas have kidnapped the daughter of a rich and powerful man in order to provide food to the poor"), I then felt the SLA's "arrest" of the daughter of the then-Hearst Corporation Chairman of the Board Randolph Hearst was morally and politically justified; as well as a creative way to break through the 1970s U.S. corporate mass media's continued denial of free speech rights and equal mass media access to most anti-imperialist revolutionary U.S. political groups who wished to present their political viewpoint to people in the United States.
So using some of the free time during my workdays in the New American Library office to read one of the newspapers that was reprinting the texts of SLA communiques, I actually ended up writing a folk song, titled "Live Like Cinque," which included the lyrics "Live like Cinque, the champion of the poor" around this time. Because in the 1970s I then felt that text like the following reflected my own feelings and political viewpoint in many ways:
"We must first understand who the Hearsts are, who they serve and represent. Randolph A. Hearst is the corporate chairman of the fascist media empire of the ultra-right Hearst Corporation, which is one of the largest propaganda institutions of this oppressive military dictatorship of the militarily armed corporate state that we now live under in this nation..."
And I also then felt that the SLA was justified in making the following demand of Randolph Hearst, as the price for returning his daughter, Patty Hearst:
"Each person with one of the following cards is to be given 70 dollars [equal to around $437 dollars in 2024 U.S. dollars] worth of meats, vegetables, and dairy products: all people with welfare cards, Social Security pension cards, food stamp cards, disabled-veteran cards, medical cards, parole or probation papers, and jail-or-bail release slips."
