Why, anybody can have a brain. That’s a very mediocre commodity. Every pusillanimous creature that crawls on the Earth or slinks through slimy seas has a brain. Back where I come from, we have universities, seats of great learning, where men go to become great thinkers. And when they come out, they think deep thoughts and with no more brains than you have. But they have one thing you haven’t got: a diploma.
The Wizard, The Wizard of Oz
- Interactivist — Ben Morea — Garbage Guerrilla (16beaver.org)
In the late 1960s, Ben Morea was the notorious leader of an unsavory Lower East Side anarchist collective called Up Against the Wall, Motherfucker. As a young historian who studies that period, I’d spent almost three years trying to locate him. All the leads I’d followed went nowhere. It was as if Morea had vanished, every bit as thoroughly as a jet contrail.