In the Company of Rebels. Chellis Glendinning
Doomsday Clock had been readjusted from its former seven minutes before midnight in 1980 to a hair-trigger three by 1984. Our task was to catalyze a new generation of activists who would plunge into the movement against nuclear proliferation.
After the workshop goers’ fear and grief had been excavated and expressed, we would meditate to envision ways to contribute to making a safer world. As far back as 1977, Marc had come up with the Vivatron Bomb, an antidote to the neutron bomb touted by the U.S. government as a military techno-strategy that, upon detonation, would kill all living beings but leave buildings, roads, bridges, vehicles, and airports intact. Marc’s notion was to create a bomb that would destroy the buildings, roads, bridges, vehicles, and airports that ecologists were identifying as sources of a lifestyle that was devastating the planet—and leave the people, animals, and plants to thrive anew.
The ways he and I together contributed to making a safer world were to organize protests, march against nearby weapons-researching Livermore Laboratory, canvas door-to-door for the Nuclear Freeze, write articles, and do radio interviews. To lend some humor to the effort, we also decided to host a contest toward a citizens’ invention of the Vivatron Bomb. Parade, California Living, Albuquerque Journal, and San Francisco Bay Guardian ran notices for the competition, and letters poured in from all over the United States—five shopping bags of entries stuffed to the brim, to be exact. On the drive to Bolinas where, in a borrowed cottage, we were to read the ideas and determine the winner, I was suddenly struck with the fact that we did not actually have the $50,000 prize money we had so frivolously promised. But Marc, of course, had thought all that through: the contest rules stated that the entries had to be not only great ideas for inventions, but also had to have been demonstrated in a major U.S. city. Needless to say, no Vivatron Bomb had yet toppled the Sears Building or set ablaze the New York Thruway—and so we published an article in California Living presenting the best of the lot.
This wellspring of ideas was third-generation Russian immigrant: the family surname before hitting Ellis Island had been Kasajovic, which translated to “fur pelt”; his great-grandfather had been a hat maker. The authorities immediately changed it to Kaskowitz; then when, as a Jew, Marc’s father set out to play professional baseball, to avoid discrimination he changed it to Kasky. One of Marc’s foremost beloveds was the woman who had braved the journey across the Atlantic from Eastern Europe and raised four children alone: Grandmother Rae. From her he learned independence of mind.
His parents were Alice and Dick Kasky. They set about making their home in Stamford, Connecticut, where, upon reaching only the minor leagues, Dick opened a tire store. Marc launched a brief career as what in those days was called a JD (juvenile delinquent)—robbing cars, breaking/entering. Then, suddenly, he made a 180-degree turn-around and became the first in the family to go to college: Connecticut Wesleyan, and later, to Yale for a master’s in urban planning. But the times lent themselves more to “drop out/tune in” work than to joining a firm in Hartford. Marc got a job as a community organizer in Jersey City.
His apartment was a third floor walk-up. The Hippie Revolution was in full bloom, although admittedly not that evident in working-class Jersey City, and on his paltry organizer’s salary, he had zero cash to spend on fixing up the place. So he gathered a bunch of wooden fruit crates and some enormous slabs of foam rubber, painted them neon orange, and set them in a sort of amphitheater arrangement in the otherwise bare living room.
Imagine Grandmother Rae’s visit. Here she had trudged hundreds of miles behind a donkey cart in the dead of winter, braved a harrowing trip across the ocean on a crammed steamer replete with fleas, lice, and the vomit of the seasick, and made her heroic way into a New York City burgeoning with immigrants like herself looking for the same bottom-level jobs. Now at last, here was the fruit of her efforts, her grandson who had, by the might of his own intelligence, achieved the American Dream: he had gone to Yale and graduated with a master’s degree! The door swung open. Inside: a sweltering walk-up apartment boasting termite-gnawed window sills, chipped linoleum floor—and a (Sears and Roebuck, not!) living room set of used cartons and screeching orange foam pads!
Marc’s work made an ingenious pivot in the 1990s. A proponent of Richard Grossman’s work on the legal “personhood” that bestows the freedoms (read: unimpeded license) corporations use to exploit workers and resources, he and his long-time buddy attorney Alan Caplan cooked up a means to stymie offenders. They launched a series of lawsuits: Kasky vs. Jolly Green Giant, Kasky vs. Perrier, and the most infamous, Kasky vs. Nike Corporation. The key to each was false advertising. Jolly Green Giant had advertised that its recipe for frozen vegetable dinners was “California style”—yet the product was actually made in Mexico. Perrier had boasted that its water was naturally carbonated underground and bottled at the source—when in fact the spring had dried up years before and the water came out of a tap. Marc and Alan won both cases.
Not once did they request personal remuneration in the settlements. Never short on ideas, Marc requested that Jolly Green Giant donate the money to Second Harvest, a non-profit that distributed to food banks. The Perrier settlement occurred during the riots in Los Angeles, and he proposed—and got—Perrier to supply thousands of water bottles to protestors and looters in the streets!
The Nike case, though—this one thrust him into the limelight of the national financial world, including a five-page feature in Fortune called “Nike Code of Conduct,” plus stories in the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, San Francisco Chronicle, etc. The gist of the suit was that Nike publicized that its workers in Indonesia and Vietnam labored in safe conditions. In reality, according to a report by its own team leaked by a disgruntled worker to the New York Times, abuses abounded. Caplan’s law firm Bushnell, Caplan and Fielding proved to be too small for the case, and Milberg Weiss of Los Angeles joined up. It went to municipal court, then to appeals court, both of which they lost. In these suits Marc was, of all things, listed as “Private Attorney General” of the State of California so that he could not personally benefit from any gains (a title he regarded as a step down from Admiral of the house boats). His team of lawyers appealed to the State Supreme Court and won. Nike appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court. Amazingly, the decision of Kasky vs. Nike went for the plaintiff—and, as a result, millions of dollars went to groups monitoring sweatshop practices around the world. The anti-corporate-globalization movement, of course, was thrilled. Corporations: 0, Visitors: 3.
Marc and I broke up in 1987. A few years later, after much deliberation on the pros and cons of the legal institution of marriage, he and his new love, actress Cat Carr, tied the knot to a full house at the Cowell Theater—with all his former lovers there to give him away. When I visited the Bay Area from my then-home in New Mexico, they always invited me to stay at their house. Marc continues his work to challenge corporate personhood, and each summer he and Cat drive their 1974 Chrysler Commander to the Burning Man celebration in Black Rock, Nevada. There the intrepid Admiral/Attorney General sits—dressed in a blue fake-fur jacket and billowing orange dance pants, eager to share the wisdom of experience with young people at a booth he calls Counsel from an Elder.
Another wild idea …
PONDEROSA PINE: SIDEWALK SOLES
(1932–2014)
That’s not a new idea, bro. We knew THAAAA-AAAT like, you know, for-EV-er!
—P.P., EARTH READ OUT
Ponderosa Pine was known for the soles of his feet; they had not seen the insides of a pair of shoes since 1968. That year an ecological epiphany struck him as he departed all trappings of the straight life in which his name had been Keith Lampe and morphed into an eco pilgrim named for a tree. Ever since then he had tread the sidewalks of the Haight, the stone paths of Golden Gate Park, and the beaches of Bolinas with neither hide, hair, nor last of footwear.
I got a glimpse of those soles when, fifteen years later, Marc Kasky introduced me to him at Fort Mason Center. They were thick. They were hard. They were the color of the black hole of the universe. Dear reader, we are talking an inch of freshly tarred epidermis contoured