Playboy Interview: Joan Baez

It's been 11 years since a slim, long-haired 18-year-old girl appeared at the Newport Folk Festival and transfixed the audience with what one writer called her "achingly pure soprano." After dominating all accounts of that event, she returned to Newport the next year, 1960, and her first album (on Vanguard) was released that fall. Its sales were unprecedented for a folk singer self-accompanied on guitar, and her subsequent concert appearances were unfailingly triumphant.

This gifted young woman was Joan Baez. Born on Staten Island in 1941--her mother Scotch-English in background, her father of Mexican parentage--she grew up peripatetic, because her physicist father moved his family often in the course of his work as a researcher and UNESCO consultant. Much of that growing up took place in small towns in New York and California, where she sang in school choirs and eventually taught herself to play the guitar. When the Baezes moved to Boston, Joan studied drama briefly at Boston University, but her increasing involvement in the Cambridge-Boston nexus of folk clubs then flourishing pulled her out of school and into a singing vocation that led to her ascent into the national consciousness in the early Sixties.

Although the music scene has changed radically since then--having become rock-driven, electrified and ecumenical--Joan Baez still draws huge audiences and remains a singular presence. Her attraction now, however, is based on much more than the undiminished power of her voice. She has become a leading activist for nonviolence as a way of life, as a way to create what she calls "the revolution"--a society in which the sanctity of life transcends all other values, including nationalism. Accordingly, she travels and organizes for the Resistance, whose members refuse to be drafted into the Armed Forces. (Her husband, David Harris, a leader in the Resistance, is now serving a three-year prison sentence for refusing induction.) Young men have turned in their draft cards to her at concerts and others have come to the decision to resist while enrolled at her Institute for the Study of Nonviolence at Palo Alto, California.

The emergence of Joan Baez as a battling and embattled force for her extramusical convictions began in 1963, when she refused to appear on ABC-TV's "Hootenanny" because that network was black-listing fellow folk singer Pete Seeger. The next year, she began to engage in tax resistance to the Vietnam war and to defense spending and, ever since, has refused to pay that part of her income taxes which she estimates will be used for death. The Government doggedly collects it, anyway--usually by attaching her income--along with a penalty for nonpayment.

During the Sixties, she also became a highly visible and vulnerable civil rights activist, marching and singing in the South as well as in the North. Among other causes, she has assisted Cesar Chavez in his organizing efforts and boycotts on behalf of Mexican-American migrant farm workers. But her primary focus in recent years has been against the war and the draft. In October 1967, she was arrested with 118 others for blocking the Armed Forces Induction Center in Oakland; after serving a ten-day sentence at Santa Rita Prison Farm, she was arrested again in December for sitting in front of the Oakland Induction Center. The result was another prison term--this one for 31 days.

Following her marriage to Harris in March 1968, they toured the country, speaking for the Resistance. Now, with her husband in jail, she continues to organize and speak out for nonviolent action, increasingly using the forum of nationally televised talk shows. Playboy's interview with her--the longest and most comprehensive she has ever given--was conducted by Nat Hentoff in New York, where she had come to appear at a concert in Madison Square Garden. As is now the rule--at her insistence--none of the seats at her concerts costs more than two dollars. Twenty thousand came and several thousand more were turned away. Her program ranged from the old labor-union organizing song, "Joe Hill," to the Rolling Stones' "As Tears Go By." Between songs, she spoke of her husband, of the reasons for his being in jail, and she revealed that their first child had been conceived. She also talked to the audience of her implacable opposition

To violence, nationalism, hate and exploitation.

As critic Marlene Nadle wrote of the event in The Village Voice, "Baez, by her presence, reaffirmed the positive, now dimming side of the movement, its humanity, its love, its moral choices. In her continuing faith in the power of non-violence, she was the symbol of [what] many in the audience would have liked to have been if disillusion or temperament or fashion or reason hadn't taken them on to different things." They listened to her and cheered her; for, as a member of the audience said, "Baez may not be fashionable or hip. But she's discovered the secret. She always knows who she's coming as."

Hentoff talked with Miss Baez throughout the day following the concert. "I've known Joan for ten years," he writes. "She's always had immovable integrity; but at the beginning, it occasionally manifested itself in a rather aloof manner, and those whom she resisted on matters of principle sometimes mistook her shyness for arrogance. Through the years, I've watched Joan become noticeably more relaxed as a performer--and evolve into a growing figure of controversy. Simultaneously, her dedication to nonviolence has become deeper and much more knowledgeable. What most impressed me in this interview with Joan was how thoughtfully and honestly she has faced the ambiguities and the practical difficulties inherent in a total commitment to active pacifism.

"We talked in her nondescript room at a large, equally nondescript motel on the West Side of Manhattan. In the elevators and the corridors, Muzak was inescapable and the place itself was equally artificial--everything, from walls to carpets, having been made of a material intended to imitate some other material. I asked her why she had chosen such plastic surroundings. She laughed. 'Traveling with the boys who accompany me, we all get to looking a little weird, and it's just not worth the sweat of going into a fancy hotel. And I'm more comfortable not being waited on with the silver trays and all that stuff. So I just wanted somewhere that was as totally mediocre as you could get, and this is it. They've put the Jefferson Airplane in this wing with us--you know, keeping all the freaks in one quarter. But that's fine. We can go get ice barefoot and do just what we want.'

"In the room, Joan sat down and stretched back in her chair. Her black hair, which used to fall past her shoulders, was now cut short. With some women, short hair evokes hardness and toughness, but Joan had never seemed more feminine. In a blue-flower-print dress, her feet bare, her figure still lithe, there was a glow in her that I'd never seen before. Perhaps it was the pregnancy, which ended on December second, with the birth of a boy, Gabriel. Perhaps it was the assurance she has gained as a practicing pacifist who knows how much she can sacrifice--including three years away from her husband--and yet do much more than survive. I wondered how much room was left for music, now that she was so wholly involved as an activist; the interview began on that note."

[Q] Playboy: You've said several times in the past year, "Music isn't my thing anymore." Why not?

[A] Baez: What I meant was that music alone isn't enough for me. If I'm not on the side of life in action as well as in music, then all those sounds, however beautiful, are irrelevant to the only real question of this century: How do we stop men from murdering each other, and what am I doing with my life to help stop the murdering? Whatever I do in music now has to be part of that larger context. I used to be called the folk-singer pacifist; now I'm considered a pacifist folk singer. It's just a new set of priorities.

[Q] Playboy: When did you begin to change those priorities?

[A] Baez: I can't answer that with a definite date. But there are certain assumptions, certain basic convictions I've had since I was a little girl--being against violence, knowing that I didn't have the right to do injury to anyone. The problem all along for me has been trying to define what I see happening and what I see coming and then knowing what to do about it. Gradually, the means and ends of action--and means and ends have to be the same--became clearer. In 1964, I began refusing to pay the amount of my income taxes that would go for defense spending. The next year, I got deeper into civil rights activities, and I also started the Institute for the Study of Nonviolence. Then there were the anti-war demonstrations I was part of; and by the summer of 1967, I was helping organize a national draft-card turn-in day. Then I served jail terms for refusing to move from in front of induction centers; and in 1968, I went on a college tour with my husband, David, to talk about resistance, about finding ways to really change things--ways that don't use violence as a means of change.

[Q] Playboy: After one of your appearances on the Dick Cavett Show, ABC commentator Howard K. Smith delivered an angry editorial in which he called you self-righteous and negative and said that, in trying for utopian perfection, you were copping out on realistic, pragmatic approaches to change. Others have gone on to say that you provoke the very violence you're against by demonstrating and encouraging draft resistance.

[A] Baez: I know the arguments. First of all, people like to talk about being "pragmatic" because it's easier that way to avoid the extraordinarily hard work necessary to really change things. And the violence they say I provoke is already there; we haven't caused it. That argument is like people in the South a few years ago saying, "Things were all calm around here until those troublemaking civil rights people came barging in." But things weren't calm. All kinds of tensions and hostilities had been festering below the surface. Things are at the bursting point all over the world. Every once in a while, they explode--in the Middle East, in Vietnam, somewhere else. It's as if the entire world were infected with a disease and the people in power were running around with this great big hypodermic needle, jamming it into one place after another. The only catch is that they're injecting the wrong fluids. When there's an eruption, they jam in the same fluid that's part of the disease, which is violence.

I know how difficult it is to even think about giving up this pet solution to problems. If you hang onto violence, you have something that kind of carried people through all these centuries. And if you go along with it--even in a nuclear age--you figure it might carry you through this, too. But if all recourse to violence is taken away, you're forced to really use your mind to search for alternatives. And you're forced to acknowledge--and this is what I mean by revolution--that no man has the right to do injury to another person or to be an accomplice in the doing of injury. This means you have to recognize that everybody is equal and there's no such thing as an enemy.

[Q] Playboy: Wouldn't you have considered Adolf Hitler an enemy?

[A] Baez: He was a human being, too. But recognizing his humanity didn't mean you had to like him and it certainly didn't mean you had to carry out his orders. In a civilized society, people wouldn't have followed him. They would have seen that he was a wreck, a very sick man; and, seeing that, they would have gotten him some help. The term enemy just gets in the way of understanding that we are all human beings. Admittedly, it takes an awful lot of un-brainwashing to come to that point. To be this kind of revolutionary requires the right-winger to throw away his flag and the left-winger to forget all those posters about power coming out of the barrel of a gun.

[Q] Playboy: Then you are against any violence for any cause, however just that cause might be?

[A] Baez: Yes, I see only one way. I don't think anybody said it better than Tolstoy: The difference between establishment violence and revolutionary violence is the difference between dog shit and cat shit. But insisting on nonviolence doesn't mean remaining passive or giving up. It means always searching for that third alternative. Sure, it's a hard search. We've had thousands of years of training in violence, so it's very difficult to bring people around to even bother looking for that alternative.

[Q] Playboy: You say you're absolutely against violence; but what would you do if you yourself were being attacked violently, if David were being attacked or if you saw a child being physically attacked? Would you just stand there and do nothing to counter the violence?

[A] Baez: That remains to be seen. But after all, I'm limited in what violence I could do. I don't carry a gun. I don't know how to use a knife. So I'd be reduced to having to use my feeble mind to get us all out of a situation like that. Look, all I can say is that I know people who have trained themselves to think of the third alternative rather than faint from fright or club somebody on the head. And those people have done well in situations like the kind you describe, not only with regard to their own self-defense but also in the defense of people near them. I remember one night, a group of protesters was sitting in at the San Francisco Federal Building. A guy was out there with a knife, swinging it around, threatening them. And Ira Sandperl, who's been with me in the Institute for the Study of Nonviolence from the beginning, walked up to that man and said, "Give me the knife." Ira took it out of his hand. You have to overcome the fear in yourself when you walk into a situation like that. You don't know whether he's going to get you in the gut or not, but you know what you have to do.

[Q] Playboy: Have you ever been in a situation where you were able to stop violence through nonviolence?

[A] Baez: One of the times I was in prison, there was a girl who had done six months of dead time. She didn't know what her sentence was. She had no money and there was no lawyer working for her. She just sat there, waiting to appear in court. And when she finally did get sentenced, the time she'd been waiting wouldn't count; it wouldn't come off her sentence. Periodically, she used to get just furious and pick a fight with somebody. She was a black girl, and one time she picked a fight with a white girl from the kitchen. I knew the white girl was a nonfighter, so I went over to try to talk to the black girl. "Get out of my way!" she said. But I stayed where I was standing, so that she couldn't move unless she kicked me aside. She didn't want to kick me. She had hold of the white girl's hair and was trying to kick her in the stomach, and there I was--in the way. Finally, her kicks got milder and then she exploded in tears. And I hugged her.

[Q] Playboy: Do you call that an example of nonviolence that isn't passive?

[A] Baez: Yes. I did something. I got in the way. But I wish that word nonviolence could be junked. I mean, nonviolence doesn't really say it. We haven't thought of a word yet in English that does say it. But the Indians have. They use the term Satyagraha, which means "truth force." That word force begins to give you some idea of what the third alternative involves. To be part of this kind of fighting, you have to be forceful; you have to be aggressive. Passivity is, in a sense, a worse enemy than violence.

[Q] Playboy: Gandhi once said that as deeply as he was committed to Satyagraha, he would rather a person took violent action than none at all.

[A] Baez: Yes, he said that; and in a way, it's fortunate he did, because passivity is so huge an obstacle to change. But in another way, it was an unfortunate remark, because that's the one thing everybody seems to pick out of everything Gandhi ever wrote. And they try to use it to justify some violent act of their own, ignoring the fact that Gandhi spent practically his entire life trying to teach people the other way.

[Q] Playboy: How would you describe this other way?

[A] Baez: Putting the sanctity of life above everything else.

[Q] Playboy: In all circumstances? Would you have placed the sanctity of Nazi lives above the fact that they were murdering millions of Jews and other people?

[A] Baez: Killing is killing, whether it's killing a Nazi or anyone else. And killing leads to more killing. If the Jews in Germany under the Nazis had known anything about organized nonviolent resistance, I think fewer of them would have been killed. Most, however, were passive; God knows that's understandable, because they were so afraid. But if they had refused to cooperate, consider how much manpower it would have taken to simply move them. Why, at one point, it took only two storm troopers to round up more than 600 people. But if millions of Jews had refused to move, they could have slowed down the Nazi machinery enormously and, in the process, there would have been no way the other Germans could have avoided knowing what was going on. The resistance of the Jews would have been too visible. And there would have been no way to keep the information about what was going on from people in other countries. The whole world would have been watching; and with the Jews resisting inside and the pressure building outside, I think there would have been far less killing and perhaps it might have stopped entirely.

[Q] Playboy: Your critics would say you're unrealistic to allege that violence can't cure violence, since--to cite a contemporary example--you don't take into account what might happen to America if violence were done against it and it offered no armed resistance. Would you leave the country defenseless?

[A] Baez: Yes, because as long as you go on defending the country, you go on killing--others and yourself. You see, the defense of country has absolutely nothing to do with the defense of people. Once we get rid of the obsession with defending one's country, we will begin defending life. We will begin to have a real sense of what it's like to take care of people instead of trying to watch over a piece of land. That's why I hate flags. I despise any flag, not just the American flag. It's a symbol of a piece of land that's considered more important than the human lives on it. Look at what happened over the attempt to create a People's Park in Berkeley.

[Q] Playboy: Isn't defending a country very different from fighting over a piece of real estate in Berkeley?

[A] Baez: Is it? I don't think so. We have to rearrange in our minds what defense actually means, and that includes defense of country. Does it mean you're going to try to protect the boundaries of a piece of land, or does it mean you're going to try to help the people on that piece of land--and all other pieces of land--live a better life? What I'm saying is that we have to begin to dispose of the very concept of nation. I don't think we can survive if nations stay.

[Q] Playboy: How would you deal with an invasion by another nation that didn't share your zeal for the abolition of all nations?

[A] Baez: To begin with, you have to examine the American people's paranoia about invasion. It simply isn't rational to seriously consider that possibility. But, all right, let's say all of a sudden, here they come--those little yellow bastards--just as you always expected. Well, if we're in the state we're in now, there will probably be a nuclear war. But if we've gotten our heads together to the point of recognizing that a nuclear reaction would be insane, we will already have made some assumptions about how to deal with invaders. We will have begun to understand the concept of a general strike by the people, and that means understanding the logic of invasion. When an invader comes into a country, he doesn't run the country. He gets you to run it. If enough people in a country are really involved in truth force, they can't be pushed by its invaders into running it.

[Q] Playboy: Then you would advocate that Americans resist invasion nonviolently.

[A] Baez: More than that. If the invader were rushing into your home town, about to take over all your hamburger stands and used-car lots, you would say, "If you're hungry, I'll feed you. If you're thirsty, I'll give you something to drink. But if you intend to run my life, forget it."

[Q] Playboy: Suppose, after listening to all that, the invader decides to shoot you down or ship you off to a concentration camp. Then what?

[A] Baez: Obviously, you can never be certain of the response to any action you take. All you can do, therefore, is be consistent with your own beliefs; and if that leads to death or imprisonment, at least you won't have broken faith with yourself.

[Q] Playboy: For your approach to work as a deterrent to violence, wouldn't the invader have to be reachable on a human level, and wouldn't the vast majority of the invaded people have to feel and act as you do? Otherwise, isn't it likely that large-scale sniping would take place and that the invader would take revenge on everyone in sight?

[A] Baez: That's right. That's why, if there were an invasion now--at the stage most Americans are now in--I think we'd be doomed. One can only hope our circle will grow until, eventually, most Americans would act in a different manner. But if you feel strongly enough about working for this kind of revolution, you have to act anyway, hope or not. You see, people say about the Germans under Hitler: "Why didn't somebody do something back then? Why did they all follow him like that?" Well, that's exactly where we're at right now. That's exactly what draft resistance is about. This country is the biggest bunch of "good Germans" on the face of the earth right now. And the resistance is saying: "We're not going to take part in it. We're pulling out now and we're going to do what we can to convince others to join us to stop the killing." I grant it doesn't look too hopeful. We're fighting not just a wave; it's more like a tidal wave. But we do exist. People are saying: "I refuse to take part in violence--any violence. I refuse to take part in the nation-state, in the United States military, in the institutions supporting it." That means they're also saying: "I am one molecule in a tidal wave, but I'm going to go the other way." Of course, it's not an easy thing to do, but it gets easier as you find your brothers. That's why the draft-resistance movement is a very exciting thing. It started with only three people about four years ago, and now there are at least 10,000 and maybe as many as 50,000 of us.

[Q] Playboy: About 1000 of that number--all of them draft resisters, including your husband--are serving prison terms. Why have so few opponents of the war been willing to put themselves on the line?

[A] Baez: Don't underestimate the number of resisters. In addition to the thousands in Canada and abroad, many more than 1000 have stayed in America and are subject to prison terms. They just haven't been arrested or imprisoned yet. No one knows exactly how many there are. A woman I know who worked for the San Jose draft board was told that 2000 people had sent their draft cards back to that particular board. "What do you do with them?" she asked. They said, "We stick them in a drawer and we shut it, because we don't know what to do with them." Now, if there are at least 2000 cards filed in a drawer in San Jose, think of what must be going on in other draft centers. There may well be at least 50,000 draft resisters in that situation.

[Q] Playboy: On what basis does the Government move against some and not against others?

[A] Baez: The loudest ones are prosecuted first. David was indicted within 13 days after he refused induction. Or someone may turn in his card and wait a year to engage in some political action, some kind of demonstration. If they hear about him--bingo--he's indicted. But there simply isn't enough court time to handle everybody who's resisting. Many haven't heard a thing yet. Their cards are blowin' in the wind.

[Q] Playboy: Do young men still turn in cards to you at concerts?

[A] Baez: Lots of times. I remember particularly at Ann Arbor a while ago, as I walked off after the last encore, a deliriously happy guy handed me his card. I took it and asked him into our little room backstage, where I kind of grilled him. "How long have you been thinking about it?" He smiled and said, "It's been months." "OK," I said, "what do you want me to do with it?" "I don't care," he said, "anything." "Let's burn half of it," I suggested, "and send the other half--with your name on it--to the Government. If you burn it all, it might take a long time before they'd know you'd done it. This way, you're telling them what you've done and they have to go looking for you. It adds a bit more nuisance for them." He said, "Fine." So we burned it in an ashtray and sprinkled the ashes all over the room. I also get mail from people who have turned in their cards or are about to. That kind of mail has been increasing. More and more guys are finally coming to the edge, and there are others who have begun thinking of resistance as a reality for the first time.

[Q] Playboy: There are also increasing numbers of college students who pledge--as many did at graduation ceremonies last year--to resist the draft if called.

[A] Baez: I don't hold those pledges to be worth much. Sure, their sympathies are in the right direction; but when the penalty is as heavy as it is for draft resistance, I'll believe they really mean it when I see it. Some do, others may not. Sometimes it's just a fad and, therefore, meaningless. Last year, a boy in a school we visited told us, "I'm going to run for office on a resistance ticket. Everybody who votes for me has to turn his card in." "Have you turned your card in?" I asked. "Well, I will," he said, "after I've won."

[Q] Playboy: Is Resistance, the group to which David belongs, any more important or effective than the other alternatives to the draft?

[A] Baez: Well, let's look at the alternatives. Everybody has four alternatives if he doesn't want to accept the draft. First, you can try to be classified a conscientious objector. I understand the C.O. position, but I don't think it's politically effective. It acknowledges the right of the Government to make that decision, but it should be your decision.

A second alternative is to leave the country and go somewhere like Canada. Now, I've been in Canada a couple of times and from what I've seen of the people who have gone there to avoid the draft, I'd say that those who haven't made up their minds yet ought not to kid themselves about what going to Canada means. If you're going there because you don't want to go to jail, that's fine. But if you're going to Canada because you think you can become more effective in working for peace, you're pulling a phony on yourself. The people I've met in Canada who went there under that impression are disillusioned and sad. I don't condemn anybody for going there, but I do feel you have to be really clear in your head as to why you're going. To save yourself is one thing, but if you're concerned with more than that, the battle is here.

The third alternative is going underground. There's a lot of that and it seems damn unhealthy to me--people hiding and changing their names. That's the official underground--people who know they're being chased and have to keep running. But there's also another kind of underground: You don't register and you don't let yourself be known. You hope your name never turns up. But when you do that, you're not clear with yourself. You don't know what would happen if you ever had to really face up to the confrontation. You're never really sure where you stand. I don't think that's a healthy way to live, either.

The fourth alternative is to resist. You are open in public about what you're doing and why. You refuse to carry a card. You refuse to be given a number. You refuse to say to the Government, "OK, here are the next years of my life." And you do more than refuse; you organize resistance. And thousands are making that decision. They're making that eminently sane decision in the midst of all the insanity around us.

[Q] Playboy: Why do you call that decision sane?

[A] Baez: My definition of sanity in this context would be seeing again, seeing each man as your brother, getting back your vision, so that you couldn't do harm to another.

[Q] Playboy: What makes you so certain that you won't eventually be driven by desperation to take part in some form of violent revolution?

[A] Baez: As long as I see one kid's face a day, that will be enough to remind me that I can't take part in killing. You remember that movie, The Battle of Algiers, about the Algerians' fight for independence? There were people in this country who saw it as a handbook for violent revolution. But what I saw in it was an insistence that, in their terms, the most revolutionary act anybody can perform is to be able to blow up a room full of people after having seen children in it. They made it clear in the movie that to be really brave and really with it, you could look at a little kid with ice cream all over his mouth--and then blow him up. All for the revolution! Well, I don't think that's revolutionary. I think it's insane.

[Q] Playboy: What leads you to believe--speaking of the world now, not just about America--that there will ever be enough people who feel as you do?

[A] Baez: I don't in the least underestimate how difficult it's going to be to end this insanity of dependence on violence. In fact, Tanzania is the only place I've ever heard of that had a rational discussion about nonviolence and the nation-state. Its leader, Julius Nyerere, called in Quaker types from all over to discuss the question of how he could defend Tanzania nonviolently. I don't know how many days it lasted, but the discussion ended with the conclusion that there was no way.

This goes back to what I was saying before. There is a fundamental difference between nonviolently defending the people of Tanzania and the country of Tanzania. You can't do the second; but it's possible to do the first. It took even Gandhi a long time to recognize that difference. In his early years, when somebody asked how his family was, he'd say, "All of India is my family." But by the end, he knew better. If he were alive today, his answer would be, "All the world is my family." He saw that when India gained her independence, not only India but two competitive nation-states had been born. There was also Pakistan. And then he started to fast again, because he realized that, in a sense, he had blown it. The nation-state, any nation-state, has nothing to do with brotherhood. But that took him a lifetime to learn.

[Q] Playboy: Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., often referred to Gandhi as a major influence on him. Do you see any major differences in their philosophies?

[A] Baez: The main difference was that King represented what historian Staughton Lynd calls "petitionary nonviolence." That means you get a lot of people to agree to put pressure on Congress to change a few things, so that the society will be a little less corrupt. It amounts to your always being in a position of asking. That's what King was involved in--having his people patiently ask for some degree of power. Gandhi, on the other hand, assumed that the power was the people's and that they must act on that assumption. He'd say, "Today we're going to take salt from the ocean, no matter what the government says about its right to tax and control it." And by the time he got to the ocean, thousands of people were walking with him and they had done it! They weren't asking anybody for anything and they weren't waving guns around, either.

[Q] Playboy: Didn't you agree with Dr. King's celebration of love as a force for change?

[A] Baez: I loved Dr. King and wanted to work with that revolution, but he and I agreed on very few things. I kept asking him, "What is it you're trying to do? What are you really trying to change?" At that point, for instance, banks run by blacks were growing out of some of his organizations; and this development was considered revolution! He'd say, "Well, the black keys and the white keys on the piano are out of tune. We have to get them into tune, and this is one way." My answer was: "But the whole fucking orchestra is shot, so what good are black banks going to do?"

[Q] Playboy: There are black people who would consider that statement exceedingly smug. From their point of view, banks run by blacks are essential in an economy so weighted against black people. If black banks will help black neighborhoods, how can you--white and nonpoor--justify that kind of criticism?

[A] Baez: I'm not preaching to anybody. Obviously, until there are alternatives that make better sense to black people, they'll go on doing what seems to fit this society's definition of progress. And that includes building black banks. It boils down to what you're going to do with your energy, and I'm not going to put any of mine into advocating or supporting blue, yellow, pink or black banks. I think the whole economic system is bad, and having black banks isn't going to make it any better. But I understand those who think that since there are white banks, there ought to be black banks, too. To me, however, it's short-sighted. And I thought King was short-sighted. His context wasn't any broader than America as it is. I think King was an American first, a good citizen and a preacher second, a black man third and an exponent of nonviolence fourth. If you remember, King delayed in coming out against the Vietnam war. He had terrific pressures from some of his own black brothers, who kept saying, "That's not our revolution. It will get in the way of what we have to do here." But we'd say, "For Christ's sake, spit it out. You can't sit on something like that when the world's blowing up." Then, little by little, he got to the point at which he finally felt strong enough to speak out.

[Q] Playboy: Many radicals feel that the philosophy of nonviolence as an effective tactic in the black revolution died with Dr. King. And what President Nixon calls the silent majority of white Americans seems to regard your nonviolent opposition to the war in Vietnam as either subversive or eccentric, or both. Do you see any way in which you can reach those to whom nonviolent protest is irrelevant, disloyal or incomprehensible?

[A] Baez: Well, if you think of people in a mass, it is very hard to imagine reaching them. But, on the other hand, with very few exceptions, whenever I've confronted anyone face to face, I've always felt contact had been made between us. I've always felt the beginning of brotherhood. That's from right-wingers to angry Panthers. When the Institute for the Study of Nonviolence opened, things looked hopeless at first. There was so much angry opposition from right-wingers. But as we got to know one another, we were eventually able to talk and make real contact. In New Mexico one day, David and I were at a campus, and in the question-and-answer period, there was this beautiful Panther-type girl. She was standing in the back of the room, saying, "Bullshit!" We hung around afterward and started to talk. All of a sudden, she smiled--Jesus Christ, what a beautiful face!--and I shook her hand. She showed up that night to hear us speak again, and this time, she wasn't there as an agitator type. She had come to listen. She listened all the way through, then came up afterward and said, "You know, I know you're right, but...." I said, "You don't have to go into it. I understand. The beautiful thing is that you came and listened." Eventually, though, she did go into that thing about 300 years of oppression. I asked her how old she was. She said she was 20. And then I asked her how long she'd been working to change things. For something like two years, she told me. "That's not 300 years," I told her. "When people wait for 275 years and then work for just a few years, you can't say they've been fighting for 300 years."

[Q] Playboy: Your answer to her doesn't hold on two counts. First, it's a bit unfair to put her down because she's been working to overcome 300 years of oppression for only two of her 20 years. Second, how can you say all black people have waited 275 years, in view of the resistance by Nat Turner, Frederick Douglas and countless others since the days of slavery?

[A] Baez: I was talking to her about her attitude--"I'm carrying 300 years of oppression on my back and fuck you." That's not real. And I grant that other people have fought in the past, but what counts is what you do now.

[Q] Playboy: More and more black people are doing things now--organizing for power in their own communities, trying to gain control over their schools, trying to improve their housing. Many blacks would tell you that you have an enormous amount of gall to preach the doctrine of nonviolence while they're still living in poverty and their kids are still locked into ghettos.

[A] Baez: First of all, I don't go around preaching to them. That's a sin--going to somebody you've been oppressing all your life and telling him how to act. But, on the other hand, if someone were seriously looking for an alternative, if someone were to ask me about ways to become really unoppressed, I couldn't in good conscience say, "The Black Panthers have some hints for you," because I don't think what they propose is a real solution. I think violence leads to more violence and finally to disaster. But if I were asked, I'd say that some other people might have some hints. Like Gandhi. He was an oppressed person. He began his career in Satyagraha when he was thrown off a train in South Africa for being the wrong color. And I would say that probably the best example now is Danilo Dolci. He was a student of architecture who went to Sicily to look at ruins and ended up seeing ruined people. He then forgot all about being an architect and started organizing in villages against the Mafia, against the Church and against the Sicilian government.

Dolci has done some very revolutionary things there, but because they're not spectacular in size, hardly anyone here has heard about them. The reverse strike, for instance. I don't think anybody has tried that in this country, but he has in Sicily. The roads from village to village were dilapidated and worthless; they needed rebuilding, and the people needed jobs. He asked the government to pay the people to rebuild the roads. Petitionary nonviolence again. But then, after working with Dolci, they said: "The hell with it! We'll rebuild our own roads." So they had a reverse strike and went out and rebuilt roads for themselves.

[Q] Playboy: How would you apply that technique in America?

[A] Baez: Well, let's look at what alternative there might have been to all that violence at San Francisco State last year. Suppose the people who were fighting over that piece of land and screaming "Get the pigs off our campus" had, instead, gone to one apartment building in San Francisco and organized a strike--a strike involving renters in a deteriorating building refusing to pay the rent and using that money to fix up the place. That would have been a more intelligent thing to do than scream about who controls the campus. Sure, a rent strike wouldn't have gotten the press coverage the fighting did. But it would have directly benefited the lives of some of the people who were being claimed as brothers by those screaming on the campus.

[Q] Playboy: That is precisely what the Panthers claim they're already doing--organizing people in neighborhoods around such basic issues as housing and schools.

[A] Baez: Well, I can't claim to be up on what everybody in the Panthers is doing. But I did read a recent issue of their newspaper and it looked pretty scary to me. All the cartoons, all the articles in it were so loaded with hate rhetoric that I can't identify with it. More than that, I want to fight it. I want to say, "Don't you see what all that hate is going to lead to?" One time in San Francisco, David and I attended a conference of people who had decided not to register for the draft, and there were, like, 50 high school kids there--boys and girls. And somebody invited a Panther, because he felt that group should have its say, even if it had nothing to do with nonregistration. The Panther came in with three guards, stationed them at the doors and then started waving around a book on the Mafia. "This is a good guide," he was saying. "They know how to get power." David and I restrained ourselves as long as we could and then we finally said, "Do you see the logical conclusion of what you're doing? If your equation is A plus A plus A plus A, you're not going to get B. You're going to get A. If you use shit plus shit plus shit, you end up with a pile of shit."

[Q] Playboy: There is another thesis, expounded most notably in Frantz Fanon's The Wretched of the Earth, that regards violence as a key stage of self -- liberation in which those who have been oppressed purge themselves of feelings of impotence through acts of violence.

[A] Baez: I don't agree, and I would point out that Fanon himself shows in his book a number of people who experienced that kind of purge and weren't in such good shape afterward. When you do violence to another, you're also doing violence to yourself; you're diminishing your own humanity. That's true even when, in the Panthers' case, it's just the rhetoric of violence they're indulging in. I do recognize that they've been doing some good things--the less flashy stuff, like giving children breakfast. I'm not about to knock that. But in their publications and their speeches, the emphasis is on sticking pigs. I can't see how you're going to nurture or increase anyone's humanity by thinking and talking like that.

[Q] Playboy: The Weatherman faction of SDS insists that a fully humanistic society can't be achieved unless actual violence is committed against the symbols of what they call the present imperialist-capitalist society. Only that kind of violence, they say, can awaken people to the repressiveness and brutality of their national institutions. We would think you disagree.

[A] Baez: Yes, that's a completely stupid approach. You don't enlighten people by frightening them; you create more barriers that way, more divisions between people. And all you accomplish for yourselves is to get your heads busted. It's utterly self-defeating. There's no violent way to get people together in brotherhood. It's like killing for peace. It makes no sense.

[Q] Playboy: You've said that although you feel you're behind musically, you're "politically ahead." How do you mean?

[A] Baez: When I say political, I mean the common life. I mean people. In the same way that I make a distinction between the nation-state and the people in it, I don't even consider electoral politics; I define political as meaning much more than that. You see, it's not a change of government we want but a new kind of society--a society in which people can have a common life based on brotherhood and freedom from violence.

[Q] Playboy: But can't electoral politics be a way of changing society? Aren't there often clear differences among candidates?

[A] Baez: I've tried on and off to act on that assumption, but it's the wrong base for action. If you remember, the peace candidate against Barry Goldwater in 1964 was Lyndon Johnson. David puts it another way when people start talking about who they're voting for. "You see a gigantic wave," he says, "and there's a surfer on top. You don't shout, 'Wow, look at that surfer pushing that wave around!' Obviously, if you look at what's happening, there's only a limited amount of distance the surfer on top of that wave can travel from right to left." Well, that's what right and left in our electoral politics is all about. Until you can change what's underneath--the wave itself--and not just ride the top, you can only go a certain distance either way. We're not going to be able to build institutions that really work for everyone until there is first a fundamental change in the way people live and in the way they relate to one another. When people have their vision back, new institutions will then grow out of that new kind of society. And they'll be flexible, responsive, open to change. I know that it's hard for a lot of people to see this. The first thing I hear is: "In this new society of yours, what are you going to do about traffic and about collecting the garbage?"

[Q] Playboy: How do you answer that?

[A] Baez: If the revolution were for real, people would care for one another, and out of that caring would come real agreement on how to deal with traffic and garbage collection. What it comes down to is that if people can get to really see themselves and others, they'll find ways to take care of all the problems of living together. That's essentially what I mean when I say I'm politically ahead. It's not that I have a blueprint detailing exactly how the new society is going to work. But I do see far enough ahead to know that unless people have the vision to care about one another, no blueprint is going to lead to fundamental changes in the way we live.

[Q] Playboy: Your detractors would call those ideas ingenuous and naive. Critic Ellen Willis, for example, reviewing your book Daybreak, wrote: "I find ... her moral approach to politics offensively escapist."

[A] Baez: It really annoys me when people talk about me as being an escapist and impractical. Is it escapist, when we're on the very edge of World War Three, to act against violence? Is it practical to be so tied up with the nation-state mentality that we couldn't get food through to Biafra? I'll tell you who's impractical and escapist: anybody who thinks we're going to survive this century if we continue as we are--putting our taxes where we put them now, letting our brothers be sent off to war. That person is impractical and naive and foolish. You see, what we're doing now isn't just imperfect. It's insane.

[Q] Playboy: You're calling millions of people insane or accomplices in acts of insanity. Doesn't that indictment come through as a kind of moral elitism that might well alienate the masses of people you want to reach?

[A] Baez: Yes, I'm familiar with that criticism, and part of it is very good and very real. There are times when you get to thinking that you have the one true light and you want to spread it around. Then, when someone reminds you that you don't know all the answers, you come crashing down. It's a good thing to be told your ego's running away with you; and I know I talk too much. But I'm sincere in trying to communicate and I also try to listen, because I'm aware of how far I have to go in terms of learning about people.

[Q] Playboy: You didn't seem to be listening when you said publicly a year or so ago, "No woman should go to bed with a man who carries a draft card." Isn't that self-righteous preaching?

[A] Baez: I'll tell you how that started. Some women were asking one another, "What can we do to help?" And the first thing that came to my mind--as a joke, in a sense--was to refuse to go to bed with anyone carrying a draft card. It's not a new idea. You remember Aristophanes' Lysistrata? The women in that play said, "No more screwing until you put down your arms." Well, the more I thought about it, the more serious the idea seemed to me, and not in a self-righteous sense. Women can help if they change their own conception of what "hero" means. As long as a hero is John Wayne coming home from the battlefield with blood dripping from his forehead, having killed X number of people, we'll keep perpetuating violence. So the base of that idea is more than refusing to sleep with people who don't break away from the institutions of violence; it's a matter of women deciding what qualities in a man they can really respect.

[Q] Playboy: William Sloane Coffin, Jr., the Yale chaplain, has said that he hopes a new definition of courage may come out of the resistance to the war in Vietnam. Are you hopeful that might happen?

[A] Baez: I think there has been a change in the past three years. Very few people say "chicken" anymore when somebody refuses to be drafted. That kind of thing used to be an almost automatic response: "Draft dodger!" "Yellow!" "Scared to go into the Army!" That's changed. Even people who totally disagree with the resistance have come to see, I think, that it does take courage to face jail for your convictions.

[Q] Playboy: Your husband, David, has remained active even in jail. What's the basis of the protest he's involved in?

[A] Baez: Well, part of it was the food. But it's important for us to look at this and the other complaints as being not about this particular jail but about all prisons. America should look at the whole system that prison represents. She should look at the idea of punishment and the idea of rehabilitation, which is just a farce. They say rehabilitation, but what they mean is just more of the same old punishment. What prison actually does is murder people's spirits. But to take the prison David was sent to--one of the people in his cell had been in for 137 days and had lost about 40 pounds. It wasn't because the food tasted bad; it was because there was no real nourishment in it. I mean, it's intended to make you so quiet and dead that you can just about move. David also said in a letter he wrote me from there that the lights are turned out at nine o'clock, but if you stay up late, you can hear the guards beating the prisoners in the hole. The hole is a room about five feet by seven, with rubber walls, and in the middle of the floor is an opening through which sewage backs up into the cell. When the grand jury went through the prison, the officials had to put down a new floor because they couldn't wash out the bloodstains. At the time David was in that prison, there was someone in the hole screaming every night.

He also wrote me about medical attention. A man in his cell was coughing up blood and they asked for the guards, who took the man, put him on a concrete floor and gave him sleeping pills. That's all they'd do for him. The last lines in David's letter were: "In here, you see the logical conclusion of American society. What happens here isn't really different in kind compared with what happens outside; it's just different in quantity." We're all so used to oppression and exploitation and the many more subtle kinds of murder we do in our daily lives that a revelation of what happens in prison shouldn't come as a shock to us. It does, however, because this particular area of brutality has been so hidden away from us. But David's right. It's not a difference in kind.

[Q] Playboy: Isn't that an extraordinary exaggeration? Surely there's a great difference between being behind bars, subject to that kind of brutality, and being on the outside.

[A] Baez: Of course it's worse to be locked up; but what I'm talking about is the insensitivity of most of us to the brutality that isn't hidden from us--the brutality that allows people to go hungry, the brutality that allows racism. Sure, people who are hungry and who are discriminated against would suffer even more if they were put into a literal jail, but my point is that what goes on in jails is a result of people deadening themselves to what is done to other human beings. And what goes on outside is a result of the same kind of complicity by silence. Still, it is worse in prison, and what we allow to happen there is something from the Middle Ages. It shouldn't exist, any more than nuclear weapons should exist.

[Q] Playboy: Don't you think we're likely to get prison reform before the majority of Americans agree that we ought to destroy our nuclear weapons?

[A] Baez: That's part of what I've been talking about. It would take a lot of people with depth of vision to get to that point. But you're taught that you're only one person and that war has always existed and so you can't do anything about it. Leave it to your Congressmen. All that stuff is so ingrained that it's very hard to move people to action.

[Q] Playboy: You expect nothing from Congress, even though the vote on the ABM last summer was so close?

[A] Baez: How can you? The difficulty with expecting sanity from Congress or from the President is that these are people who have pledged themselves to the nation-state. And the nation-state cannot exist without arms and armies. You can't really expect them to be interested in a concept of brotherhood that has nothing to do with boundaries. They generally seem to be sincere people, but they're committed to protecting the nation-state. So it seems silly to ask them to do the things we're going to have to do. But most of us just wait. We wait from kindergarten on for something to change. Yet nothing's going to change until we change it ourselves.

[Q] Playboy: How? The power, after all, is with those who make and enforce the laws. And they're the ones who decide to appropriate the money for arms.

[A] Baez: They have the power only because we allow them the power. What has to be done--and it's a very complex undertaking--is to get enough people to withdraw support from the military-industrial complex so that the impact of those of us in opposition can be felt.

[Q] Playboy: How do you withdraw support?

[A] Baez: Through the income tax, for instance. I think people who want to participate in an act of withdrawal from the military-industrial complex should refuse to pay 83 percent of their income tax. That's how much of every tax dollar is going pretty directly into the military. Furthermore, most people don't like the income tax anyhow. So it would be a grand thing for people not to pay most of it.

[Q] Playboy: But the tax collector will get it all eventually, anyway--plus a penalty of six percent interest. So by withholding part of your taxes, you actually give the Government more money.

[A] Baez: I think by the time the tax collector beats down enough tracks to find the rest of your money, the expense to the Government is just about equal to the interest. But that isn't the point. The point is the difference between passivity and action. The passive attitude is: "I hate to give them this money for war and for arms." And then you write out the check. By acting to withdraw, however, you at least declare yourself, and I keep hoping more and more people will do just that.

[Q] Playboy: What's your own relationship with the Internal Revenue Service?

[A] Baez: They come and get the money. Since I started not paying, the money has existed in one bank or another and they eventually find it. But this year, it doesn't exist and I don't know whether it will by the time they come around looking for it. Maybe there'll be royalties arriving from somewhere I hadn't known about, or maybe there won't be. But I must say I don't care. I do know that at some point in my life, the money definitely won't be there, and then I suppose they'll start attaching land. And after that, well, there won't be anything more they can get, will there?

[Q] Playboy: Except you, for a prison sentence--Which may help explain why very few people are likely to withdraw their support from the military-industrial complex by refusing to pay taxes. Is that your only suggestion for ways in which people can help bring about the kind of nonviolent revolution you want?

[A] Baez: To answer that, you have to define what you mean by revolution--beyond the term nonviolent. Now, when you talk to people about what they want--I mean people who haven't lost their vision or are in the process of getting it back--they make it clear that they want peace and they talk about brotherhood, about humanity, about people not being hungry anymore. But what does all that mean in terms of what each individual should do? It seems to me that if anybody sat down and thought about it long enough, he would decide to live in such a way that he's not exploiting or damaging somebody else. That's a pretty basic and sane beginning, isn't it? And it's a long way from something like a campus revolt.

[Q] Playboy: Do you think all campus revolts are pointless and counterproductive?

[A] Baez: No. Some campus demonstrations seem to be good simply in the sense that until they happened, people never thought they could do anything but follow orders and walk in and out of classrooms and do homework. So, in a way, action on campus is a step toward recognizing that you're not totally impotent. On the other hand, they usually end up leading nowhere, so you wonder which is worse--sitting around doing nothing or screaming dumb things at policemen. Somehow, nobody ever asks, "Does anybody on this campus want to go off and start a real school where we could actually learn things?"

[Q] Playboy: Some people are asking that very question--and answering it by starting their own free universities.

[A] Baez: The free universities are a beginning and some good stuff is coming out of them. But there ought to be much more of that kind of innovation. Take black studies, for instance. Why not create a place where you can study what it is you really want to know about black history and culture, instead of arguing over this or that piece of property? I mean, that would be a step toward fullscale change that would involve taking on a whole new thing, beginning a whole new experience.

[Q] Playboy: Are you saying that campus demonstrations have resulted in no constructive reforms?

[A] Baez: Well, again, look at what took place at San Francisco State. One of the things that seem to happen every time there's a big campus revolt--and San Francisco State was certainly no exception--is that your definition of the enemy gets so ridiculous. If people are serious about revolution, they have to wage a revolution for all oppressed people--and that includes policemen, who must be some of the most oppressed people in this society. If a revolution isn't for all the oppressed, it's a fake. But what happens is that out of frustration and anger--and not having a deeper vision--you pick the nearest thing as an enemy: the cops. And at San Francisco State, Hayakawa. He certainly made himself available; he acted like a perfect ass. It's the easiest thing in the world to take out all that frustration on somebody like him--to threaten his life, to throw bricks in his windows. But as that sort of thing goes on, whatever vision you had when you started the revolt seems to taper off into practically nothing.

A couple of months after the fighting was over at San Francisco State, David and I went onto the campus to find out what had really happened there and to answer any questions they might want to ask. Some of the kids were mad at me because I'd been quoted as putting the rebellion down. But the quote hadn't been in context. My disagreement had been in the sense in which I've been talking about here. Anyway, our appearance had been organized by Resistance. Some SDS guys had planned to throw stuff and break up our discussion, but the Resistance people convinced them it would be smarter to say what they want in leaflets and to ask the questions they really wanted answered. So they did. But most of the people were just asking the same questions as everywhere else, like, "What do we do now?" It was as if their whole strike had been bought off. That's the only way this nonnegotiable bullshit can end up. Either you peter off into nothing or you accept a halfway settlement because you're just not going to get all the things you demanded at the beginning. Nobody on that campus had a third alternative--like starting their own school or, as I suggested before, organizing a tenant strike. Either you didn't do anything or you threw bricks. And when it was all over, what revolutionary change had actually taken place?

[Q] Playboy: There have been other campuses--Columbia, for one--at which real change does appear to have followed campus rebellions. After the violence in the spring of 1968, the Columbia administration took as its goals the very student demands that had led to the rebellion.

[A] Baez: I have no firsthand knowledge of that situation, so I can't say if it's right or wrong. But I agree with what Aldous Huxley said about violent revolution: Any good that comes out of a violent revolution comes in spite of the violence. Sure, people will say, "It's only because we did what we did that we got what we got." But somebody like Huxley or I would answer, "Think how much more you might have gotten if you hadn't gone through all that violence." And then I'd add that they really ought to look hard at exactly what they did get. David calls America and its institutions the great marshmallow. In the end, the great marshmallow seems able to absorb almost everything. So the question always is: Has there been any real, meaningful change? Or has somebody been bought off again?

[Q] Playboy: Blacks in Watts and Newark and Detroit would claim that the great marshmallow wouldn't even have acknowledged their existence if there hadn't been violent rebellions there.

[A] Baez: What has really changed in these cities since then? Nothing. That kind of reaction eliminates the possibility of showing people you exist in another way, in a way that would be much more powerful than playing the power games of the majority. Sure, you can say. "I exist in exactly the same way you do; I can be just as nasty as you can." And since you're acting just like they do, they'll try to put you down or buy you off one way or another. But it's very difficult for the power structure to absorb, to mute your real needs, when you make your humanity known. The example that always comes to my mind is a moment in Birmingham a few years ago. Children, little black kids, were walking toward a spot they had been told was out of bounds. They were singing and praying. There was a white fireman who had been told to hose them when they reached a certain point. I was watching the fireman. When the moment finally came, he shook his head and said, "I can't do it." But if those kids had been trying to make themselves known in the usual ways, the fireman could have and would have done it. I mean, if one of them had pulled a switchblade, it would have been the easiest thing in the world to hose them all to kingdom come.

[Q] Playboy: Do you think every fireman or policeman would have had that reaction to praying kids? Another man might have hosed them down without the slightest compunction.

[A] Baez: What I'm saying is that everybody has the capacity to react in that way. This doesn't necessarily mean that he's always going to act on it; we've all had a lot of our humanity trained out of us. But some remains, and it's that quality you have to keep on trying to bring out in other people as well as in yourself. In a way, we're all schizophrenics. We have in us, on the one hand, stupidity, fear, greed and a lot of other destructive qualities. But, on the other hand, there are elements of decency and kindness and love. The question is: Which elements in us are we going to try to nurture?

[Q] Playboy: That second group of elements doesn't seem to be among those that some of the radical left are trying to nurture. How do you deal with those who insist they have the right to break up meetings and shout down anyone with whom they disagree?

[A] Baez: First of all, you have to make distinctions. There are times when meetings have to be pretty stormy. If, for instance, there's an internal hassle, you ought not to try to impose your "wisdom" from the outside until that hassle is cleared up. You've got to get all that pent -- up stuff out. But on the other hand, when people rigidly insist that only their side has the right to be heard, that's something else. I suppose the person who's shouting you down feels that if you finally leave the room, he's won. But he hasn't won anything except a decibel contest.

[Q] Playboy: What do you do in that kind of situation?

[A] Baez: Well, once when David and I were talking, some black radicals were trying to shout us down. First I joked with them, but finally I said, "Hey, hold it! I've got just one thing to say. Do you have any interest in hearing it?" And there was a shout, "No!" I said, "That's what I thought." And everybody laughed, including a couple of the hecklers. Well, that made the man leading the shouting feel a little funny. So he said, "Yeah, sure, go ahead." Sometimes you can get through that way--showing how silly it is to not even try to listen to what the other person has to say.

[Q] Playboy: What did you say when you finally had the chance?

[A] Baez: The man who'd been doing the shouting had been talking about Irish this and Jewish that and what an Italian son of a bitch someone else was. What I said was, "Listen, if you're going to end racism, you're going to have to stop being a racist. You're going to have to stop putting down people in groups." I mean, how can you be part of real change unless you see, or try to see, each person in terms of who he is? When I say you can't end racism if you're a racist yourself, I'm also trying to show that you can't make a new kind of society by forgetting that every one of us is valuable and unique, that the most important thing--before all others--is the sanctity of each human life.

[Q] Playboy: Do you also apply that attitude to the subject of abortion?

[A] Baez: I don't like the idea of abortion at all, but at the same time, I know I'd help out some 16-year-old girl who felt that abortion was the only route for her. I'd probably try to find her a doctor. It's her decision to make.

[Q] Playboy: Do you feel as ambivalent about birth control?

[A] Baez: No, because, unlike abortion, birth control has nothing to do with a life that's already begun. But I do think birth control is getting to be a very serious problem. I had a dream about that recently. In it, there was a law that people couldn't have more than two children. And in the dream, I had two children, one after the other. Then I thought, "Oh, phooey, I don't get to be pregnant anymore." I felt bad, because being pregnant was so nice; it was such a lovely feeling.

[Q] Playboy: Do you and your husband intend to limit the number of children you have?

[A] Baez: David and I would love to have a little yard full of kids, but I think we should have two of our own and then adopt somebody else's.

[Q] Playboy: Would you advocate that other couples do the same?

[A] Baez: I think this sort of thing should--and will--become a general practice. It makes sense not only as a way to deal with overpopulation but also because it would be a way of breaking out of the usual family insularity. Having their own children is connected with people's egos and the carrying on of their name and all that stuff. But meanwhile, there are always hungry little kids running around with no name and no family. I think more widespread adoption would be good not only for those kids but for the people doing the adopting. It would increase their capacity to think beyond themselves, to actually feel the sanctity of an individual life that didn't come biologically from them.

[Q] Playboy: There's one area in your concern about the sanctity of life that seems somewhat unclear. During the parade in Berkeley for the People's Park in the spring of 1969, John Lennon called KPFA, a local radio station, to encourage the march. He also said that the marchers should keep their cool and realize that there are no principles worth dying for. You objected publicly to that last line. Why?

[A] Baez: I don't think I was being inconsistent. I called KPFA and said that I didn't think any principle is worth killing for, but obviously there are things worth dying for. Not necessarily the People's Park, but there are times when you may have to be willing to face death if you're acting for life.

[Q] Playboy: What would you find worth dying for?

[A] Baez: People. Of course, it's much too easy when you say it like that. But I can imagine putting myself in the way of violence to prevent violence being done to another.

[Q] Playboy: You said earlier that you've already done that--in jail, when you stopped a black girl from beating up a white girl.

[A] Baez: I suppose so, but that's not real danger. When I speak and act for draft resistance, though, I'm making myself really vulnerable. Just about everywhere I go, I know there's a possibility that somebody's going to want to pop me off. But if I started worrying about getting killed for saying the things I say, I'd quit doing most of everything I do. There are a million places and times when it could happen, but I just have to forget about them. Let me make it clear, though, that I'm by no means looking for martyrdom. (continued on page 136)Playboy Interview(continued from page 64) There are things worth dying for, but there's a hell of a lot more to live for.

[Q] Playboy: You mean your struggle to transcend nationalism and its predilection for violence as an instrument of foreign policy?

[A] Baez: That's something pretty worth while to live for, don't you think?

[Q] Playboy: Yes, but wouldn't you concede that there are a few cultural strengths in nationhood that might be worth preserving?

[A] Baez: Like What?

[Q] Playboy: Let's talk about the U.S. Is there anything specifically American that you feel is worth preserving?

[A] Baez: All I can think of is peanut butter.

[Q] Playboy: Let's be serious

[A] Baez: Well, America does have some very beautiful place. I've traveled a lot in the world, and when I end up on the West Coast in Big Sur, that caps them all for me. I just love it. That's another reason to get all the more frantic about not wanting everything to be blown to hell in a nuclear war. I'd like to save those beautiful place--but I also want them to be shared. Everybody should be able to see what Big Sur looks like or what the Grand Canyon looks like--until they make a sewage hole out of it or whatever it is they plan on doing. As for the other things that are usually talked of as particularly American--freedom, independence--they're not exclusively American, to say the least. And they're certainly not the dominant values of America just now.

[Q] Playboy: What are the qualities of American life and institutions that you feel are least worth saving?

[A] Baez: I think I feel most strongly about the schools. I don't know which is worse--kindergarten or graduate school. You see, as I've said, I think action is directly connected with vision. You can't act, you don't know how to act, unless you can really see things; and the trouble with most of us is that our vision has been clipped short in a variety of ways, most notably in school. They put all the emphasis on stupid things. There's no chance in a school--public or private--of dealing with, confronting, really seeing life, death, sex, all the things that would begin to make a person wise, as opposed to being knowledgeable, Look at many of the people who are in the schools. The saddest thing about them is that they're there because they feel impotent anywhere else."Who'd ever listen to me if I didn't have a Ph.D.?" they ask me."What would I do if I weren't here? If I drop out, is that equal to being a bum?" That pervasive feeling of impotence means that until people have a real choice of things they want to do, what they do isn't real. And what kind of choice is it when you've gone through life with you parents and everybody else expecting you to go to college? The pressures on you are so great that you're not really left with a choice. It's the same thing with the Army. So many people are in the Army because they can't bring themselves to see that they have a choice. They're not used to seeing; their vision has been cut off by the way they've been "educated."

[Q] Playboy: To what kind of school do you intend to send your child?

[Q] Baez: I Know I won't send my child to public school, and Robert and Christy, the couple I live with, won't send theirs, either. we're going to end up starting our own. You just set up the kind of school you want and, if the system doesn't like it, you go to war, because having your own kind of school is worth a fight. It's going to be easier for us out in the country than it would be if we lived in the middle of Chicago and he just couldn't bear having his kids in public school there. So he and three or four other people just started their own, shifting from house to house. They've got something like 16 kids involved by now. I think that would be the ideal thing for a lot of people who live in the cities--haul the kids out of those crummy schools and try to work with them Yourselves.

[Q] Playboy: What Kind of school will yours be?

[A] Baez: The closest I can come is Summerhill a private school in Suffolk. England], where each child is allowed to grow and follow what interests him without compulsion, without arbitrary curriculum. A school ought to be a place where children feel they're trusted and respected. Basically, a school ought to be a place where a child is allowed his childhood. The more childhood a child is allowed, The more childhood a child is allowed, the les he's going to have to go on being a child for the rest of his life. I've sent two kids to Summerhill and I could see the transition in them. I Sent them when they were ten and now they're thirteen. One, a cousin of mine, was kind of beginning to retreat into himself three years ago. He's part of a welfare family, has three brothers and a sister and, what with that and having to do chores all the time, he was developing a twitch. The other boy wandered into my house with a friend and just stayed. He's also from a family on welfare. Now, either this boy could have chosen to be really sensitive or he could have turned into the town tough. Both sides were very clearly evident.

Well, we packed them off to Summerhill and now they're just beautiful. I saw my cousin recently in Denver and he was putting a little plastic car together, his hair down to his shoulders. It was like some empty place in him had been filled by his having been able to play and have the time to find out who he was at Summerhill. You can just play for two years and if you decide to go to class, you go to class. The best example of how that works is a kid A. S. Neill, the headmaster, wrote about. He didn't go to a single class for 13 years and then he decided he wanted to be a woodworker. So he crammed into two years the courses in woodworking he would have been given over a six-year period in a regular school. You see, Neill isn't interested in turning out unhappy geniuses. He wants people to come out of there who can find some kind of happiness within themselves and in the way they relate to the world.

[Q] Playboy: Do you have and criticisms of Summerhill?

[Q] Playboy: Well, Neill refuses to inflict anything

[A] Baez Well, Neill refuse to inflict anything on the kids. There's no infliction of religion, for example, but--and this is what troubles me--he also doesn't want them to be bothered thinking about the war and the nuclear-arms race. That seems unreal to me. I don't see the point of trying to hide it from kids. But Neill feels Summerhill is an island where he can give 60 kids a year freedom from what he calls "the bombastards"--the rest of the world. He things we--the world--havent't got ling to go. But I don't see this as really protecting the kids. That approach means evading reality.

[A] Baez: Oh, yes. It's growing and it's getting more exciting. When we began, people in the school didn't talk much about resistance to the draft. But while we were in Carmel Valley, we began to get lots of refugees from Fort Ord, the Army installation there. And gradually, more people have come who are greatly concerned with resistance. At an Easter session last year, for example, there were eight guys, and by the end of the ten days, I don't think there was one of those eight who wasn't going to either turn his card in or refuse to register. That sort of thing happens continually at the institute now. Most have thought about it before, but there are others to whom the possibility of really resisting never occurre. However, when you have the chance to spend a period of time in which you do nothing but think and learn and reflect--really dig what you and life are about--then there are certain conclusions most people come up with. And the school has another effect. Some who have been there often go on to function as resource people for groups around the country that want to start (continued on page 152)Playboy Interviewcontinued from page 136 studying nonviolence where they are--in schools or wherever.

[Q] PlayBoy: But there are still so few of you, and it's the majority view that keeps being buttressed by all the claims that man is inherently and unalterably aggressive. What argument do you have against those who point to history as proof that human nature is violent and cannot be fundamentally changed?

[A] Baez: All the examples in history are not on that side. Anthropologists can tell you of societies in which nonviolence is the norm. I can think of one tribe in Africa to whom it never occurred not to be civil to anyone who wandered in off the desert. There were about 40,000 outsiders. This tribe fed and clothed them all for as long as was necessary and didn't grumble about it or worry about whether they'd replenish their supplies. This was just their way of thinking, their human nature.

[A] Playboy: But that kind of behavior is very much an exception in human history.

[A] Baez: Oh, I'll grant that the statistics, if you want to argue that way, are certainly in favor of the other side. But I'm not interested in that kind of argument. I tell you that I keep seeing people making changes in themselves that I didn't think they could make. I've seen it in myself--changes I didn't think were possible.

[Q] Playboy What are they?

[A] Baez: Living style, for one. In spite of the fact that I was probably more radical than any other entertainer I've met, I was living like a star before I met David. Not so much in terms of opulence, although things were comfortable, but with regard to the atmosphere. Like, I didn't have people up to the house and there were Private signs all over the place. And then there was the income I was making. I never liked having the ticket prices high, but I never fought to get them down. You believe what people around you tell you: "You're an entertainer, my dear, and you're so good you deserve $10,000 a night." Well, nobody deserves $10,000 a night. But with the help of David, I began to see the absurdity of some of these thing--like the prices and the "star" scene.

[Q] Playboy: What it hard to change?

[A] Baez: I fought at first. I fought before he ever opened his mouth. I'd say, "I won't ever have to leave this house, will I, David?" And he'd say, "Of course not"; but a week later, he said, "I think I'll get a little place near Palo Alto, where I can stay a couple of days a week to work with Resistance." I asked if I could come, and within a month, I'd put the big house up for sale. If a year ago someone had suggested to me that I live with other people, I would have been outraged. "Me--share my kitchen, share my things? But the way things developed, about two months before David went to jail, there were five of us living around the place in Palo Alto, sharing the kitchen and the bathroom. Along with David and me were a man David went to jail, I wanted to have my own base, but I knew I couldn't do that alone with a newborn baby. So it was a natural thing for us to live together.

[Q] Playboy: Do you agree with those who feel that raising children in this kind of communal environment may have decided advantages over traditional family life?

[A] Baez: That's one of the things I'm terribly excited about. I know that I suffered from the insularity of family; we were much too close to my mother and my mother was much too close to us. And I know that my tendency will be to act the same way with my kid. But he will have the advantage of being part of an extended family. There are other adults there, and since Christy is pregnant, he'll be growing up with another little kid. I think this is important for a child--not to be closed into a arrow concept of the family. There's another thing I like about our situation for a child. There's not much wearing of clothes where we are.

[Q] Playboy: Why not?

[A] Baez: The fact is that Robert and Chirsty do not naturally wear clothes. I mean, when they work and they're outside and up in the hills, they don't bother to get dressed. They're really beautiful, because they don't bother to get dressed. They're really beautiful, because they don't make a thing out of it. It was really hard for me at first, but eventually I was into the same thing. It's still a little harder for me, because I never know when time is going to pop in, so I'm not as free about it as they are. But what a magnificent thing it is for a child to grow up not having to call various parts of the body by giggly names because they're covered up all the time. I think that's certainly going to help create a healthier environment for any child growing up there.

[Q] Playboy: Since you started living with your friends, you've cut your hair short. Was that some kind of symbolic action, or were you just tired of having it long

[A] Baez: It was funny. When I did it, people started saying I was square because I'd cut my hair, but I'm more radical than ever. Yet I think that when you've had long hair for a long time and then cut it short, the reason must go little deeper than just wanting a new style. I'm not sure what that deeper reason is, but I do know I had wanted to do it for a long time. When I finally got up the nerve, it was in part because of David and the kind of person he is. All he said was, " Cut it if you want to, What the hell." And when I'd done it, he said he thought it made me look more revolutionary. And that made it fun for me But my, how serious some people got about it. There was a furious letter from a girl who said I must have really needed an image change to go and do something as outrageous as that. I don't know why she was so indignant. All I can tell you is that I'm glad I did it, because it's the way I want to look and because David likes it.

[Q] Playboy: How did you meet David?

[A] Baez: Well, he resigned as president of the student body at Stanford in April of 1967 to go around the country talking about the war and the draft and to organize the Resistance. And maybe six months or so after that, one afternoon he pulled in at the Institute for the Study of Nonviolence. He was a frazzled, bearded wreck. He sat around for a while and he couldn't figure out what the hell we were doing. He wanted to know where all the action was and be got sort of bored. But he did confess later that he was kind of interested in what I was up to and what I was all about. He came down twice like that, but I didn't really spend any time with him. Then, in October of that year, I ran into him him when I sat in for the first time at the entrance to the induction center in Oakland. It was the same day David refused induction into the Army. That happened a little distance away and I didn't see it take place. Those of us sitting in were arrested for refusing to disperse and he was arrested at the same time and taken to the same jail I was in.

And then, between jail terms--I was arrested again in December on a similar charge--I saw him once or twice again. The second time I was in jail, he came to visit me, and that's when I began thinking that maybe this guy had something on the ball. I realized he was the only visitor I really cared about seeing. A month after that, we went on the road together to talk about the draft and get support for the Resistance. I gave concerts and the two of us would speak at colleges and other places. In the middle of that tour--toward the end of March 1968--we decided to get married.

[Q] Playboy: Was it difficult for both of you after he'd been convicted for refusing induction and you knew it was only a matter of time before he'd be sent to prison?

[A] Baez: The only time it was rough was near the end. We were never quite sure exactly when it was going to be. But when we thought it was coming, we'd begin living in a certain way--we'd give a little more--and then we'd find out it wouldn't be for maybe another two months. It was hard to adjust to that--being keyed up and then going back to waiting again. We'd be having a million fights and we couldn't figure out why, but that's what caused it--the uncertainty, the tension. Probably the most glorious days we spent were those when we finally knew it was about to happen . David was just elated. But then he stared getting mad because they didn't show up. We suddenly realized that they were waiting for the Apollo l1 moon shot. They wanted to obscure the whole thing while everybody's attention was on that. And we were right. They picked David up on July 16, the day of the lift-off.

[Q] Playboy: Have you resigned yourself successfully to waiting out his sentence?

[A] Baez; There's a song I often sing at concerts. It's called One Day at a Time, and part of it goes: "I live one day at a time./I dream one dream at a time./ Yesterday's dead and tomorrow's blind." That, really is the only way for me to live now. Three years is nothing that I can comprehend, but I can get through a day easily enough. Also, I may be wrong about this, but I think a lot of the unhappiness people go through when they're separated is due in large part to feelings of guilt. " Why didn't I do so-and-so when we were together? Why didn't I try harder?" But I don't have those feelings. What I do have, since he's been gone, is a feeling of being very close to him. And, of course, having the baby is just a blessing.

[Q] Playboy: With all your work in the Resistance and at the institute, do you feel you've neglected your music? As we mentioned earlier, you've said you feel politically ahead but musically behind. How far behind do you think you are?

[A] Baez: I'm not sure. Maybe I shouldn't have used that term, because, thinking about it, I don't know whether there's a behind and an in front. Some of the stuff that might now seem the most far out and avant-garde may turn out to be very short-lived and without much meaning at all. I've decided that the thing to do is stay fresh within whatever context you're working. If you do that, you can still have meaning. And look at the way country music has become part of the so-called new music has become part of the able recording in Nashville.

[Q] Playboy: But you were quoted as saying of the Nashville musicians, "These guys are fascists. In a different situation, they would have lynched me in a minute."

[A] Baez: Oh, God, I was joking. Why, the feeling there was unlike anything I've had with musicians in years. It took a couple of days for that Southern skepticism to wear off, but after that, there was not only a musical closeness but we'd begun to really love one another. We had the tightest thing going. I did make wisecracks about the George Wallace posters they had all over the building, but that was because we had gotten to know each other well enough by then to kid each other.

[Q] Playboy: Did you ever try to talk seriously with them about your political convictions?

[A] Baez: No, I didn't talk about any of that while I was there. I didn't feel I had to. That was the first time in probably five years that I've been through five days without talking about draft resistance. There was no point arguing, when we were there to make music. But my secretary is more blatant about that sort of thing. At one point, she asked one of the musicians, "Have you heard of Resistance?" "What's that, a new group?" he asked. "Yeah, as a matter of fact, it is kind of new," she said and tried to describe it. The she asked, "What do kids here in Nashville do when they get drafted?" "Oh, they go." "Don't any of them not go?" she went on. And the answer was, "Well, every town's got one or two draft-card burners. You can't blame Nashville for that."

[Q] Playboy: In the LPs you've recorded in Nashville--and everywhere else, for that matter--there have been very few songs of your own. Why don't you write more of your own material?

[A] Baez: I'm just not particularly talented at it. I still try to write every once in a while, but I despise mediocrity and I see it all over my work when I try to write. So I usually just dump it out before I get half done.

[Q] Playboy: Have you been listening much to what other people are writing, now that nearly all the new performers and groups are creating their own material?

[A] Baez: No, I'm not really into the world of music that much. I do listen a little more to the new things now than I used to, but I can't pretend to be all that knowledgeable about what's happening.

[Q] Playboy: What do you hear that you especially like?

[A] Baez: Johnny Cash. His voice continues to deteriorate, but his soul is there. And The Band--which was first called the band from Big Pink--is phenomenal. The Rolling Stones' Beggars' Banquet was magnificent. And, of course, the Beatles--not so much some of the recent stuff but certainly sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. I can't put into words why that affected me so, except to say it was like a whole picture, everything coming together. I also like Joe Cocker, except that he sweats too much for me to be able to watch.

[Q] Playboy: What about Janis Joplin?

[A] Baez: There's something about her I appreciate very much. And it's probably the same reason other people are drawn to what she does: They know they'll never be able to cut loose like that. At the same time, I see her destroying herself and that makes me sad. I mean, boozing all the time and the people around her not challenging that. They just buy her another bottle. But I do like her voice--if you can call it a voice--and there's something about her style that makes me stand back and clap for her.

[Q] Playboy: You haven't mentioned Bob Dylan. Do you still feel, as you once said, that whether or not he decides to join the human race, he's a genius and that something of him will survive in history?

[A] Baez: Yes, I do still feel that, and from what I hear, he is quite happy now in the human race. At least I hope so.

[Q] Playboy: Much of the audience for rock, folk, jazz and blues today--including yours and Dylan's--seems to consider drug taking integral to the listening experience. Does that bother you?

[A] Baez: I think people should be able to smoke pot the way other people take drinks. When we get over this dumb prohibition of pot, it will be a very healthy thing for everybody. The other drugs frighten me. There are levels of drugs frighten me. There are levels of drugs, of course, and some are scarier than others. I've seen people on acid and speed who look destroyed. Some say it's only temporary, but I can't help thinking, "IS that person ever going to get grounded again?" Or, "What would it take for him to want to get grounded again?" And I can't sympathize with somebody who sells them stuff like that. It's too unpredictable and it can do great violence to the spirit. Like, someone in Haight-Ashbury once came up to me and said that this nonviolence thing is really for him, but I asked him, "Then how come you're still pushing acid?" It's worthless, I guess, to talk like that, but I get angry when I see it.

[Q] Playboy: Along with a more permissive attitude toward drugs, there has also been a loosening of sexual restrictions among the young. Do you have reservations about this, too?

[A] Baez: I feel very unresolved in my own head about what makes sense and what doesn't and about how young it ought to star. A.S. Neill, for instance, told about a very young teenage couple who had been at Summerhill and seemed very close and sort of in love with each other. They came to him and said they wanted to share a room. He said he would have loved to be able to let them, but he couldn't. His explanation was that he had to think of Summerhill and what would happen to the school if the girl got pregnant. Nor could he just hand her some pills, because that would have put the school in jeopardy, too. It was instructive to me, however, that otherwise he would have said, "Go ahead." I don't think that would necessarily be healthy at all for a lot of 14-year-olds in America. But at a place like Summerhill, where you've been allowed to be real all those years, you've been allowed to be real all those years, you have a genuine sense of caring by the time you're 14. I imagine the approach to sex there would be the realest you could find anywhere. It wouldn't be the titillating and unreal approach to sex we have in this country: frantic make-up, deodorants, breath sweeteners. A 14-year-Old in this country who's somebody will probably wind up being just a sexual athlete--and that's not healthy.

[Q] Playboy: Are you saying that there hasn't been much significant sexual liberation in this country?

[A] Baez: So much of it still seems connected with repressed desires that I question how real some of the liberation is. There was a book in a bookstore window in California and the title was Sex Without Guilt. Nobody bought it, at least not there. It was like, "Phooey! What fun would sex be without guilt?" I feel there's still a great deal of sexual repression. I mean, look at the way sexual feelings continue to be repressed in the public schools. You're not allowed to talk about sex. you're told that masturbation is a dreadful thing. But nearly all of what happens in school is repressive in this country. That's why I say again that school does so much harm in almost every way, in cutting off people's vision, in limiting their capacities.

[Q] Playboy: Would you contend that unless the society itself is liberated, it may be delusionary to speak of sexual liberation?

[A] Baez: Yes. Sex isn't an isolated phenomenon; it's part of the whole personality. And how many people are whole? How many really have vision? Let me go back to the school situation. A little kid starts talking wildly about what he's going to be when he grows up. He's waving his arms around, his eyes are sparkling. "I'm going to do this; I'm going to do that." And the adults say. "It's impossible, impossible, impossible." But he's little and doesn't know any better and goes on dreaming and refusing to believe he can't do what he wants to. But before he's been in school very long, he's given those placement tests and the adults insist they know what he can do best. He's still saying, "I want to go to Africa, I want to be a doctor, I want to learn eight languages." But the teacher says, "Well, your test says you'd be a better tree surgeon or mechanic." And eventually, the child begins to believe what he's told. You see, we're not going to be really free unless, in a sense, we can get back to when we were four and were able to dream of all kinds of possibilities and believe in them. We have to get back to a recognition that each of us is unique, that any possibility is real. The crudest way to put it is that people have to get their balls back, balls that have been sliced off bit by bit. And, of course, they have to do it for themselves. Nobody is going to hand them back on a big tray.

[Q] Playboy: How do you feel about the argument that women in particular have had their "vision" taken away from them, that their options are much more limited than those of men because this remains basically a male-supremacist society? Are you involved in women's liberation groups?

[A] Baez: I'm not, but I feel I should take a closer look. I've been turned off so far because I live near Berkeley and most of the stuff I've seen came out of there and I didn't like it at all. I seemed to be saying, "I'm a woman. I demand my rights. I can be as good a soldier or a competitor as any man." You're not going to have a new kind of society, a real sense of brotherhood, that way. On the other hand, I've heard of some good, less flashy things coming out of women's liberation activities--like cooperative nurseries, so that women who've been stuck in a house for ten years can get out. I expect there are other things going on that I should know about. But it's going to take a big effort for me, partly because I've spent the last year and a half trying to be less aggressive, trying to play less of a man's role. All those years before, I was by myself as an entertainer on a stage, and that's a very odd position. It's doing what a man usually does --learning how to project to a lot of people. But being married to David, I wanted to get away from that kind of aggressiveness--and in the process, by the way, I've learned how to cook and I love it. NO women's liberation front is going to take that way from me.

[Q] Playboy: Have they tried?

[A] Baez: Well, toward the end, when David's arrest was coming up, the place was flooded with people and Christy and I just cooked all the time; and one day, I was confronted by a couple of women who were so hostile to that sort of thing that they made me begin to feel uncomfortable. I asked them them if they wanted some dinner and they said, "Well, if you feel like cooking it." The way they said it, I thought, "Oh, am I going to look funny having an apron on?" And I started horsing around, clapping my hands and trilling, David, dear, dinner!" You know, the housewife routine. They got so mad that one of them still refuses to me.

[Q] Playboy: Whatever your personal feeling about some of its more militant exponents, do you feel there is a necessity for the liberation of women as people?

[A] Baez; I see very, very clearly the need for women to free themselves of many things--having to wear brassieres and make-up and take all those pains to fit into a stereotypical pattern of how you're supposed to look in order to be a sex object. And how you're supposed to act. Act beyond that, the still-prevalent concept in this county that the woman's place is in the home. Well, it isn't or shouldn't be for many women. And even for those who refuse to accept that role, the jobs open to them are equally stereotyped and limited and they earn about half what a man does for the same work. But as to how to go about changing all that, it boils down again to means and ends. And when the means are as crazy as some of them are now, the end result isn't going to be real.

[Q] Playboy: As you pointed out earlier, the identity of means and ends is central to your thinking. But are you an absolutist on the question? Can't a particularly desirable end ever justify bending the means to reach it?

[A] Baez: Absolutist is a pretty rigid term, I prefer to say that I don't think there's any difference between ends and means, because what you do always determines what you get. We have all of human history to prove that. Men have always said, " We want peace; we want brotherhood; we want tranquillity. just one more war and we'll have it." But after just one more war, you've laid the whole groundwork for the next war. To be more specific, take the Cuban revolution. There are some beautiful things about that revolution that I refuse to knock--like ending the system of economic privilege. But at the same time, a certain mentality grew out of the way that revolution was fought. I know that children in Cuba now start the day saluting the Cuban flag, singing nationalist songs, and that by the age of ten, they're carrying rifles. That doesn't seem to me likea very sturdy groundwork for anything but another nation-sate and the dependence on violence that goes with protecting the nation-state.

[Q] Playboy: Young people in Cuba say there is no alternative to keeping the country militarily alert with the American colossus only 90 miles away. Without cultivating nationalism and without a citizenry that knows how to handle guns, they insist "the revolution" couldn't be preserved.

[A] Baez: My answer is what is always is: How do you think you're going to preserve any revolution in that way, particularly when there's a colossus right over your head? Being a bristling, armed nation-state is going to make it that much more tempting for the colossus to want to crush you. The one alternative is to do something very different from what any nation-state has done in the past. I mean, the development of a nonviolent society. But you can't do that if your primary concern is preserving the nation state rather than the people in it. So I would say that the Cuban revolution hasn't been revolutionary enough

[Q] Playboy: Given the odds against you--and the lessons of history--how do you sustain a belief that your way will work, in Cuba or anywhere else?

[A] Baez: It's not easy, because one can never tell how much he's fooling himself. Sometimes I get very encouraged through the people I work with and the context in which I work. But then I get brought down. I meet someone like a woman who interviewed me recently. She's very much into Black Pantherism and she told me, "You're all by yourself. How do you go on thinking that way when nobody else does?" I kept saying, "But there are others. If you're interested, get out of New York City and look around outside the context you're operating in. We do exist. There are people who believe that blowing other people's heads off is a dumb idea. I'm not the only one on earth who thinks as I do." But then, when she'd left, I thought of the really hasn't known anyone else who thinks as I do. Maybe I do overestimate the numbers and the force on our side, because I surround myself with people who more or less believe as I do. We do exist, but it may be that there won't ever be enough of us,

[Q] Playboy: When you get discouraged, what lifts you out of it and gets you going again?

[A] Baez: The thing that keeps me doing the things I do and makes me think they may work, in spite of everybody's arguments about human nature and in spite of the wars and the exploitation, is that I've never in my travels met a person who didn't want to love and be loved by other people. I think that need can be as powerful a force as any of the forces we've been talking about That's the force I try to work with. It's there. The makings for the revolution I'm talking about are there. Oh, you often talk to the guy down the street and he's sure he can do it, but he adds that first you've got to get that other guy out of the way, because he might start after us with a machine gun. Everybody feels he's capable of being part of that real change I call revolution; but so far, only a few have gotten over that frenzy about the other person. That's what we have to work on, but we do have a base: that need everybody has to love and be loved.

[Q] Playboy: Are there times when you feel there is no real hope at all, even with that base?

[A] Baez: I'm acquainted with that feeling. It usually goes away fairly fast, but I have it once in awhile. I can't pretend not to have had it. It's then I think: What if the revolution never happens? Well, I want to have lived my life in such a way that I won't regret any of the things I've done. So even if we never reach the goal, I'll at least have attempted to live a decent life all the way through. I'll have kept on trying to reach people, trying to keep myself open, so that I can be reached, trying to be kind, trying to learn about love. In my most down moments, I think maybe that will be the most we'll be able to do--to live a life of trying to do those things. And if it comes to that, it will, after all, have been quite a lot have done.