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Emmett was a masterful character actor and brilliant in a lot of ways, but he was eclectic -- he tended to take from people what he needed. One of the seminal guys, but who was not in the Mime Troupe, was Billy Murcott. Billy was this quiet, uncharismatic, very smart guy that he'd grown up with. He always had graphs and charts of different historical events up on his wall. And I think Emmett created the appropriate personality to embody the insight that Billy had. It was Billy, as I remember, who crystallized something that was in the air, the notion of Free, I think, and the articulation of autonomy. And it was radical enough and extreme enough to take us even another step farther out than the Mime Troupe. That real power was autonomy and that all ideologies had some degree of bullshit in them. And that the left, the socialist left, was no longer a model of anything. It had degenerated into a bunch of old men yapping theory and ideology. That what was required was for people to be forthright and straightforward and to take responsibility for doing what they felt ought to be done, regardless of ideology -- just do it. And that people like us were not going to be any more comfortable in a leftist nation-state than we were in a rightist nation-state. Billy wrote the first Digger Papers. The very first manifestos were written by Billy, as far as I remember. Billy was the unsung genius behind the Diggers.

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