TruthToTell Nov 25, 2009: MARV DAVIDOV w Carol Masters: You Can’t Do That! AUDIO HERE

January 14, 2012: Yesterday, knowing the end was near, lifelong peace and justice activist Marv Davidov surrounded himself with family and several friends from the old trenches to say goodbye, even to talk briefly with a reporter from the StarTribune. Partying along and celebrating their time together, he died later that day, no regrets for almost al of it, save, perhaps for the successes that elude us all in a culture of war and corporate greed. Most of us will depart this vale having failed to effect all of the change we know to be necessary for a people’s survival, but many of us will simply run out of the intellectual and emotional energy that never left Davidov, despite his failing body.

Just over two years ago, Davidov and his collaborator and close ally and friend, Carol Masters penned his biography, You Can’t Do That! A perfect title for a lifetime of resistance. Posted below is the original airing of the interview we recorded with Marv and Carol a few days earlier. Ever up to his wisecracks, Marv tells his story

November 25, 2009:

Andy Driscoll probes the mind and motives of Marv Davidov – a near icon of nonviolent resistance and revolution here, but also everywhere across the country for nearly 57 years. Known primarily in these parts – at least among the general public – as the founding inspiration for the war-resistant action group, The Honeywell Project.

Starting in 1968 and 1969, dozens of Project protestors were arrested after jumping the fences during demonstrations against Minneapolis Honeywell’s Defense Systems division in Minneapolis railing against that company’s manufacture of the cluster bomb – a nasty little device that, when lobbed into an area where people congregate – soldiers or civilians – would detonate and scatter-shoot thousands of shotgun pellet-type missiles to maximize its kill of human beings, not just to destroy military buildings or materiel. Of course, its greatest impact was almost always on civilians, theoretically not an announced target in wars between military powers.

The Honeywell Project and its latest incarnation now known as the Alliant Technology Resistance have hammered on war materiel manufacturing around here for 40 years. But Marv Davidov, despite his loss of kidney function and under dialysis three hours a day, three days per week, hangs in there – not always everyone’s darling, but admired by all for his persistence and his courage in the face of violent counterforce over the last half-century. His dialysis on Wednesdays at our usual broadcast time forced us to pre-record Marv and his biographer, Carol Masters, between dialysis days. We sat down with them yesterday, and to no one’s surprise, Marv was ever on his game.

Before the Honeywell Project, Marv’s was a deep background of nonviolent revolution in the 50’s and 60s – including Freedom Rider work to Mississippi and prison, then, later, walking from Canada to Cuba right at about the time of the Bay of Pigs debacle during the Kennedy Administration. That walk brought more grief, pain and jailings from white supremacists in still-rebellious Georgia as the marcher tried combining civil rights in the US with peace promotion toward Cuba. Marv spins his tails and we hear excerpts from Carol Masters’ biography, Marv Davidov: You Can’t Do That!