The Dick Gregory I knew

The Dick Gregory I knew

By Jon Rappoport

I could start a conversation with Dick Gregory, and before I knew it, it would be going in six directions at once. He wasn’t just riding one wave. He was swimming in all the oceans at the same time. He was moving on his own time clock. Sooner or later, the currents of realization would come through to me. He was looking at a far shore that was more real to him than any present moment. He was already in the future, and he saw it like a grand impresario would see his own carnival. Grand, ongoing, symphonic.

I hadn’t been in touch with Dick Gregory for quite a while. When he died, two weeks ago, I remembered the days I spent with him, in the mid-1990s, in Washington DC and LA.

It started with a report I did for KPFK radio in LA on mind control. Dick happened to be in the studio the day it aired and he called me and told me to get back to him as soon as I could.

We met at the radio station and had a conversation on-air. A month or so later, I called him and mentioned that I was in business talks with a nutritional company, and they wanted to meet him and possibly bring him on board as a spokesman.

A number of phone conversations followed. I went to Washington and met Dick at a hotel. We spent the afternoon together. He was recovering from dental problems and wasn’t at full-strength. But his half-strength was greater than a hundred people on fire.

I began to see what he was after. He wanted to meet with the foreign owner of the nutritional company and propose several wide-ranging projects to promote better nutrition.

Dick was a PR man, the likes of which exceeded anything I’d ever encountered. He was a PR man for the truth, and his imagination was unlimited. He talked to me about a walk-a-thon across the US which would enlist ten thousand people. Entering the final leg, coming into Washington, people in the marathon would hold simultaneous press conferences about nutrition, toxic metals in water supplies, the effects of environmental pollution on populations. Dick envisioned a ten-ring circus of truth. As he described it to me, I went from highly dubious to believer. He had the vision, he had the energy, he had the visibility, he had the power. He was unstoppable.

He needed funding, and he saw the possibility of traveling with me to Europe to sit down with the owner of the nutrition company and come away with a check.

I realized he’d been down similar roads before. No one had stepped up to the plate with $$. But that didn’t deter him. It never would.

Long story short, the trip to Europe and the deal with the nutrition company didn’t come off. Several execs in the company came to consider Dick “problematical.” Well, of course he was. Who the hell did they think they were dealing with? He was problematical to the status quo, the medical cartel, polluting corporations, and the government that was protecting these corporations.

Back in Los Angeles, I wrote up half a dozen PR projects Dick had discussed with me in Washington. We met for breakfast when he came to town and I gave him my prospectus. It made him happy to see someone could take his ideas and put them down on paper and organize them.

Of course, there was still and always the question of money, where to get it, how to raise it, and how to make sure a backer would stay with us all the way, because all the way meant causing a certain amount of good trouble.

At breakfast that day, Dick spooled out a few more schemes, designed to wake up people, tell the truth, and draw major publicity.

On one level, he seemed like a guru of free-association and stream of consciousness—but that was just the beginning of his vision. He knew with great certainty that he could pull these projects off with maximum coverage, maximum embarrassment to the powers that be, and maximum education for one and all.

He was ready to put his whole career on the line without a moment of hesitation. He saw the decades of that career and the public cache he’d earned as the launching pad for the next phase—a profound form of public relations—relations with the public—on the basis of Knowledge As Power. He knew exactly what that phrase really meant. He understood how he could embody it in large staged events that would set up a super-real wave of interference in the mass hypnosis that was, and is, official news and official science and official crime.

Behind his quips and stories and remembrances, he was watching, with silent certainty, the passing parade of cultural insanity, and he had other parades in mind.

Greater parades, in the middle of which, buried facts, searing facts and revelations would emerge.

He was ready to turn the famous “there’s a sucker born every minute” into “there’s a conscious, awake, and motivated soul emerging from deep sleep every minute…”

Travel on, Dick.

Who knows what you’re going to do next?