Dissenter Makes Capital From Leftist Views

Roger Leisner is committed to spreading the words of leftists, dissenters and others at the political fringes in the materialistic ‘90s. So committed that he sends taped speeches to like-minded broadcasters across the land in the hope they will volunteer free air time.

Many of them do. In fact, in an ironic testimonial to old-fashioned capitalism, Leisner says he’s on his way to building his Radio Free Maine into a successful commercial enterprise.

“My goal is to make a living from it,” said Leisner, 50, whose tireless activism dates back to 1965, when he received a draft notice while a student at Southern Illinois University.

Following the college lecture circuit mostly in the Northeast, Leisner sets up a video camera in the front row and makes video and audio tapes, which he sends to stations most likely to air them.

The stations run the gamut from a one-watt pirate station run by a blind man in a Springfield, Ill., housing project to the Radio Pacifica network, which transmits nonconformist fare in five of the nation’s major markets. In between are such stations as Free Radio Berkeley and Radio Havana.

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Leisner banks on free air time to draw interest from listeners for his tapes, which he sells through his mail order business. Videocassettes cost $19 and audio cassettes cost $10.50.

Tapes feature such off-center figures as Jerry Brown, Ralph Nader and Jesse Jackson, and on the more radical side, ‘70s activist Angela Davis, Chicago Seven defendant David Dellinger and author-dissident Howard Zinn. Feminist Camille Paglia, peace activist Helen Caldicott and American Indian activist Russell Means are also on Leisner’s list of recordings.

Leisner also records the annual Democratic Socialists of America conference. And a few mainstream and popular culture figures, like former Senate Majority Leader George Mitchell of Maine and movie producer Oliver Stone, show up on Radio Free Maine tapes.

But the speaker who generates by far the largest following is Noam Chomsky, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology linguistics professor who travels about the country delivering stinging critiques of American institutions and foreign policy.

Chomsky, whose theories revolutionized the scientific study of language, is also a prolific author whose social and political commentary is widely quoted. He counts as his devotees students and activists as well as a diverse field of artists and intellectuals.

On one tape, portions of Chomsky’s speeches are superimposed over music by the Los Angeles-based punk group X, which adds background vocals for effect.

“There’s a standard view of democracy, which is what you hear in the Fourth of July rhetoric. But there’s an actual view of democracy, which is held by sophisticated elites, and their view is that the public is a dangerous enemy,” Chomsky says over guitars and drums.

“You are the domestic enemy,” the chorus echoes Chomsky.

Chomsky also speaks at length on foreign policy. In a Dec. 8 address at the University of District of Columbia, he touched on U.S. policy in Vietnam, the Mideast, Haiti, Bosnia and other regions. The talk was replete with Chomsky’s trademark references to letters, memos and other government documents to support his arguments.

Leisner said Chomsky is his main star because “he covers a lot of territory. There’s a real honesty in what he does. He makes us critically think.”

A side benefit of Leisner’s work is that he is chronicling spoken words that might otherwise be lost forever, said Al Lewis, a former radio and television actor best known for playing Grandpa on “The Munsters” TV series.

“He provides a service you can’t get anywhere else,” said Lewis.

The 86-year-old actor, who vividly recalls the blacklisting of artists suspected of having ties to communism during the 1950s, said he has always questioned broadly accepted doctrines of public policy and history.

“I think [Chomsky] is the greatest living intellect in American society today,” said Lewis, who shares the tapes with his philosophy-professor son.

Leisner has tried to make Chelsea Clinton a believer and sent the president’s daughter an unsolicited batch of Chomsky and other tapes. The White House acknowledged the tapes had arrived, but said nothing more.

Radio Pacifica puts all of the Radio Free Maine tapes in its archives, and Leisner, who was a history major in college, also sends them to Southern Illinois, where they are being filed away.

Sales of tapes depend a lot on what time of day they air, and generally “they play me at horrible times,” said Leisner. “But when they play me at prime time, I do quite well.”

WGDR, a Radio Pacifica affiliate based at Goddard College in Vermont, doesn’t have a special time slot for tapes produced by Leisner and a few others who do the same thing. But those that are played go over well, station manager Stu Bautz said.

“We get a really high listenership and good feedback from it,” Bautz said.

Leisner’s business got a boost last May when Playboy magazine reviewed a Chomsky tape, “The Role of the Media in Manufacturing Consent.” The magazine described it as “a particularly bracing analysis of the recent elections and the propaganda offensives of the American ruling class in the past 25 years.”

Leisner traces his own activism back to the Vietnam War era. Although he ended up being deferred from military service, he saw the draft as “a war against the working class.”

On campus, he helped forge a Unity Party coalition between radicals and black students and became active in town politics. Since then, Leisner has worked as an advocate for low-income housing and as a union stagehand, and was active in Jesse Jackson’s 1984 and 1988 presidential campaigns.

His own political leanings?

“I’m probably more of an anarchist than anything else.”