ALAN B AND WHAT POLITICAL WARFARE LOOKS LIKE | 2006-10-26
I was thinking of Alan B all alone out there handing out the Mantra and being told by the university officials that "This is OUR university. Have you gotten permission (from us) to do this? Have you paid us tuition to be a student so you can do this?"
When I wrote Why Johnny Can't Think I wanted people to go into universities and put our stuff on the bulletin boards and face down the officials who told them they had to pay for the place but they had no right to express THEIR opinions there.
It didn't happen. It takes a lot of years to build up the kind of confidence I have on a campus. The bottom line was FEAR. For all their chest-beating about the universities, nobody was ABOUT to go in there and fight it out. I offered to go in there with them.
No takers.
Alan B is proposing more than he realizes, and he will probably come back the first time with his tail between his legs. I got slapped down more times than I can relate in the last fifty years.
But it is the tries, the defeats, that are especially worth reporting back.
When I brought my Austrian wife, whom I met in South Africa, back to the States with me we were watching the first reports on an American election, at the very beginning of the primaries. It showed a lone man out at about 7 am in a deserted shopping mall with his campaign literature in hand.
"Now THAT," I told her, "Is what REAL politics looks like. Look at that guy. I have been where he is many, many times."
We keep reading stuff from Stormfront about people who dream of being in the march of tens of thousands of Storm Troopers who have just taken over the government. When we see campaigns talked about on television, we see the candidate marching in with thousands of ecstatic supporters cheering for him.
That is what politics looks like to almost everybody who hasn't been in a campaign from the get-go.
Actually, when a campaign reaches the point where the candidate has gotten the nomination and it is a serious fight, the planning for that news event where the camera shows the candidate marching in greeted by the enthusiastic crowd, the planning for that news event began weeks before. The campaign the local drudge, like me, and says "We'll be there on September 8."
Said drudge then begins calling, arranging. It's scary because you are never SURE people will show up. And all that matters in a news event is that they SHOW UP.
"But I've got a LIFE. I have to do to a movie that night."
But I've got a LIFE.
But I've got a LIFE.
The assumption is that Ole Bob has no life at all except to knock himself out, free of charge, to do this work.
So flash back to the candidate I was watching at the beginning of the primary with my new wife. That man was out there alone in what no chest-beater would call "real" politics, the mass marches and the mass demonstrations. REAL politics is mass demonstration. REAL politics is fighting off the worshipping mob of supporters with a grin on your face.
Until that happens, people will tell you, "But I've got a LIFE."
Compared to what people call READ politics, this is nothing to interrupt your LIFE with.
A final note. My wife called me at work one evening in November, when I was tired and busy.
She said, "You remember the guy we saw on television when you said 'That's what REAL politics looks like?"
I thought and then remembered the incident through my fog of election-day exhaustion and said, "Yes."
My wife said, "He just got elected."