, consider the legacy of Saul Alinsky, the man who gifted Hillary and Barack the dream.This is the guy the right always despised and idealists like Hillary Rodham wanted to marry before she met Bill. Yet, no less a luminary than William F. Buckley admired Alinsky's tenacity, calling him an "organizational genius" back in the day. Buckley is sometimes referred to as the sensible right-winger of his era, but naturally he often made me ill, sort of like George Will does today, or the pseudo-intellectual columnist David Brooks, who hasn't the honesty of your average bank robber.
Hillary may have anointed Alinsky's feet, so taken was she by his vision of a truly democratic America. Barack Obama carried the man's principles to the mountain top, of course, but Saul isn't around now to help poor Obama. Barack is in trouble with the left because he has evidently put Alinsky's searing logic on low-heat. (He's in trouble with the right because he's a black "socialist," a hopeless tandem.) His slow-cooked methodology may be spreading something salmonella-like at the worst possible time. Alinsky pre-dated (he died in 1972) the radical ecological movement, but recall that he was dialectically opposed to "materialism." And what is more materialistic than the quest for oil, I ask you?
No Marxist however, Saul sought "change" from the inside. He might have spanked Barack for the president's tepid response to BP's pungent disaster in the Gulf, because now that Barack is supposedly on the inside he isn't doing much.
Saul wasn't a communist, or even a socialist, he said, because he wasn't a joiner. (So take that, Sarah Palin, you tea-partying hackolyte!) The funnier Marx, Groucho, said the same thing if you recall: "I wouldn't belong to any organization that would have me as a member." Or to that effect.
These are difficult times for Barack, Hillary, you, me.
I have a connection to Alinsky, too, I just haven't run for high-office yet, or any office, except Sgt.-at-Arms in high school. Tall, handsome, kind of quiet, I promised everybody free hall passes any time they wanted them. I won.
I read Saul's seminal organizing bible Rules for Radicals when I was a kid. I loved it in 1974, took it to heart. Required reading for community organizers, I read it hard until my eyes bled, wore out the pages, passed it around. It worked. I was once called a "Bolshevik" by an alderman in rural Maine because I argued with him over his decision to not buy emergency oil for a poor woman and her ten or fifteen kids, I can't remember how many, really, but more than enough. I cursed the guy and my co-organizer told me I was ridiculous. My boss later said, Hon (she called everybody Hon, short for Honey I guess), you can't be pissing people off, you must learn the art of cajoling and kissing ass, or something like that. Alice Bean. There are a million Beans in Maine, one big family.
We got the oil.
That was a crazy time, like these days. Alinsky won, his faithful moved to the highest rungs of power (remember I haven't tried yet), but they are, sadly, sort of suspended there, having lost their mojo.
You know what Saul would say today? We need change, baby. Read this for a lucid account of where we are.
TS
No comments:
Post a Comment