B. U. G. S.

If you will look carefully at the articles below, you will find I am doing a lot more than mere bragging.

I am saying that I am so truly educated that people who make a point of “education” are so low that I am desperate to disassociate myself from them.

I am saying that I am so truly sophisticated that people who make a point of “sophisticated” are so low that I am desperate to disassociate myself from them.

And so forth.

I am saying that, in order for me to accept you as an intellectual equal, you have to share my complete contempt for what passed as respectability and education and sophistication.

This is one hell of requirement.

It would astonish a working man who has spent his entire life being put down by people with degrees that he has already passed all these tests after a few minutes of conversation with me.

Does this strike anybody as modesty?

IN MY OPINION anybody I encourage to comment should recognize that he has received a compliment that is unavilable anywhere else.

So now let me explain again the best compliments I ever received.

I had organized a joint march in Washington, DC against the education establishment of those protesting racial busing in South Boston and Louisville and other places and those protesting offensive textbooks in West Virginia. THOUSANDS of WORKING people had chartered buses AT THEIR OWN EXPENSE to come to Washington to join the march.

If you understood reality, which nobody but Ole Bob does, there has never been anything like it except the Million Man March.

The Million Man March was also done at the personal expense of the black men who participated in it. I will never quite forgive myself for having criticized it at the time. I of all people should have known what it meant to the people in it.

Compared to these phenomena, my march and the Million Man March, all the other Washington demonstration were nothing.

Bored college students or liberal blacks descending on Washington by the hundreds of thousands is no great surprise. They have plenty of time and plenty of money is provided for them.

In the two demonstrations I describe, every single person made a real personal sacrfice for something that was routine on campus, a political protest, but is outside the ken of people who work for a living.

Not to mention the time I got independent truck drivers to stop all the traffic in Washington, DC and a few other incidents.

I call myself a redneck from Pontiac, South Carolina, but my modesty is a bit limited.

I’m just so subtle you never notice it.

So I expect you to take my compliments very, very seriously.

How do the words, “They are sinking in a swamp and we are looking down on them from a tower” strike you as being subtle.

That is the reality.

As to what I gloried in as compliments, during the joint march against the education establishment described above, I happened to be walking up just as a couple of West Virginia coal miners who had paid their way to the march were talking to lady from South Boston.

The South Boston anti-busing movement was huge. So there was a lot of debate about who would speak for them at the press conference I had arranged.

As I walked up, nobody noticed me. One of the coal miners said, “Well, Whitaker speaks for us and he’s not even a hick.”

Coal miners are not the most trusting of people. For him to say offhand that it never occurred to him that anybody but Whitaker would speak for his crowd was a compliment I cannot replicate.

In top secret clearances, one of the incidents I have had to explain was when a Ku Klux Klan put thousands of dollars into my checking account about 1961.

That caused me a LOT of trouble, but I do remember one moment when I wished it hadn’t happened.

Before Joe lynches me for too long an article, I’ll end this one and explain the entire situation in another.

To wind up my point here, one should judge compliments by quality not quantity.

I am not free with them, and I hope some of you value the one I give you here.