My political specialty, which no one else seem to be able to do, was getting into grassroots movements of working people, the ones later called Reagan Democrats.
Truck Roy is too young to know about my work with the Independent Truckers, when we shut the whole Washington, DC area down. He is an actual, honest-to-Betsy Trucker, so he knows ABOUT that. I personally got it going, but, as Ben Franklin advised, I let others have the “credit.”
It was easy to do. I did the press releases. But by then I was already famous among grass-roots protestors.
I was happy to note that a Stormfronter who is a member of the Electrical Workers International HAD heard of my work with them in Louisville, where he resides.
Pretty good for something I did almost three decades ago.
Conservatives were always talking about REACHING The Working People. They would ask me what The Secret was. I told them, “We found out what they needed and provided it.”
They KEPT asking me what the Secret was. Then they would meet with each other and talk about Reaching the Working People.
Then they would once again ask me what the Secret was.
The Communist Daily World, organ of the CPUSA, denounced my Populist Forum as a huge, heavily financed organization. Part of the huge right-wing conspiracy, you know. There were three of us, and we had no budget. The CPUSA always claimed it Spoke For the Working Class, but they didn’t know any more actual working stiffs than conservatives did.
Our Secret was safe from THEM.
The conservatives would ask me once again what the Secret was. Then they would go back and meet on the question of How to Reach the Working Class.
Does this begin to sound familiar? Does it make it clear to you why I am not exactly stupefied by the fact that I keep winning battles in front of them and people see me do it and then never follow my example?
Well, I had learned the why of this before I started getting into the grassroots revolts of working folk.
My formula was, “Find out what they need and provide it.”
Provide what?
Well, the problem was that the people who wrote and spoke for a living couldn’t reach the grassroots protests of working people against things like offensive textbooks and busing.
What WAS this unbridgeable gap? It was the fact that they didn’t know any working people and the working people didn’t know any people who were on their side and who could write and speak professionally.
So our press man would call up grassroot groups and ask if they could use us three people who spoke and wrote for a living. Once they found out we really would, we got more calls than we could handle. In other words, if the gap is between people who can do public relations and working people, you can bridge it by offering your work TO the working people because it is just what they need.
Find out what they need and provide it.
I got some writing money from National Review and a couple of other conservative publications, but we never charged a nickel and we never had a budget.
Conservative money was going into financing huge conventions dedicated to discussing How to Reach the Working People. At one I happened to attend, a woman I met had just attended a large seminar discussing — guess what? — my own first book.
I didn’t know about that seminar or the many others like it, though there were a lot of them at those Seminars about Reaching the Working Class Protests.
It never occurred to me that the convention-holders, who knew I was there, would even consider having ME address the group at all. Have you ever heard of a group that had seminars on a book in a place where they knew the author was and didn’t ask him to sit in?
The point I am making is that I not only didn’t resent it, I would have be flabbergasted if they had asked me to be there. They were raising money on DISCUSSIONS on how to Reach the Working People, not on someone who was DOING it.
Does any of this begin to sound familiar, Mantra-Folk?
#1 by Simmons on 05/17/2010 - 11:01 am
The modern right always aligns itself off of the modern left. The suited clowns want to be just like the left when they grow up.
Even Ol Nick of the BNP afforded his opposition respect they do not deserve, and hence got what he deserved 1.5% of the pop vote.
We all suffer for the want of asking our Mommy Profs any sort of question that might actually challenge their “authority.”
#2 by Dave on 05/17/2010 - 11:44 am
It not only sounds familiar, it is standard operating procedure, regardless of the issue.
What else are we supposed to expect from our legions of University trained windup talking dolls?
What people fail to see is the fundamental incoherence of the average person whose brain has been ruined by education.
For example, do you have any idea of how difficult it is to find a lawyer who is capable of thinking straight?
Finding such a lawyer is one of life’s most arduous procurements. Yet, I never have the slightest trouble finding an auto mechanic whose brain doesn’t work perfectly.
Speaking of lawyers, the courts are incoherent. They have no way to get to coherence. The entire Establishment is incoherent.
To the extent that they try to be coherent, it is always this cat chasing its tail dynamic. They are always chasing some “being-in-becoming”. They never consider that anything they deal with can just “become”. Everything, but absolutely everything is a “process” with them.
It is inconceivable to the Establishment to actually solve a problem. That is something they just don’t do and resolutely refuse to do. The simplest things are beyond their reach. The claims they make regarding their competence are preposterous. I think of them as “the hordes of the helpless”.
Encountering the Establishment, whether at the state or Federal level, is like encountering an outing of 500 Downs Syndrome people sitting on various benches at the State Fair. An organization is what its members talk about. You can imagine the conversations that a crowd of 500 Downs Syndrome people have with one another. Now you understand the Establishment a little better. The Establishment uses a higher level vocabulary, but this makes them LESS coherent than their Downs Syndrome counterparts. But as an analogy, it works perfectly.
Yet most on our side think the Establishment is all powerful. Go figure.
#3 by Gator61 on 05/17/2010 - 7:14 pm
Bob,
I think part of the problem is that many of the elites don’t think that the working people are smart enough to bother to ask them what they think or need. All that needs to be known is provided by mommy professor.
You mentioned my home town of Louisville Kentucky. I worked my way through college there selling bedding plants in a small garden center. Early in the morning, you find me among the working people at the Hay Market. None of the people there were college educated, many were not even high school educated. Very few of them were stupid. As a matter of fact some of the brightest people, most insightful people I’ve ever known worked down there.
At night I would go to class at a prestigious Catholic college (now a University). The professors at this all white college, in an affluent, all white part of town about the working class, and race relations. For the most part I would nod and agree with them, I did after all want to get my diploma, but I could not help thinking how little they knew about race relations compared to the men on the Hay Market located across Jefferson Street from the Clarksdale Housing Project. The working men down there didn’t think about race relations in esoteric terms. They lived race relations. They understood the differences between the races because they saw and lived it on a daily basis.
If the educated elites were to talk to the guys on the Hay Market, and found out what they needed, the cognitive dissonance would be too much for them to bear. The reality that they live is just too different from mommy professor’s theories.
#4 by Alan B on 05/18/2010 - 2:13 am
Politicans and Mommy Professor are nothing more than parasites and snake oil salesmen. These charletans claim to have all the answers to everything. Their Ivy league diplomas qualify them as experts at managing everthing and anything. They remind us how complicated everything is and how everything must be studied down to the most finite level. These experts are hard at work, this devotion to solving all the worlds problems will always lead to the demand more time and money and of course, more experts. Hate to see all that progress go to waste if their funding ran out. The Bugs folks know all about this BS racket.
Experts are hucksters, they work at maintaining the statis quo, in other words,they are experts at making a living, by doing nothing and changing nothing.
#5 by Truck Roy on 05/20/2010 - 11:49 am
I agree 100% with you Gator.
There was this old hippie who was hitching a ride. He was a nurse of some sort (Had a college education), and he wanted to hitch hike across the country like he used to do when he was a youth. He was on his way back to Ohio from the West Coast to visit his son, before going to do some volunteer medical work in Africa.
I picked him up at truckstop just east of Reno. We got to talking racial politics.
He say’s “You don’t seem like a racist”. See, he figured that a racist would be full of crazy hate and maybe high on drugs or something.
But everyone who spends sometime in Newark NJ, Gary IN, Compton CA, Brooklyn NY, El Paso TX, etc knows that race is real. If you don’t know it, you will learn it real quick.
I know that I would rather live in Great Falls MT that San Antonio, because San Antonio is beginning look a lot like Mexico and Great Falls is still American.
This does not mean that I wish ill on Mexicans nor Negroes.
If I was unloading a truck in Memphis (Very, very dark) and a Negro needed help moving something, I would help him.
But if I sure as hell don’t want his people in my neighborhood. I will help the fellow if he is working with me, but I sure as hell won’t let him date my sister.
Actually, I don’t have any sisters, but you know what I mean.
On Bob’s post: I am working on my verbal skills and hope be able to travel and help represent folks someday. In the short term, I can only afford to get involved in local politics.
I have started going to City Council meetings. Got to make some contacts.
I think that folks on fixed incomes (Retiree’s, disabled) have a great opportunity to get in front of the cameras and represent. They won’t lose their jobs and they have some spare time.