B. U. G. S.

We called them Home Truths because they “hit you at home.”

They HURT. A good example is the kid who went out for high school football who was five foot four and barely weighed maybe a hundred pounds. The coach would tell him that there were come unofficial physical requirements that prevented him from giving the kid a tryout.

Of course, the Home Truth, what the coach was thinking, was “Dammit, you know you’re too LITTLE for me to put you out there even for practice. I would be responsible, and you should damned well know it.”

I have found that more Home Truths are funny than they are painful.

We had a Home Truth about our Populist Forum and we had a truly ingenious way to deal with it. But I have never met anybody who didn’t laugh when I described it because it IS funny.

A lot of people talked about an alliance between the grass roots working people who backed Wallace and the regular conservatives, but no one knew how to make a start.

So Bob Hoy, who had press experience, dealt with the press and made the grassroot contacts. My wife, who was a legal secretary did the paperwork and the real organizing, and me, who conceived it and did the writing.

The Communist Party Daily World described us as a “large heavily financed organization” and we loved them for it.

You seem the Home Truth was that we were three people with full time jobs and no budget. Hoy was getting the national news media to our press conferences for anti-busing, independent truckers, national protests against dirty textbooks required by the educational establishment, and on and on.

Let me claim my credit here. Hoy got the press and did the field work, but the people we dealt with were uniformly stunned by my writing. It is really weird for a person used to ordinary language to hear EXACTLY what he said translated into a press release.

They would sit a moment in a surprise and then say, “That’s EXACTLY what I said.”

They were used to their preacher putting God’s spin on what they were fighting for. They were used to conservatives and liberals putting their spin on it. When they heard me say exactly what they would have said if they knew how to write press releases, they were always amazed.

But we usually let them think we represented an Organization. The media would have been hard for Hoy to get there if they had known that, while all the other people vying for their attention were big outfits or Celebrities, we were three people and no budget.

So when Hoy had to deal with the press, he never refused on his own and ticked them off. When I dealt with conservatives, I made no decisions that contradicted them. Hoy said that Whitaker or Brigitte had the decision on this, I said that one of them did.

Sometimes we had what we called “a show call.” Hoy had to turn a group down for our services or refuse to give something to the press. He got on the phone with them listening and called me or Brigitte. If it was Brigitte who was available, he made unblushing use of Male Chauvinism.

You see, on a show, Brigitte became the “supervisor.” Then and probably now, everybody assumed a female supervisor meant that she we speaking for an even bigger Boss who couldn’t be disturbed.

That’s three levels of organization. Obviously we were a large, heavily financed operation.

Or Hoy would call Bob Whitaker, who was up there on Capitol Hill. All of us knew exactly what was going on from the tone of voice we used. Hoy or Bob was obviously talking to his Superior, the Man Who Made the Real Decision. Not just anybody could speak for all the money and organization in The Populist Forum.

So when I got a call, I knew my role. Whatever it was Hoy needed at the moment, he would say the right things to me. If he needed a veto, he would make that clear, and the other way around.

The Home Truth, three overworked people and no budget was never even suspected. I became the official spokesman for the working people for the national conservative movement.

Truth can be grim, but it can also be funny.