Forewarned is Forearmed

Arma virumque cano?

Matt Welch led me to this (not a linkable blog, so you have to scroll down to the headline "Scheer Wins Writers Guild Debate On Style, Wit.")

The real story was not about Scheer, who obviously knows how to please a crowd described as "90%" left. As author Luke Ford noted, it was

"hard to hear my tape of the debate because the audience laughs so loudly and applauds so vigorously to Scheer's remarks. He knows his crowd."

I admire Horowitz even more than I did before I read Luke Ford's account of the "debate" and as my blogfather Jeff Soyer would say, "I feel a rant coming on…."

I have seen it all before, the booing, the yelling, the heckling, the name-calling. I have also seen far worse. The first major instance was in 1982 when I dared to march in San Francisco's Lesbian Gay Parade with a float we called "GAY GUNS." You can read about that nightmare here. A decade later, I faced an even worse situation when I dared to sit on the City of Berkeley's Police Review Commission.

In those days I was terrified of personal, ad hominem style attacks, so I had to shore up my endorphin receptors before the meetings. But even that did not work. I felt this growing, gnawing, horrible sense of dread, guilt, and shame. There I was -- a "public servant" unable, even at a low level of government, to speak my mind because of the tyranny of mob rule. The more I repressed it, the more I was attacked, and the guiltier I felt. I would go home and bitch to my lover about how I hated them and hated myself. Unbearable!

Perhaps I had forgotten the lesson I should have learned with GAY GUNS. Police Review Commissioners were appointed and I was known to be anything but politically correct, so I was warned that I might not like the job. What the hell, I figured. Noblesse oblige and all that stuff. What I did not realize was that it was my job to either do the bidding of the angry left or become, simply, a political punching bag.

I refer here to "grassroots" tyranny. In Berkeley, there is a hard core of a few hundred activists who are able to tyrannize the entire city. They are single-minded, emotionally disturbed people who never outgrew their malevolence -- and that was the severest, most dysfunctional radicalism in recent history. I know this because I flirted with it as a youth myself. They consider themselves to be warriors, yet they do not fight the fair fight. This is because not only are they outnumbered, but fair fighting is against their principles and indoctrination. They may use democratic tactics when feasible, but as a backup and as an ever present threat, they rely on tyranny. The problem is that "good" people -- people who know better -- derive considerable power from (and owe considerable indebtedness to) the political thugs and their tactics, and the power flows upwards through a strange labyrinth of mutual self-support, and socially enforced bullying of all who might entertain thoughts of dissenting.

Aside from an occasional encounter with a menacing laid-off elevator operator, most politicians do not feel the lash of this type of tyranny firsthand. They never had to sit on the Berkeley Police Review Commission. They also have never had to live in the middle of the welfare state hell which they create and abet.

How I used to envy the Berkeley City Council! The United States Congress! They got to sit there and say anything they wanted, and no one was allowed to threaten their lives, spray paint or burn their cars. They even had police present, much the same way a judge -- even the lowest level justice of the peace -- always has a bailiff. Cowards, I thought. There I sat, intimidated because we had no protection against the mob (on more than one occasion the police who were there for hearings fled in fear for their safety) by an inability to keep order.

And we were supposed to be there to "get" the police. The only people who showed up at those meetings were the professional anti-police activists, and they were there to keep score on how well we lived up to their sickening Marxist expectations. I was a traitor if I ever sided with the police. I was the enemy for trying to contribute what I naively thought would be a small public service.

I lost my fear of that sort of mob. It died somewhere. Something burned out. Like the brain cells of a drug user?

Now, ten years later I find myself in the position of being called a "homocon".

That's just the latest label, but for years leftists have been horrified by my gun views. They simply cannot stand the fact that any homosexual might support the Second Amendment. Yet these same people are all for gays in the military?

People who don't want you to have opinions contrary to their expectations will resort to any means to define you, to force you into a category. I don't understand why they do this, because I don't do it, but I think that it may touch on why so many people are turned off by the political process.

Let me examine what I have seen firsthand. I have, it seems, no right to be a liberal, no right to be a conservative, and no right to be middle of the road. That is because the existing political system of stereotypes will not allow people who don't fit. It is a little like organized religion. If you are a Catholic, you must agree with them, if you are a Baptist you must agree with them, on and on except (I guess) for Unitarians and Buddhists...

For refusing to vote as directed, I was on many occasions called a "traitor." What is treason, anyway? I am glad we have a restrictive definition of it in the U.S. Constitution, because while I didn't like being called one, I know that in a legal sense I have never been that and never would be. Unless, of course the United States were taken over by traitors... But morally speaking, what is treason? A number of right-wingers have stated that anyone in favor of legalizing drugs is a traitor in the "drug war." I find that difficult to comprehend, and little different logically from the thinking of the people who called me a traitor for voting not to hear police complaints which were not within the jurisdiction of the Berkeley Police Review Commission. Just insulting, hyperbolic language, really. Like calling people racists who aren't, such labeling only dilutes the term "treason" until it has no meaning. I must say that had those people been thinking clearly, they would not have called me a traitor at the time, for it helped clarify, in combination with their very real threats, my thinking, and set me up for what I am doing now -- BLOGGING. You call me a traitor, I get over that, and then the word ceases to have meaning. It goes back to childhood; if you shame a child unjustly, then later where lies the sting of shame?

Of course, when I was on the Police Review Commission, it escalated from mere words, and instead of worrying about definitions I found myself fearing for my life.

Leaflets were passed out by an angry mob with names and addresses of commissioners coupled with "take whatever action your conscience deems necessary" code language, my truck was burned, another Commissioner had his car torched, and police officers were directed to leave Commission meetings for legitimate fear of "officer safety" (leaving us to face the mob alone). I will never forget a meeting with Berkeley's City Manager, who related his horror story of angry activists visiting his home when he was at work, and threatening his wife and kids.

"YOU CAN HAVE THIS PLACE!" he told me. Shortly thereafter, he quit his job, and went on to greener pastures as City Manager of a lovely, more peaceful place, -- Albuquerque, New Mexico.

So, I have to admire David Horowitz's courage and he gets my vote for winning the debate. I don't know if I could do what he did, but someone has to.

Blogging is the least we can do.

Based on my experience, so is arming ourselves.