I Radical

This is very cool!  I’m a radical again!  It’s been so long.  I miss the days, back in the sixties and early seventies, when I saturated myself in defiant nobility—“Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice,” “Woodstock,” “Mad Dogs and Englishmen” six nights in a row at the Redondo Fox, Nehru shirts, bell-bottoms and long hair (hair period).  Then I got a job, got married, got kids, got responsible and fell into the mainstream of normalcy—but not anymore.  I just received a political mailer informing me that I’m extreme again.  Move over Jerry Rubin—sit down Abbie Hoffman—I’m about to blow out the Anthem on my Fender Strat.

I usually grow weary of election propaganda.  But the mailer forming the genesis of my neo-epiphany has rejuvenated my otherwise sedentary political bloodstream.  Of course I’m not running for office, so the mailer, strictly speaking, wasn’t about me.  It was about Craig Huey and some of his (what I thought to be) old time blah-blah American convictions.  But, apparently, Craig and I are edgy—bad boys if you will.  From whence does this edgy-ness arise you ask? 

For one, it comes from those with whom Craig and I associate—our bro-hams.  “He communicates” the flyer exposes “with the knowledge, understanding and language of the Evangelical community.”  Busted!!!  The man, the heat, the fuzz, the cops—they’re always judging me cause of my hair!  My old man told me to quit hanging out with those evangelicals.  “They’re just gonna get you in trouble Paulie!”  It just made me want to hang out with them all the more—same with Craig I guess.  Craig communicates with religious people—extreme—I like it.  But there’s more.

Huey punches his recalcitrant Tommie Smith toward the clouds in mutinous defiance of Roe v Wade.  He thinks the judges were “out of order.”  Tastes like fodder for a sit-in.  Did Huey really say “We cannot ignore the unborn” as the flyer suggests?  Dude!  Crazy, how it all comes back in style.  For hundreds of years Huey’s take on politics was main-stream.  He was normal.  Put one of those white fluffy wigs on him and he could have been a signer.  But now he takes rank with those truculent youths smoking cigarettes behind the library.  But there’s more.

The “deep-throat” like flyer reveals that Huey also “communicates…with the ‘Institute for Creation Research’ which promotes teaching Creationism in public schools.”  Has he no boundaries?  Was he raised by wolves?  The last thing on earth this country needs is someone with the irresponsible conviction that there is an actual Creator—scandalous, sinister—there should be a movie—I’m there—six nights in a row.  Maybe a cameo by Thomas Jefferson explaining what he meant by “Nature’s God” and being “endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights.”  Guess he was a radical too.

I’m stoked!  After all this time I’m a radical again.  Gotta split now; see if I can find my eight-track of “Easy Rider” and my old lady (she left, lookin’ a little nervous).