Doug writes today about guns showing up at health care rallies and imagines, what if, instead of good ol’ boys, it was, say the Black Panthers … Oh my. Can you fucking imagine. A row of uniformed (black leather jackets and cool berets, as I recall) angry, young and solemn African-American men carrying fucking guns.
For that is what these gutsy kids went and did. Having had enough hassles from the Oakland Police Department, which in the Sixties was a fearsome, racist thing—under the leadership of Bobby Seale and Huey Newton, these young men said, Enough, organized and armed themselves and stood up to the police—who suddenly found all sorts of reasons not to harass the black community near as much—and stood for things like the children’s breakfast program.
They marched, and when they marched in unison, the message, the impressive visual, was indeed revolutionary. It was the closest this wimp country has come to the kind of revolutions we so desperately need, and will no longer find the roots of. The times were different, there were a million things to not think about. William Styron had published “The Confessions of Nat Turner.” I was in school, the same school as Bobby Seale and some of the other Panthers, we had a terrific poli sci instructor who taught what the clarity of radical thinking is. A deconstruction of bullshit that trained the eye to see what is. Which cannot be remotely compared with the “other” extreme, of wing-nut thought: a prejudicial, hate-filled indiscriminate mess. These people need therapy, education … to come to know their own minds. It’s true, as George Lakoff has written, the more you know, the more educated, the more enlightened. There’s no way around it.
This truth of course drives the right fringe into its preeminent frenzy, the idea that the “elite” is going to tell them what to do—there is no deeper hatred. And of course it springs forth in rage, all the more powerful for being the repressed truth. God damn it, bein’ a hate-filled know-nothin’ was good enough for my daddy, and it’s good enough for me. A right they will defend with the business end of a gun.
Which is why I’d just love to see the Panthers again, as they were, march into a rally, or perhaps line the stage, and see the hush fall over the crowd. What incredible courage those kids had—I can’t get over it. Arming themselves so as not to be intimidated any longer, and willing to die for it.
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I saw a show on VH-1 (of all places) just the other day that showed the Panthers walking into the California legislature toting shotguns…lots of scared old white dudes.
Of course they got arrested (not for the guns as it was legal at the time, but for walking into the legislature) and Gov Reagan was quick to pass a law making it illegal to tote loaded weapons in California.
Did you see Barney Frank giving it to a LaRouchie at a town hall yesterday? Even the fucking LaRouchies are coming out of the woodwork. Strange times.
And what is the connection between LaRouche and Hitler … No, I don’t want to know.
I knew democracy would come to a bad end. Giving everyone a voice.