Thoughts on Socialist Love & Peace in Austin
James Versluys
People seem fond of saying humanity is evolving. This quaint notion is used in a hazy and abstract historical sense to mean that humanity is going somewhere, which is true enough. We are technologically advancing, which is changing our culture in ways we simply perceive and almost never predict. This is taken to mean that humans themselves are somehow different now, that we have some kind of centrally malleable nature.
Absurd. I doubt humanity is now substantially different than any time in the last ten thousand years. I doubt any group of people in the United States at the outset of the 21st century is any happier than any similarly sized group of dirt poor peasants in medieval Europe, although we do seem a modicum less civilized, to judge by history. The average man, which is to say the inferior man, is no different than his medieval peasant counterpart in any way with the exception of a few trite skills that allow him to function in a technological society. The medieval peasant tended also to have fewer superstitions and foolish fears of the dark than modern man. Calling the modern peasant a "citizen" does not seem to have improved him noticeably.
To be fair, this isn’t modern man’s fault. It is the fault of those who would control him, and so need to pump him full of vague fears and ill-defined threats, sending the peasantry scrambling to be led to safety from an endless array of phantasms and demons, all wholly imaginary.
Visiting a modern democratic socialist meeting at the University of Texas at Austin recently brought all this to light. While I was in Austin I attended one on a whim, and had a great time watching this truth to unfold.
I don’t know what the meeting was ostensibly about, nor do I know who any of the main players in the drama were, but it was packed with exactly the kind of people who would harry and harass the modern peasant with an never-ending group of groundless fears.
The first thing I noticed about the conference attendees was the concerted effort many of them were making to dress well. After 30 years of getting walloped for having adorned their bodies as sloppily as their minds, the left is finding the value in a superficial decorum. Dignity lends legitimacy to those without.
It was a special shock because when my friend invited me, he gave me the notion that this was a meeting similar to the ones I had attended when I was a communist at the age of nineteen. I dressed for the occasion…shorts, Che Guevara t-shirt, baseball cap turned just so to indicate my faux wackiness. It was a shock to see only a dozen or so people dressed this way in the entire conference. The rest were in their Sunday best with badly tied hand knots over poorly made slack suits. It was worth the whole trip just to watch people who hadn’t dressed up since confirmation put on airs. One younger fellow of thirty looked as if he had never been in a suit and kept fiddling with it the entire time I was there. He took his tie on and off maybe ten times in as many minutes. It looked like every attendee of a Mormon Conference congregation found themselves in the wrong room, all at the same time.
Although we were there throughout most of the conference, I never did figure out what it was about. One speaker would get up and drone on about immigrant rights and land reform in Mexico, and the other speaker would get up and describe sex in the new century from a perspective of a feminist who had been in a coma since 1968. The surprise of the day came when a midget got up and spoke about Freak Rights. Apparently just being tiny makes someone a freak, because the way he spoke indicated there was nothing unusual about him at all except for his height. In fact, he was the most boring speaker of the night, and he delivered some weakly-fierce (I can't think of any other way to describe it) diatribe, like he was reading from a Xeroxed copy of some Hunter Thompson text censored for The Learning Channel.
All in all, the whole night seemed to be a flashback to the time when the 60’s movements were just beginning and the good kids were having the first wiggles of excitement at being in a newly sexualized atmosphere away from their parents. This would have been less notable if the average age in the room hadn’t been at least forty.
Another nouveau-throwback was a negro troupe walking around telling white people to feel guilty about being white. One lithe and somewhat pale black fellow in particular walked up to me and asked me to stop being white. I stared at him.
"Oh, what I mean man is that you don’t have to take this societally imposed norm of whiteness," he said, looking uncomfortable.
I kept staring. Since I was half a foot taller and outweighed him by a hundred and twenty pounds, he beat a hasty retreat by offering me a cigarette and suddenly finding an urgent matter to discuss with what looked like a little black hippy chick, if such a thing exists.
I walked around trying to find out what the conference was about. No one seemed to know.
I asked one lanky looking customer with a beret on top of a Brooks Brothers suit, and he told me it was about the Gore defeat and "democratic rights". Not one speaker mentioned Gore the entire time I was there. So I asked another person what the conference was about and she didn’t seem to know either.
"It’s about coming together," she said cryptically.
Coming together. Ok. About what?
"Coming together as human beings, each as a member of a greater community", she said, getting visibly excited at the explaining. At first I thought she was retarded or had some speech deficiency because she just babbled and tripped over her words at high speed, but then I saw that she was just very, very, very excited to be telling me whatever enlightenment she had about human togetherness. The realization that she wasn't retared startled me and I basically ran away from her. I need to remember to give thanks at the alter of my ancestors for giving me such a discriminating and excellent flight or fight mechanism.
Later on during the second break I kept wandering around looking for someone to ask or something to read which explained why anyone was there to begin with. It turns out I went to the only leftist rally in the history of the world that didn't have five thousand leaflets explaining what they were doing there. Although I did find a table with a million leaflets, not a single one of them made reference to the place we were at. I saw one program for a rally in Yugoslavia, but not one for UT.
I then made the mistake of asking the girl at the counter with all the papers on it what the rally was about. She was pretty and well dressed and looked about my socioeconomic status, so I thought she would respond like a normal person. I didn't even know NOW. had a Shi’ite branch, but there she was. She told me what the rally was "really" about was man's undying oppression of women, and proffered me a group of pamphlets on another rally she was trying to get people to. She had a low, threatening voice, and spoke very slowly, like she was talking to...well, talking to a man. I also note that she constantly implied I was "part of the problem" and that I couldn't help my male right wing tendencies, which is true enough. She seemed to have pegged me for a reactionary despite my Che-Guevara-as-Christ-risen get up. How could she tell? Is it pheremonal?
One of her lectures was interesting. She announced that she wasn’t even looking for a job despite a master’s degree from a good college. "Why should I bother?" she asked. Hmm. Got me there.
Basically she was one of those women who grew up so rich and with so many options that she ended up allowing herself to think that because she was a woman, she didn't have any options at all, and so decided to do nothing. I noted that her shirt, jacket, and binders all sported little crimson "Harvard" logos. The intelligent among us will just nod in a knowing manner. My friend finally walked up and saved me with a story about a family emergency.
A safe looking person to ask was a preacher, so I sidled up to him and asked. He turned out to be a reverend of the Temple of Krell, which he explained is a satirical religious take on a religion that hasn’t been a serious religion for a hundred years- the Church of England. He said the conference was about how spirituality was part of the democratic ideal. No one spoke about religion or God or even did so much as mention Mahatma Ghandi once in the entire conference.
Walking through the conference, I began to ponder how entirely unique this section of history came to be, and how, if society was going to survive, humanity would have to dump whatever disgusting development created this group of monomaniacs and self absorbed shallow pools of humanity. This was individualism alloyed out of any of its good qualities, marked by people who thought the world revolved around them and their thoughts so much that they imputed their own designs onto the other people there. As I left the hall I thought it was very fortunate After all, they all believe in practicing birth control, so the problem may just fix itself, and this group will move from being annoyingly, philosophically empty to being pleasantly, biologically extinct.
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