Well Bottom Blues

I’ve never requested my FBI file but I’m pretty sure it goes back over 50 years to my freshman year in high school. Our service class was a comparison between the US and Soviet system. And there was a model UN.

I was assigned Taiwan, and decided instead in 1971 to represent the People’s Republic of China. I will repeatedly to the Albanian mission to the UN who were representing the PRC’s interest there looking for information to support my project.

Those letters were never answered.

Fast forward to the late 1970s. I joined the Young Socialist Alliance, the youth wing of the Trotskiest Socialist Workers Party. At the time the University of New Orleans had the largest chapter in the United states. The local organizer from New York ghost wrote a piece about me titled Why I Joined the YSA and had it published in their national newspaper (which led me to quit).

I was active in the local anti-nuclear movement and supported the city take over of the for-profit local utility. I published an opinion piece in the local newspaper arguing for the bankruptcy of the utility building water for three as a sort of economic death penalty for their stupidity.

Time passed, at one point I decided I wanted to “get in the game” of politics, and left newspapering to join the campaign of a centrist Democrat. He won and I followed him to DC in 1987. In 1988 he sent me and another staff member to Louisiana to be the staff of the Dukakis presidential campaign.

When vice presidential candidate Lloyd Benson came to Louisiana, the secret service declined to pin me, amem er of the campaign staff  to be in his presence without explanation, even though I was working in the Senate and could walk up to him and shake his hand at any time.

Some years later I was living in Fargo North Dakota. Geore W Bush was coming to town in the state democratic party leaked a list to the local newspaper of people who would not be admitted to this public appearance at this local State University. I was on it. My ex-wife freaked because she had siblings in politics in the state but it was one of the proudest moments of my life.

In recent years I’ve been very publicly outspoken about Palestine. That would make me, in current Republican parlance, a jihadist. I post my views on that and on the public fascism of the Trumplican party under my own name, not a pseudonym.

So when Donald Trump talks about eliminating his enemies, I’m pretty sure I’m somewhere down on that list even if nowhere near the top.

Once years ago during a troubling time at work my Trekie boss asked us for a statement of personal affirmation. I replied, today is a good day to die. I think I’ll just carry on in that spirit with this affirmation: better a bullet in the chest than one in the back of the head.