is property theft?

Speaking of the John Birch Society, maybe as a legacy of that, or maybe the reason it attracted you in the first place is your tendency to see a sort of conspiracy when the simpler answer would be ineptness. I think you have blamed, I don’t remember who, maybe They, or more likely the congress, or more likely the democrats of purposely handling international things in a way that gives our enemies the advantage.

I remember that the Birchers were considered subversive, but now that I think of it how would that work, surely they wouldn’t conspire with other countries, and how could anybody think that that bunch of nuts could overtake the US?

I’m thinking back to that Goldwater/Johnson election and how it made a democrat out of me. Goldwater was certainly seen as a warmonger, and Curtis LeMay wanting to drop the bomb didn’t help. One thing I think both we and the Russkies can pat ourselves on the back for is that in fifty years of cold war neither of us ever dropped the bomb.

But I remember too the joke that went around as we dug ourselves deeper into Vietnam, where it was a good thing we didn’t elect Goldwater because then we would have been involved in an Asian war. A lot of presidents had their fingerprints on that war, but none had so many as LBJ. And there was Nixon pretending a little bit like he had a piece of peacenik him in, I think he had the peace symbol in one of his commercials. But of course nobody believed a word he said.

So in one sense it made sense to kick up a fuss at the Democratic convention. But thinking about it, it wasn’t so much that it was because we hated LBJ, but that we thought it was a party we might sway, probably because they had some peace candidates, McCarthy and Bobbie, before Humphrey won the nomination. I don’t think we ever thought the republicans would end the war. Kind of ironic in that you now see Nixon apologists claiming that he ended the war, and in a way he did, but that is a story for another day.

So kind of like the tea party claims to be beyond political parties but clings to the reps in their death grip, so did we hippies cling to the dems, and you could give us some credit for bringing in McGovern and a radical platform to the dems in 72 and sinking them like a stone.

I agree that the right is the party of the individual and the left of the collective. But I don’t see any lone wolf activity in the tea party. They cling to each other seamlessly, and it is very rare that one will criticize another one.

I’m reading a book on racism in the early US, The White Man’s Burden, and one thing the author has just mentioned is how closely property was linked to liberty in the early US. I think Locke and Paine were always talking about private property. On the one hand, all men should have liberty, but on the other hand how dare you fuck with the property (slaves) of another man?

One of my favorite phrases in my hippie days was that property is theft. Well it had a good ring, and in a way it has something to it in the way property is arbitrarily distributed. Well more on that tomorrow.