My friends the secessionist terrorists

I couldn't help but notice that the latest themes in the US Presidential race are Barack Obama's links to 60-70s era leftist "terrorists" and Sarah Palin's, well, conjugal link, to a domestic secessionist political party (Alaska Independence Party). I feel it is time to come clean then, because I have links to BOTH.

In the 70s, during a stage of what I like to call my 'political nomadism' I was a, well, how shall I put this, a anarcho-surrealist direct action syndicalist soviet sympathizer.

I hung out at lefto-commie bookstore at my Southern California University with slackers who could not graduate after 7 years and generally made leftist mischief on campus, participating in a campus Fungus Festival (free dope and mushrooms), a takeover of the Dean's office over, of all things, free daycare, a confrontation with the Chilean Honorable Consul (we wouldn't let him out of the parking lot), and, finally on the night of the failed Carter Desert 1 Iranian hostage rescue mission, we stayed up all night, watching the news until President Carter came on at 3 am and then spray-painted the campus with various annoying slogans. It was fun, you had to have been there. Really.

Then, I moved on... I caught a ride in a VW van with a crazed Mexican Frieda Kahlo clone to the Bay Area (home of the Bay Aryans) where I got a job with the clipboard wing of the Sierra Club going door to door against an unpopular water diversion project called the Peripheral Canal that would send most Northern California's water...to LA. May not sound like much to you but...when we went door to door on this issue we discovered that about 35% of the people who gave us money (we had a $75 a night quota) started ranting at us "and I don't care if you split the state, too!"

Four of us took notes and came to the conclusion that, well, we couldn't win an election with these numbers, but 35% was a significant fundraising base. This is in the year 1981, OK?

Eventually there were 7 of us. Former canvassers with some local connections (a 6th generation Californian, another in with a local supervisor, a recycler, a pill-popper, a river rafter, a Skull and Bonesman and others who were bored with nothing to lose) and together we formed, let me try to explain this clearly, a regional secessionist faction of the California State Democratic Party. We called ourselves Democrats for Alta California and bought a post office box in the suburb of Fremont (named after the famed 1840-50 bushwacker and yahoo).

We were a laugh riot at the 1982 State Democratic Convention. No one had heard of us before and no one, especially the Southern Californians, knew what to make of us. We dominated the “Environmental Caucus” but when we suddenly learned that we had a majority of votes, and we could name our caucus chair, we didn’t know what to do or who to nominate. We pointed at some other guy, who then went rogue and embarrassed the State Assembly Chairperson Willy Brown (later mayor of SF) in front of the collected press corps. We ran amuck until our resolution on stopping water exports to Southern California closed the whole convention when the nasty Southern Californians called a quorum vote, and finding not enough delegates on floor at the end of day, closed the convention.

The group broke up out of its own inertia, but within our ranks there were SERIOUS NORTHERN CALIFORNIAN NATIONALISTS. People who wanted to pull Northern California, Oregon (Lemuria) and Nenslo-Seattle out of the United States forever. People who had read Berkeley novelist Ernest Callenbach's pulp fiction ECOTOPA. People like me who would like to come back to Alta California and grow medical for a living. Legally. But back then I realized to make it happen we would have to arm ourselves, and start taking out WATER PIPELINES. We would have to form a militia (our model was a Lebanese leftist militia called Mouribatoun who wore PINK camo fatigues) and die in needless battles.

Instead we blew it off and drove back through the Sacramento River Delta in Datsun pick up trucks on high dangerous canal berms so we could get back to Berkeley and watch replays of the Cal-Stanford game. You know, "the play," where Cal won by throwing 5 laterals and scoring a touchdown in the middle of the celebrating Stanford band.

So what is my point? My point is terror IS ONLY A TACTIC. Everyone does it.
The Americans did counter-terror in Vietnam – it was called the Phoenix Program. In the 70s we had hot, cool, well dressed, armed, intelligent Marxist/Anarcho direct action squads with names like the Weather Underground, Brigate Rosse, Baader-Meinhofs, Angry Brigade, Symbionese Liberation Army, Black Liberation Army, and others who messed up the heads of THE MAN until they were all hunted down, rounded up and killed one by one. They were more like the turn of the century anarchist bombers, the bearded guys in hats and cloaks who threw round bombs shaped like bowling balls with long sputtering fuses, who had names like Ravachol and shouted slogans like “There are no innocent bourgeois!!” More recently in Oregon a little group of Earth First! types ran around bombing and burning construction sites and other bad-for-environment sites before they were all rounded up, tried and given 20 year sentences.


Or in the case of Bill Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn, repented and got tenured university posts. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_Ayers for his impressive resume. What pisses me off is that Mom-From-Hell Sarah Palin bringing up his name AS IF he is still out bombing on weekends for fun, like some member of ‘60s dinosaur rock band If you renounce the tactic, turn yourself in, and are then acquitted of any charges, then become a fine-upstanding citizen in academia and education, you are rehabilitated, right? NOT IN AMERICA. “Palling around with terrorists?” The US Army is doing that now in Iraq – they are paying, PAYING, former Iraqi insurgents and Al Q types to switch sides and guard their own neighborhoods. This involves hanging out with the commanders, drinking tea, shooting the breeze and whipping out the Benjamins.


If the 8 year old Barack Obama tried to stick his head in the door of any meeting of the Weather Underground back in the 60s it would have been slammed and he would have been told to go bed. For his own good. His Whitebread mom while may have consorted with Kenyans and Indonesians but fortunately ignored these armed hippies.

Actually what Obama should do is call a news conference, say Bill Ayers will be there, but then only one guy comes out to meet the press-Jeff Bridges in costume and character as “The Dude” from the Big Lebowski.

You want terror? REAL TERROR? Reread the history of the French Revolution. Robespierre, that crazy cut-up, defined it thusly: “Terror’ is nothing more than “PROMPT, SEVERE, INFLEXIBLE JUSTICE.” Put that in your pipe and smoke it.

I like to tell my friends here in “Red” China, where I now make my home, that my secret dream is to see America split up into 8 or 9 little countries, just like the former Yugoslavia or USSR. All on its own due to internal contradictions, without any help from yours truly. Then we could not make war or mischief on the rest of the world like we do now.

Oh, by the way I approve of this message.
Shining Path of Least Resistance

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