Speaking for the Dead
In Memory - Sam Konkin, revolutionary man
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Recently I've had a number of people die on me, generally unexpected. This is always difficult for me to deal with. As an optimist and a doer and shaker - or so I see myself - I assume that if there's a problem, then there's a solution. But then there's death. Some things simply cannot be undone.
One recent loss was a delightful 23 year old woman who I only knew over the phone. However, Kortney Zeman made such an impression that I was truly shocked and saddened to hear that she had died of hypothermia in a sudden storm in the mountains. It was almost unimaginable, and, of course, I kept thinking, with no logic to it, that there must have been something I could have done. I attended her memorial at the Regen House, where she had lived with a crew of fellow environmental radicals, mainly notorious for the recent, apparently unfounded, raid by the FBI in connection with the lot full of RVs that was torched by someone or other who left "ELF" graffitied around the crime scene.
The Regen folks didn't strike me as likely culprits, frankly, and, since then, in point of fact, the cops have arrested a couple of other guys for the torchings who apparently had no connection at all to Regen. They did do quite a job of creating a memorial for Kortney, with photos, poetry by and about her and a long night of remembering her. The best one can do in reality at this point. Those of you who saw "Zardoz," may contemplate the idea that other options might be forthcoming shortly as technology improves. For more details on this, check out the transhuman or extropy sites.
I was reminded of other young women that I knew who had died. One of them was a plucky girl who would never have won any beauty contest, but got by on personality and brains, and would have made the perfect lover for me if I had been so lucky or had any sense way back around 1968. I introduced her to pot, and was so blind that I skipped right by several references and ignored the patch over one eye as we smoked in my attic hideaway that one day. She had so little time left, and she wanted EVERYTHING!!! And she deserved it. But it was too late. I never saw her again, and all I know of her name is BJ. A whole world lost in her passing...
Then there was Laura Patrick, as far as I can recall now a near clone of China Beach's Dana Delaney, both in looks and personality - at least of the character in China Beach. Laura was the kind of girl that guys have a special name for - a "real sweetheart." Meaning, a girl that could not conceive of deliberately hurting another living being. Not that she was a prude, by any means. Just someone you could absolutely trust your life and honor to. The kind of woman that men die protecting.
Around 1970, again, and I came across a huddled group of her friends, weeping inconsolably. While she was on summer vacation from college, where she was barely surviving financially, as her family was far from wealthy, she was out driving with her five brothers when a drunk crossed over into her lane and hit them head-on, killing all six of them. The drunk survived. Laura still lives in my memory and that of perhaps a couple dozen others. I wish sometimes that there is that infinity of parallel universes that Hawkings suggests, some of which have Laura living out her life, happy.
I hardly knew these people, in reality, but most of us, I think, tend to grok people quickly, as a whole. Some people are instantly likeable. Some people we fall in love with in the first thirty seconds and never forget. Others we only learn to like over time, as we get past a prickly surface, and annoying quirks to the core person. Sometimes we are totally fooled, for a while, anyway, which is what the professional sociopath is about. Death puts a stop to the expectation of further revelations and forces us to sum up what a person meant to us and what they might have meant, had the life gone on. It suddenly makes us aware of all the lost opportunities, and should serve as a useful reminder not to let other such opportunities slip by.
Now I hear today that Sam Konkin is gone, with whom I spent hundreds of hours, and much discussion and debate. Who could have imagined it? A unique individual, as well as one of the really knowledgeable sources who had put all the background information on the BIG conspiracies of corporate fascism together. Not perfect, Sam often misjudged other people in his personal relationships - usually to the positive, and it often cost him dearly when they betrayed him. Like the drunk who murdered Laura, many of those who sucked up to Sam and played off his personal tolerance and refusal to believe the worst of anyone survive him. I do not envy them. They had the opportunity of a lifetime to enrich their lives by association with Sam, and they blew it. Sam always seemed larger than life, creating his own mythology around him. He radiated a cheerful calm wherever he went, with a humorous quip or story always at the tip of tongue, and an unlimited enthusiasm for life and the revolution. Just unbelievable to think of him dead...
(See the Jeff Riggenbach obit for some additional details on Sam's life and work.)
Also, try the Reason Foundation's comment site for a string of remarks, obits, and details on Sam and his impact.
I met Sam at the First Southern Libertarian Conference in Atlanta, Georgia, in 1971. While I'm sure that no one expected it, this particular conference set a number of paths into which many, many, future events would track. Virtually all the big idea people of the new, radical, largely anarchist libertarian movement were there. I recall meeting Sam, his sidekick and intellectual trigger man, J. Neil Schulman, Bob Cohen (self-styled "anarcho-chauffer"), as well as Jarret Wollstein, who gave a terrific anarchist analysis of the fundamental problems with the state, and then an equally bad and destructive advocacy of a "libertarian ethic" (which STILL haunts us today) and then the New Banner Institute crew, with whom I would spend the next several tumultuous years plotting anarchy and Montessori education.
There was even a contingent of Bob LeFevre fans from California, who were so sadly outclassed intellectually by the East Coast groups following Rothbard or Rand, that they pretty much shut up and left after no one even wanted to attend their party. My life, as well as a few hundred others, was rechanneled by that single event, and Sam correctly perceived its significance at the time.
In the backdrop of the conference, however, a more sinister scene played itself out, one that would echo down the years of my and Sam's lives. Sam and his crew decided to get a taste of the "Old South." As Sam told me years later, he had been strongly influenced by an elementary school teacher, a young woman from the deep South who apparently doted on young Sammy. Transplanted somehow to Canada, she recreated an ante-bellum wonderland in her tales to her young charges, evoking the kind of deep spiritual lies found in "Gone With the Wind."
Setting a pattern for so much of his later life, Sam grafted his childhood infatuation with this pretty young teacher onto his later political theorizing, turning the slave-holders into benighted paternalistic heroes for independence. The Civil War became a glorious struggle for Southern independence against the onrushing Northern mercantilist corporate state. Not that Sam ever displayed any signs of racism... Despite his connections with the notorious Institute for Historical Review, Sam was about as rational on the issue of race as anyone I've ever met, and various Jews, blacks and other ethnicities were as close to him as anyone.
Thus, however, as would characterize Sam's entire intellectual and spiritual life as I witnessed it over more than three decades, a romantic vision transfigured a more ugly reality. Yes, the United States of the North was an evil empire of mercantilist proto-fascism, with Lincoln the champion for virtually every manner of the tyranny that emerged later in fascist Italy or NAZI Germany. The deep South, however, was hardly any kind of utopia. Slavery was and is an ugly, brutal, evil institution, combining murder, kidnapping, theft, with the loss of every vestige of human dignity and hope. The evil motives of the ultra-wealthy Northern political puppeteers, disguised as patriotism and abolitionism (but only when patriotism later flagged under the truly horrific rates of casualty), in no way ameliorated the deep spiritual evil of the Southern racism and slavery.
So, here we have Sam, attending the premier forum for the advancement of freedom in modern history, culminating his trek with a visit to an Atlanta restaurant specializing in recreating a never-existed dream embodying the exact opposite, from the black children dressed in little knickerbockers - is that the correct term? - uniforms, black with striping and little billed caps, exactly like one of those offensive little statues you used to see on people's lawns or by the front entrance, greeting the guests, to the entire panoply of a strange, twisted excuse for evil.
Years later, at Sam's Long Beach "Anarcho-Village," I slept on Sam's couch under a huge Confederate flag stretched across the wall. Ironically, I had a dispute with a black neighbor over a continuously barking dog during that period. The neighbor at one point called the swat team in, alleging that I had threatened him with a gun. (Not true.) Now imagine me trying to explain myself to the Long Beach cops while sitting under Sam's Stars and Bars.
When I moved to Long Beach, CA, in early '76, from Columbia, South Carolina, I naturally went first to the "Anarcho-Village," just West of Cherry on 7th street, and frankly a dump. But the core of Sam's "New Libertarian" crew were all there - J. Neil Schulmann, Victor Koman, Bob Cohen, Charles Curly and Andy Thornton. Nearly every night was packed with intense argument about theory, strategy, history, art, science fiction. During the days, while my funds lasted, I read thru as much of Sam's library as I could stuff into my brain, including Max Stirner's "The Ego and His Own," which influenced me strongly and helped me uncover the repressive mental habits that I still nourished in myself. In the years to follow, the local non-LP (Libertarian Party - "PartyArcs" (Sam's designation)), or, better, anti-LP libertarian movement gravitated to Sam and his following, and, for well over a decade, the Anarcho Village was a center of libertarian anarchist thought and plot.
Sam, himself, had fled from New York City with his little crew after an abortive attempt to sabotage the Libertarian Party, the details of which are probably available somewhere still as he documented them in print in either his "New Libertarian" magazine or his later "New Libertarian Weekly," (Click here and then do a text find on New Libertarian) for which I wrote several articles. He considered the New York fiasco merely a stepping stone to greater effort, and, from everything I heard or overheard, continued nationwide plots to destroy the LP via his various "New Libertarian" associates for at least as long as I kept in close contact.
I had learned to trust Sam after the State of South Carolina had cracked down on the New Banner Institute, alleging child abuse, around 1973, but in fact, as the County Solicitor John Ford declared to all and sundry at their first court hearing, out to get "those atheists" off the streets of Columbia - as well as putting a stop to all that "race mixing." (We had kids of both of the top S. Carolina black politicians - "I.S." Levy Johnson and Tom Broadwater - in our College of Early Learning.) Oddly enough, most of the libertarian movement appeared to have accepted the state's charges without the slightest question. Sam alone, among influential libertarians nationwide, stood up for the Institute.
(The charges were all later dropped, and that County Solicitor - for whom it was said that "he would doubtless die in office - one way or another," such was his popularity among the Bible pounders - was voted out of office, largely because of the outrage over his attack on the Institute. The parents of the kids in our school - mostly non-libertarian themselves - virtually made it their life's work to defeat the man.
This is even more impressive when one considers that the same Richland County Solicitor had utterly smashed the local very large and active New Left Anti-War movement, by planting his agents among them, then arresting them on bogus charges of selling drugs at their anti-war coffeehouse, and then prosecuting them, while never mentioning that among the defendants, privy to all the private meetings with the defense attorneys, were his paid informants. At least one of that era's victims, Brett Bursey, spent serious time in a state prison for his anti-war work and is still today working his way through the appellate system on some of them dating from the Vietnam war, which illustrates - to me, anarchist, anyway - how futile that state (generic "state", including federal, state, local) court system route generally is. I'm always amazed to hear people expressing dismay over the fact that their enemies haven't given them a fair shake.)
I slept on Sam's living room couch for about six months from my arrival in Long Beach in '76. It was both a happy and unhappy time. I thoroughly enjoyed the radical hotbed atmosphere, but I found myself alienated more and more from the subjectivism and power plays that permeated the group. I had just escaped from a psycho-drama in Columbia, South Carolina, in which the New Banner people (those who had not been purged by their Great Leader or his Perfect Romantic Partner wife - who he later kidnapped) had been involved in a nationally televised kidnapping, the details of which are so bizarre that if I described it, no one would believe me, I suspect. For the previous year, I had lived in daily fear for my life from people who were gun nuts for real - and all I wanted to do was start a revolution, please.
On that very first night I spent in California, at the Anarcho-Village, I almost turned around and drove back to the East Coast. I had come to California because it seemed from a distance that here was where the revolution would really be happening. I had formulated several possible revolutionary strategies and assumed that people here would be eager to hear of them and would have ideas of their own to present and defend.
In hindsight, I think that few Californians appreciate how the rest of the country perceives them. At the University of Georgia, we all heard about the wild parties, the rampant drugs, the anti-war radicalism, etc., the intellectual fervor, centered at Berkeley, but assumed to be part of the "California scene." So, we tried to compete, naturally. I suspect that we did a lot more in Athens, Georgia, at the University of Georgia, than Berkeley ever dreamt of. To illustrate, in 1975 a wave of "streaking" hit college campuses nationwide. Frat cats, and some sorority girls taped little wings to their ankles and then dashed madly across campuses in the nude.
At the University of South Carolina, the news of California streakers aroused the competitive spirit. Instead of a few rare instances, dozens of streakers of both sexes constantly raced about eluding the typically fat, middle-aged campus cops with ease.* However, the university authorities had learned their lesson from the war protests. Official opposition just encouraged the typical hormone-charged college student. So, they co-opted it, staging an official streak-in, with a band, bleachers and a start and finish line, and, sure enough, hundreds of students of both sexes showed up for it, and that ended the streaking. (Sure wish video cams had been around back then.)
*The general capabilities of South Carolina law enforcement during this period could hardly be underrated. The Keystone Cops were more competent. On the University of South Carolina campus, local gang bangers marched around wooden-leggedly, with lock cutters stuffed up their pants. The Campus Cops could not touch them, allegedly, without further evidence, and thus there was a huge trade in stolen bicycles. Worse, there was a long, high, elevated ramp over the athletics area in a deep little rift valley behind the campus. Somehow, multiple rapes of coeds were occurring on this ramp at night, mostly by black males from the projects just past the end of the ramp, and no one could figure out how to stop it. While prostitution was definitely illegal, as well, it was booming all around Columbia. And when homosexuality was legally still a felony, Columbia boasted one of the largest and most active gay communities on the East Coast. There were stringent blue laws as well, with liquor sales verboten after midnight - unless you were in a private club, of which there were hundreds, with membership costing typically a dollar, where you could drink all night.
The reality of the California dream is much closer to the nightmare depicted in the classic movie, "Vanishing Point." California is a bureaucratic, boring, stupid state - especially Southern California. (I do like San Francisco - a lot.) Intellectual activity is rare and actively discouraged. A party without a heated political or philosophical argument in New York City is considered a failure. In California, the hostess will angrily break up any such activity. Typical California parties feature extremely loud music, specifically to prevent people from talking. Californians are anal. They don't curse drivers that cut them off; they shoot them.
So, here I was, a newbie to the great American Dreamland. We were all crowded into Neil's tiny Anarcho Village (AV) apartment, sharing the space with hundreds of books and albums, and I got into a rant about how we could use known techniques of child-rearing, based on Montessori, to raise the intelligence of a group of children to the point that they would all be functioning geniuses. I had been researching this field since the late '60's, when I stumbled across "the Autobiography of John Stuart Mill," right about the same time that I had been reading about Montessori in the Ayn Rand Newsletter. I figured that if we got a bunch of libertarian parents together to join in on the effort, then the majority of the kids would grow up as committed revolutionaries, and, with their brains to boot, they would create the revolution for us.
Further research had convinced me that if you started with a baby, enriching the environment, providing coherent, appropriate feedback, a child of normal genetic endowment could be raised to genius level. Montessori herself appeared to be in basic agreement with the idea. She felt that one of the flaws in her system was that it started too late - age 2 or 2.5. However, she had enough on her plate with the thousands of Montessori schools worldwide, and she also could not figure out how to make a business of it, especially as she concluded that an infant should not be separated from its mother.
At the Anarchist Montessori School that the New Banner Institute (who I had met at that famous First Southern Libertarian Conference) started, the still operating College of Early Learning, we had kids aged six or seven who could read a newspaper with adult comprehension and were starting in algebra. They could find any spot on a map or globe, and discuss both the time line and logic of evolution. These kids had started with us at ages three to five. How much more powerful would a child who had had that kind of advantage from birth become?
In addition, at the CEL, we had expanded the Montessori Environment to include ethics. The CEL featured a school monetary system (on the "cookie standard"). School jobs such as cleaning tables were put up for bid. Disputes were arbitrated by the kids themselves, and the arbitrars charges for their services. As far as possible, we tried to create a working, functioning anarchist utopia within the school, and it was working!
Montessori, for those who are not familiar with her, was a revolutionary in her own right, and not "just" in education. For her, the question was how to change society. She concluded that simply passing on our adult concepts to our kids would yield successive generations of degraded knowledge, like a xerox of a xerox of a xerox. Instead, each generation must be given the tools and the opportunities to discover truths for themselves. From their own original perspective, they would have the personal power to grasp the reality of their time and forge their own dreams, building upon the past, but with new elements of their own discovery. Thus, the Montessori school is a laboratory, with equipment designed to be self-correcting. As far as possible, the learning process is based directly upon the scientific method. There are no authorities but the individual mind of the child.
Montessori believed that when people were individually weak, then societies became easily infected with corrupt ideas like Nazism, that played on weakness, offering to solve problems if only one submits and believes the Great Leader. Strong, competent individuals who knew that they could depend upon their own minds were the best antibodies for such social illnesses. Anne Frank, for example, was a Montessori child. Thus, the Montessori child chooses his or her own work in the Environment for Discovery. No one, including the directors, has the right to interfere, unless the child starts acting in a way destructive to the environment itself.
As I said, I agreed with Montessori's tentative conclusion that starting even earlier would yield even better results, and I made it clear that I was NOT suggesting putting pressure on the child. That has been the mistake of all too many who have attempted this path. J.S. Mill and William James Sidis are good examples of what happens when you force-feed a child - altho J.S. Mill did accomplish a huge amount of good work in his life, in spite of the neurotic legacy of his father's pressure.
However, returning to that fateful night in Long Beach, Neil Schulman had clearly been Sam's right hand man, and suddenly here I was, the notorious renegade "banneristi," (another term coined by Sam, of course)exactly the kind of person that Sam romanticized - as he did everyone he met, I think - into some kind of living archetype - moving in, literally. So, when I described the kind of children who might evolve, given the opportunity to fully engage and evolve their minds at the optimum age, I made the error of referring to them as "Supermen." Neil's gleeful and instant response was to shout at me, "You're a goddamn fucking NAZI!!!"
I almost left right then, and it might have been a better choice. Instead, I spent the next decade or so attempting to work with people who openly insulted me at every meeting with great moral satisfaction and glee. The first and only time that I offered to drive the Sam - and that meant Neil as well - to dinner, for example, Neil took great delight in gratuitously insulting Ayn Rand, referring to her as "that old bag." Since Neil himself has always acknowledged Rand as a primary source of his own philosophy, it's clear that his aim was at me, and he did succeed in infuriating me. Neil clearly saw me as a primary foe in his jealous clinging to Sam. In fact, a great deal of Neil's behavior over the next decade could be hypothetically explained by this simple hypothesis - drive off every other potential major ally and then you have Sam for yourself.
The libertarian movement, by 1976, had already gone through several divisive schisms. There was the Rand/Rothbard break. Then the Rand / Galambos split that resulted when Galambos, according to him in a private discussion with me, stupidly insulted Rand (without meaning to, but Galambos did that a LOT) resulting in Rand's infamous attack on her misinterpretation of Galambos's "Competing Governments" idea. This was doubly tragic in that the reason for Galambos' trip to see Rand in New York City was to get her permission to produce her major novel, "Atlas Shrugged," as a movie, which he had the funds to do. Then the Branden / Rand break up. And the split among objectivists over the limited government vs. anarchy issue. Then there was the multitude of people who had at one point been avid students of Galambos and then succumbed to his personal nastiness and the growing paranoia that foreshadowed Galambos's descent into Alzheimer’s, of which the Rand episode was relatively mind by comparison. And, finally, the LP vs. anti-LP.
On the East Coast, I had only caught pieces of this in passing, altho it always struck me as odd how the great leaders (ultimately, Great Leader (singular) after the others were all purged and the women only had one stud left), of the New Banner group were always putting down any possible worth of any other libertarian groups. Why the movement took this disastrous turn is still a mystery in many ways, but turn it did, away from useful revolutionary activism, away from critical fundamental analysis, away from organizing practical projects implementing its philosophy in the real world, and toward a competition over an ultimately shrinking pie - the movement itself.
I well recall attending the various libertarian supper clubs in the late '70's thru early '80's and the response I often got if I attributed to Rand. People felt impelled to shout me down in a fury at the mere mention of her name. I wasn't trying to use an argument from authority, nor slavishly follow any objectivist line - I had many disagreements with Rand. I just wanted to place credit where due. No matter. Any mention of her was verboten.
To get an idea of what has been lost, it is instructive to look up back issues of libertarian journals from that period. Almost invariably they included a rich want-ads section, with all sorts of fascinating offers and opportunities for projects, free-market banks, schools, grey-market vitamins by the kilogram, etc. By the mid-80's, all that was pretty much gone. What energy there was had been sucked up in political action by the Libertarian Party, ultimately burning out most of the potential revolutionaries. Sam and I both saw how potentially destructive the party could be - and ultimately was in many instances and respects. The big difference came in that I considered Sam's tactics of infiltrate, sabotage and attack to be likely to simply make it all worse, using up more valuable energy while doing little to correct the problem. I concluded that the party was there to stay, so we might as well figure out how to work around it and convince people of better strategies.
While I am a glutton for punishment and was willing to put up with insults and worse, many others did leave the local libertarian scene, and, in fact, I lay it to Sam's credit - and that of his following, to be sure, but Sam could have stopped it - that the local Southern California libertarian movement was largely destroyed and dissipated over the following decade. Neil, in particular, made a point of shouting down the speakers at local libertarian supper clubs, if they dared deviate from Sam's Agorist anti-political line, leaving many others who had come to hear the speaker fuming in rage at Neil's antics. Sam's crew took a local hotbed science fiction scene which had been strongly libertarian in its leanings and, within a few years, had converted it to "libertarians not welcome."
A classic example of Neil at his worst came at a meeting of the South Bay Libertarian Supper Club around 1978. Olivia Cole, co-star of "Backstairs at the Whitehouse", as well as several movie roles, had been promoting a local private, mostly black school and cultural center - Sheenway. Olivia is one of the really nice people of the world, and, with no idea of what libertarians were about, presented a fine overview of what Sheenway stood for. Sheenway had offered an alternative to the kids who otherwise would have spent their youths in what are euphemistically termed "schools" in Watts. While these public prisons for kids were offering an education in violence and drugs, Sheenway provided first class academic education tailored to the individual child, including Montessori pre-school and karate classes.
Sheenway had been started by Dr. Sheen as his response to the Watts riots. When he died, his daughter, Delores Blunt Sheen, with all kinds of degrees and a black belt in karate took over. She cultivated contacts with Hollywood via many black and white performers, and managed to start careers in show biz for many Sheenway students as a result, including her son, Erin, who played in "The Bad News Bears Go To Japan."
I think this is the connection to Jody Foster, who later became a strong supporter of Sheenway (Hey! I sat ten feet behind Jody at a benefit ceremony honoring people who had contributed to Sheenway, where I also got a plaque(!) for my work in getting Sheenway computer access leading to the highly successful "Computer Gang Project," financed by Richard Prior.). At that point, however, it was Jody's mother (as I understand it, anyway), Sara, who was very active in the libertarian movement, who was the direct connection between Sheenway, Olivia Cole and the supper club. Sara had been volunteering at Sheenway after hearing about them in the papers after the school had been vandalized - apparently by gangs (altho I know a different story on that, as well.)
So, Olivia gave her excellent presentation, with slides, etc., and asked for questions.... At which point Neil starts in, sneering, in a voice that would serve as a shout for most people, something like, "Well, I don't consider any school to be libertarian that has the students pledging allegiance to the most oppressive imperialist power on the planet! ... Meaning, of course, the pledge of allegiance to the U.S. flag, of which Olivia had shown a slide.
Olivia took it in stride, altho I'm sure it did not especially turn her toward libertarianism. However, I overheard two large men after the meeting had ended, discussing Neil as follows. One of them said ~ "You know, I haven't been so mad in years. If that A--h--e ever pulls anything like that again, I will personally throw him out on his ass!" To which the other responded, "And I will help you." I later discovered that these gentlemen were running a philosophical discussion forum focused on objectivism.
(Regarding "throwing Neil out on his ass," it probably would have taken both of them at minimum. Neil is ENORMOUS. He is tall, very large-boned, AND quite obese. A truculent Baby Huey is an apt visual metaphor. Neil is quite capable and willing to physically intimidate. Simply stepping in front of someone (or two) and thereby blocking their access to a speaker, or answering himself whenever someone near to him is being recognized by the floor (pretending that he thinks it is he that has been recognized and daring anyone to do anything about it, these and a dozen other tactics that Neil has perfected pose near insurmountable obstacles to any kind of free intellectual intercourse in his presence. Most speakers are not prepared to deal with him, and he gets quite belligerent if called on his behavior, which can be even more intimidating. Of course, there are equalizers.....
In spite of Neil - or perhaps even partially out of embarrassment for his behavior - the South Bay Libertarian Supper Club committed itself to providing a fairly large sum of money to Sheenway to allow them to put in escrow a large section of the block on which the school was located so that they could expand into a full-featured high-school. Usually, I suspect, Neil's interruptions simply served to drive people away from whatever venue he attended.
Sam's crew also severely and quite deliberately damaged the highly successful "Future of Freedom" conference series that had been started by (now congressman, but then anarchist revolutionary and pot-smoking draft resister - see the "New Republic" coverage - if you can find it, as most of the data on Rohrabacher has mysteriously disappeared - or google on: "Gene Berkman" "Dana") Dana Rohrabacher', and then revived by local activist Larry Samuels. Allegedly their motivation was based in moral purity.
Sam's crew, arrived en masse at the organizing meeting for the 2nd of the FoFCon series that Larry Samuels sponsored. I don't think that any of them had attended any prior meetings. The fix was in. They objected to the conference being held at a state university (Cal State Long Beach), and, failing to sway the conference committee on that issue, instead disrupted the meeting and prevented much-needed progress, deliberately sowing discord and setting committee members against each other. I still have an audio tape of that meeting, including Neil Schulman's classic performance, in which his interruptions went for a longer period of time than I was allowed to speak for my own presentation on reorganizing the conference financially. The previous conference had made money!! My suggestions centered around converting the con into a share-holding enterprise based on the common law trust model that Anthony Hargis was promoting.
(Note: the March 17, 2004, "Orange County Register" business section, page 2, had a short story indicating that Anthony L. Hargis has been ordered incarcerated indefinitely until he turns over the names of his customers to the local federal judge. Further info can be found by googling around on "Anthony" "Hargis" "federal" "court".
Briefly, Hargis has been in business for the past nearly three decades, offering accounts denominated in either gold or dollars for people who want to cheaply invest or hedge in gold without paying the sizable premiums that coin dealers charge. His primary focus has been on capital preservation in the face of inflation, a subject on which he has given many seminars, altho doubtless other people used his services for other purposes, such as paying bills reliably when they were out of the country on extended personal or business affairs. The feds are apparently alleging that Hargis is running a tax avoidance warehouse bank. Interesting that such a fishing expedition can take place now under the new federal mandates that allow demanding of customer records from car dealerships or just about any business, on mere suspicion of wrongdoing - to protect us from those who would take away our rights as free Amerikans, naturally...)
I felt that one of the major problems of the libertarian movement was that, although it lauded the free market as the answer to everything, it utterly failed - with rare exceptions, such as Hargis, whose gold depository is still running quite successfully today* (see note above, however) - to incorporate business models into its own proceedings and enterprises. Asking people to buy shares in the next FOFcon and offering to pay workers and speakers in such shares seemed like a step in that direction that was long overdue.
* ALH & Co. was open for business on Saturday, March 20, 2004, and is still functioning as usual as of yesterday (03/24/04). No word yet on Anthony, who is still incarcerated. The customers with whom I spoke on Saturday were mostly confident that they will be able to handle whatever the feds come up with. General belief seems to be that this is supposed to set an example. If Hargis folds and turns over his customer data for the fed's fishing expedition, then a lot of softer targets will surrender without a fight. I find it particularly egregious that while ALH&Co. is targeted on the basis of suspicion that some of his customers might be doing something wrong, there are thousands of foreign companies in the U.S., especially Taiwanese, who have one company here and one company there - totally separate, you understand? And they sell to themselves, setting the prices so that the U.S. side makes little or no taxable income, while the Taiwanese, etc., side takes all the profits and simply keeps them (minus payoffs to the local politicians to keep their market shares intact).
U.S. companies then get to pay for all the infrastructure while the foreign companies get everything for free and are able to set prices just below the point that any American manufacturer can compete. THERE's where all the money is going! And there's why all the manufacturing is disappearing. Probably half a $trillion, mostly from California, sucked right out... Do you hear me, Arnold?
Back at the FoFCon committee, Neil, however, and a couple of conference committee members, including Terry Diamond took the position that libertarian events were and ought to be altruistic acts of love, not commercial enterprises. (Terry also had personal reasons to oppose me in general.) Neil declared, "these things NEVER make money. Why would anyone invest in a money loser?" As I mentioned, the immediately prior FOFcon had in fact made money, but Neil was not interested in facts.
I had painfully - with a cut nerve in my left hand - typed up and zeroxed a several-page set of analyses and recommendation, including a cover picture showing the flow of input and output for a share-holding conference. Neil took one look at my hand-drawn illustration and, smirking, shouted, "That looks like an amoeba!," followed by a choreographed storm of laughter by the wrecking crew from the AV.
In reality, as I guessed at the time and was confirmed to me years later by a witness to the actual conspiring, Sam's New Libertarians had plans for their own conference, and hoped to kill FOFcon, the only competition. Yet again, they only succeeded in hurting the movement. Their conference never went beyond talk, and I left the con committee in disgust. (The theme and most of the events at the prior FOFcon had been my ideas.)
It was I, sad to say, who was primarily responsible, I believe, for creating the truly destructive connection between Sam Konkin's group, who were largely followers of the anarchist economist, Murray Rothbard, and the local Randian schism group following George Smith, author of "Atheism, the Case Against God." I had hoped that by bringing the groups together, since both groups were schismatic from the original source, (Sam considered himself to be a better Rothbardian than Rothbard and George was of the Branden side of the
One recent loss was a delightful 23 year old woman who I only knew over the phone. However, Kortney Zeman made such an impression that I was truly shocked and saddened to hear that she had died of hypothermia in a sudden storm in the mountains. It was almost unimaginable, and, of course, I kept thinking, with no logic to it, that there must have been something I could have done. I attended her memorial at the Regen House, where she had lived with a crew of fellow environmental radicals, mainly notorious for the recent, apparently unfounded, raid by the FBI in connection with the lot full of RVs that was torched by someone or other who left "ELF" graffitied around the crime scene.
The Regen folks didn't strike me as likely culprits, frankly, and, since then, in point of fact, the cops have arrested a couple of other guys for the torchings who apparently had no connection at all to Regen. They did do quite a job of creating a memorial for Kortney, with photos, poetry by and about her and a long night of remembering her. The best one can do in reality at this point. Those of you who saw "Zardoz," may contemplate the idea that other options might be forthcoming shortly as technology improves. For more details on this, check out the transhuman or extropy sites.
I was reminded of other young women that I knew who had died. One of them was a plucky girl who would never have won any beauty contest, but got by on personality and brains, and would have made the perfect lover for me if I had been so lucky or had any sense way back around 1968. I introduced her to pot, and was so blind that I skipped right by several references and ignored the patch over one eye as we smoked in my attic hideaway that one day. She had so little time left, and she wanted EVERYTHING!!! And she deserved it. But it was too late. I never saw her again, and all I know of her name is BJ. A whole world lost in her passing...
Then there was Laura Patrick, as far as I can recall now a near clone of China Beach's Dana Delaney, both in looks and personality - at least of the character in China Beach. Laura was the kind of girl that guys have a special name for - a "real sweetheart." Meaning, a girl that could not conceive of deliberately hurting another living being. Not that she was a prude, by any means. Just someone you could absolutely trust your life and honor to. The kind of woman that men die protecting.
Around 1970, again, and I came across a huddled group of her friends, weeping inconsolably. While she was on summer vacation from college, where she was barely surviving financially, as her family was far from wealthy, she was out driving with her five brothers when a drunk crossed over into her lane and hit them head-on, killing all six of them. The drunk survived. Laura still lives in my memory and that of perhaps a couple dozen others. I wish sometimes that there is that infinity of parallel universes that Hawkings suggests, some of which have Laura living out her life, happy.
I hardly knew these people, in reality, but most of us, I think, tend to grok people quickly, as a whole. Some people are instantly likeable. Some people we fall in love with in the first thirty seconds and never forget. Others we only learn to like over time, as we get past a prickly surface, and annoying quirks to the core person. Sometimes we are totally fooled, for a while, anyway, which is what the professional sociopath is about. Death puts a stop to the expectation of further revelations and forces us to sum up what a person meant to us and what they might have meant, had the life gone on. It suddenly makes us aware of all the lost opportunities, and should serve as a useful reminder not to let other such opportunities slip by.
Now I hear today that Sam Konkin is gone, with whom I spent hundreds of hours, and much discussion and debate. Who could have imagined it? A unique individual, as well as one of the really knowledgeable sources who had put all the background information on the BIG conspiracies of corporate fascism together. Not perfect, Sam often misjudged other people in his personal relationships - usually to the positive, and it often cost him dearly when they betrayed him. Like the drunk who murdered Laura, many of those who sucked up to Sam and played off his personal tolerance and refusal to believe the worst of anyone survive him. I do not envy them. They had the opportunity of a lifetime to enrich their lives by association with Sam, and they blew it. Sam always seemed larger than life, creating his own mythology around him. He radiated a cheerful calm wherever he went, with a humorous quip or story always at the tip of tongue, and an unlimited enthusiasm for life and the revolution. Just unbelievable to think of him dead...
(See the Jeff Riggenbach obit for some additional details on Sam's life and work.)
Also, try the Reason Foundation's comment site for a string of remarks, obits, and details on Sam and his impact.
I met Sam at the First Southern Libertarian Conference in Atlanta, Georgia, in 1971. While I'm sure that no one expected it, this particular conference set a number of paths into which many, many, future events would track. Virtually all the big idea people of the new, radical, largely anarchist libertarian movement were there. I recall meeting Sam, his sidekick and intellectual trigger man, J. Neil Schulman, Bob Cohen (self-styled "anarcho-chauffer"), as well as Jarret Wollstein, who gave a terrific anarchist analysis of the fundamental problems with the state, and then an equally bad and destructive advocacy of a "libertarian ethic" (which STILL haunts us today) and then the New Banner Institute crew, with whom I would spend the next several tumultuous years plotting anarchy and Montessori education.
There was even a contingent of Bob LeFevre fans from California, who were so sadly outclassed intellectually by the East Coast groups following Rothbard or Rand, that they pretty much shut up and left after no one even wanted to attend their party. My life, as well as a few hundred others, was rechanneled by that single event, and Sam correctly perceived its significance at the time.
In the backdrop of the conference, however, a more sinister scene played itself out, one that would echo down the years of my and Sam's lives. Sam and his crew decided to get a taste of the "Old South." As Sam told me years later, he had been strongly influenced by an elementary school teacher, a young woman from the deep South who apparently doted on young Sammy. Transplanted somehow to Canada, she recreated an ante-bellum wonderland in her tales to her young charges, evoking the kind of deep spiritual lies found in "Gone With the Wind."
Setting a pattern for so much of his later life, Sam grafted his childhood infatuation with this pretty young teacher onto his later political theorizing, turning the slave-holders into benighted paternalistic heroes for independence. The Civil War became a glorious struggle for Southern independence against the onrushing Northern mercantilist corporate state. Not that Sam ever displayed any signs of racism... Despite his connections with the notorious Institute for Historical Review, Sam was about as rational on the issue of race as anyone I've ever met, and various Jews, blacks and other ethnicities were as close to him as anyone.
Thus, however, as would characterize Sam's entire intellectual and spiritual life as I witnessed it over more than three decades, a romantic vision transfigured a more ugly reality. Yes, the United States of the North was an evil empire of mercantilist proto-fascism, with Lincoln the champion for virtually every manner of the tyranny that emerged later in fascist Italy or NAZI Germany. The deep South, however, was hardly any kind of utopia. Slavery was and is an ugly, brutal, evil institution, combining murder, kidnapping, theft, with the loss of every vestige of human dignity and hope. The evil motives of the ultra-wealthy Northern political puppeteers, disguised as patriotism and abolitionism (but only when patriotism later flagged under the truly horrific rates of casualty), in no way ameliorated the deep spiritual evil of the Southern racism and slavery.
So, here we have Sam, attending the premier forum for the advancement of freedom in modern history, culminating his trek with a visit to an Atlanta restaurant specializing in recreating a never-existed dream embodying the exact opposite, from the black children dressed in little knickerbockers - is that the correct term? - uniforms, black with striping and little billed caps, exactly like one of those offensive little statues you used to see on people's lawns or by the front entrance, greeting the guests, to the entire panoply of a strange, twisted excuse for evil.
Years later, at Sam's Long Beach "Anarcho-Village," I slept on Sam's couch under a huge Confederate flag stretched across the wall. Ironically, I had a dispute with a black neighbor over a continuously barking dog during that period. The neighbor at one point called the swat team in, alleging that I had threatened him with a gun. (Not true.) Now imagine me trying to explain myself to the Long Beach cops while sitting under Sam's Stars and Bars.
When I moved to Long Beach, CA, in early '76, from Columbia, South Carolina, I naturally went first to the "Anarcho-Village," just West of Cherry on 7th street, and frankly a dump. But the core of Sam's "New Libertarian" crew were all there - J. Neil Schulmann, Victor Koman, Bob Cohen, Charles Curly and Andy Thornton. Nearly every night was packed with intense argument about theory, strategy, history, art, science fiction. During the days, while my funds lasted, I read thru as much of Sam's library as I could stuff into my brain, including Max Stirner's "The Ego and His Own," which influenced me strongly and helped me uncover the repressive mental habits that I still nourished in myself. In the years to follow, the local non-LP (Libertarian Party - "PartyArcs" (Sam's designation)), or, better, anti-LP libertarian movement gravitated to Sam and his following, and, for well over a decade, the Anarcho Village was a center of libertarian anarchist thought and plot.
Sam, himself, had fled from New York City with his little crew after an abortive attempt to sabotage the Libertarian Party, the details of which are probably available somewhere still as he documented them in print in either his "New Libertarian" magazine or his later "New Libertarian Weekly," (Click here and then do a text find on New Libertarian) for which I wrote several articles. He considered the New York fiasco merely a stepping stone to greater effort, and, from everything I heard or overheard, continued nationwide plots to destroy the LP via his various "New Libertarian" associates for at least as long as I kept in close contact.
I had learned to trust Sam after the State of South Carolina had cracked down on the New Banner Institute, alleging child abuse, around 1973, but in fact, as the County Solicitor John Ford declared to all and sundry at their first court hearing, out to get "those atheists" off the streets of Columbia - as well as putting a stop to all that "race mixing." (We had kids of both of the top S. Carolina black politicians - "I.S." Levy Johnson and Tom Broadwater - in our College of Early Learning.) Oddly enough, most of the libertarian movement appeared to have accepted the state's charges without the slightest question. Sam alone, among influential libertarians nationwide, stood up for the Institute.
(The charges were all later dropped, and that County Solicitor - for whom it was said that "he would doubtless die in office - one way or another," such was his popularity among the Bible pounders - was voted out of office, largely because of the outrage over his attack on the Institute. The parents of the kids in our school - mostly non-libertarian themselves - virtually made it their life's work to defeat the man.
This is even more impressive when one considers that the same Richland County Solicitor had utterly smashed the local very large and active New Left Anti-War movement, by planting his agents among them, then arresting them on bogus charges of selling drugs at their anti-war coffeehouse, and then prosecuting them, while never mentioning that among the defendants, privy to all the private meetings with the defense attorneys, were his paid informants. At least one of that era's victims, Brett Bursey, spent serious time in a state prison for his anti-war work and is still today working his way through the appellate system on some of them dating from the Vietnam war, which illustrates - to me, anarchist, anyway - how futile that state (generic "state", including federal, state, local) court system route generally is. I'm always amazed to hear people expressing dismay over the fact that their enemies haven't given them a fair shake.)
I slept on Sam's living room couch for about six months from my arrival in Long Beach in '76. It was both a happy and unhappy time. I thoroughly enjoyed the radical hotbed atmosphere, but I found myself alienated more and more from the subjectivism and power plays that permeated the group. I had just escaped from a psycho-drama in Columbia, South Carolina, in which the New Banner people (those who had not been purged by their Great Leader or his Perfect Romantic Partner wife - who he later kidnapped) had been involved in a nationally televised kidnapping, the details of which are so bizarre that if I described it, no one would believe me, I suspect. For the previous year, I had lived in daily fear for my life from people who were gun nuts for real - and all I wanted to do was start a revolution, please.
On that very first night I spent in California, at the Anarcho-Village, I almost turned around and drove back to the East Coast. I had come to California because it seemed from a distance that here was where the revolution would really be happening. I had formulated several possible revolutionary strategies and assumed that people here would be eager to hear of them and would have ideas of their own to present and defend.
In hindsight, I think that few Californians appreciate how the rest of the country perceives them. At the University of Georgia, we all heard about the wild parties, the rampant drugs, the anti-war radicalism, etc., the intellectual fervor, centered at Berkeley, but assumed to be part of the "California scene." So, we tried to compete, naturally. I suspect that we did a lot more in Athens, Georgia, at the University of Georgia, than Berkeley ever dreamt of. To illustrate, in 1975 a wave of "streaking" hit college campuses nationwide. Frat cats, and some sorority girls taped little wings to their ankles and then dashed madly across campuses in the nude.
At the University of South Carolina, the news of California streakers aroused the competitive spirit. Instead of a few rare instances, dozens of streakers of both sexes constantly raced about eluding the typically fat, middle-aged campus cops with ease.* However, the university authorities had learned their lesson from the war protests. Official opposition just encouraged the typical hormone-charged college student. So, they co-opted it, staging an official streak-in, with a band, bleachers and a start and finish line, and, sure enough, hundreds of students of both sexes showed up for it, and that ended the streaking. (Sure wish video cams had been around back then.)
*The general capabilities of South Carolina law enforcement during this period could hardly be underrated. The Keystone Cops were more competent. On the University of South Carolina campus, local gang bangers marched around wooden-leggedly, with lock cutters stuffed up their pants. The Campus Cops could not touch them, allegedly, without further evidence, and thus there was a huge trade in stolen bicycles. Worse, there was a long, high, elevated ramp over the athletics area in a deep little rift valley behind the campus. Somehow, multiple rapes of coeds were occurring on this ramp at night, mostly by black males from the projects just past the end of the ramp, and no one could figure out how to stop it. While prostitution was definitely illegal, as well, it was booming all around Columbia. And when homosexuality was legally still a felony, Columbia boasted one of the largest and most active gay communities on the East Coast. There were stringent blue laws as well, with liquor sales verboten after midnight - unless you were in a private club, of which there were hundreds, with membership costing typically a dollar, where you could drink all night.
The reality of the California dream is much closer to the nightmare depicted in the classic movie, "Vanishing Point." California is a bureaucratic, boring, stupid state - especially Southern California. (I do like San Francisco - a lot.) Intellectual activity is rare and actively discouraged. A party without a heated political or philosophical argument in New York City is considered a failure. In California, the hostess will angrily break up any such activity. Typical California parties feature extremely loud music, specifically to prevent people from talking. Californians are anal. They don't curse drivers that cut them off; they shoot them.
So, here I was, a newbie to the great American Dreamland. We were all crowded into Neil's tiny Anarcho Village (AV) apartment, sharing the space with hundreds of books and albums, and I got into a rant about how we could use known techniques of child-rearing, based on Montessori, to raise the intelligence of a group of children to the point that they would all be functioning geniuses. I had been researching this field since the late '60's, when I stumbled across "the Autobiography of John Stuart Mill," right about the same time that I had been reading about Montessori in the Ayn Rand Newsletter. I figured that if we got a bunch of libertarian parents together to join in on the effort, then the majority of the kids would grow up as committed revolutionaries, and, with their brains to boot, they would create the revolution for us.
Further research had convinced me that if you started with a baby, enriching the environment, providing coherent, appropriate feedback, a child of normal genetic endowment could be raised to genius level. Montessori herself appeared to be in basic agreement with the idea. She felt that one of the flaws in her system was that it started too late - age 2 or 2.5. However, she had enough on her plate with the thousands of Montessori schools worldwide, and she also could not figure out how to make a business of it, especially as she concluded that an infant should not be separated from its mother.
At the Anarchist Montessori School that the New Banner Institute (who I had met at that famous First Southern Libertarian Conference) started, the still operating College of Early Learning, we had kids aged six or seven who could read a newspaper with adult comprehension and were starting in algebra. They could find any spot on a map or globe, and discuss both the time line and logic of evolution. These kids had started with us at ages three to five. How much more powerful would a child who had had that kind of advantage from birth become?
In addition, at the CEL, we had expanded the Montessori Environment to include ethics. The CEL featured a school monetary system (on the "cookie standard"). School jobs such as cleaning tables were put up for bid. Disputes were arbitrated by the kids themselves, and the arbitrars charges for their services. As far as possible, we tried to create a working, functioning anarchist utopia within the school, and it was working!
Montessori, for those who are not familiar with her, was a revolutionary in her own right, and not "just" in education. For her, the question was how to change society. She concluded that simply passing on our adult concepts to our kids would yield successive generations of degraded knowledge, like a xerox of a xerox of a xerox. Instead, each generation must be given the tools and the opportunities to discover truths for themselves. From their own original perspective, they would have the personal power to grasp the reality of their time and forge their own dreams, building upon the past, but with new elements of their own discovery. Thus, the Montessori school is a laboratory, with equipment designed to be self-correcting. As far as possible, the learning process is based directly upon the scientific method. There are no authorities but the individual mind of the child.
Montessori believed that when people were individually weak, then societies became easily infected with corrupt ideas like Nazism, that played on weakness, offering to solve problems if only one submits and believes the Great Leader. Strong, competent individuals who knew that they could depend upon their own minds were the best antibodies for such social illnesses. Anne Frank, for example, was a Montessori child. Thus, the Montessori child chooses his or her own work in the Environment for Discovery. No one, including the directors, has the right to interfere, unless the child starts acting in a way destructive to the environment itself.
As I said, I agreed with Montessori's tentative conclusion that starting even earlier would yield even better results, and I made it clear that I was NOT suggesting putting pressure on the child. That has been the mistake of all too many who have attempted this path. J.S. Mill and William James Sidis are good examples of what happens when you force-feed a child - altho J.S. Mill did accomplish a huge amount of good work in his life, in spite of the neurotic legacy of his father's pressure.
However, returning to that fateful night in Long Beach, Neil Schulman had clearly been Sam's right hand man, and suddenly here I was, the notorious renegade "banneristi," (another term coined by Sam, of course)exactly the kind of person that Sam romanticized - as he did everyone he met, I think - into some kind of living archetype - moving in, literally. So, when I described the kind of children who might evolve, given the opportunity to fully engage and evolve their minds at the optimum age, I made the error of referring to them as "Supermen." Neil's gleeful and instant response was to shout at me, "You're a goddamn fucking NAZI!!!"
I almost left right then, and it might have been a better choice. Instead, I spent the next decade or so attempting to work with people who openly insulted me at every meeting with great moral satisfaction and glee. The first and only time that I offered to drive the Sam - and that meant Neil as well - to dinner, for example, Neil took great delight in gratuitously insulting Ayn Rand, referring to her as "that old bag." Since Neil himself has always acknowledged Rand as a primary source of his own philosophy, it's clear that his aim was at me, and he did succeed in infuriating me. Neil clearly saw me as a primary foe in his jealous clinging to Sam. In fact, a great deal of Neil's behavior over the next decade could be hypothetically explained by this simple hypothesis - drive off every other potential major ally and then you have Sam for yourself.
The libertarian movement, by 1976, had already gone through several divisive schisms. There was the Rand/Rothbard break. Then the Rand / Galambos split that resulted when Galambos, according to him in a private discussion with me, stupidly insulted Rand (without meaning to, but Galambos did that a LOT) resulting in Rand's infamous attack on her misinterpretation of Galambos's "Competing Governments" idea. This was doubly tragic in that the reason for Galambos' trip to see Rand in New York City was to get her permission to produce her major novel, "Atlas Shrugged," as a movie, which he had the funds to do. Then the Branden / Rand break up. And the split among objectivists over the limited government vs. anarchy issue. Then there was the multitude of people who had at one point been avid students of Galambos and then succumbed to his personal nastiness and the growing paranoia that foreshadowed Galambos's descent into Alzheimer’s, of which the Rand episode was relatively mind by comparison. And, finally, the LP vs. anti-LP.
On the East Coast, I had only caught pieces of this in passing, altho it always struck me as odd how the great leaders (ultimately, Great Leader (singular) after the others were all purged and the women only had one stud left), of the New Banner group were always putting down any possible worth of any other libertarian groups. Why the movement took this disastrous turn is still a mystery in many ways, but turn it did, away from useful revolutionary activism, away from critical fundamental analysis, away from organizing practical projects implementing its philosophy in the real world, and toward a competition over an ultimately shrinking pie - the movement itself.
I well recall attending the various libertarian supper clubs in the late '70's thru early '80's and the response I often got if I attributed to Rand. People felt impelled to shout me down in a fury at the mere mention of her name. I wasn't trying to use an argument from authority, nor slavishly follow any objectivist line - I had many disagreements with Rand. I just wanted to place credit where due. No matter. Any mention of her was verboten.
To get an idea of what has been lost, it is instructive to look up back issues of libertarian journals from that period. Almost invariably they included a rich want-ads section, with all sorts of fascinating offers and opportunities for projects, free-market banks, schools, grey-market vitamins by the kilogram, etc. By the mid-80's, all that was pretty much gone. What energy there was had been sucked up in political action by the Libertarian Party, ultimately burning out most of the potential revolutionaries. Sam and I both saw how potentially destructive the party could be - and ultimately was in many instances and respects. The big difference came in that I considered Sam's tactics of infiltrate, sabotage and attack to be likely to simply make it all worse, using up more valuable energy while doing little to correct the problem. I concluded that the party was there to stay, so we might as well figure out how to work around it and convince people of better strategies.
While I am a glutton for punishment and was willing to put up with insults and worse, many others did leave the local libertarian scene, and, in fact, I lay it to Sam's credit - and that of his following, to be sure, but Sam could have stopped it - that the local Southern California libertarian movement was largely destroyed and dissipated over the following decade. Neil, in particular, made a point of shouting down the speakers at local libertarian supper clubs, if they dared deviate from Sam's Agorist anti-political line, leaving many others who had come to hear the speaker fuming in rage at Neil's antics. Sam's crew took a local hotbed science fiction scene which had been strongly libertarian in its leanings and, within a few years, had converted it to "libertarians not welcome."
A classic example of Neil at his worst came at a meeting of the South Bay Libertarian Supper Club around 1978. Olivia Cole, co-star of "Backstairs at the Whitehouse", as well as several movie roles, had been promoting a local private, mostly black school and cultural center - Sheenway. Olivia is one of the really nice people of the world, and, with no idea of what libertarians were about, presented a fine overview of what Sheenway stood for. Sheenway had offered an alternative to the kids who otherwise would have spent their youths in what are euphemistically termed "schools" in Watts. While these public prisons for kids were offering an education in violence and drugs, Sheenway provided first class academic education tailored to the individual child, including Montessori pre-school and karate classes.
Sheenway had been started by Dr. Sheen as his response to the Watts riots. When he died, his daughter, Delores Blunt Sheen, with all kinds of degrees and a black belt in karate took over. She cultivated contacts with Hollywood via many black and white performers, and managed to start careers in show biz for many Sheenway students as a result, including her son, Erin, who played in "The Bad News Bears Go To Japan."
I think this is the connection to Jody Foster, who later became a strong supporter of Sheenway (Hey! I sat ten feet behind Jody at a benefit ceremony honoring people who had contributed to Sheenway, where I also got a plaque(!) for my work in getting Sheenway computer access leading to the highly successful "Computer Gang Project," financed by Richard Prior.). At that point, however, it was Jody's mother (as I understand it, anyway), Sara, who was very active in the libertarian movement, who was the direct connection between Sheenway, Olivia Cole and the supper club. Sara had been volunteering at Sheenway after hearing about them in the papers after the school had been vandalized - apparently by gangs (altho I know a different story on that, as well.)
So, Olivia gave her excellent presentation, with slides, etc., and asked for questions.... At which point Neil starts in, sneering, in a voice that would serve as a shout for most people, something like, "Well, I don't consider any school to be libertarian that has the students pledging allegiance to the most oppressive imperialist power on the planet! ... Meaning, of course, the pledge of allegiance to the U.S. flag, of which Olivia had shown a slide.
Olivia took it in stride, altho I'm sure it did not especially turn her toward libertarianism. However, I overheard two large men after the meeting had ended, discussing Neil as follows. One of them said ~ "You know, I haven't been so mad in years. If that A--h--e ever pulls anything like that again, I will personally throw him out on his ass!" To which the other responded, "And I will help you." I later discovered that these gentlemen were running a philosophical discussion forum focused on objectivism.
(Regarding "throwing Neil out on his ass," it probably would have taken both of them at minimum. Neil is ENORMOUS. He is tall, very large-boned, AND quite obese. A truculent Baby Huey is an apt visual metaphor. Neil is quite capable and willing to physically intimidate. Simply stepping in front of someone (or two) and thereby blocking their access to a speaker, or answering himself whenever someone near to him is being recognized by the floor (pretending that he thinks it is he that has been recognized and daring anyone to do anything about it, these and a dozen other tactics that Neil has perfected pose near insurmountable obstacles to any kind of free intellectual intercourse in his presence. Most speakers are not prepared to deal with him, and he gets quite belligerent if called on his behavior, which can be even more intimidating. Of course, there are equalizers.....
In spite of Neil - or perhaps even partially out of embarrassment for his behavior - the South Bay Libertarian Supper Club committed itself to providing a fairly large sum of money to Sheenway to allow them to put in escrow a large section of the block on which the school was located so that they could expand into a full-featured high-school. Usually, I suspect, Neil's interruptions simply served to drive people away from whatever venue he attended.
Sam's crew also severely and quite deliberately damaged the highly successful "Future of Freedom" conference series that had been started by (now congressman, but then anarchist revolutionary and pot-smoking draft resister - see the "New Republic" coverage - if you can find it, as most of the data on Rohrabacher has mysteriously disappeared - or google on: "Gene Berkman" "Dana") Dana Rohrabacher', and then revived by local activist Larry Samuels. Allegedly their motivation was based in moral purity.
Sam's crew, arrived en masse at the organizing meeting for the 2nd of the FoFCon series that Larry Samuels sponsored. I don't think that any of them had attended any prior meetings. The fix was in. They objected to the conference being held at a state university (Cal State Long Beach), and, failing to sway the conference committee on that issue, instead disrupted the meeting and prevented much-needed progress, deliberately sowing discord and setting committee members against each other. I still have an audio tape of that meeting, including Neil Schulman's classic performance, in which his interruptions went for a longer period of time than I was allowed to speak for my own presentation on reorganizing the conference financially. The previous conference had made money!! My suggestions centered around converting the con into a share-holding enterprise based on the common law trust model that Anthony Hargis was promoting.
(Note: the March 17, 2004, "Orange County Register" business section, page 2, had a short story indicating that Anthony L. Hargis has been ordered incarcerated indefinitely until he turns over the names of his customers to the local federal judge. Further info can be found by googling around on "Anthony" "Hargis" "federal" "court".
Briefly, Hargis has been in business for the past nearly three decades, offering accounts denominated in either gold or dollars for people who want to cheaply invest or hedge in gold without paying the sizable premiums that coin dealers charge. His primary focus has been on capital preservation in the face of inflation, a subject on which he has given many seminars, altho doubtless other people used his services for other purposes, such as paying bills reliably when they were out of the country on extended personal or business affairs. The feds are apparently alleging that Hargis is running a tax avoidance warehouse bank. Interesting that such a fishing expedition can take place now under the new federal mandates that allow demanding of customer records from car dealerships or just about any business, on mere suspicion of wrongdoing - to protect us from those who would take away our rights as free Amerikans, naturally...)
I felt that one of the major problems of the libertarian movement was that, although it lauded the free market as the answer to everything, it utterly failed - with rare exceptions, such as Hargis, whose gold depository is still running quite successfully today* (see note above, however) - to incorporate business models into its own proceedings and enterprises. Asking people to buy shares in the next FOFcon and offering to pay workers and speakers in such shares seemed like a step in that direction that was long overdue.
* ALH & Co. was open for business on Saturday, March 20, 2004, and is still functioning as usual as of yesterday (03/24/04). No word yet on Anthony, who is still incarcerated. The customers with whom I spoke on Saturday were mostly confident that they will be able to handle whatever the feds come up with. General belief seems to be that this is supposed to set an example. If Hargis folds and turns over his customer data for the fed's fishing expedition, then a lot of softer targets will surrender without a fight. I find it particularly egregious that while ALH&Co. is targeted on the basis of suspicion that some of his customers might be doing something wrong, there are thousands of foreign companies in the U.S., especially Taiwanese, who have one company here and one company there - totally separate, you understand? And they sell to themselves, setting the prices so that the U.S. side makes little or no taxable income, while the Taiwanese, etc., side takes all the profits and simply keeps them (minus payoffs to the local politicians to keep their market shares intact).
U.S. companies then get to pay for all the infrastructure while the foreign companies get everything for free and are able to set prices just below the point that any American manufacturer can compete. THERE's where all the money is going! And there's why all the manufacturing is disappearing. Probably half a $trillion, mostly from California, sucked right out... Do you hear me, Arnold?
Back at the FoFCon committee, Neil, however, and a couple of conference committee members, including Terry Diamond took the position that libertarian events were and ought to be altruistic acts of love, not commercial enterprises. (Terry also had personal reasons to oppose me in general.) Neil declared, "these things NEVER make money. Why would anyone invest in a money loser?" As I mentioned, the immediately prior FOFcon had in fact made money, but Neil was not interested in facts.
I had painfully - with a cut nerve in my left hand - typed up and zeroxed a several-page set of analyses and recommendation, including a cover picture showing the flow of input and output for a share-holding conference. Neil took one look at my hand-drawn illustration and, smirking, shouted, "That looks like an amoeba!," followed by a choreographed storm of laughter by the wrecking crew from the AV.
In reality, as I guessed at the time and was confirmed to me years later by a witness to the actual conspiring, Sam's New Libertarians had plans for their own conference, and hoped to kill FOFcon, the only competition. Yet again, they only succeeded in hurting the movement. Their conference never went beyond talk, and I left the con committee in disgust. (The theme and most of the events at the prior FOFcon had been my ideas.)
It was I, sad to say, who was primarily responsible, I believe, for creating the truly destructive connection between Sam Konkin's group, who were largely followers of the anarchist economist, Murray Rothbard, and the local Randian schism group following George Smith, author of "Atheism, the Case Against God." I had hoped that by bringing the groups together, since both groups were schismatic from the original source, (Sam considered himself to be a better Rothbardian than Rothbard and George was of the Branden side of the
