tag, you’re it

To paraphrase HL Mencken, the early 20th century cynic and proto-libertarian, nobody ever lost an election underestimating the discernment of the general electorate. Democracy seems to prove that you can indeed fool enough of the people enough of the time to sustain an endless parade of crooks and parasites. It is probably wisest to shrug it off, to take for granted that most people will be sheep regardless of which herd they join. And so one needs to carefully decide who one ultimately cares about, organizationally.

There’s no doubt in my mind on that one. I don’t really care about the “majority”. I care about their humanity; if someone is hurt in the street, I actually am the type of guy that tries to help. And certainly, when I think of brand, message, PR, votes, and so on, I care about them in that context – I care about them in some sense “politically”. But ORGANIZATIONALLY I’m indifferent to them.

The Jones Drones and Paul Bots are always going to be there, throwing themselves on the barricades, blindly following and thus being ruthlessly manipulated, right alongside the Tea Partiers, Obama fanatics, and all the rest. And me? On the one hand, I don’t have the heart to manipulate them; it seems cruel, it seems to me indeed to be the very problem I got into this thing to try and “solve”. On the other hand, I refuse to coddle people by spoon-feeding them a pie-in-the-sky version of reality. All of which makes me, in all likelihood, doomed in the realm of politics.

That’s ok, because I’m definitely not a politician, nor even an activist for that matter. I’m an organizer. And a good organizer, in my opinion, rigorously applies the basic principles of Alinsky (the leftist who out-organized just about every single “patriot” that loves to hate him); that is to say, a good organizer organizes the organizers. This recursive, energizing principle isn’t particularly “leftist”, really. In fact, it’s pure free market – it’s just good management, it’s good leadership. You empower your NCOs, your middle managers. Because those are the people most fundamentally driving the work.

Everything I’m writing, I’m writing for that one in ten, maybe even one in a hundred, that actually works. This is for the people ready to lift their heads that first inch out of the sand, to take that first step. This is for those ready to actually EXPERIENCE politics, activism, organizing, whatever, as opposed to nodding along, reading the “information”, following the “leader”, baaahhh, baaaahhh. Blah. This is for the doers, because those are the people – maybe, you are the person – who will reclaim this “revolution”, if that is even possible anymore.

It’s debatable – but it’s worth a try.

By Their Fruits…

It’s time to write now.

It’s been 18 months. I could make excuses, but won’t. There have been more important priorities for me – earning a living for one. And building TAG for another.

But seeing this movement get co-opted, so relentlessly, from so many angles, has become too much for me to bear any longer. There really can be no higher priority now than speaking out and letting the proverbial chips fall. This isn’t easy for me to write, and it sure won’t be easy for people to digest, but I’m convinced it has to be done.

The thing is – I’m finally at the “screw it” stage. I’ve become convinced that the “movement” (abstractions like “the movement” and “the new world order” are exactly the problem)… the “movement” is so full of taint, so corrupt, and almost certainly so deeply penetrated by the very networks “it” purportedly seeks to counter, that I really don’t care too much any more about having a lot to do with the “movement”. Whatever values the “movement” might represent (and there’s the problem, everyone has their own take on the “movement”) are irrelevant to me at this point. I have MY values; they have more to do with very basic principles concerning how to live correctly than with any political ideology, libertarian or otherwise. You, dear reader, might even share some of them – don’t cheat, don’t lie, don’t steal. And the principle, the very principle that THOSE PRINCIPLES are way more important than political -isms, is a theme of my own learning experience in this “movement”.

Dig it: just because someone says the word “liberty” every third sentence, doesn’t make them a decent human being. Some of them make off with hundreds of thousands from exploding balloons and other blown political ops. Some of them are actual felons, with criminal records, scamming people who join their “intentional communities”. Some of them make over a million bucks a year selling fear and anger, rooted in a simplistic “us vs them” mythology with tenuous connections to reality. Some of them run presidential campaigns only to create family empires that blithely sell this “movement” back to a party and political system so hopelessly and systemically corrupt that it leaves a guy like me without a lot of, er, “hope” for “change” – at least at the national level. But then, TAG is 100% local for a reason.

There’s a theme underlying this crowd of self serving opportunists: they are invariably involved primarily in “the message”. They run political campaigns to get out “the message”, they sell books and DVDs to get out “the message”, they scream into bullhorns to get out “the message”. Well, to hell with “the message”; I got the damned message long before there was even an internet, and I want some results.

Don’t get me wrong; I think of “brand” all the time. I know how important marketing and communications are, but basing your life around a “message” is a crock of shit. It is purely POLITICAL, in the worst sense of the word, as opposed to PRODUCTIVE. The lack of metrics, of measurable results, is precisely the sort of thing we CONSTANTLY fight to address in TAG, because a common theme of the opportunists – the POLITICAL CLASS, whether they spout “freedom” or not – is that all they do is talk. They are literally full of hot air, like the now forgotten Ron Paul Blimp, that stands as some sort of pathetic monument to the absurdity of the whole approach.

Sustaining this political class, a class that permeates the liberty “movement” just as integrally as it permeates every other damned “movement”, is a constituency so incredibly naive, so totally devoid of rudimentary street smarts, that it blows my mind. I guess it’s because I spent the first dozen or so years of my life growing up in Manhattan? Maybe; maybe suckerdom is the rule. But so many people who otherwise actually do possess common sense turn into deaf-dumb-blind men when certain ideological buttons are pushed, that I’ve come to believe there’s more to it than that.

Folks talk about “waking up”. Indeed. Wake up – please! People will chatter incessantly on a million mailing lists from sea to shining sea, speculating on one conspiracy after another – all of them OUT THERE. But they won’t take principal players ON THEIR OWN TEAM and apply to them the most basic law of discernment – that is, they will not judge them by their fruits.

walking the walk

I try…

I won’t be posting much in the next week as I’m putting all my energy into the new PAC here, TAG. Between phone banks, radio, bylaws, websites, we’ve got plenty to do.

If you live in or around Austin and are interested in joining a group focused on advancing liberty by means of non-partisan local activism, please come to our first meet this Sunday, August 24th at Scholz’ Beergarten. Doors open @ 4PM. Membership is $10. We’d love to offer FREE BEER! but I’m afraid you’ll have to buy your own.

The response to the last couple of “lessons” was really amazing. All I can say is “I’m not Ron Paul, you are…”. If you’ve enjoyed some of them, you might want to peruse the juicy bits in the middle. The ideas in there are driving my own activism; if we can realize some success here, perhaps others will follow the lead. Or, YOU could make it happen in YOUR neck of the woods, and for my part, I’ll happily follow YOUR lead, like I’m trying to follow the lead of all the good people in Fairfield IA.

liberty=peace+freedom…