The Flathead Valley’s Leading Independent Journal of Observation, Analysis, & Opinion

 

20 October 2010

Proximity is not proof of agreement

Forty-two years ago, I spent a week in northern Wisconsin as a volunteer for Eugene McCarthy during his presidential primary campaign there. That same year, I attended a political rally at which George Wallace spoke, this time as a reporter for my college’s student newspaper.

Wallace was menacing enough on television. In person, he was much more frightening, coarse, calculating, appealing to the darkest parts of human nature. Thinking back to that night, I now recognize the crowd as 1968’s version of today’s tea party, lower middle class Americans whose sons were dying in Vietnam and whose incomes and standard of living had stalled. They were looking for scapegoats, and Wallace offered one: those pointy-headed, briefcase carrying, bureaucrats (pronounced “bee-row-krats) in Washington.

It was entertaining and enlightening, but not persuasive. Omar Khayyam was speaking for the curious of all generations when he wrote:

Myself when young did eagerly frequent
Doctor and Saint, and heard great argument
About it and about: but evermore
Came out by the same door where in I went.

Being in the same room as George Wallace gave no one cause to suppose that because I was present for his speech, I agreed with his awful remarks.

The same principle should be employed in evaluating the politics of those who have had the misfortune to listen in person to a speech by Red Beckman, a notorious Holocaust approver and anti-Semite: proximity is not proof of agreement.

I offer that observation because Derek Skees, the tea party Republican candidate for Whitefish’s House District 4, is receiving some questionable criticism for attending a meeting in Missoula at which Beckman spoke. The meeting was underwritten in part by Rick Breckenridge, an outspoken advocate of unfettered property rights, and at the time the treasurer of record for Skees’ campaign (Breckenridge was succeeded by Mike Robinson in mid-August), an association that raised some eyebrows.

But none of that proves that Skees is an anti-Semite, a racist, a secret worshipper of Der Fuhrer, or anything other than someone who ruined his afternoon by listening to Red Beckman. It’s a act of considerable intellectual dishonesty to suggest otherwise.

***** Update, 3 June 2016. Wallace spoke at the hockey arena in Duluth, according to an AP story published in the Bend Bulletin (Oregon) on 11 October 1968.