“Our youth are impatient with the preliminaries that are essential to purposeful action. Effective organization is thwarted by the desire for instant and dramatic change, or as I have phrased it elsewhere the demand for revelation rather than revolution. It's the kind of thing we see in playwriting; The first act introduces the characters and the plot, in the second act the plot and characters are developed as the place drives to hold the audience’s attention. In the final act good and evil have their dramatic confrontation and resolution. The present generation wants to go right into the third act, skipping the first two, in which case there is no play, nothing but confrontation for confrontation’s sake – a flare up and back to darkness. To build a powerful organization takes time. It is tedious, but that's the way the game is played – if you want to play and not just yell, ‘Kill the umpire.’ What is the alternative to working ‘inside’ the system? A mess of rhetorical garbage about ‘Burn the system down!’ Yippie yells of ‘Do it!’ or ‘Do your thing.’ What else? Bombs? Sniping? Silence when police are killed and screams of ‘murdering fascist pigs’ when others are killed? Attacking and baiting the police? Public suicide?”

“Prologue” in Saul Alinsky Rules for Radicals

“When there are people who espouse the assassination of Senator Robert Kennedy or the Tate murders or the Marin County Courthouse kidnappings and killings or the University of Wisconsin bombing and killing as ‘revolutionary acts,’ then we are dealing with people who are merely hiding psychosis behind a political mask.”

Prologue” in Saul Alinsky Rules for Radicals [he also warns that it is counterproductive, disgusting and scaring normal people].

“Let them call me rebel and welcome, I feel no concern from it; but I should suffer the misery of devils, were I to make a whore of my soul...”

“Thomas Paine” quoted as 2nd of 3 header quotations in Saul Alinsky Rules for Radicals [before even the table of contents].

In my latest Loonie Politics column I argue that the dominant feature of federal policy nowadays isn’t Carney’s ill-concealed radical leftism, it’s unconcealed but widely overlooked massive incompetence. Almost nothing’s actually working, good or bad, and the soothing spin just makes it worse.

“In a world where everything is so inter related that one feels helpless to know where or how grab hold and act, defeat sets in; for years there have been people who found society too overwhelming and have withdrawn, concentrated on ‘doing their own thing.’ Generally we have put them into mental hospitals and diagnosed them as schizophrenics. If the real radical finds that having long hair sets up psychological barriers to communication and organization, he cuts his hair.... As an organizer I start from where the world is, as it is, not as I would like it to be. That we accept the world as it is does not in any sense weaken our desire to change it into what we believe it should be – it is necessary to begin where the world is if we're going to change it to what we think it should be. That means working in the system. There's another reason for working inside the system. Dostoevsky said that taking a new step is what people fear most. Any revolutionary change must be preceded by a passive, affirmative, non-challenging attitude toward change among the mass of our people.”

“Prologue” in Saul Alinsky Rules for Radicals

“Why does the perfect social state always seem to be a state of perfect boredom stiffened only by self-righteousness?”

G.K. Chesterton in London Magazine August 1924, quoted in “Why Do You Ask Me Rhetorical Questions? 6” in Gilbert: The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 27 #2 (November/December 2023)

“You should be more afraid of a stupid man than of an evil one.”

Christina, Queen of Sweden (1626-1689) [emailed by a friend and quoted for instance at https://www.azquotes.com/quote/966702]

On the 9th Hour podcast I joined theatre artist Breanna Doyle and host Charley to discuss heroes and villains in history, finding truth among shifting interpretations, and what it means for us today.