Ba De Dum!

My dad got waylaid by a canvasser on the street yesterday morning, drumming up support for Cheney’s impeachment. Dad said he was down with the cause, and asked what he could do to help. “Give money,” she said.

He gave her three bucks.

Behind this anecdote is a question.  Now, the dad is cynical enough to have given to the vendor despite his opinion that he’s a “bit of a wacko” because of both the humor and the “truth told in jest” behind the comment “he’s eighty-four years old” and the fact that he agrees with the sentiment of impeaching Cheney.  But what do we make of the vendor?  Where does her cynicism pop into the picture?  There are two immediate options: either she believes in Larouche and has come up with the line “he’s eighty-four years old” as a manner of parting reluctant people out of their money, or she has glommed onto what was the most immediate manner of addressing the political situation she disapproves of, and cynically is passing through Larouche as an intermediary on the way to that cause.

A third option is the Ruth Williams slow-burn realization that this is crap, and thus she slowly peters out to the end.

………………………..

Rummaging through this book (and I link to the wikipedia article instead of my usual Amazon.com link to books because the links to reviews and criticisms of the book — ie: its possible faults — are instructive), I’m bemusing myself with the question of “How do you dissolve a cult?”  There are no particularly easy answers, the members of a cult have been particularly groomed and tested and retested for loyalty’s sake.  I gravitate toward the end of the chapter concerning Marlene Dixon, which parallels the similar path to a cult’s destruction as Greg Healy.  Reagan / Thatcher made the farthest reaches of left-wing thought propagated by the Masters look irrelevant to the situation at hand.  Political cults, unlike religious ones, are vulnerable to broader movements in politics that can make it harder for leaders to justify to the membership their sacrifices.  Our friend in Virginia has that covered: he moved from the far left to the far right, and has feigned across the more mainstream political spectrum ever since, without really changing any positions.

The third element, critical to the process, is a breakup of the leadership group.  Dixon survived as long as she did because her worst features and corruption were hidden from the membership by a tight circle of leaders.  Most important was her second in command, Sandra.  In 1982 Dixon turned viciously against Sandra.  Sandra at the same time expressed her disdain for the group and began to toy with the idea of leavaing with a small coterie to set up a think tank in Washington.

It was the opening provided by divisions in the leadership that permitted an outpouring of the rage of the members against the guru.  The members of the DWP were worn out from working “seven day weeks and until 1 am most nights for years.”  Many had lived in poverty in collective houses and yearned for a more balanced life with some time for family and career.  It became harder for the members to believe that the very real sacrifices they were making were actually producing results.  Once the full extent of Dixon’s alcoholism, irrationality and privileged life-style was exposed to the members, there was no putting the pieces back together again.

And on and on.  Back to Larouche, I mention that Dennis Kucinich, on the edge of the Democratic Party, has issued letters of impeachment for Dick Cheney.  It is not too hard to imagine that the channels of distribution of the idea came from out of Larouche, by way of cultural osmosis, really.  (Kucinich heard it sometime, maybe received letters from constituents recommending he needs to impeach Cheney First, etc.) Larouche claims to be in working relations with Bill Clinton, so even the sort-of-accidental influence of a less than central figure pushing an DOA bill must be a little off.  Nonetheless, it is enough to write up for the purpose of convincing his followers that he yields influence.  (Hey!  He takes credit for the ideas behind a Chuck Hagel op-ed piece on Iraq, even as I murmur that I remember distinctly the “Larouche Doctrine” included the absolutely insane necessity that it be referred to “the Larouche Doctrine” — by way of his only real political belief of “See that Crisis?  Me For Dictator!”–, meaning whatever else the sensical ideas of convening the neighboring nations in a conference and whatever political divisions Hagel has in mind for Iraq may or may not have in common with Larouche’s ramblings on the topic, it ends up having no relation whatsoever.)
I wish that every person in Larouche’s orbit over the age of 30 would just walk out and quit right now.  This would leave Larouche with what he seems to desire at the moment, what his organization has built its temples of fantasy (paging Robert Beltan) and geared it toward — the “Larouche Youth Movement”.  In a sense taking him back to his beginning of a small group of grad students, albeit a number more, devoid of long-timers who have a moment’s pause if they can recollect a bit of a sense of history.  (Do not personally recall Reagan.)   (That covers the baby-boomers, the tweeners, and Generation X.  I detect that the Tweeners are lumped in with the baby-boomers in the Larouche screeds against baby-boomers, and the odd recommendation of suicide.)

……………

From the factnet board, a bit of comedy by the perhaps over-committed, perhaps not, ex-Larouchite:

Big things are taking place in Windy Hill , the secret location of the man who has successfully predicted the end of the world, economy and Hegla’s shopping trips for over 3 decades.

“Those fiends” snarled Lyn, as barked on the LarouchePhone to make sure that the LPAC quota of 10,000 hits a day is met, or humanity is doomed as we know it.

I’m guessing that the prima facie evidence that I know nothing about Lyndon Larouche is that I have not donated $2000 to any of his campaigns and am not standing with box-cards hawking his literature on street corners or on college campuses.

This is in in reference to Brian.  I believe in free will, and I believe we can hand that free will to anyone or anything we want to to whatever degree we want to do so.  (Is Mike Gravel a better successor to FDR?  I don’t know.  He couldn’t be worse.)
My response to “dcreporter”, and I am tempted to give out the name of the publication — actually in a sly manner where I invert the words of the publication and toss in a few participles, was essentially a deferal.  In terms of rummaging through old EIR publications, there is something I would do if I could stomache these things: collegate and trace the history of Larouche’s use of the word “baby-boomer”.  Googling “larouchepub” and “baby boomer”, and what seems to predominate are a bulk of interviews held between two people discussing the greatness of Lyndon Larouche.  (Larouche’s publications are odd in that way.)  For some reason the word “baby boomer” is not highlighted, as per the regular google functions, and I am not willing to wade through this crap to be able to sort through the use of the word “baby boomer” as a pejorative.  (The earliest appearance using this minimal technique is 1995.)
A few years ago, after Larouchites succeeded in aggrivating the campus of Portland State Unviersity (a tactical guerilla operation beyond the typical setting up of a card table), and made enough of a nuisance of themselves, the school newspaper ran the article “Who Is Lyndon Larouche?”  In retrospect, I do not believe the article was particularly insightful, even with a bit more meat on it than I’ve come to find out is usual for these things.  It seemed to be dragged down by explanation of the nature of Larouche’s opposition to the wars in Iraq.  (1991 and 2003).   What is weird is that I think there should be just be one form item written, easy to be used by any college whenever it seems necessary with a handful of bullet point items on the history of Larouche.  Out of the student forment of SDS at Columbia University, lead a group of self-described Trotskyites, lead a campaign of violence against Communists with billy-clubs and machettes in “Operation Mop Up”, any number of items can be plugged in from there to te 1986 and 1988 California ballot measures that would have quarantained AIDs patients, prisioned for fraud and served 5 years of a — 15 year?– sentence, and now we can touch upon Jermiah Duggan, if we want to.  Badda bing badda boom, write it someone, let it out to fair use, and don’t think too hard when the topic of Larouche comes up on campus.  (The vast majority of students and everyone sees a charlatan operation intuitively anyways.  point oh oh oh oh one percent notwithtanding.)

Mull this for a moment, and…

The following comes from Tim Wohlforth’s 1994 book The Prophet’s Children: Travels on the AMerican Left, and is somewhat redundant to this here. As a matter of course, I think this book excerpt is a little more lucid, maybe simply because it is situated in a longer narrative, and ultimately one of more significant reach.

I pass this along with an admission that I am pouring through a different book co-written by Wohlforth, On the Edge: Poltiical Cults Right and Left, for a somewhat more pertinent and diabolical post, which may just end up being a few excerpts from this book which serve as very specified case studies and may have me actually having something to say, which would be entitled “How to Dissolve a Cult“. Useful to whom, I can’t quite say.

Shouldn’t I be mocking the latest political Prostitution Scandal or something?

……………………………………………………..

That year we got our next wave of recruits from the SWP, and we could not have done worse. We began discussions with LL. I had known Lyn just a little when I was an SWP member. He lived in a nice apartment on Central Park West with his wife, Janice, and small child. Lyn earned his living at the time as an economic consultant, playing no role at all in the party discussions in the 1961 to 1964 period. After we had all left, L suddenly stirred from his slumbers and started submitting lengthy documents to the SWP discussion bulletin. He developed positions that at least appeared to be close to ours, and we began a collaboration.

He had by then left his Central Park West wife and was living in the Village with Carol Larrabee (Schnitzer, White), a woman who had joined the SWP during the regroupment period. L had a gargantun ego. A very talented, brilliant fellow, he was convinced he was a genius. He combined a strong conviction in his own abilities with an upperclass arrogance that, happily, I rarely encountered in radical circles. He assumed that the famous comment in the Communist Manifesto, that a “small section of the ruling class cuts itself adrift, and joins the revolutionary class” was written specifically for him.

The characteristics of L’s thinking process, which he would later develop to reactionary extremes, were already present when I knew him in 1965. He possessed a marvelous ability to place any event in the world within a larger perspective, a talent that seemed to give the event meaning. The problem was that his thinking was schematic and lacking in factual detail, and ignored contradictory considerations. His explanations were just a bit too perfect and his mind worked too quickly that I always suspected that his bravado covered superficiality. L had the “solution” to anything and everything. It was almost like a parlor game. Just present a problem to L, no matter how petty, and without so much as blinking his eyes, he would come up with the solution, usually prefacing his remarks with “of course.”

I remember private discussions I had with L in 1965 when he went on at length about Kennedy, Rockefeller, and the Trilateral Commission. L held to a view that there existed a network of foundations and agents of the more moderate, internationalist-oriented, Eastern-based capitalists who sought to avoid unrest at home through reform projects and to avoid revolution abroad through development programs like the Alliance for Progress. He was very much a believer in conspiracy theories. I, even in my most ultraleft days, was a bit of a sceptic. For L, even as a radical, the liberals were the main enemy.

I was distrubed by L’s thinking process in those days. I do not claim to have realized then where he would end up, but he definitely made me uncomfortable. He seemed to be an elitist with little interest in the plight of ordinary people. His ideas were too schematic and mechanical for my taste. I could not agree with the position he expounded in that period that the Vietnam War was a battle over Vietnam’s capabilities of becoming the breadbasket for the industrialization of Asia. I also was suspicious of conspiracy theories.

L stayed with us only six months — I think our little group was not big enough to contain him — and he moved on to Robertson’s Spartacist League. Unable to win this group over to “Lism”, Lyn and Carol left after a few months. Sometime later we got a letter from him in which he announced that all factions and sections of the Trotskyist Fourth International were dead and that he and Carol were going to build the Fifth International. I suppose, in a way, this is what he thinks he has done.

I continued to follow L’s political evolution after he left our group. Dennis King, who has made a study of L, has noted that I was “one of the first observers to spot something amiss.” In the beginning of 1967 L and his wife joined a relatively broad coalition of New Left intellectuals called the Committee for Independent Political Action. He gained control of the West Village CIPA branch and started gathering a coterie of young intellectuals. He had finally discovered his milieu, and success swiftly came his way. Through a combination of rather high-level classes and spirited polemics, L won over a group of graduate students, most of whom were members or sympathizers of Progressive Labor. Progressive Labor was in that period at the height of its strength within SDS. L’s gifted young intellectuals included […]

It was the Columbia University occupation and student strike in 1968 that established Larouche on the left. The student movement there was being led by SDS. There were two main factions in SDS, reflecting a split developing in the national organization: Mark Rudd’s Action Faction, and a somewhat more moderate group known as Praxis Axis. The rather appropriate names were coined by L. The Rudd group was interested only in provocative demonstrations and punch-ups with the cops. It would soon emerge as the Weatherman group of underground terrorists. The Praxis group was influenced by the French intellectual Andre Gorz, who held that a new working class was being created by modern technoloy. The students were the vanguard of the new working class. Gorz’s ideas gave the group a kind of mainstream “student power” perspective. L captured most of the PL-SDS group at Columbia and was able to come forward as a relatively strong third alternative. He presented a plausible program for linking the struggles of the students with the struggles of the surrounding poor black community. This was a period when many students radicalized by the Vietnam War and the black struggle were beginning to look for a way to carry the leftist struggle beyond the campus gates. L appeared to some to have a program that could fulfill this wish.

After quickly regrouping his followers into the SDS Labor Committee (later to become the NCLC), L began to hold meetings in the Columbia area. From time to time I attended these meetings. Some twenty to thirty students would gather in a large apartment not far from Columbia. They would sit on the floor surrounding L, by now sporting a very shaggy beard. The meeting would go on at great length, sometimes for as long as seven hours. It was difficult to tell where discussions of tactics left off and an educational presentation began. The students were given quite esoteric assignments, such as searching through the writings of Sorel to discover the anarchistic origins of Rudd, or studying Rosa Luxemburg’s The Accumulation of Capital. For some reason, perhaps because the SDS movement was strong on spirit and action but rather bereft of theory, L’s ruminations found a home.

L in this period developed a series of ideas by extracting and distorting some theories from the Marxist tradition. Even today, from his right-wing position, he retains this element in his thinking. He held these ideas, in an elementary way, even in the period of his membership in our organization. Most important was his Theory of Hegemony. He wrote in 1970: [consult the book yourself.]

L drew this notion from his interpretation of Lenin’s What Is To Be Done?, where Lenin speaks of intellectuals bringing socialist conciousness to the workers. He then expanded it by drawing from Gramsci’s notion of hegemony. L’s goal was to forge an intellectual elite corps that would gain hegemony on the left and then capture from on high the allegiance of the masses. I am not arguring that L’s interpretation of Lenin and of Gramsci was in any way an accurate one — Gramsci, for example, was a strong believer in an automonous working-class movement — but only showing which strands of the Marxist tradition appealed to L and motivated him and his followers in his radical period.

A necessary corollary of L’s concept of a superior intellectual revolutionary elite is the concept of an inferior class. Here L distorted Marx’s distinction between the class itself (ordinary conciousness) and the class for itself (socialist conciousness). he also made heavy use of Lenin’s polemic against the “economists” in Russia who, in Lenin’s opinion, were adapting to the backwardness of ordinary conciousness of the workers. It appeared that L and his followers, even in their radical stage, had a low opinion of ordinary human beings. In 1969, for example, L followers Steve Fraser and Tony Papert wrote about forcing “working people and other groups to begin to part with their habitual swinish outlooks.”

The second strand of L’s thought was his Theory of Reindustrialization. This concept remains the heart of his current economic theory and rightist agitation. L began with a rather orthodox theory of capitalist crisis derived from Marx’s Capital and Luxemberg’s The Accumulation of Capital. He was convinced that capitalism had ceased to grow, or at least ceased to grow sufficiently to meet the needs of the country’s poor. This created an economic crisis that would only worsen. he believed international capitalism was on the brink of entering what he called the “third stage of imperialism” (see his pamphlet of the same name published in 1967). The “third stage of imperialism” was an attempt by the developed nations to overcome the stagnation at home and revolution abroad by formenting a new industrial revolution in the third world. L expected this to take place in India. His idea was the advanced nations would use their unused capacity to make capital goods and export them to India, setting up factories that would employ the country’s surplus work force.

At this point in the argument L borrowed from his Trotskyist background to develop a transitional program that would, he hoped, motivate the masses to support him so that he could resolve this worldwide crisis of capitalism. Trotsky proposed a program that addressed the immediate needs of masses of people in the hope that the struggle around these demands would lead the people to realize the need for socialism. L hoped to win the support of American workers by promising that his program would supply jobs. For example, during the Vietnam War his idea was to reconvert the war industries to this peaceful reindustrialization.

This entire economic schema, which made up the bulk of Lites writings and agitation in the late 1960s and early 1970s, was presented in an increasingly frenetic manner, bolstered by predictions of economic doom. L was a crisis-monger of the first order — though our group gave him a run for his money. L and his followers became increasingly convinced that the fate of the world rested with their group and with their leader — LL, Jr. The resources, both technological and human, were present for this glorious economic transformation. The problem lay with the cussed stupidness of the nation’s leaders and swinishness of the masses. If only L were in power all the world’s problems would be dwelt with swiftly.

In the early 1970s, as the Left in the United States shrank under the impact of conservative times, L lashed out with a series of attacks on the SWP and the CP. Soon his group was denouncing all leftists and seeking support from extreme right-wingers. The Lites began mouthing anti-Semitic phraseology, promoting the nuclear power and arms industry, advocating a Star Wars defense, and baiting gay people. The old Trotskyite, a member of my own small organization, had emerged as a Fascist! I am most struck by the elements of continuity in L’s thinking. This where I believe there are lessons for the Left.

Most important is L’s elitism. Ordinary human beings were viewed by L the leftist and by L the Fascist as a swinish element to be manipulated. L never absorbed the humanist and compassionate side of the Marxian socialist tradition. He is not alone in expressing this defect. We need only think of Stalin, who could ruthlessly permit the death of millions of peasants and consciously purge and murder hundreds and thousands of his own Communist cadres, all in the ostensible interests of “history”. A more recent example is Pol Pot’s conduct in Cambodia. Only socialism rooted in humanism can any longer be considered socialism. Once an individual, party, or state is no longer anchored in this view, then terms like “left” and “right” lose any significance.

In fact it is quite remarkable how the “new” L organizes his followers in a Leninist cadre fashion, drives them with a vision of their historic tasks and necessity of their actions, and successfully reaches layers of society with “transitional” slogans that appeal to economic needs or old prejudices.

Well, I’m in this for the long haul, so bear with me anyone who doesn’t care.
OLD Business.  There is a difference between commenters Steve and Dianne Bettag.  Dianne Bettag appears to me an autotron.  Steve seems a decent sort, misguided but aren’t we all?  I’m referring here to some people who have commented in the past.  Dianne Bettag threw out the canard about Dennis King and High Times, an item that seems to have come from on high from Larouche.  Steve furthered it, but once I rebuffed it, moved on with original thoughts on the matter of Dennis King.  I was not in any position to say anything about King.  I finally have read some items from his website, and I at least know the reference to this…
P.S. I originaly wasn’t going to go there about Denis King, but I have to. When King’s book first came out, not wanting to buy it, I read large portions of it sitting in the bookstore. I finally quit in disgust when I got to his claim that LaRouche considers “Bronze, Silver and Golden souls” as biologically determined. Anybody that has even minimal competence in the study of LaRouche’s views would know that he has consistently been implacably hostile to any notion of the biological determination of the human personality. So by characterizing LaRouche’s notion of golden souls as representing a biological type, King shows himself to be either dishonest, or at the very least incompetent in understanding his subject.

I feel myself rummaging through into an area that looks ultimately meaningless to any larger picture.  If I could get my hands on a physical copy of King’s book, I would be in better shape.  My time online is short, and I tend to multi-task while online.  I’m not apt to read a 300 page book online.  But the interview that King posted online delves into the matter, and I see that he picked it up… somewhere.  (Probably a matter of looking at the footnotes of his book to see what publication Larouche discussed colors of souls.)

It seems to amount to code language that slides him with Adolf Hitler.  I don’t know what to make of it as of yet, and I don’t even know if I want to bother with the effort to make something out of it.  It doesn’t strike me as terribly interesting.  I can analogies between Hitler and Larouche without pondering his views on predeterminism and free will.  (The joke I will come back to: fill in the blank — BLANK Youth Movement.  I wish to point out to the Steves of the world that may be reading this: that is roughly the first impression the average person, especially college student, has when met with this organization.)  As the interview rolls on, we are brought back to the policy initiative on the California ballot in 1986 and 1988.  My first thoughts when reading through them, and some campaign literature of the time, fully independent of Dennis King mind you?  Hitlerian, thank you very much.
There is a certain hysterical effect I see with King’s comparisons on Larouche and Hitler in terms of “breathe a sigh of relief once he goes to prison, but then…”  Comparing the post-prison career of Hitler and Larouche: okay — Hitler became the DIctator of Germany and overrun half of Europe.  Larouche?  Saw his momentum stop, struggled through a difficult decade unable to get his movement back on foot, before finding new targets of recruitment with a renewed strategy and clearer focus and a scape-goating of his old followers for his difficulties.  Two different paths entirely.
Whatever the faults of Dennis King, I assume that he has tracked Larouche’s money trail to a tee.  Which makes his admission, and I find it difficult to imagine that this has changed in the nearly two decades since this interview, that he can only speculate on where his start-up funding came from, one of those mysteries that unraveled will show us …  the real conspiracy.  Larouche has, simply put, manipulated the seedy world of Global finance that he’s hewed on about for the past four decades for his personal aggrandizement.  It is one of those profound ironies.

I think a cutsey Freakonomics-like lesson can be made of the Economic rules of the operation of Larouche’s, which I will pursue a bit … in a later post.

P.P.S. I continue to find more to respond to. LaRouche’s pro-technology views. He does not advocate technological without regard to environmental consequences. What he is against is the “environmental movement” which has been dominated by the idea that industry is somehow intrinsically bad for the environment and should be shut down or at least severly restricted. He sees this viewpoint as being promoted by those who oppose industry on other grounds – for example the question of industrializing the third world which would totally shift the financial balance of power worldwide.

Mercy me!  This is one of the lynch-pins of Larouchism, and at the heart of how he has managed to travel the ideologies around from a psuedo-Trotskyism to a psuedo-Reaganism to  — um — “FDR-Kennedy-Mackinley-Lincoln-Hamilton-Franklin Democrat”… Simply put, he likes big, shiny objects.  And he likes the idea that he might oversee the construction of these big, shiny objects — and control the lives of the masses.  (Statist is he.)   Larouche is taking credit, and backing, this largely universally panned proposal.   It is an insane proposal, the undersea channel across the Bering Strait connecting Russia with Alaska.  It is a way to appear relevant for the strange man in Virginia to his followers, but in terms of ideology… well, we can fully develop and develop and develop the Earth without any environmental impact statement because… we will building moon bases.  Limitless imagination!

Stating the obvious…  Well, as posted a few months ago, maybe not completely.
Evidence points to a major news feature coming out in short order about the strange little man in Virginia and his operation, in wake of the suicide of Ken Kronberg.  This happens every so often, my big question is what is going to be rehashed by order of background information.  It is a good chance for the newspaper to float quotes from anonymous ex-members, pass on some things that Dennis King has to say, and throw in a defending quote or two from his flock of recently minted baby-boomer despising disciples.  I believe the Larouche news machine should be priming the pump right now, getting their template together to fill in the blanks for purpose of attacking the writer of the article, implying a conspiracy de jour against the Messiah-in-Chief, builder of a relatively expensive Potemkin Village world of a top-down model of culture and political activism.  (Larouche has taken credit most recently for a Chuck Hagel op-ed piece on Iraq and Dennis Kucinich’s measure to Impeach Dick Cheney.  His schtik is to float policy influence amongst his true believers, gist for the mill.)
I too went to Ken Kronberg’s funeral. A few noteworthy things:
1. There was no mention whatsoever of LHL or the Labor Committee throughout the service.
2. The sermon at some point quoted Kronberg as saying something like: I used to think the universe was run by conflict, everyone attacking each other, but now I know it’s run by Love. Pretty obvious polemic against You Know Who.
3. The written item called “Remembering Ken” that was passed out to those attending–which was written by Kronberg’s wife Molly, also a longtime member–did not mention LaRouche or the ICLC or PMR or Fidelio or Campaigner or ….–not a word.

Looked like a posthumous repudiation of LaRouche by Kronberg–actually, not just posthumous (see the quote from the sermon).

Charming.  This is a world which I don’t quite know if it has any value in passing along, but it is a life and a statement.
My private speculations on what exactly is going to happen when, surely within 15 years and more than likely on the short end of that time period, the strange man in Virginia passes away togs henceforth and thusforth, and perhaps this is the end-game for the strange beast that has hunkered about since the 1960s:

Meanwhile, back at “Windy Hill”, the Archon’s rental mansion, I wonder if he knows just how deep the doo-doo is going to get. From the look of things at FACTNet I would surmise that those who are still hanging on, aside from the LYM, are just hanging around watching the vultures circle and waiting for them to pounce. Maybe waiting for the Archon to pass on, and the org with him. I simply don’t see it surviving. If Mrs. Archon has all the rest of the money locked up on her side of the pond then she can probably live well for a good long time, unless somebody decides to audit the books.

If you drew a line-graph of prosperity (or a potemkin prosperity), I imagine a peak in 1986, which drops down to a low through the Clinton era, and is funneled back up with a more apt target (Bush Administration) and a more strategically sound recruitment base, on college campuses.  I suspect the lines will diverge away as we move away from Cheney/Bush, and I’m not sure there’s enough anti-environmentalist college kids to suck into an anti-global warming crusade.
Which means that the clever Accounting box shuffling to paper over monetary deficiencies in various parts of Larouche, Inc. will strain more and more of the old Guard technocrats — the Ken Kronbergs — before a final bust.  But that’s just a theory.

Hey!  I found an online edition of the late 1970s “Dope, Incorporated”!  (Well, it popped before me.)  Weeee!

I should go make fun of Mike Gravel’s performance in the Democratic Debate now.

Y’know, when I linked to this in the “erstwhere” category to the side with the comment “a cryptic post made stranger by the fact that I happen to know what he is referring to”, I was evidentally talking out of my butt, to a certain extent. I don’t know what he was talking about.

Which is that I didn’t have a clue who “Prince” referred to. Apparently “Prince” refers to Star Trek: Voyager star and Lyndon Larouche accolyde of sorts, Robert Beltran — official Theater Director and Acting Coach for the Larouche Youth Movement.

What? You don’t believe me?

Actually what I had been wondering was when Dennis King would get around to sticking up whatever he was going to stick up on the Death of Ken Kronberg. (Disclaimer, as this is the first attack-line from Larouchians against him — and what a nonsensical attack it is!–, slightly distorted but I’ll straighten it out: Dennis King once wrote an article that appeared in High Times magazine). This is the internal memo that did it. We all presume.

I’ve long been bemused by Larouche’s current line of attack against “baby boomers”, the Larouche Youth Movement (again: name me one other organization with the word “Youth Movement” in it) having been started in 1999, reportedly, for the purpose of “solving the Baby Boomer Problem”. (“Part 9” in that series of posts I did at the end of last year and beginning of this year.  I actually have a certain pride in that series of posts.).  Dennis King’s link to Larouche discussing the “baby boomer problem”, so as to fit together the storyline, is almost arbitrary: he could have linked to any number of pieces (this, for instance), and to any number of quotes.  I must admit — Shedding off the Baby boomers and moving onto a younger, more supple age, all the while “dividing and conquering” within your ranks, does make sense in terms of operating a cult.  I find fascinating the manner in which the LYM has absorbed the “baby-boomer” meme, and indeed some things about that Robert Beltran interview crack me up.

Dennis King’s linking to the FACTnet page is somewhat strange, only in so far as — for whatever reason that message board chooses to dump all of its discussions into one topic forever. Hence this begins in February of 2006, and to get to everything about Ken Kronberg, you have to jump to the bottom. Presumably King might just excerpt the comments pertaining to Kronberg, and stick them on a page at his server.
Like so:

As someone who also knew Ken, and knows people still in the orbit of WorldComp-PMR Printing, to have read the briefing where the organization spits on the “baby-boomers” who commit suicide was one of the most despicable things I have read by Lyn, even beyond his frantic postings about Jeremiah Duggan, since this involves someone who gave thirty plus years of his life to a megalomaniac. The best thing we can do is be life affirming and show people still locked inside that there is life on the other side of bizarro world. Perhaps LaRouche’s postings about “baby-boomers” committing suicide was his fearful recollection of his personal suicidal tendencies from the 1950s. (borisisbad)

AND

I went to Ken’s funeral last week, and there was a surreal quality to the easy mixing of past and current members, especially at the reception following the service. Members who quit 5, 10, 20, even 30 years ago circulated freely, chatting with current members about children, high school sports, colleges. I got the distinct feeling that the psychosis of the morning briefing has less and less of a hold on many of the current members. I discussed this with Fernando, whom I greeted as the antichrist in league with the black guelph. After a good laugh, we agreed that members must not believe the nonsense they’re forced to spout; otherwise how could Fernando be greeted as a long-lost friend.