Thoughts from the ammo line

Ammo Grrrll remains on THE LONG AND WINDING ROAD, A Political History, Part 4: Inside the Cult. She writes:

Richard Henry Dana, a Harvard student, wrote Two Years Before The Mast in 1840 about his stint as a common sailor on a ship sailing around Cape Horn. I could write a considerably longer broadside than just this column called Six Years Inside a Leftist Cult, but it’s really been done by several other people, including David Horowitz, cited frequently last week, and whose work I could scarcely improve upon. I can only scratch the surface in one column.

Whether you call it a Cause or a Cult, an entity that seeks to take all your time, all your money, and control where you live, what you do for a living, and, in extreme cases, even who you marry, is a Hydra from which it is difficult to escape.

We are all familiar with the Moonies and with various Eastern religious cults. Of course, their adherents vehemently deny that their sect is any more cultish than the mainstream religions. It seems to me that a couple of questions would settle the issue: “Does your cause/cult/religion try to keep you from family and friends?” and “Are you free to leave?”

Devotion to a cause or an idea is not all bad. I think that we as a species are hard-wired to serve a cause higher than ourselves. Some causes are healthy, some less so. Heck, it’s not just our species – we have a friend whose Bernese Mountain Dog was bred to pull a little wagon and is happiest when doing that. Other breeds spend their lives merrily herding sheep and we met a charming dog in Mesa who had flunked out of service-dog school because she was too easily distracted from her singular task.

Sadly, MANY institutions and causes inculcate an extreme “us vs. them” tribalism. Again, I think we may have a tendency to tribalism in our DNA as a holdover from very primitive times when the Outside was existentially dangerous to our little bands of humans.

When my mother was in her 90s, she loved a series of books about an Amish-like group whose heroines were sometimes on the outs and were “shunned” as a form of social control. (She would often pray for the characters in these books and, amazingly, things often turned out for the best!) Shunning – whether from Beltway cocktail parties, faculty lounges, or apostates from a race or religion, is a POWERFUL form of compelling conformity.

But back again to 1969: within our political sect, we called each other “comrades” (no, really) and some others “contacts” (someone who could potentially be recruited). All the rest were either non-entities or mortal enemies. The worst hatred and scorn was saved, not for the much-maligned “ruling class,” but for other socialist sects competing for the same small pool of lost or misguided souls.

The cult assigned you not only to a city, but also to an area of work. I was in the antiwar “fraction” until the war ended, first in Minneapolis and later in San Francisco. I learned a great deal and proved to be a pretty good organizer of dang near anything. One of the group’s mottos was “picnic or strike, we do it right.”

The group practiced what was called “democratic centralism.” This allegedly meant that free-flowing democratic discussion could take place WITHIN the Party. But once a decision was reached, a vote taken, then the members were bound to defend that position to all and sundry outside the movement. That was where the “centralist” part came in.

It sounded pretty good on paper, but it was a bald-faced lie. A small national leadership decided everything and put enormous pressure on the rank-and-file to agree. If serious disagreements arose, the national leadership would move people around until the leadership’s cadre had a majority within a branch, very similar to “packing the Court.”

Most of us who didn’t work for “the Movement” directly at poverty-level wages were told which industries and jobs to infiltrate. Much later when the Party made “The Turn” to the working class, some long-time adherents from balmy Santa Cruz made the good decision to quit rather than go into mining in Northern Minnesota. But in 1969 you either worked for The Movement or tried to get a skilled job in order to give the maximum amount of “dues” to the Party. I had few discernible skills and so worked for The Movement.

While in the antiwar fraction, in 1970 I was sent for six weeks to New York City to help out with the antiwar office there. It was truly a thankless job, working the phones with lists of previous donors and potential donors. You worked 12 hours a day for $65/a week calling people who were every bit as thrilled to hear from us as you are to get inquiries about your car warranty at dinnertime. It was mind-numbing, depressing work. But thank the Lord, there was not yet Caller I.D. Most people at least picked up the phone.

The highlight of my six weeks was calling Dustin Hoffman – still listed in the New York phone book – and getting his answering machine. I talked to the outgoing message for several seconds before the beep, not realizing it was a tape-recorded message. Then I had all the other people in the office call and listen to this new-fangled instrument. I’m sorry, Dustin.

I was supposed to stay with a comrade who lived in a squalid 2-room apartment with the bathtub in the kitchen. It was 1970 and junkies and the homeless mentally deranged roamed the streets, subways, and urine-filled apartment hallways. Everything from mailboxes to “security” doors was broken. I was a nervous wreck and soon found my own housing with a former high school friend of Joe’s who lived in a decent apartment in a safe neighborhood.

It was over the Christmas holiday. Dan, my blessed host, went home to Chicago. I was certain that the New York comrades would organize a gathering so the out-of-town helpers would not be alone. Ha! That was the first time I realized that whereas the group’s members might love “Humanity” in the abstract, their concern for actual people was severely limited.

After waiting all week for an invitation, on Christmas Eve day – we were still making cold calls – I threw courtesy to the winds and came right out and asked the harridan in charge, “So, what are you guys doing tonight and tomorrow?” (Hint, hint). And I will quote you exactly what was said to me because I remember it clearly some 52 years later: “Well, a bunch of us are going to exchange small gifts and have a potluck. Somebody got chestnuts to roast and we have a lot of wine.” Me, losing the last shred of dignity: “Gee, I’ll be all alone and that sounds fun!” And the woman – may all her teeth fall out but one, and that should ache her – said, “Yeah, it will be! But you better get back to work now. We’re knocking off at 4:00.” Apparently, she had never seen a production of “A Christmas Carol.”

I spent Christmas Eve alone in Dan’s apartment watching sad Christmas movies on a small television, one after another, missing my family, missing Joe, and crying. I had just turned 24.

The New York stint came to a bad end when the Head Harridan and I butted heads. Feminism had just started to reach its tentacles into every area of life. As we made these phone calls, hour after hour, day after day, the one “break” we got besides cigarettes (I didn’t smoke…but considered starting) was a little transistor radio that sat on a shelf near the fund-phoners.

One day, near the end of the six week assignment, Bob Dylan’s “Lay, Lady, Lay” came on the radio. I loved that song and still do. And from the other side of the large open boiler room, like a bat out of Hell, lumbered the Sensitivity Monitor to turn it off! She stormed back to her lair muttering about sexism and “objectifying womyn” and I turned it back on again. The office went deadly silent.

“Who did that?” she screamed. “I did. I like that song. Please do not turn it off again.”
She came over to do that and I stepped in front of her and said very softly, “If you turn it off again, I am going to throw you down the stairs.” At that time I was still over five feet tall, but she had six inches and eighty pounds on me. But, we have all seen someone “snap” and know when to let it go. The radio stayed on. But she reported me. Of course she did. If she’s still alive, she’s undoubtedly the head of an HOA somewhere.

My assignment ended with a black mark on my record for “threatening a comrade” which I was “counseled for” when I got back to the Twin Cities. I wish I had been prescient enough to channel the future George Costanza who, when queried about making whoopie with the night office cleaner on a desk, said: “I gotta plead ignorance here – was that wrong?” I could have added: “Nobody told me when I joined a group whose avowed purpose was a violent Communist overthrow of the country, that you couldn’t even threaten to kill someone…” But I had raised more money than anyone else, so I was not expelled.

However, already cracks were appearing in the foundation of our confidence in this movement. The decisive blow would come a couple of years later when – ecstatic! – I got pregnant and it looked like I would carry to term successfully after a couple of heartbreaking miscarriages. Even though a tiny handful of the comrades had had children before joining the movement, it was as though some alien being had landed among the Party leadership. It was a fad among several of the young women to get sterilized so that their revolutionary activities weren’t interrupted by the dreadful inconvenience of having to raise children. Now here was this crazy baby-loving woman, big as a house, and they did not know what to do with me.

Next week: Part 5, Leaving the Cult, Not With a Bang but a Whimper…