Function under difficult circumstances? Oh yeah, I know how to do that.
Like the time when I was drinking beer with Tariq Ali and Ernest Mandel after a long meeting of the FI Secretariat. I was trying to explain to the two of them that the problem with Joe Hansen is that he never got over being Trotsky's bodyguard at Coyoacan. Everything was downhill after that. So Joe wasn't the right guy to guide our underground apparatus in Latin America. It had to be somebody with more pzazz, less burned out. Joe was like the character in that play by David Hare called "Plenty", a woman who worked with the Resistance in France during WWII and finds life boring ever after. The film is no good. But the play! With Kate Nelligan giving the performance of her lifetime.
She's one of the best, old Kate is. The only actress who ranks with her is my very dear friend Blythe Danner from Bard College. I used to hang out with her and Chevy Chase, two very talented kids. I taught Chevy how to deliver a joke and got Blythe to overcome her stagefright. Holding her in my arms one late night looking at the stars over the Hudson River, I said, "Blythe, it has to come from _Within_ you. Don't worry what others say." That helped her over the hump.
I lost touch with Chevy after I got involved in radical politics. It all started when I was hanging out with Bob Dylan in NYC in 1966. He had just gone electric and had been reading a lot about the Vietnam war. So I was at his pad smoking weed with him and Joan Baez, arguing for the Vietnam war in my feckless Camus-styled existentialism. They were arguing me down pretty good, but I didn't let go. That existentialism shit was pretty deep-rooted in me. It went back to my long talks with Hannah Arendt back in 1960. She made a big impact on me, with all that Heidegger jazz. So anyhow, Joan told me that she wanted to talk about it some more after Bob had nodded off from the potent Hawaiian shit we were smoking. We went back to my pad and rapped some more until she finally got me straight on that whole Gulf of Tonkin thing. Then we hopped into bed and had wild sex.
>From then on, I got involved with Trotskyist politics which is a story in
itself that I will leave for another day.
What's really wild is when I left the Trotskyist movement and started running guns for the FSLN. I used to get tip-top weapons from a drug-dealing hipster I knew from college days, who I used to ride motorcycles with. He had a groovy Vincent Black Shadow and I drove a Harley Sportster that had been bored out to 1100cc.
And this is really the important thing. It was me that got the 3 factions of the FSLN to unite. I met with Borge, Wheelock and Ortega in the mountains of Nicaragua in 1975 and gave them a speech about the need to negate the negations in a Forest/Johnson Hegelian-Marxist dialectical fashion. "Oh," they said, and united just as soon as I got back to NYC to start a jazz club from proceeds from the gun-running. That's where I discovered Wynton Marsalis....
Louis Proyect (http://www.panix.com/~lnp3/marxism.html)