Contrary to the allegations of Alexander Cockburn, Jeffrey St.Clair, and perhaps others who are frustrated with the current low level of activism and are in search of scapegoats on the left to blame, radical organizers did not and do not turn our backs on alienated insurgent white people who have a different political viewpoint from ours. (The tactics of involving them are certainly a matter of ongoing debate. In SCEF, we insisted on explicitly anti-racist programs, with African Americans and women in positions of leadership. UE organizers with whom we worked regarded our approach as sectarian, and although they were exemplary advocates for the class, they limited their union's demands and programs to least-common-denominator economic programs.)
Because most of our arenas of activity were industries or communities where African Americans took the lead, we encountered relatively few right-wing white people who were eager to join our movement. An exception was our antinuclear organization, the Mississippi Catfish Alliance, which mobilized in opposition to the Yellow Creek nuclear reactor that TVA proposed to build in Northeast Mississippi, and the Grand Gulf reactor built by Mississippi Power and Light Company at Port Gibson.
When we held a demonstration at the Yellow Creek site, Catfish was mainly white and rural, mostly poor people who bitterly resented the TVA's plan to drastically change their environment without any concern for their wishes, but it also included contingents of students and faculty from Ole Miss and Mississippi State, possibly mobilizing 200 people. At Grand Gulf, the crowd was about ten times bigger, with African Americans outnumbering whites about five to one. Most were local Claiborne County people, probably the most militant mass constituency in the state, with additional contingents from Alcorn, Jackson State, and (white students and faculty from) the University of Southern Mississippi.
In Jackson and Hinds County, the Catfish Alliance comprised mostly seasoned leftists, black and white, but also a fervently antinuclear group of rightwingers brought to us by a Liberty Lobby supporter, the wheelchair-bound proprietor of a pawnshop who had once been elected coroner during the segregation and prohibition era. A young white woman organizer and I met with him on several occasions to work out the terms on which we agreed to include his group. When we told him that racial epithets would not be tolerated, he sulked, but then said he would practice our etiquette by treating his Choctaw Indian store manager with respect, and would stop disparaging him. I also informed the man that my own heritage is Jewish, whereupon he denied holding anti-Semitic views.
After building a mass base for Catfish, we ran an electoral campaign for the state's three Public Service Commission posts on an independent antinuclear platform. In the Northern District our candidate was Linda Lewis, white proprietor of a health food store in Oxford; in the Central District, Sarah Johnson, African American councilwoman from Greenville; in the Southern District, Ayres Haxton, a welder from Natchez. As a matter of principle (perhaps reluctantly) accepted by our right-wing white supporters, we required that the campaign literature include all three candidates and a single statewide platform. Of the three, only Johnson came close to challenging the victorious Democrat, but the campaign did get a lot of press, and TVA canceled the Yellow Creek project. The reactor at Grand Gulf was completed even after a tornado cracked its containment dome, and is today the main generator owned by Entergy Corporation. Catfish never received support from the antinuclear or environmental movements nationally, perhaps because it was predominantly black in membership and constituency.
The coalition with our Liberty Lobby pawnbroker and his group did not endure after our defeat at Port Gibson, and in any case most of his followers hankered for overtly racist political expressions. None of them became permanent converts to our cause, although lots of other poor and working-class white Mississippians did. But one element of the collaboration was interesting in the context of our present discussion: The pawnshop sold a lot of guns to black activists, with a wink and a nod to the paperwork requirements.
Meanwhile I had begun attending gun shows in the mid-1970s, which — pace Alexander Cockburn — were not and are not "fun." They were held at the Jackson Trade Mart two to four times each year, and were infamous for hosting Ku Klux Klan and Nazi recruiters. A Jackson television news program once had featured the enormous swastika banner across the side wall at one gun show; thereafter all cameras were banned.
My reason for attending, even before the KKK's mass resurgence, was to monitor the recruitment of mercenaries to fight for white Rhodesia. Much of my solidarity work with the Zimbabwe African National Union consisted of documenting and publishing data on mercenary recruitment, which was directed in the U.S. by the Army Special Forces Reserve at Arlington Heights, Illinois (a CIA front), the unit from which Soldier of Fortune publisher (and later NRA leader) Robert K. Brown held the rank of colonel.
Mass recruitment of mercenaries was conducted by Soldier of Fortune staff; gun shows provided congenial ambiance for those activities, which grew significantly as the Carter administration ratcheted up its counterinsurgency war in El Salvador. Mercenary recruitment escalated exponentially during the Reagan years; gun show organizers came to regard enlisting fighters for the Nicaraguan contra cause as their patriotic duty.
That is not to say that thousands of men and women who drove into Jackson from 30 outlying counties were coming to sign up for combat duty in Central America, not at all. The great majority were hunters, and a significant minority were competitive shooters, in search of weapons, ammunition, supplies, and equipment. Despite their economic importance, they and the dealers who served them were accorded no special welcome. But the hundreds of police, highway patrolmen, sheriffs' deputies and constables who came were honored guests, usually admitted free if they attended in uniform. (So much for Cockburn's delusion that gun shows are gathering places for anti-government insurgents.)
The central themes of gun shows I attended were always twofold — the romance of military combat, and flagrant (I want to say, inhuman) cruelty. Thus the main aisle contained a large display of fully automatic weapons, with a .50-caliber water-cooled machine gun as the centerpiece, and video screens showing combat training exercises recommended for owners of all sorts, from Uzi machine pistols to Browning Automatic Rifles.
Bipod-mounted .30-caliber BARs were sentimental favorites of World War II and Korean veterans, but could only be purchased legally, with a full paper trail, license, and payment of the BATF's federal transfer tax. Buyers who wanted off-the-books automatic weapons were sold hardware kits that easily converted Colt AR-15 "sporting" rifles into fully automatic M-16s.
Stands for mercenary and Klan-Nazi recruiters, also given prominent floor locations, included sales of such wholesome publications as torture manuals (I excerpted the worst examples several years ago in a CovertAction article) and "Official Running N----r" racist caricature targets (a police favorite). One ghoulish display included photographs of burns that police interrogators had inflicted on their captives with stun guns and cattle prods, as advertisements flogging sales of those very devices. Brass knuckles were another favorite product.
It's true that mercenary recruiters disappeared after the Sandinista defeat in Nicaragua, and that gun show culture in Jackson became more subdued in the 1990s. But the essential themes of armed combat and cruelty, and the law enforcement presence, were as strong as ever the last time I attended one several years ago.
In 1993 I moved from Mississippi to Pennsylvania, and have lived here ever since. No longer do I hunt, and my target shooting is infrequent. Nevertheless, gun culture is more pervasive here than it ever was in Mississippi. Opening day of buck season is a holiday for every blue collar worker, and for many high schools. (My sweetheart says Firstdaybuck is one word in the Pennsylvania vocabulary.)
Certainly many facets of U.S. working-class culture ought to be challenged by leftists as we organize and propagate our vision of the good society, but it seems to me that tilting against gun culture is not a good idea, certainly is not a priority, and is doomed to fail if attempted. On the other hand, the Cockburn-St.Clair infatuation with right-wing gun culture is far worse, especially in light of Katha Pollitt's evidence that St.Clair's advocacy is personally hypocritical.
In the absence of a popular leftwing insurgency, they seem to have decided that any insurgency is better than none, while at the same time castigating the left for having failed to ignite one. St.Clair's riposte to Pollitt is laden with esteem for the NRA's virility in contrast to the Sierra Club's timidity, but neither organization can serve as a model for activists. Both of those, in different ways, derive their power from bourgeois and corporate sponsorship, and government indulgence.
Cockburn and St.Clair are certainly not the first among us to promote a get-rich-quick mirage for organizers, but their message cannot be permitted to drown out the simple truth. Our grandest and perhaps most difficult task is to project by example, even in relatively quiet times or backward circumstances, the vision we seek to reify, as we prepare to intervene when history again favors our cause.