Teach In, Bug Out - satirical analysis of Los Angeles gathering to oppose US and NATO military campaign in Kosovo

National Review, June 14, 1999 by Rob Long

Peace in my clime.

Bel Air, Calif. I knew I was in trouble when I read the flier: The "National 'Teach In' on the War in Yugoslavia" was being held at the Leo Baeck Temple in "West Los Angeles." Now, I've lived in L.A. for years, and this temple is in "West Los Angeles" only in the most general sense. In the most specific, it is in Bel Air. No doubt the event's sponsors-Pacifica Radio, the Southern California Americans for Democratic Action, and The Nation-were hip to the irony of a couple of hundred stringy-haired old leftists puttering up in their old VW vans to Bel Air. So they called it "West Los Angeles" and hoped nobody would notice.

The trick to measuring the left-wingishness of any gathering is to note the time elapsed between parking your car and hearing someone call for the immediate release of Mumia Abu-Jamal, the great martyr currently on death row for killing a Philadelphia policeman. Here it was a minute and a half, but I stopped to tie my shoe, so let's call it a minute.

Outside the hall were card tables and kiosks dedicated to everything from a Free East Timor to the unconditional release of Mumia. The lady at the Revolutionary Worker table offered me an "information packet" on the war, which turned out to be five back issues of her rag stuffed into a paper sack. She wanted a five-dollar "donation."

"It costs five dollars?" I asked.

"No, no. It's free. But we want a five-dollar donation."

"So it's five dollars for the packet?"

"A five-dollar donation," she continued to correct.

It was another ten dollars to get into the event, though this too was called a "donation." An older woman wrote out my name on a pink (!) index card, which was supposed to serve as my ticket. But no one bothered to take it, and when I entered the hall, each auditorium door was marked by a ticket color: Blue tickets were to use the far-left door, pink tickets the next one over, and so on. Inside, people just milled around.

So Soviet style ruled the day: In ten minutes, I had been shaken down for 15 bucks, given a ticket no one would ask for, and told which door to use, though no one seemed to care. I had also been handed about ten xeroxed screeds, only a few of which pertained to Kosovo, and one of which attacked the radio station sponsoring the event for being insufficiently radical. The Mumia-fication of the teach-in was complete when I overheard two participants discussing the war from "Mumia's perspective."

Of the 28 speakers (28!), only three really captured the crowd. The first, Ian Williams, caught them all off guard by supporting- vociferously-the war. Williams is The Nation's U.N. correspondent (trust the paleo-Left to assign the U.N. its very own correspondent), and he spoke with wit and passion. He was roundly booed and hissed. The crowd included a very large Serbian-American contingent, there being a sizable Serb population in Los Angeles, west or otherwise. But Williams managed to score some excellent points. "Kosovo," he said in his working-class Scottish burr, "is Vietnam." Much applause. "But," he went on, "the Serbs are the Americans." Silence from the crowd as they worked that one out. Then a few shouts of "Go home!" in distinctly Slav accents.

Arianna Huffington was there, glamorous and out of place, but she quickly won over the crowd with her breezy lines (Madeleine Albright and Sandy Berger are "dwarves") and her inside-the-media analysis. It must have been a treat for the gray-ponytail set to hear a genuine celebrity-a real Establishment pundit-talk about media spin. Sort of like "radical chic" in reverse.

It was Jesse Jackson, though, who really confused the crowd. They wanted to love him, and when he walked up to the lectern in a hail of flashbulbs and key lights, it seemed as if drama had finally come to the teach-in, or drone-on, as I had come to think of it. But near the end of his speech, the Reverend said a curious thing: "If bombing would stop the ethnic cleansing, then we should keep bombing." He looked up at the crowd, expecting a major ovation. He got, instead, a few claps and a deep intake of breath. In other words, Jesse Jackson got the kind of reception you'd expect him to get in a Bel Air synagogue.

"You can stop it!" Arianna Huffington exhorted the crowd, referring to the war. But this crowd couldn't stop a dairy cow, let alone a NATO operation. They're too busy hissing and booing and handing out xeroxes. And since most of them believe that military force is unjustified under any circumstances (except, maybe, to free Mumia), it's left to a strange bedfellow like La Huff to make the thoughtful argument against the bombing, which is that it is a kind of "global Waco" where the bloodshed and violence created by the "rescuers" negates the reason for that rescue in the first place.

At a certain point, I had had enough. I made my way through the chattering crowd, past the Free East Timor booth, past the Tibet Now table, past the lady selling copies of the Revolutionary Worker, and finally past the Free Mumia kiosk. These people aren't fighting yesterday's war. They aren't even fighting yesterday's peace. They're just . . . talking.