Lyndon LaRouche, who died earlier this week, was a dreadful man, whose crazy and sinister conspiracy theories may have helped fuel the gradual breakdown of civic trust that has helped ruin politics and civility in our nation.
When I first heard of him, I didn’t quite get it. I thought he was amusingly nuts. After all, how often do you find a whack job who thinks that Queen Elizabeth II is evil, all-powerful, and controls the international illegal drug trade?
I interviewed LaRouche once, on the phone when I was working for the Detroit News. This was just before the Democratic National Convention that year, and LaRouche told me he expected to win the nomination. I asked something like. “How can you think that when Walter Mondale has more than 2,000 delegates and you have, well, zero?”
“They manipulate the wheels,” he sort of hissed at me. “Those stupid little wheels in the voting machines,” he said. I duly reported this, probably in a manner that did not make the leader of the cult look especially good. The day after my story appeared, two of his followers showed up at the office with a pail full of soapy water.
They wanted, they said, to “disinfect” my desk. Luckily, security threw them out. Three years later, LaRouche was convicted of plotting to deliberately defraud the Internal Revenue Service and defaulting on loans from his followers. He served about seven years in a federal penitentiary and was released to return to his compound near Leesburg, Va., where he had accused the local garden club of being a nest of Soviet fellow travelers.
Somehow, I don’t think America will miss him nearly as much as we will John Dingell. However, there was something else interesting going on in Virginia in 1984, close to the time LaRouche was explaining the stupid little wheels to me. A 24-year-old named Ralph Shearer Northam was graduating from Eastern Virginia Medical School, and, as you might expect, was in the class yearbook. Except there’s a picture on his page that shows a guy in blackface holding a beer, and another in what seems to be a Ku Klux Klan getup. The caption says, “There are more old drunks than old doctors in this world, so I think I’ll have another beer.”
Few apparently knew about this, and no one paid any attention to it until very recently, when it was mysteriously discovered by a Donald Trump-supporting web site. For Ralph Northam, as you probably didn’t know three weeks ago, is the Democratic governor of Virginia, and for two weeks, many of his own party’s leaders have been demanding he resign.
Some have been hesitant, because it has also surfaced that the lieutenant governor, Justin Fairfax, has been accused by two women of actually physically sexually assaulting them, not this year, but a whole lot more recently than 1984.
Many have been calling for Fairfax to quit, for Northam to appoint someone clean, preferably a woman, lieutenant governor, and then resign himself.
But both men say they aren’t going anywhere.
Frankly, I do think the lieutenant governor’s position is extremely problematical. If criminal charges are filed against him, I don’t see how he can do his job.
But the governor’s case is entirely different. Yes, blackface and a hood are tasteless, and that picture wasn’t a good idea even in a non-Orwellian 1984. But young men do silly things, and the governor has a spotless record on civil rights.He opposes the death penalty, which is applied disproportionately to people of color, and black voters, according to polls say he should stay. Demanding Northam’s career be ended for a lapse of taste as a very young man is, indeed, political correctness run amok.
Herd mentality is never a substitute for common sense.
