Demagogue for 'alterwoman'

Bastard Hat
    By David Auerbach

As part of my continuing attempt to integrate myself into the surrounding community, I picked a room that faced Cross Campus this year. Perhaps it was the wrong way to go about it. In the last week alone, two people have stood in the center of cross campus spewing bilious, hate-filled invective right through my window. So much for community.

The first was an as-yet unidentified woman who put her satchel down in the middle of cross campus and announced that we were all going to hell, and that everyone--except me, apparently--knows there is a "Sodomite Club" on campus. She discussed how Yale women like to get wast-ed (accompanied by an endearing arm gesture) and have sex, and how they are going to burn, burn, burn because of it. She brought visual accompaniment in the form of crude drawings blown-up from an old Jack Chick tract, a nice touch. She went at it for three hours and made an encore performance the next week, attracting an audience of dozens and at least one video camera.

The second miscreant was Bob Kokta, Republican candidate for alderman. For a mercifully short half-hour he spouted homilies about how New Haven has to crack down on crime and how the cops need to show criminals they mean business. (In light of Malik Jones, I'm not sure what more they could do, but whatever.) This means going after all outstanding warrants, striking the fear of God into young kids, and basically jailing the poor. Apparently, Kokta will also be back in a couple weeks, though few seem to care, as he only had an audience of three dutifully silent people.

Now, I'm not going to say that we should be paying more attention to local politics than religious fanatics, or that it was immature and condescending for students to mock her as such. That would be patronizing my readers, a bad habit to get into. No, I'd say, given the similarity of their views, Sister Carrie should be running for alderman instead of Mr. Kokta. She's much more fun than Kokta, and they both don't have any chance of getting along with the rest of the aldermen. I don't have to tell all you folks out there not to vote for Kokta (but just to be safe: don't vote for Kokta), so why not pick someone interesting to listen to out on cross campus? She's just the sort to get us involved in local politics.

And while Carrie has the fairly noisy conviction of her beliefs, Kokta drones on like someone injected with a Methadone-Prozac cocktail, blandly oozing third-hand polemics with the bloodless enthusiasm of Howard Cosell. As he reads his lines off of invisible cue-cards, he comes off as the sort of career politician which Yale churns out all too regularly. Outside of politics, people like him could find their true calling in consulting, which rewards those long on rhetoric and short on ideas, but in the political arena he's simply another wind-up robot. Even if his narcoleptic banter does conceal a reactionary agenda worthy of Pat Buchanan, how can we be expected to pay attention to him when he puts us to sleep?

Where Kokta is incapable of engaging in anything but the most mundane exchange of dogma, Carrie provoked Aquinian argument from the crowd, which is more than many philosophy professors ever could. Sure, most watched her out of sheer disbelief and ennui, but those are precisely the traits to which politicians must appeal, because they generate interest. Assuming her whole act isn't a put-on (I would be sorely disappointed if it were), running her for office would make people care. It would make people have fun.

Picking on either Kokta or Carrie is shooting dead fish in a barrel, and to those who haven't been paying attention, that's not my point. A very wise man once said that the worst thing that ever happened to liberalism in this country was Bush losing to Clinton in 1992, as Democrats by default idly followed their centrist-going-right-fast leader into such fiascoes as NAFTA and the crime bill. Clinton seemed so uninteresting, so run-of-the-mill, so much your typical career politician, that people were just too enervated to object. So let's make things a little more exciting. Wouldn't your local constituency be livelier if your Congressman were replaced by one of the Promise Keepers? Wouldn't you prefer to debate Sister Carrie rather than your typical Conservative Party stooge? Politics may be dead, but let's keep it interesting, please.

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