"SLOWLY I TURNED...": FROGUEIAN CHRONICLES II, by Red Emma

Steve, years later, still loving the sound of his own voice above everything

[From Dissent 39, 12/13/99]

"Slowly I turned..."

     by Red Emma

Perhaps, like Red Emma, you are inclined, in unguarded, unnecessarily compassionate moments, to imagine SOCCCD’s cartoonish defenders of malevolence instead as three-dimensional characters, actual human beings with real lives and interests, families and friends. Their performance at last week’s FA rep council meeting perhaps disinclines such empathy.

In fact, I admit that I occasionally imagine them teaching in actual classrooms. That flight of fancy is quickly doomed. Considering any number of them lecturing innocent students on, say, Political Science, I shudder and abandon imagination for facts.

Indeed, some facts are available regarding the real lives of our scofflaw colleagues. Curt, for instance, spends his time thinking about alien life forms (and I don’t mean Lee W). The former Madame President enjoys many a happy hour at Nordstrom’s, annoying the staff and buying colorful St. John’s Knits and coordinated naval accoutrements: epaulets, fobs, and fetters. (“Avast! Here comes the admiral,” warn the innocent Nordstrom’s clerks. “Abandon ship!”) I think that I heard somewhere that El Rey belongs to the Sierra Club. Finally, Steven J. Frogue, ersatz civil libertarian, crows loudly and often about his support of free speech and even Pacifica free speech community radio—Red Emma’s own favorite station (KPFK 90.7 FM in Los Angeles).

Here’s a heartwarming Christmas story: it seems Frogue, our board’s intellectual colossus, also attends fascinating public lectures. Red visited the next door neighbor’s to watch “The Simpsons” on a recent Sunday night. Afterward, his weekly TV appetite not completely dulled, he surfed a bit, stumbling on that sagely entertaining man of American letters, Gore Vidal, giving a talk at the Writers’ Guild. G.V. waxed political on the state of our savage Republic, then fielded a few softball questions and said goodnight.

As is usually the case with these C-SPAN events, the cameras lingered first on the stage, then the crowd, in this case a packed house. I am curious about what America looks like (at least the America that attends remarks by our favorite patrician democrat), and, yes, Dissent readers will have anticipated that, indeed, that evening’s audience included our very own addled co-conspirator, S. Frogue, who was stumbling out of the hall, looking a little confused at being around so many people who didn’t know (or care) who he was. It may seem difficult to conceive of attendance by an apologist for “fiscal conservatism,” a right-wing Republican Holocaust conspiracy nut, a racial exoticizer with a penchant for Jew-Asian-Mormon baiting, at an event critiquing exactly the kind of people as our Mr. Frogue. But, really, it ain’t.

This behavior is, in fact, Classic Frogue and not the first time Red Emma has witnessed the curiously clueless (or is he?) Frogue in full paradoxical action. He is oddly, perhaps sentimentally, inclined toward solidarity for the underdog, the critic, the iconoclast, even while working his magic on the Constitution, Shared Governance, and historical revisionism. I recall UCI student demonstrations supporting affirmative action where, on the day the cops busted up the student shanty town, Steve arrived in his brown suit, helped clean up, and attempted to join an organizing meeting in the Multi-Cultural Center. Here he was, naturally, regarded with suspicion by students. Let’s speculate why: white guy, dresses like a cop, crazy eyes, asks a lot of inane questions…hmmm.

Yet Steve Frogue knows where the ACTION is. (I think I read once that he was a high school history teacher! Go figure.) He identifies somehow with freedom struggles, with campaigns for justice. Why?

People who imagine Frogue lives under a rock miscalculate the extent of his calculations. He genuinely believes himself connected to a thoughtful community of dissent, perhaps even imagining that he is somehow a leader of it: Frogue the freedom fighter. Frogue the defender of difficult political positions. Frogue the civil libertarian.

But, you ask, why even think about Frogue, Red Emma? Why, indeed? Let’s consult Gore Vidal himself, one of Frogue’s unlikely mentors, on the role of Frogues in our district, our community, our political experience:

Of the many words with which the mental therapists have enriched our language, “paranoia” is one of the most used if not useful. According to authority, a paranoiac is one who suffers from delusion of persecution or grandeur. Everyone, of course, has paranoid tendencies. In fact, a sizeable minority of the people in the world maintain sanity by focusing their fears and sense of outrage upon some vague enemy usually referred to simply as “them.” Once the source of distress has been identified as the Jews or the Communists or the Establishment, the moderate paranoiac is then able to function normally—until the magic word is said, as in that famous vaudeville sketch where mention of the town Kokomo makes mad the timid comic, who begins ominously to intone: “Then slowly I turned…”

In this essay (“Paranoid Politics,” United States), Vidal appraises the place of the political paranoiacs (“It is ironic that a nation which has never experienced a coup d’etat would be so obsessed with the idea of conspiracy”), shining considerable light not only on such freaks as Steve (who must have missed this essay) but on the larger problem of a majority of Americans who accept the national chauvinism (Iraq, Panama, Kosovo…) which seems, to their credit, to force the pathetically misdirected, often idealistic multitude to embrace paranoia as socio-political expression. Frustrated, they subscribe to Oliver Stone’s Prevailing Winds, listen to Art Bell, read The Spotlight, and find even in Gore Vidal an ally, simply because he objects to something, to anything at all, as the rest of us accept institutional abuse of power, corporatism, and, in our own sorry district, a Nazi, a homophobe, and two supporters of the Christian Coalition.

In the spirit, then, of real life, I ask those colleagues of mine who regularly embrace paranoia and delusions of grandeur (“I can’t risk my job”) to more fairly and honestly assess their own political power. You have it. The reason you have it is because Administration counts on you not using it. “Hypocrisy,” chanted the late Allen Ginsberg, “is the key to self-fulfilling prophecy.” In other words, just because you’re not paranoid doesn’t mean they’re not going to get you anyway.

Finally, it’s not that Steve is wrong, it’s that he’s right…wing. He makes his foolish, reactionary political choices based on the cowardice of others, smart people who too often choose to ignore where the ACTION is. Just now the action is at a community college district in South Orange County, a momentary political Kokomo, where reside lots of good people who should not only know, but DO better. --RE

Andrew Tonkovich