The thing is that what seems to happen each time the Black Lives Matter
people do this, the audience isn't convinced. Instead, the are alienated
because they see it only as an interruption of something they want to hear.
It seems to confirm their prejudices, not convince them to think about what
the demonstrators are saying.
Miriam
-----Original Message-----
From: blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Roger Loran
Bailey (Redacted sender "rogerbailey81@xxxxxxx" for DMARC)
Sent: Saturday, August 15, 2015 2:48 PM
To: blind-democracy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [blind-democracy] Re: In Defense Of Heckling: Some History Past And
Present | PopularResistance.Org
I remember Andrew Pulley and I yelling, "Nationalize Standard Oil!" at Jay
Rockefeller. The trouble is that Rockefeller had a loudspeaker and the two
of us only had our voices and it was only two of us. I think the only people
who heard us very clearly were the coal miners we were imbedded with
immediately surrounding us. They seemed to approve of our attempted
heckling, but we couldn't convince them to join us. They seemed to be more
amused at our attempts than anything though.
On 8/15/2015 12:49 PM, Miriam Vieni wrote:
I'm posting this. Not sure I agree with it, however.to an asylum.
Miriam
In Defense Of Heckling: Some History Past And Present |
PopularResistance.Org
In Defense Of Heckling: Some History Past And Present |
PopularResistance.Org popularresistance.org
https://www.popularresistance.org/in-
In Defense Of Heckling: Some History Past And Present
Bernie Sanders
Marissa Johnson, left, speaks as Mara Jacqueline Willaford holds her
fist overhead and Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Bernie
Sanders, I-Vt., stands nearby as the two women take over the
microphone at a rally Saturday, Aug. 8, 2015, in downtown Seattle. The
women, co-founders of the Seattle chapter of Black Lives Matter, took
over the microphone and refused to relinquish it. Sanders eventually
left the stage without speaking and instead waded into the crowd to
greet supporters. (AP Photo/Elaine Thompson)
A politician was set to give a speech to a large gathering of liberal
supporters. However, before he could get a word out, an activist began
speaking loudly from the balcony and refused to be shut up. Other
activists stationed around the audience shouted out their support,
whereupon the politician lost his temper and began lecturing them on
the damage they were doing to their cause which he claimed to support.
Because of the continual heckling, it took two hours for the
politician to give what ought to have been a twenty minute speech. The
next day the press was full of outraged editorials. How could they
show such disrespect to him? Lock them up. Send them in straight-jackets
running for U.S.
If you thought this was a description of a recent confrontation
between the intrepid BlackLivesMatter activists and the faux socialist
President, Bernie Sanders, you would be wrong. This is a descriptionunfurled a banner and heckled
of what British suffragists did in 1908 at a speech by the Liberal
leader Lloyd George, then Minister of the Exchequer and later PM.
British suffragists made a repeated practice of interrupting and
heckling politicians. In the U.S., suffragists invaded the Congress,
President Wilson while he was making a speech. Both David Lloyd Georgeand
Woodrow Wilson were considered to be reformers in their day, but itpelted with tomatoes and rotten eggs.
took applying heat to get them to actually do something real to help
achieve the vote for women. Heckling was the least of it. Some
suffragists did more radical things to politicians, like tossing
bricks through windows at halls where they were speaking and trying to
blow up Lloyd George's country house located on a golf course.
Heckling is a proud old tradition that needs to be defended and kept
alive by practicing it from time to time - just like Thomas Jefferson
said about the Tree of Liberty needing to be watered periodically with
revolution. In the election of 1884, the Democratic candidate Grover
Cleveland who had fathered an illegitimate child was frequently
greeted at campaign rallies by Republican opponents with the baby-like
cry, "Ma, ma, where's my pa?" When picketing the White House by civil
liberties advocates proved ineffective, feminist Lucy Branham followed
President Harding on his cross-country summer tour in 1923 and heckled
him about the release of American political prisoners. Herbert Hoover
was heckled repeatedly at speeches on the campaign trail during the
depths of the Great Depression in 1932, and his train and motorcade were
term.
The dull conformist 1950s were a slow decade for the fine art of
heckling, but the rebellious Sixties saw a big-time heckling comeback
as part of the overall repertoire of protest. Many times anti-war
activists, including yours truly, confronted and heckled politicians
and government officials about their responsibility for and complicity
with the Vietnam War. As Lyndon Johnson escalated the war and protests
grew, he found himself hardly able to speak in public without being
drowned out by the chant, "Hey, hey LBJ! How many boys did you kill
today?" This was apparently a factor, along with his poor performance
in the New Hampshire Primary, in his decision not to run for a second
in disgrace.
The election season of 1968 was intensely marked by equal opportunity
heckling of the candidates. In September 1968, 200 anti-war protesters
organized by the Peace and Freedom Party disrupted Hubert Humphrey's
presidential campaign rally inside a Seattle arena. They heckled him
as a murderer and a fascist and chanted "Dump the Hump" as he pleaded
for them to behave themselves like "ladies and gentlemen" and let him
speak. After they were ejected, one of the protesters told a newspaper
reporter: "Talk about free speech - we don't think Hubert Humphrey is
entitled to it except as an accused criminal on trial for murders of
thousands of Vietnamese. He calls us 'American-style Hitler youth.'
Well, let me tell you something - he's Lyndon Johnson's Goebbels."
Richard Nixon was a favorite of hecklers. Tricky Dick deserved all he
got and more, not least because his campaign had hired hecklers to
disrupt speeches by his opponent for the U.S. Senate seat from
California, Helen Gahagan Douglas in 1950 and did the same against his
opponent for President, George McGovern, in 1972. Disabled Vietnam vet
Ron Kovic sitting in his wheelchair interrupted Nixon's acceptance
speech at the 1972 Republican Convention to denounce the VA's abysmal
treatment of Vietnam vets and what was happening in Vietnam as a
"crime against humanity." As the Watergate Scandal deepened, cries of
"Jail to the Chief!" met Nixon at his public appearances and resounded
in his ears from Lafayette Park on the day that he resigned the Presidency
at a campaign stop for Robert Dole.
Arguably the heckling most successful at drawing the ire of a
politician and causing him to reveal his true inner character occurred
in Binghamton NY on September 16, 1976 when a leering VP Nelson
Rockefeller gave the finger to a group of protesters from the SUNY campus
They were calling out that vile rich man for what he indeed was - the"I feel your pain."
"Attica Killer." Rockefeller and uplifted middle finger were captured
in what became an iconic photograph.
ACT UP, the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power, in a desperate race
against time to save lives in the face of cruel government inaction,
heckled up a storm. During the 1992 presidential campaign, ACT UP
activist Bob Rafsky confronted an angry Bill Clinton speaking in a
Manhattan night club and demanded that Clinton do more than merely intone,
ACT-UPers heckled numerous do-nothing government officials. Followingof confronting them.
in that same tradition, earlier this summer a transgender Latina,
Jennicet Gutierrez, heckled Obama at a White House LGBT Pride event
over the mistreatment and sexual abuse of transgender people in U.S.
immigrant detention centers. Sadly, she was booed by many of the LGBT
luminaries who were in attendance, who have gone mainstream and left
the ACT UP tradition behind in favor of sucking up to politicians instead
public meeting on the Yugoslav War at which I called him a "sell-out"
In terms of my own heckling "career," I was one of a group of radical
white college students from Michigan State who heckled the racist
segregationist George Wallace when he came to Lansing, Michigan to
campaign for president in 1972. With several classmates, I also
confronted Nixon's VP Spiro Agnew and called him an "international
outlaw" to his face when we caught him at the Lansing Airport. (In
those days, you could get within a few yards, within easy pie-throwing
distance.) Some of us next disrupted an appearance by Gerald Ford at
Michigan State for pardoning Nixon. And I'm proud to have added onto
my activist resume two hecklings so far of Bernie Sanders - once at a
for not opposing the war and again last year over Israel's assault onUniversity.
Gaza as part of a loud cohort of Code Pinkers and Occupiers.
Code Pink has been doing a fantastic job inside the beltway and around
the country of keeping the political heckling tradition alive speaking
truth to power and demanding they halt their evildoing. They've
developed and transformed this practice from an improvisational art
into a virtual science.
Only several weeks prior to confronting Bernie at that now-famous,
viral-videoed town hall meeting held in Cabot, Vermont, Code Pinkers
had interrupted Condoleeza Rice where she was speaking to the new body
of military cadets, GOP guests, and the general public at Norwich
We yelled out "war criminal" at her for her part in promoting the Bushleads to can create a teachable moment about the real nature of the System.
regime's mendacious war against Iraq. Some local activists were
disturbed that Bernie should be treated with similar disrespect given
that "he's on our side." But is it likely, without the embarrassment
caused by BlackLivesMatter women in Phoenix and Seattle, that his
campaign would have started talking about structural racism? Getting
Bernie to listen and pay heed to the peace community and address the
vital topics of war, imperialism and U.S. support for Israel in his
presidential campaign will take further interventions.
The fact is that heckling politicians and officials is about all
that's left of what passes for "democracy" in this day and age.
Elections, at least at the national level, are totally bought and paid
for. But because office-holders and office-seekers, along with
collecting their paychecks and taking their directions from their
corporate backers behind closed doors, do still have to go through the
motions of appearing before the electorate every four years, it
provides a moment of vulnerability for activists and citizens to take
advantage of. (Wouldn't it be a god-send if they could all just be
booed right off the stage into oblivion?) So don't miss your
opportunity when one comes soon to a location near you between now and
November 2016! Heckling politicians - and let's not forget all those
corporate criminals, too, although they rarely come out from their
offices and boardrooms to be properly harassed - will not make the
Revolution. But it sure can be fun! And the public controversy it often
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In Defense Of Heckling: Some History Past And Present
Bernie Sanders
Marissa Johnson, left, speaks as Mara Jacqueline Willaford holds her
fist overhead and Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Bernie
Sanders, I-Vt., stands nearby as the two women take over the
microphone at a rally Saturday, Aug. 8, 2015, in downtown Seattle. The
women, co-founders of the Seattle chapter of Black Lives Matter, took
over the microphone and refused to relinquish it. Sanders eventually
left the stage without speaking and instead waded into the crowd to
greet supporters. (AP Photo/Elaine Thompson)
A politician was set to give a speech to a large gathering of liberal
supporters. However, before he could get a word out, an activist began
speaking loudly from the balcony and refused to be shut up. Other
activists stationed around the audience shouted out their support,
whereupon the politician lost his temper and began lecturing them on
the damage they were doing to their cause which he claimed to support.
Because of the continual heckling, it took two hours for the
politician to give what ought to have been a twenty minute speech. The
next day the press was full of outraged editorials. How could they
show such disrespect to him? Lock them up. Send them in straight-jackets
running for U.S.
If you thought this was a description of a recent confrontation
between the intrepid BlackLivesMatter activists and the faux socialist
President, Bernie Sanders, you would be wrong. This is a descriptionunfurled a banner and heckled
of what British suffragists did in 1908 at a speech by the Liberal
leader Lloyd George, then Minister of the Exchequer and later PM.
British suffragists made a repeated practice of interrupting and
heckling politicians. In the U.S., suffragists invaded the Congress,
President Wilson while he was making a speech. Both David Lloyd Georgeand
Woodrow Wilson were considered to be reformers in their day, but itpelted with tomatoes and rotten eggs.
took applying heat to get them to actually do something real to help
achieve the vote for women. Heckling was the least of it. Some
suffragists did more radical things to politicians, like tossing
bricks through windows at halls where they were speaking and trying to
blow up Lloyd George's country house located on a golf course.
Heckling is a proud old tradition that needs to be defended and kept
alive by practicing it from time to time - just like Thomas Jefferson
said about the Tree of Liberty needing to be watered periodically with
revolution. In the election of 1884, the Democratic candidate Grover
Cleveland who had fathered an illegitimate child was frequently
greeted at campaign rallies by Republican opponents with the baby-like
cry, "Ma, ma, where's my pa?" When picketing the White House by civil
liberties advocates proved ineffective, feminist Lucy Branham followed
President Harding on his cross-country summer tour in 1923 and heckled
him about the release of American political prisoners. Herbert Hoover
was heckled repeatedly at speeches on the campaign trail during the
depths of the Great Depression in 1932, and his train and motorcade were
term.
The dull conformist 1950s were a slow decade for the fine art of
heckling, but the rebellious Sixties saw a big-time heckling comeback
as part of the overall repertoire of protest. Many times anti-war
activists, including yours truly, confronted and heckled politicians
and government officials about their responsibility for and complicity
with the Vietnam War. As Lyndon Johnson escalated the war and protests
grew, he found himself hardly able to speak in public without being
drowned out by the chant, "Hey, hey LBJ! How many boys did you kill
today?" This was apparently a factor, along with his poor performance
in the New Hampshire Primary, in his decision not to run for a second
in disgrace.
The election season of 1968 was intensely marked by equal opportunity
heckling of the candidates. In September 1968, 200 anti-war protesters
organized by the Peace and Freedom Party disrupted Hubert Humphrey's
presidential campaign rally inside a Seattle arena. They heckled him
as a murderer and a fascist and chanted "Dump the Hump" as he pleaded
for them to behave themselves like "ladies and gentlemen" and let him
speak. After they were ejected, one of the protesters told a newspaper
reporter: "Talk about free speech - we don't think Hubert Humphrey is
entitled to it except as an accused criminal on trial for murders of
thousands of Vietnamese. He calls us 'American-style Hitler youth.'
Well, let me tell you something - he's Lyndon Johnson's Goebbels."
Richard Nixon was a favorite of hecklers. Tricky Dick deserved all he
got and more, not least because his campaign had hired hecklers to
disrupt speeches by his opponent for the U.S. Senate seat from
California, Helen Gahagan Douglas in 1950 and did the same against his
opponent for President, George McGovern, in 1972. Disabled Vietnam vet
Ron Kovic sitting in his wheelchair interrupted Nixon's acceptance
speech at the 1972 Republican Convention to denounce the VA's abysmal
treatment of Vietnam vets and what was happening in Vietnam as a
"crime against humanity." As the Watergate Scandal deepened, cries of
"Jail to the Chief!" met Nixon at his public appearances and resounded
in his ears from Lafayette Park on the day that he resigned the Presidency
at a campaign stop for Robert Dole.
Arguably the heckling most successful at drawing the ire of a
politician and causing him to reveal his true inner character occurred
in Binghamton NY on September 16, 1976 when a leering VP Nelson
Rockefeller gave the finger to a group of protesters from the SUNY campus
They were calling out that vile rich man for what he indeed was - the"I feel your pain."
"Attica Killer." Rockefeller and uplifted middle finger were captured
in what became an iconic photograph.
ACT UP, the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power, in a desperate race
against time to save lives in the face of cruel government inaction,
heckled up a storm. During the 1992 presidential campaign, ACT UP
activist Bob Rafsky confronted an angry Bill Clinton speaking in a
Manhattan night club and demanded that Clinton do more than merely intone,
ACT-UPers heckled numerous do-nothing government officials. Followingof confronting them.
in that same tradition, earlier this summer a transgender Latina,
Jennicet Gutierrez, heckled Obama at a White House LGBT Pride event
over the mistreatment and sexual abuse of transgender people in U.S.
immigrant detention centers. Sadly, she was booed by many of the LGBT
luminaries who were in attendance, who have gone mainstream and left
the ACT UP tradition behind in favor of sucking up to politicians instead
public meeting on the Yugoslav War at which I called him a "sell-out"
In terms of my own heckling "career," I was one of a group of radical
white college students from Michigan State who heckled the racist
segregationist George Wallace when he came to Lansing, Michigan to
campaign for president in 1972. With several classmates, I also
confronted Nixon's VP Spiro Agnew and called him an "international
outlaw" to his face when we caught him at the Lansing Airport. (In
those days, you could get within a few yards, within easy pie-throwing
distance.) Some of us next disrupted an appearance by Gerald Ford at
Michigan State for pardoning Nixon. And I'm proud to have added onto
my activist resume two hecklings so far of Bernie Sanders - once at a
for not opposing the war and again last year over Israel's assault onUniversity.
Gaza as part of a loud cohort of Code Pinkers and Occupiers.
Code Pink has been doing a fantastic job inside the beltway and around
the country of keeping the political heckling tradition alive speaking
truth to power and demanding they halt their evildoing. They've
developed and transformed this practice from an improvisational art
into a virtual science.
Only several weeks prior to confronting Bernie at that now-famous,
viral-videoed town hall meeting held in Cabot, Vermont, Code Pinkers
had interrupted Condoleeza Rice where she was speaking to the new body
of military cadets, GOP guests, and the general public at Norwich
We yelled out "war criminal" at her for her part in promoting the Bushleads to can create a teachable moment about the real nature of the System.
regime's mendacious war against Iraq. Some local activists were
disturbed that Bernie should be treated with similar disrespect given
that "he's on our side." But is it likely, without the embarrassment
caused by BlackLivesMatter women in Phoenix and Seattle, that his
campaign would have started talking about structural racism? Getting
Bernie to listen and pay heed to the peace community and address the
vital topics of war, imperialism and U.S. support for Israel in his
presidential campaign will take further interventions.
The fact is that heckling politicians and officials is about all
that's left of what passes for "democracy" in this day and age.
Elections, at least at the national level, are totally bought and paid
for. But because office-holders and office-seekers, along with
collecting their paychecks and taking their directions from their
corporate backers behind closed doors, do still have to go through the
motions of appearing before the electorate every four years, it
provides a moment of vulnerability for activists and citizens to take
advantage of. (Wouldn't it be a god-send if they could all just be
booed right off the stage into oblivion?) So don't miss your
opportunity when one comes soon to a location near you between now and
November 2016! Heckling politicians - and let's not forget all those
corporate criminals, too, although they rarely come out from their
offices and boardrooms to be properly harassed - will not make the
Revolution. But it sure can be fun! And the public controversy it often
In Defense Of Heckling: Some History Past And Present |
PopularResistance.Org frame end
