As I see it, heckling is free speech. Do I like it when it's my guy
who is being heckled? Hell no!
Did I grin when it was Old Tricky Dick who was being heckled? Hell Yes!
Is heckling rude? Maybe. But when your Cause is being shut out and
no one will give you a podium and air time, it is one way of being
noticed. And as far as I'm concerned, folks who decide to go in front
of the public and hand out their positions on issues, and ask for our
votes, they are also asking to be challenged. I find it sort of funny
to see people who think they have all the answers and the wisdom of
the ages, being brought up short by some hecklers who want to express
a different position.
It's like, "Hey! How dare you interrupt someone as important and
all-knowing as I am." Years ago, 1973 to be exact, the Office of
Services for the Blind decided to celebrate the tenth anniversary of
the opening of their facility in South Seattle. Our state blind
organization had been trying for months to get the attention of the
news media, asking that they interview our members who were objecting
to the sluggish, sloppy services being provided by the Office. We
couldn't get five words in the papers. So when the agency announced
it's open house and invited the papers to cover the event, we showed
up. We had about 50 members marching up and down the sidewalk in
front of the building, carrying signs protesting the lousy services.
And then we were noticed by the Media. Channel 5 interviewed me, I
was state president at the time, and the Seattle PI and Times both
quoted me and several others. Naturally we were very unpopular with
the employees of the Office, being accused of crashing their
celebration. But it gave us a big boost in our efforts to obtain a
Commission for the Blind. Which we later accomplished.
It's a wonder that Cathy ever dated me. She was working as a clerk
steno in the BEP, and felt personally affronted by our charges.
Somehow my great charm and stunning looks won her over. But that was
five years after we had worked together. By that time we had our
Commission and a very persuasive director, who might have had
something to do with changing Cathy's opinion. She had a front row
seat in observing how effective the new programs performed compared to
the past ones.
But the point is that this picketing of ours was one way of heckling
the Office's position. It's all a method of protesting.
Carl Jarvis
On 8/15/15, Miriam Vieni <miriamvieni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
I'm posting this. Not sure I agree with it, however.
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 to an asylum.
If you thought this was a description of a recent confrontation between the
intrepid BlackLivesMatter activists and the faux socialist running for U.S.
President, Bernie Sanders, you would be wrong. This is a description 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, unfurled a banner and heckled
President Wilson while he was making a speech. Both David Lloyd George
and
Woodrow Wilson were considered to be reformers in their day, but it 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 pelted with tomatoes and rotten eggs.
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 term.
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 in disgrace.
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 at a campaign stop for Robert
Dole.
They were calling out that vile rich man for what he indeed was - the
"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, "I feel your pain."
ACT-UPers heckled numerous do-nothing government officials. Following 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 of confronting them.
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 public meeting on the Yugoslav War at which I called him a "sell-out"
for not opposing the war and again last year over Israel's assault on 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 University.
We yelled out "war criminal" at her for her part in promoting the Bush
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 leads to can create
a teachable moment about the real nature of the System.
In Defense Of Heckling: Some History Past And Present |
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nd-present/
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 to an asylum.
If you thought this was a description of a recent confrontation between the
intrepid BlackLivesMatter activists and the faux socialist running for U.S.
President, Bernie Sanders, you would be wrong. This is a description 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, unfurled a banner and heckled
President Wilson while he was making a speech. Both David Lloyd George
and
Woodrow Wilson were considered to be reformers in their day, but it 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 pelted with tomatoes and rotten eggs.
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 term.
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 in disgrace.
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 at a campaign stop for Robert
Dole.
They were calling out that vile rich man for what he indeed was - the
"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, "I feel your pain."
ACT-UPers heckled numerous do-nothing government officials. Following 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 of confronting them.
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 public meeting on the Yugoslav War at which I called him a "sell-out"
for not opposing the war and again last year over Israel's assault on 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 University.
We yelled out "war criminal" at her for her part in promoting the Bush
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 leads to can create
a teachable moment about the real nature of the System.
In Defense Of Heckling: Some History Past And Present |
PopularResistance.Org frame end
