23 years ago I was introduced to a successful Arizona politician by a Native American leader in a lunchtime cafeteria.    The first words out of the politico’s mouth were a stream of profanity ending with a loud “…and so FU-K you!  He said Pima County Interfaith Council (PCIC) for which I was working at the time hadn’t paid him the proper obeisance.  

The Native American leader, accustomed to kind words and solicitous mutual pandering, nearly fell backwards over a chair, literally blown away by the exchange.  Ashen faced, on the way out of the place, he asked with fear and trembling:  What was that all about?  I was chuckling out loud.  Reminds me of ward committeemen in Chicago I said.   

What?

I kind of like him.  

You what?  

I kind of like him.  

I got to go he said glancing around in the parking lot before hurrying off.  

That was the last time I saw him.

The politico, as it turned out, became a long time collaborator with PCIC and a regular, blunt, self-interested truth teller.  I concluded from our first meeting the message was:   “I’m attacking you because the truth is I think you’re on to something that may be useful to me down the road.”  

I looked forward to conversations with him, the jousting, the posturing, the lessons in how the intricacies of AZ politics worked.  One day, at his favorite breakfast spot, he said, “All politics is deception.”  

I added to myself:  “All organizing is decoding.”

After many years of often tense negotiations and several big PCIC wins in part engineered by the same politico (on workforce development, youth infrastructure, adult education, children’s programs) I developed genuine affection for his prickly ways.  Never buddy, buddy.  Always with an angle.  Always contentious.  Always smart.  Always on guard.  

Saul Alinsky self identified as a Jew.  We know this because when he was asked about his faith tradition “Jewish” was his answer.  

I wonder from time to time about the role his faith tradition has played in the vulgar, false attacks on him that have persisted over the years.  

While for now the attacks often seem better explained as an opportunistic association seeking to target Barack Obama, for me the Jewish question lurks in the background.  After all they predate Obama’s rise by decades.

Alinsky was a mouthy, irreverent, master of the sound bite before sound bites were the order of the day.  His ability to outwit even the brightest of adversaries like conservative icon William F. Buckley, Jr on coast to coast television clearly did not sit well with his detractors.  

Alinsky’s values were grounded in the prophetic tradition of Hebrew Scripture.  His identification with outsiders, the cut out, the shut out, the weak, the voiceless, the vulnerable are entirely consistent with the relentless prophetic focus on widows, orphans, strangers and the economically destitute.   Jeremiah, Isaiah, Amos.

His dialectical thought, attention to language and focus on teaching public skills is a hallmark of his lifelong passion for equipping the underdog for a seat at the table of decision making.  The Prophets didn't shrink from challenging the ruling elites of their day and neither did Saul Alinsky.

When someone announces himself as a Catholic Church Militant claiming to embody the one True Church, you gotta think something - probably the person’s brains - are seriously scrambled.  Who could make such a claim for The Church led by the Pope?  

Michael Voris that’s who.   Purporting to represent the Real Church as opposed to the Phony Church overseen by Pope Francis, this Mr. Voris inhabits a strange crusading fantasy land.  

How bizarre are his views?   Lets start with that fact they are couched in trumped up church triumphant trappings I call “Faux Middleages”.  Ominous, ponderous, leaden, pretentious layered over untruthful, spindly, heretical and sulfurous.    He hasn’t missed 50 years of Church history.  More like 500.

Here’s what the dude embracing the cutting edge is in to:

Blasting the "Gay Mafia" running the Church, humping for his followers to "Talk Like a Man, Not a Sissy", excoriating "The New Pope & Homoheresy", denouncing "Homosexuals and the Conclave", condemning "Gays in the Clergy" and baiting "Father Gay".  Say what?  Got a problem, buddy?

When he’s done trashing gays he moves on to the “Alinskyites”.

In this and so much else he’s right there with Stephanie Block on a battlefield they've conjured out of thin air. 

Saul Alinsky has accomplished the most difficult of all challenges to organizers -   agitating from beyond the grave.  His success in this regard has been advanced in part by the sheer volume of stupid things said about him.  

Alinskynow.com has been monitoring this torrent of lathered blather for several months as it continues unabated.  The most extensive diatribe by far, a full four volumes by someone named Stephanie Block, represents twenty years of hands on research into the nefarious concepts, projects, pronouncements and networks that flow from Alinsky through the shape shifting, amoebic Alinskyites.    

Her work is an awful strain on the reader’s patience.  To describe it as boring is far too gentle.  Mind numbing is more like it.  

While paranoid world-views are generally entertaining in some fashion, Block proves the opposite is possible.  In fact it’s entirely plausible that the author of Alinsky Now is the book’s only reader through to the end.  If you want four volumes occupying over 800 pages that no one else has read, have a go at Block’s Change Agents, Alinskyian Organizing Among Religious Bodies.  (See Amazon review.)

Most of the rest of the material about Alinsky floating downstream is like Block’s stuff except more compact – much more compact.  The finale is always something like “…and he dedicated one of his books to Lucifer – The Devil.”  This last is always offered as breathless, novel revelation. 

Because most readers of messages from Blockville apparently don’t have a clue who Lucifer was the bloggers generally feel called upon to clarify his nature.  In Blockville nuance is not highly valued.  After all, no one likes The Devil although he at least is reported to have a sense of humor.

For sure Alinsky would have been experimenting with all kinds of media technologies had he lived into our time.  Facebook, Twitter, d-base construction, websites, blogs, digital vids and the rest of it would have been part of his repertoire.  But guess what?  He would have seen through the baseless hemorrhage of emails, websites and messaging that passes for "organizing".  He would have mocked the ersatz realities towards which the progressive foundation world relentlessly drives community groups.  He would have been appalled at the spectacular wastage of potentially useful resources invested in building an online fantasy world.  

Given his obsession with finding and training organizers, at bottom he would have raged against the bastardization of organizing through the quick, the easy, the shallow and the ephemeral.   Alinsky understood that constructive change required patience, political judgment, deep on the ground relationships and accountability.  

Black Hole in Cyberspace  Part 1

Conventional wisdom has it that Industrial Areas Foundation (IAF) style face-to-face organizing is outdated and outmoded – a kind of political blast from the past.   The primary technologies invented by Saul Alinsky are now seen by many as quaint outcroppings of a now bygone era.  Today’s Alinskyites, according to this view, are building political ghost towns in desert wastelands far from the wellsprings of real power.   Short on scale, short on national reach, short on grand plans.  This is the critique delivered by a raft of politicians (including President Obama himself), academics, union leaders and political consultants.  

New modes of web based communication - faster, easier to scale, simpler to launch and subject to manipulation by a handful of super techies and their backers – are touted as a superior use of time, talent and money if change is the objective and utilitarian metrics the obsession.   Grand scale initiatives appealing to mega donors driven by the promise of big, fast change dwarf the slow, patient work of face-to-face organizing.

Modern political campaigns including the spectacular flare up of the first Obama campaign exemplify the high dollar, high tech approach to messaging, vote gathering and measured impact.  The fact that David Plouffe and company pursued the systemic integration of low tech “house meetings” to augment both the air and ground games of the first Obama campaign reflects the extent to which the imperial vision of candidate promotion digested face to face Alinskyite modalities for its own ends.  The house meetings served an important purpose of offering the appearance of attention and consultation to a voting population hungry for the touchstone of real engagement.  They also blipped upwards the high tech communications database and added bodies to the walks and talks of the ground game.

More sales event than real conversation the Plouffe/Obama approach betrayed the core value of the house meeting.  The campaign ended up compromising and trivializing the house meeting methodology even while succeeding at advancing an instrumental outcome – the election of Barack Obama.  From the point of view of political instrumentality these events were a grand success.  From the point of view of deepened democratic practice they were short term, shallow, deceptive and ultimately disheartening for legions of participants.

Watch out all you Alinskyites, Ted Nugent is out to get you.  But his hinge on the old gate seems to be getting a bit rusty.   Here's a sample of his latest talk dirty.  Check out his linkage of Alinsky with fascist goose steppers.  Never mind that Alinsky was a life long anti fascist not to mention a Jew.

Nugent's latest swing:

"The poor overworked tail must be near exhausted to death from all that nonstop dog wagging by the Joseph Goebbels and Saul Alinsky propaganda ministry scamgangbangers out there...

 "Taking their lessons right out of Saul Alinksy’s “Rules for Radicals,” the Speech and Thought Police believe they can silence opposition, including such powerful opposition as that by a rodeo clown, by smearing, vilifying and condemning anyone who does not march to their politically correct fascist goose-steppers".

Read more at http://www.wnd.com/2013/08/im-a-rock-n-roll-clown-so-ban-me/#34mtPmDr3arItar8.99 

In July Peter Buffett, son of Warren Buffett, delivered a scathing critique of the foundation/industrial complex that he is increasingly positioned to understand. He points to an age old reality associated with charitable giving, namely, that it often serves the interests of the giver more than the receiver. Saul Alinsky had developed a penetrating understanding of this phenomenon during the course of his career and resisted financially driven imposition on all fronts. As a consequence, organizations operating in the Alinsky tradition - particularly IAF - always push back against the demands of outside money to control agendas. This infuriates program officers, foundation boards and ROI preoccupied wealthy donors who find primary satisfaction in exercising power and control as they "do good". IAF and the Alinsky tradition represents the power of local squared as a counter to the colonialism of wealth.

Original article: The Charitable Industrial Complex

The Obamistas and Righteologues share a key narrative agreement regarding Barack Obama's years as a community organizer.  The fictional narrative works for both.  On the left, his time in the trenches validates his claim to be a man of the people putting his values of community into action.  On the right, his time as a CO proves his leftism and triggers the now standard litany/rant.  All of this nets out as a plus plus for both sides.  Never mind that both are indulging in seriously phony claims.  
As Michael Gecan makes clear in his brilliant little book, After America's Midlife Crisis, Obama wasn't much influenced by the ethos or values of community organizing.  After all, he spent less time in that role as a low level street worker than in college.  The reality is that he was far more a creature of Chicago's Daley Machine politics and the rarified atmosphere of the University of Chicago's constitutional law environs.

The Righteologues trump up Obama's brief stint as a community organizer for their own demonizing purposes.  Dragged in to this fiction is the falsification of Saul Alinsky's track record, organizational innovations and legacy. 

A pictorial narrative!  That must be Lenin looming in the background.  Or is it Karl Marx?  No matter.  A Red's a Red.
Saul Alinsky remains a target for right wing ideologues - righteologues - more than 40 years after his death.  Righteologue bloggers and radio talkers talk dirty about Alinsky to make the case that whoever associated with him, the organizational network he inspired - IAF - or anyone who attended IAF National Training is a commie, red, lefty or at least a pinko.  

It's all a bit bizarre and merits further inquiry.  What's up with the obsessive invocation of Saul Alinsky?

Some partial explanations are obvious.  Barack Obama attended Ten Day IAF Training in the mid nineteen eighties so tarring IAF with left wingism reinforces a narrative about the President.  In this vein, Alinsky, Alinskyites, Obama, big government liberals become part of a seamless narrative fantasy/conspiracy.   Of course at the moment Obama is their villain in chief.  

Still, the venom directed at Alinsky himself after all these years raises a deeper question.  What was it about Alinsky that triggers such rabidity?

My thinking is that Saul Alinsky was a far more provocative agitator than glib claims about his location on the left/right political spectrum imply.  The fact is he was neither "left" or "right".  His core teaching about the "Iron Rule" - never do for people what they can do for themselves defies catagorization, perhaps leans more right than left.
His opposition to the reelection of FDR certainly places him in this direction as well.  Most important, Saul Alinsky was not a big government guy.  Far from it.  In two of his mmost famous quotes he described Lyndon Johnson's Great Society as "political pornography" and later "welfare colonialism".  This is certainly not the language of a big government liberal.  

So I repeat the question from a different angle.  If Alinsky does not fit the righteologue narrative very well why does he remain central to it?
One place to look for an answer is in the psyches of the righteogues themselves.  A characteristic of Alinsky's organizing and all of those following in his IAF footsteps is a clear determination to work across racial lines.  TWO, Fight Kodak, Buffalo, CSO were all characterized by African American and/or Latino primary constituency and leadership.

Modern generation IAF organizations have continued in this vein invariably bringing together disparate racial and ethnic groupings.  When the verbal subterfuge is stripped away, righteologues butt up against the inescapable, namely, that however they may jabber on about freedom and patriotism when it comes to crossing racial and ethnic lines they are miserable failures.  In the absence of this intention and capacity what kind of freedom and patriotism are they really advancing?  Only the Shadow knows for sure.