Saul Alinsky Violated The Geneva Convention

... because reading his book is torture.

For reasons to be explained in a future blog post, I'm wading through the sludge that is Saul Alinsky's Rules for Radicals. It's horrible. In fact, it's recursively horrible or maybe mutli-dimensionally horrible or perhaps it's over-horribled as it's crammed with examples of every kind of horribility that a book might ever have.

It also reveals why Obama was such an obnoxious and tedious bore. The book is all about community organizing and after you've sampled what bits you can stand, you see a class of people who are at once pompous, hyper-intellectual, unreflective, ignorant, incompetent and completely useless.

First, there's the prose. Alinsky writes like Hitler. He makes broad, sweeping statements based on ignorance and ego that immediately call to mind reams of contradictions.

We approach a critical point when our tongues trap our minds. I do not propose to be trapped by tact at the expense of truth. Striving to avoid the force, vigor, and simplicity of the word "power," we soon become averse to thinking in vigorous, simple, honest terms. We strive to invent sterilized synonyms, cleansed of the opprobrium of the word power— -but the new words mean something different, so that they tranquilize us, begin to shepherd our mental processes off the main, conflict-ridden, grimy... blah blah blah blah blah...

Then there's the description of his life. Here's a bit of the nth Level of Hell that he not only inhabits, but wants you to inhabit as well.

Frequently personal domestic hangups were part of the conferences. An organizer's working schedule is so continuous that time is meaningless; meetings and caucuses drag endlessly into the early morning hours; any schedule is marked by constant unexpected unscheduled meetings; work pursues an organizer into his or her home, so that either he is on the phone or there are people dropping in.

Meetings, meetings, meetings. That's what organizers do. Sit around and talk. It's enough to make you tear gas yourself.

Then there's the utter insipidness of the thing. Here's a real Deep Thought Alinsky feels the need to share.

Communication with others takes place when they understand what you're trying to get across to them.

Please, just stop.

It dawned on me as I listened to this word hash spray out of the speakers of my car that the only people this would resonate with would be college students. Feed this trash to a 40-year-old plumber with a wife and 3 kids and he'll listen for 90 seconds and then find a way to go do something else. Alinsky himself talks about it when he mentions how some organizers finally get a clue and bail out.

Much of an organizer's daily work is detail, repetitive and deadly in its monotony. In the totality of things he is engaged in one small bit. It is as though as an artist he is painting a tiny leaf. It is inevitable that sooner or later he will react with "What am I doing spending my whole life just painting one little leaf? The **** with it, I quit."

Of course they quit. It's all horrible. Alinsky, however, was too in love with his own self-importance and all the meetings to quit. He was the guy who never left college while the rest of his friends grew up and went out into the real world. He was the campus radical with his pony tail turning gray and his hairline receding and his clothes 30 years out of date, lecturing the kids about how this revolution thing is done.

That led me to an explanation of modern college faculty. The majority of the people they interact with are each other and student-children who don't have the experience to see through their drivel. It's all self-reinforcing. That's why Shapiro, Murray and others are driven from campus. It's protection of their tiny world, insulation from people who will be able to point out their nonsense.

Maybe the riots on campus are really acts of mental self-defense, a fanatical spasm of protection of a world-view they know deep down is idiocy.

The idiot himself. I think the glassy stare is my favorite part of this picture.