Reminiscing About Jerry Falwell

This post on Salon caught my eye:

After this intensely fought election, both President Bush and Sen. John Kerry are speaking of the need to heal our divisions and come together as a single, united nation. They're wrong. Critics of the Bush presidency do not need to heal our divisions but to insist on them. President Bush has presided over an extraordinarily divisive and polarizing administration. The suggestion that we should now "heal our divisions" is really a suggestion not for unity but for capitulation.

Cass Sunstein's advice makes me think back to the fall of 1980, when Jerry Falwell's campaign road tour came to Tucson, where I was attending the University of Arizona. I stood across the street from the downtown arena and protested with some folks as the crowd of about 10,000 gathered for Falwell's speech. A fellow graduate student (and born-again evangelical) taunted me from across the street, "look who you're with!" My newfound compatriots looked fine to me, but I think he thought they looked gay to him. Maybe they were, but I thought they were nice folks.

Quite to our surprise, the doors to the arena appeared utterly unguarded after the crowd entered, so we decided to enter the arena in a spirit of protest. We entered the indoor space just as Falwell came to the podium, and we erupted spontaneously into rigid arm salutes and spirited shouts of "Seig Heil." Falwell knew straw men when he saw them - I'm sure that's why the doors had been left unguarded. He immediately condemned us for our self-evident, perverted totalitarian spirit (truly absurd, but we had played a little too easily into his hands). Several protestors were removed when they became a little too feisty. But Falwell actually wanted us around: he knew just how shocking we were to his followers, despite what I thought was our meek appearance, and how useful that was to fire up his followers. We settled down and listened to Falwell's keynote speech, watched a patriotic spectacle, and listened to a few other speeches in a similar vein.

At the very end, Falwell asked everybody to stand and sing "America, The Beautiful." I abruptly noticed our little protest group had been surrounded on all sides by various flacks, who quickly grabbed our hands (hard), pressed us in from all sides (hard), and more or less forced us to sing along with them. So, despite our manifold differences, we all sang together in a spirit of patriotic harmony. And if we had decided to struggle and shout, who knows? With a little 'help' from our 'friends', even those who sing the bass notes could have hit those high-C's.

Different time, same spirit. If liberals work together with Bush, we won't suffer any trouble. The Republicans don't want to convert us: everyone has freedom of thought in America, after all, and they would never, ever even think about taking that from us, especially since we can be useful at times. Capitulation, simple surrender, is all they ask.

"No Capitulation! Seig Heil!"