Sometimes, when I interview or attend a speech, I think to myself: “What the hell have I gotten myself into?” Attending Holly Swanson’s speech at Prince Lucien Campbell Hall last week was one of those. Swanson’s stated premise was that the environmental movement had been taken over by the Green Party, which she labeled as “a communist organization.”
Politics here in Eugene can be described as “FUBAR” at best. Given the incendiary subject that Swanson (who is the head of “Operation Greenout” — a group dedicated to exposing the hidden agenda of the Green Party — and author of “Set Up and Sold Out” ) addressed, it’s little wonder that plainclothes Department of Public Safety officers showed up to keep people from demonstrating — physically — their disdain for Swanson’s position.
Her main premise (outside of the communist allegations, which I still find dubious) resonated quite a bit with me. She alleged that, in many ways, the Greens have become rather manipulative in their practices. This is a no-brainer. The Greens do keep dangling out the specter of total ecological collapse, and do not use this to bring attention to real ecological problems. Instead, they use it to milk votes and memberships out of people in the same way that Pat Robertson uses the shadow of Satan to wring money out of those dumb enough to listen to him.

That being said, it was still an evening that left me with a view of some of the worst sides of both extremes, left and right. Swanson, although she definitely had an interesting premise that I somewhat agree with, came across as someone who had gotten so lost in her own ideology that she just lost focus. There were things that may have sounded completely logical to her, but were to me just slightly above “I have here in my hand a list of 59 names of members of the State Department.” By the same token, the large retinue of hecklers came off as being not only closed-minded and provincial, but also so assured of their own moral superiority that anyone who didn’t agree with them was automatically a horrid Earth-raper who was personally keeping the entire population of Guatemala penniless.
There were quite a few points in the evening in which both the audience and Swanson lost me with major logical disconnects, proving historian Henry Adams’ observation that “practical politics consists in ignoring facts.” Hank should have replaced “facts” with “logic.” One of the audience members who actually came prepared for rational discussion instead of flame-slinging, mentioned a passage in her book in which she linked the Nazi-era “green police” of occupied Holland (if you’ve read or seen “The Diary of Anne Frank,” you’ve heard of them) and the Green Party. When he asked Swanson to elaborate, her response in a nutshell was: They both used the color green. This was such a blindingly bizarre statement that it defies belief that anyone could utter it. To basically say that the Green Party is linked with the Nazis because they both use the color green to me was offensive. I have no love for the Greens, but to resort to innuendo like this, with no mitigating facts linking the two in any rational fashion, is very much the same kind of crass manipulation for which she rightfully criticizes the Greens. Of course, the best her opponents could muster was to say that she had “blood on her hands” merely because she was wearing a gold necklace implying that she supported some sort of “blood jewelry” market like the diamond trafficking in Sierra Leone, which in of itself is equally manipulative.
What fun. The debate was like listening to a mostly pathetic battle of wits between Sen. Joe McCarthy and Abbie Hoffman. I, for one, am just glad I survived the “Stale Ideology Amateur Hour.”