SCREWY MEWLING: THE REAL "PATCH ADAMS"
by Erik Jay
There I was, minding my own business, reading a little of this and that and the other thing at a few online news sites, when a headline caught my eye: "Patch Adams Leads Nude Protest." I clicked into the story, if only to see if he looked at all like Robin Williams, who played him in the 1998 movie, "Patch Adams."
Nope. But I read the story anyway. And now, since I am going to comment on it and make all kinds of generalizations from the actions of this specific individual (I know, it's a classic logical fallacy, but who's keeping score?), you get to read it, too.
Patch Adams Leads Nude Protest
SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - Led by a naked Patch Adams, a group of anti-nuclear protesters paraded nude down a San Francisco street to publicize the potential dangers of a catastrophic Y2K atomic meltdown.
"Nonviolent people like us really have so few tools to face the capitalist system," Adams told the protesters as they stripped for their demonstration Sunday. "All we really have are ourselves and our ideas. Our ideas have not done the job."
Adams, an unconventional doctor whose prescription of activism laced with humor was portrayed by actor Robin Williams in a recent movie, was one of a group attending a conference entitled "Creating a Culture of Peace for the 21st Century."
The naked group paraded briefly down San Francisco's Van Ness Avenue, chanting "Disrobe for disarmament," and "News, not nukes." A few cars slowed to gawk, the Examiner reported.
"I'm glad to be a part of a community that is as passionate as I am," protester Carol Brouillet, a 42-year-old mother of three and author of books on nuclear issues, told the newspaper.
"I'm glad my husband's not here," Brouillet added. "He wouldn't do this, but we have different world views." [October 5, 1999]
COMMENTARY: "SCREWY MEWLING"
Do you wonder sometimes if people really think about what they're saying? (Besides whenever you read something of mine.) In the short article above, we get an astonishing admission of the intellectual vapidity and fundamental impotence of the wacky wing of the anti-nuke movement.
This story made the news only because Dr. Patch Adams, a trendy character who's used up only eleven or twelve of his fifteen minutes of fame, was there naked. And he was in the street naked, not in the sparsely attended conference, because the conference organizers didn't get the media coverage they wanted inside, with everybody's clothes on.
By Adams's own admission, the anti-nuke movement's "ideas have not done the job" -- so it's time to get naked, draw attention to the cause, and, and... and then what? Then point everyone to the ideas that you already publicized when you invited all the press badges and videocameras to the conference in the first place? The same ideas as at the last conference? You know, the ideas that made the media decide not to come to this one?
Time to slow down, Doc, and look at what's really happening, okay? What's really happening is this: With the American media positively salivating for stories that trash large corporations, insult our national pride or predict the latest and greatest doomsday scenarios, your "movement" can't buy a story placement even though you appear to have all those media saliva generators. There's just one problem: No one believes you.
Now if I were actually talking to Dr. Patch, I might ask him what he meant by his statement that "nonviolent [protesters] really have so few tools to face the capitalist system." Come again? He has tools aplenty, political tools and better: the power of publicity (with all ratings from G to X available), a free press, scores of troublemaking foundations that could help him, the bulk of the American university system, a sympathetic news and entertainment industry, not to mention Robin Williams. (Did he even give Robin a thank-you call?) Hey, Doc (here I go again, like I'm actually talking to him, for Pete's sake): My dad taught me that it's a poor carpenter who blames his tools.
The anti-nukes have a positively intimate relationship with the press; whose fault is it if the media's not buying any more Y2K horror stories? Adam Smith's? And how did you lose Bernie Sanders' and Bruce Babbitt's phone numbers? Because you were dizzy from the rich food and the intoxicating beverages that served as the conference's research into the effects of eating lunch like captains of industry? Now if people like Bruce and Bernie don't listen, Doc, it can only mean one of two things: (1) the facts don't back up your crazy idea, or (2) the facts don't back up this even crazier idea that they have.
I can smell the words "capitalist system" they way people like Doc Adams spit them out, with such hot venom -- you know, the system that gives him the best medicine and technology in the world to treat his patients? that empowers a free and vigorous press that he can use to change minds and hearts? that rewards him in proportion to his efforts? Is there some other "system" that offers the good doctor a better chance to change national policy? A socialist system or one-party state? Well, sure they do, assuming you're one of the elite. And, see, Adams is a leader -- and no real revolutionaries (or even their top 100 or 1000 comrades) ever took up arms, stuffed ballot boxes, or pulled off a quick coup to become common members of the proletariat. Everybody wants to run things.
In Doc Adams's screwy mewling we have an admission that opponents of fuzzy-headed, blubbering, ditzy and Luddite anti-nuke agitation should quote and trumpet and publicize ad infinitum. "Our ideas have not done the job," admitted the Doc. But for all his talk about lack of "tools" the fact is that, once they all got off the dais and into the street, Dr. Patch and the Adams family of followers did go face the capitalist system.
And they mooned it.
And they got airtime, column inches, and e-coverage.
And people say that I'm wasting bandwidth.
Originally published in WHAT NEXT? The Internet Journal of Contentious Persiflage, Issue #10, 10/07/99. Reprinted with author's permission in The Daily Obectivist, December 1999.
