Rand Paul's recent statements about people attending dangerous speeches reminded me of once in college when I became an inadvertant revolutionary. Maybe. You can't be too careful whose lectures you attend.
I went to Iowa State University back in the early '80s when dinosaurs ruled the earth and Reagan was in the White House -- but I repeat myself. I was studying Graphic Design and was for a while doing political cartoons for the campus newspaper.
One year, the College of Design sponsored a series on Central American Art, with a small exhibit and a few guest lecturers. I happened to meet one of the lecturers in the company of one of my professors. He introduced us, and the lecturer, upon learning I did political cartoons, said, "I'm sure you did your best, but Reagan got re-elected anyway."
I smiled and shook his hand. Actually, I had voted for Reagan -- I was moderately conservative at the time and really disliked Mondale for reasons that seem trivial now -- but wasn't so pro-Reagan that I felt a need to get into an argument about it. He invited me to attend his lecture, and I decided it might be interesting.
He began his lecture by thanking everyone attending for showing solidarity with the Nicaraguan people. This was a surprise to me; I thought I was attending a lecture about art. But I let it pass.
The title of the presentation was "Revolutionary Art in Central America", and the theme of it was about how art had flourished in Latin American countries following the overthrow of dictators. That was his thesis, anyway; but all the examples he showed in his slide presentation were works that had been done by artists from other, more repressive countries. It was kind of like the Polish joke from the Solidarity Era about the dog who runs into Russia to eat, but then runs back across the border into Poland because there he's allowed to bark. His lecture just left me with this mental image of hordes of Chilean art students descending upon small Nicaraguan villages like swarms of locusts, leaving nothing but Stirring Revolutionary Murals in their wake. I waited for him to show examples of the Nicaraguans themselves, freed from tyranny and producing inspirational art of their own out of their experiences, but he didn't seem to have any. I left the lecture unimpressed.
But another of my professors was annoyed. Like me, she had attended assuming that it would be a lecture about Art, rather than an indictment of Reagan Foriegn Policy in Latin America. "There was probably somebody in that room taking everybody's names down to pass on to the FBI," she griped. "Now my name's going to be on a list." She came from the '60s generation, and this sort of thing seemed like a real threat to her. I merely shrugged and blew it off. It didn't seem like that big a deal to me.
But the Times They Are a Changin'. Maybe we're going back to a time where you do have to be more careful about whom you associate with. After all, President Obama had to stop going to church over criticisms that he had listened to a sermon by an Angry Black Pastor.
Of course, as skeletons in the closet go, I have a lot darker secrets than attending a slide show by the artistic equivalent of a Liberation Theologian; but it's sobering to think that someday I, or worse yet, one of my daughters, may come to grief, all because my Name is on a List somewhere.