On Halloween night in 2008, I was exploring an old warehouse in Oakland California, when I heard an eerie voice singing:
"We shall not , we shall not be moved .."and, suddenly an strange undead apparition emerged from the shadows carrying pamphlets about anarchists and other radicals; a SCARY SOCIALIST. "Brother, I said, shaking, who are you and how did you come to be here?"
"I am as bewildered as you. One minute I was peacefully demonstrating with my fellow Wobblies for the release of Red Emma when shots rang out and the next, a terrifying cabal of the most frightening looking guys I have ever seen were reciting incantations and digging me up in the centre of a circle of black candles in the cemetery near this warehouse. They would not say who they were but I heard the words Skull and Bones and Republican National Committee. They said they had an important job for me for one week, well 4 and one half days, Until Nov. 4th. Well, I says, that sounds swell and I ain't worked in a while , but what do you fellas want me to do? You don't want me to be a scab or nothin, do you? So they says, no no no! just be yourself, hand out your pamphlets, make a speech or 2 - do what you do!"
Then he said" Can you help me find a crowd to agitate?"
So, with some trepidation, I took the scary socialist to a Halloween party I was invited to and it turned out my worries were unfounded: he fit right in. He wasn't the only political type there. Not at all. there was a guy dressed as the Statue of Liberty carrying a sign about same sex marriage and someone dressed as a nurse with signs about health care reform. And everybody was talking about Nov. 4th the next week.
Well, I did not see him in person after the party, but over that weekend, the Scary Socialist seemed to be all that people on the TV news and talk shows were talking about, so I guess the people who dug him up made a valiant effort to scare everybody with him. I thought I might write about him in these pages at the time.
But you all know by now that election day came and they did not scare everybody enough. I was walking by the same part of town the night of the election, and amidst the cheers and horns blowing and I thought I saw him clamber over the fence into the cemetery and disappear into the shadows. I thought that was the last I would hear of him for at least another 90 years. I just forgot about writing about him, thinking he was irrelevant now.
Boy was I wrong. The health care debate heated up and he was dragged back out, scarier than ever, boys and girls. So I thought I would post these photographs and talk about him after all.
