The case of Andrew Meyer, the University of Florida student tasered by campus police while resisting arrest for disrupting a speaking engagement by Senator John Kerry on Tuesday, has provided excellent fodder for the Left’s paranoid nightmares about the cryptofascist United States. Finally, they tell us, the ugly, brutal face of Amerika has been revealed to all.
At the Huffington Post (which collectively reads as if it were written by the ensemble from Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest), the feminist writer Naomi Wolf declares that this “shocking moment for society” is the “iconic turning point and it will be remembered as the moment at which America either fought back or yielded.”
No, it was not September 11—when 3,000 Americans were killed in spectacular terrorist attacks and the nation girded itself for war—that marked the decisive moment in America’s recent history, but rather the tasering and subsequent arrest of a deranged and self-promoting college student in Gainesville, Florida. And in the dreams of Naomi Wolf—where she, Andrew Meyer, and the rest of the crew at the Huffington Post represent some sort of Leninist vanguard—it is not Islamic terrorists whom America must “fight back” against, but rather our very own government. “It is time to rebel in the name of the flag and the founders,” Wolf, our latter-day Abigail Adams, pronounces.
Having recently graduated from Yale University, where such self-obsessed, imaginary political martyrdom is de riguer, I have very little sympathy for Meyer. He wanted this to happen, giving a digital camera to a woman before he rose to the microphone, asking her, “Are you taping this? Do you have this? You ready?” Meyer wanted a show, with, naturally, himself as the star. In a matter of months, I predict, he will be touring the country speaking at antiwar rallies and campaigning for Dennis Kucinich.
For much of the Left today, protest has become a form of therapeutic self-aggrandizement. Publicly demonstrating one’s most sincerely felt political commitments (to as many people as possible) has long been an underlying, motivational aspect of leftist movements.
This incident reminds me of the 2004 arrest of then-Yale junior Thomas Frampton, a classmate, who cunningly feigned his way into a volunteer usher position at the Republican National Convention at Madison Square Garden. The first night of the convention, Thomas chose an opportune moment to start screaming antiwar slogans and, according to the criminal complaint, “did forcibly assault, resist, oppose, impede, intimidate, and interfere with Special Agents of the United States Secret Service, in the performance of their official duties” by charging the VIP box in which Vice President Cheney sat with his wife and grandchildren. As befitting a liberal activist believing in equality before the law, Frampton posted the $50,000 bond and his father, a wealthy, high-powered Washington attorney, hired excellent legal counsel. Frampton got a slap on the wrist.
Neither Meyer nor Frampton rationally could have believed that his antics furthered a “progressive” political cause. On the contrary, these two young men must understand that most people—especially political moderates whom, presumably, Meyer and Frampton hope to persuade—will look at them as mere fanatics. But both Frampton and Meyer clearly think of themselves as modern incarnations of John Brown. And what they think of themselves is, in the end, all that seems to matter.
