Greetings, my fellow port swillers!

Ol’ Robbo was interested to read over at the Puppy-Blender’s again today the report that Louis Farrakhan had been banned from FacePlant and Twatter, originally and hilariously as a “right-winger”, but latterly identified merely as an “extremist” once the derisive guffawing got too loud.

I mention this because back in the day of my academic career at The People’s Glorious Soviet of Middletown, CT, one of the campus militant groups invited Farrakhan to come speak.  All hell broke loose:  Lots of other organizations demanded that the invitation be rescinded; there was a persistent rumor that the Jewish Defense League planned to bomb the offices of the student newspaper; and a couple days prior to the speech there was a notable uptick in the visible presence of both campus security and town cops.

And of course a protest was organized to take place outside the venue where Farrakhan was speaking.

Now Dear Ol’ Wes was renowned back in the day for what Ol’ Robbo more than once referred to as the “Protest de Jure“.  The kids were always out demonstrating about one thing or another, Apartheid all the way through zoo abuse, to the point where I literally saw hall-mates of mine get into arguments over what day it was, what protest it was, and what was the appropriate costume/signage.  Indeed, as cartoonist to the campus conservative newspaper, I even went so far at one point as to propose a generic protest placard – readily amendable at the last second – to avoid these awkward situations.

That’s Ol’ Robbo – always trying to help! (It didn’t go over very well.)

Anyhoo, what marked the anti-Farrakhan protest different from all the other eleventy-billion gripe-fests that occurred during Ol’ Robbo’s time as a student was the fact that I actually attended this one.

Yep, marched, sat, listened to a bunch of speeches, marched back.  (No, I did not chant.)

Mind you, Ol’ Robbo didn’t participate because he thought Farrakhan should not have been allowed to speak in the first place, as so many of my fellow protesters evidently did.  No, I turned up simply to show my poor opinion of the things that came out of Farrakhan’s mouth (and still do).  He has the right to rave, I have the right to say he’s raving.

I thought that was what free expression was all about,  Silly me, at least in the eyes of our Social Media overlords.

Speaking of Ol’ Wes, friends of the decanter may be interested to know that the most recent passenger to climb into the Donk 2020 Presidential Hopeful Clown Car, Colorado Senator Michael Bennet, was a classmate of mine there.  I didn’t know him back in the day, and only became aware of his name when the alum magazine glommed on to his Colorado senate election campaign a few years back and started puffing him.  This evening, I went so far as to pull out our old yearbook and look him up.  The face is vaguely familiar, but I still got nothing.

I’d assume that in the unlikely event Bennet wins in ’20, a request from Ol’ Robbo based on our undergrad ties for an appointment to an ambassadorship – to, say, the Vatican or the Court of St. James – would more than likely fall on deaf ears.  Eh.

 

***Classic Blues Brothers reference actually based on The Skokie Affair, required reading in Con Law, at least back in my day.  I hate Illinois Nazis, too.  But to be frank, Elwood had no biznay running them off that bridge.