It’s a rain-barrel coalition. And the longest acronym ever: PLOPRCARANCAIM. Palestine Liberation Organization and Puerto Rican Committee against Repression and African National Congress and American Indian Movement all together now on a 27-city tour. Consolidate your social debts: an operator is standing by. I detect the fine, furtive puppet-mastery of PAM (People’s Antiwar Mobilization) in this. Last year (see “The Gimlet Eye,” Feb. 28, 1986) PAM coopted the AIDS crisis. PAM’s people would radicalize Lupus Awareness Week if they could. It is their strategy to form moral conglomerates wherever possible. They must have some kind of mergers and acquisitions department. Leftism has to economize in 1986: get as many groups as possible on one bulk-mail letterhead. Yet, despite this multinational corporation, all they can pull is a hundred orsotoa dismal classroom at NYU.
Tonight each group will draw on the prestige and celebrity of Mr. Incarceration 1986, Nelson Mandela. The ANC is your parent corporation here: the others defer obsequiously to it. After all, at least one exquisite, mediagenic horror per week has come slithering out of South Africa. By contrast, the PLO and AIM and PRCAR can serve just reheated atrocities. Leonard Peltier of AIM was sent up in 1975 for killing two FBI men. Bury my brain at swollen nose if I can remember the relevant data there. PRCAR has 11 people in jail for sedition—not one of them charismatic. The PLO woman is rather desperate. She’d like to be accepted. Unfortunately, her clients are under persecution by a people with superior victim status. She is reduced to bathetic invective. “The Palestinian cultural costume has been worn by hostesses onElAlas Israeli national dress.” Worse, the damn Zionist movement has stolen falafel. It’s as if some Indian asked for a royalty on each moccasin sold by Shoetown.
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