Signs Of The Times -

Signs Of The Times - We're coming up on the first anniversary of the death of Senator Paul Wellstone.

The signs are popping up all over Saint Paul today:

Wellstone
Don't Stop Fighting!

I saw a row of them on Summit Avenue today. It dragged me back to some of the conservative protests while the late Senator was alive; some misbegotten signs pasted Wellstone's head on Lenin's body, to low comedic effect. Wellstone was no Lenin - I never heard him advocating re-education camps. But the year since his death has seen the rise of a cult of personality among his most fervent supporters; every variety of Wellstone sign dots nearly every street in St. Paul (the tonier the neighborhood, the more signs; Wellstone was the intellectual granddad of Howard Dean's lilywhite legions), benignly reminiscent of the inescapable posters and signs found in countries ruled by other, more malignant personality cults.

Many of us local conservatives were up-front about our admiration for the man, as a person. While this blog spends a lot of time caricaturing the narrow-mindedness and even rank, hateful bigotry of many of Wellstone's more emphatic (I won't say "Fanatical") supporters, many of us on the right genuinely admired Wellstone. Not merely for the passion he brought to the job (every moonbat of every political stripe oozes passion), but for the fact that he treated political differences, by all accounts, as fodder for civil debate. Not the false civility of forced acquiescence - nobody could accuse Wellstone, the lonest wolf in the Senate, of that - but passionate disagreement that didn't extend to the personal realm. Wellstone attended Barry Goldwater's funeral; can anyone see Barbara Boxer or Charles Rangel doing that?

Here's the real point; I heard Paul Wellstone spout an endless litany of ideas I considered dumb. But I never once heard him impugn the character of those with whom he disagreed.

Which is more than I can say for many of his supporters. Paulapalooza - the Wellstone memorial turned partisan commercial that left some of us feeling nearly ill at the gall involved in hijacking Wellstone's legacy and memory - reeked with anger at those who opposed the Senator. And his followers have gone on in rare form; we've been accused of making the state a meaner, dumber, colder, uglier place, in ways big and small.

We've seen bumperstickers that ask "what would Wellstone do?" Well, we can rule that out, I suspect.

As much as we admire Paul Wellstone as a human, we need to remember this: Had Paul Wellstone's (and Maxine Waters', and Dennis Kucinich's, and Michael Moore's for tha matter) ideology prevailed over the past fifteen years:

• The Berlin Wall might still stand
• The people of Afghanistan would still be subject to the Taliban
• The people of Iraq would still be getting fed into shredders, gang-raped, murdered and disposed in the night at the behest of the government
• The concentration camps of North Korea would be excused - ignored, while waiting for the pusillanimous "international community" (how's that for an oxymoron") to decide whether to cower, or merely appease.

And that doesn't even count domestic issues.

So to paraphrase - OK, to hijack the sign that's popping up all over Saint Paul today:

Mourn Wellstone.
Keep Fighting His Politics.

With all due respect to the man's legacy - and as a human being, it was and is a great one - I'm going to keep doing just that.

Posted by Mitch at October 24, 2003 10:31 AM