No Fair

As a kid, I lived about ten blocks south of the Sarasota County Fair grounds. This being the era before airc oinditioning (or the era my parents finally shoelled out for air conditioning) I slept with the windows open. The thumbing bum ping sounds of hte fair woul,.d raor int through the my windows at night. Sound carries, and my ears wree about 100 moire acute in those days. The perioidic screams pof peolple going up and down the sine waves of the roller coaster, the rattling tracks, the pitchment saying alive alive, the freaking callipoe music. Gorsh, it all sounds like fun. My imagination painted lovely pictures. The actyual fair itself was always disappointing.

The swining 60s was a lot like that. THe big party just down the street. Woodstock. Frank Zappa and the GTOs freaking out in Laruel canyon. Ken  KEsey and his pals on the bus. A distorted picture to b e sure, filtered through the Life's camera lenses and various cynical documentarians strio,llng up and down Haight Ashbury asking stupid quewstions about the hippie experience. But my head resonbatinged with the thunmping, buympoing sounds of the fair I was a little too young to snerak into.

So, in 1973 I stride into colledge in no longer fashionable blue jeans and long hair. It's UVA,m wahoo-wah. EVerybody else is wearing sperry topsiders and Izod lacoste t-shirts. The preppy look. I think it was born there. Buncha neat sonsabitches, damnit. I felt like Pigpen on the edges of the dance in Peanuts raising a cloud of dust.

No hippies. Anywhere in sight.

Except, uh, there's this one table. Right smack dab in the college quadrangle. Sorry, UVA doesn't have a quadranbgle. The lawn." YEp. Sorry.

Two scruffy bearded guys in denim workshiurts and one girl in a peasant bl;ouse with straight (perhaps ironed) hair hanging down below the edge oif the table. Maybe one year older than I was, but they looked ancient. Fossils. Artifacts of another time.

LaRouchies.

That there being the slang term applied to an obscure sect of proto-commie semi-Socialists emroiled in the ravings of a left-lkeaning trust fund baby who later turned right wing. Lyndon LaRouche, being the man in question. Out of his own deepo pockets, he printed up a monthly Daily Worker style tabloid paper what was insulting know as the LaRouchie paper. A stack of same was laid out on the table. I pikcked one up.

Whereupon my cartoonist's eyes were immediately drawn to the editorial cartoon.

The image (gawd-- talk abouty opriginality!) was of a giant capitalist octopus, it's tentacles encircling the b log. Its various appendages limbs whate er were labeled STANDARD OIL, EXXON, DOWN CHEMICAL, etc, etc. A Satanic uncle sam posed the question, "What more could you ask for?" The evil capitalist octopus replied, "Nothing." But -- in the extreme lower right corern of cartoon -- was a circle wherein the ciogar-smoking face of Castro appeared. Tjhe wprd bibb;re saod" "Void where prohibited by law.