Back in 1992, I got a call from a friend. Would you like to go to a political rally? he said.
That was almost twenty years ago. I am smarter now, and would have asked more questions before saying yes.
On the way to the rally, I asked my friend: Who is this person?
He's a candidate for president, he said.
Of what country? I asked jokingly.
My friend didn't think that was very funny.
So we get to the rally, and the candidate turns out to be a big mustached galoot named Bo Gritz.
What? You've never heard of him? He's the real-life Rambo! He's the guy they based Hannibal of the A-Team on! He's the hero of Ruby Ridge! (He's an ex-military with a bizarre record; you should really read the Wikipedia summary of his career, it speaks for itself.) He was running that year as the Populist Party candidate.
And here's the thing of it: my friend, the one who brought me to this “rally,” was (unbeknownst to me) Gritz's Rhode Island campaign manager.
Guess where our seats were?
Up on stage, facing the crowd, alongside Bo Gritz and his wife, smiling into the TV cameras.
I felt like I was at one of Hitler's Nuremberg rallies, sitting three seats away from Adolf.
Gritz's “speech” was incoherent: don't pay your federal income tax blah blah blah, Vietnam blah blah blah, Christian nation blah blah blah. I was shrinking into my folding chair. It was worse than the Nuremberg rallies. It was like a Klan meeting. (They'd bussed in a whole bunch of disabled veterans as an audience; they all seemed increasingly perplexed about why they were there as the evening wore on.)
And Bo (who was big and handsome and crazy-looking, like a cross between an astronaut and the Incredible Hulk) just kept ranting.
I was terrified that people would see me on TV, attending this bizarre event.
I shouldn't have worried. No one saw anything.
In hindsight it seems funny. I wish I'd bought one of his t-shirts as a souvenir.
His slogan that year, by the way, was “God, guns, guts, and Gritz.”
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