Foster House and Barry Goldwater

This morning, as I procrastinate from working--a bit annoyed that there are no decent seminars here at the AVCA Convention this morning, I came across a comment from someone that "Inequality is the root of social evil."  It was attributed to Pope Francis--and it sounds like something he would say, but this is the internet, and like Abraham Lincoln says, "You can't trust every quote you find on the internet."

It reminded me of like in Westgate 307, the year I had Chris Gabel as a roommate, living in a suite with Steve Haugse and Dave Meythaler.   Steve Haugse had a message board posted outside his door in case people stopped by while he was out--yup, this is long before email, cell phones, or text messages...back in the era when people actually talked with one another.

Sometimes Meythaler would post quotes on the board, and often, we found it fun to mess with him...and the quotes.  The best was when he posted one of Barry Goldwater's most famous quotes:

"Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice." 
(Editorial comment: Recent torture revelations certainly prove this an inaccurate assertion)

So we changed it a little:

*Liberty in the extremism of vice is no defense.
*Vice in the defense of extremism is no liberty.
*Extremism in the vice of defense is not liberty.

And we put every combination up on the door.
Dave wasn't amused initially.  He'd posted the Goldwater quote as something profound and we made a mockery of it...which Foster House excelled at.  If snark was an Olympic event, Foster House of 1986-88 would have been repeat Gold Medalists.

But having written all this above, what's shocking is that Goldwater's quote, considered outrageously radical in the early 1960s in a time of tension with the USSR, the height of the Cold War, today is accepted by more than half the American population--torture to get info from MAYBE-bad guys?  Good.  Lack of due process?--if it means "security", great, doesn't affect me.  But at what point does it slide further--we already have tortured foreigners we thought could potentially be terrorists--when do we start the torture of citizens?  When does it become okay to rectally insert food for the sake of stopping a string of robberies?

Would Goldwater appreciate that the LA School District now has a mine-resistant APC or grenade launchers?  (Yes, that's right--a school district has THREE grenade launchers)  Think he'd be happy with the increase in SWAT raids across the country, the accidental deaths of hundreds of people in those raids (the total over the past decade is now something like 105).

The answer is no.  The world changed.  Goldwater, once considered a conservative extremist, saw politics move in his lifetime (after white Southerners took over the Republican Party, infusing it with silly fundamentalist religious, political, and racist views) so that at the end of his political career, Goldwater was considered a moderate and on some issues "liberal".  The man who admired Goldwater, Reagan,--Reagan couldn't be elected today--doesn't pass Republican 'litmus tests'.

I guess maybe we shouldn't have been so flippant about that Goldwater quote.  It proved to be far more prescient than I, as a nineteen year old, could ever have suspected.