The story of Tom voting for Wallace was actually preceded, when I wrote much of this 40 years ago, by a discussion of my political analysis and philosophy during our years as protesting activists in the Sixties. Of course we were all against the war then. It was not until I had gone through my several months back home from college and my time with the Interior department (Winter 1967 through Winter 1969) and I had become an environmental activist that I got serious to thinking and acting on all this. What came out of that was an interesting conflict between me and the rest of the protest community.

I had read a mimeographed pamphlet on Imperialism. It was on coarse 8 ½ by 11 paper and stapled together. It reminded me of the Samizdats in the Soviet Union at the time, the way dissidents self-published criticism of the Soviet leadership on whatever they could get their hands on. I suspect if I dig through my own archives I might find it. It was revelatory. While it only analyzed the Viet war through the looking glass of Western colonial history, I suddenly came to see that all conflicts could be cast in that model, exploitation of the weak by the strong for getting what the strong needed.

Civil rights? Keep down competition, control resources and have a labor pool available. Whites over Blacks.

Feminism/Sexism? Keep down competition, control resources and have a domestic labor pool available for sex and child rearing. Men over Women.

Environmental destruction? Keep down competition over scarce resources, take what we need, at the lowest cost and the greatest profit. Man over Earth.

I don’t think I had put it that well at the time but I believe it is a structural analysis that holds up. You cannot imagine how impossible it was to get my fellow activists to broaden their view of what we were fighting against past their specific issue, the Vietnam War. If I had been more eloquent or had more energy can you imagine if all the human power of those folks had been brought to bear on all the specific symptoms of Imperialism? It was not to be.