David McElroy

If you’re in Fairbanks, Alaska, you can hear me on KFAR-AM Saturday morning at 9 a.m. Alaska time. For those elsewhere, you can listen live online and an archive will be online later if you miss it live. If you’re in the central time zone, as I am, air time is noon Saturday.

I’ll be interviewed on a show called Patriot’s Lament, which specializes in topics of interest to libertarians and anarchists, so this is a rare opportunity to appear on radio with people already family with my political belief system.

In preparation for the show, I’ve been listening to its archives. They’ve recently interviewed some of the real rock stars of the libertarian/anarchist community, people such as Lew Rockwell, Jeffrey Tucker, Tom DiLorenzo, Larkin Rose, Scott Horton and Ben Stone.

It’s a very laid-back show and I’m looking forward to a great conversation. I hope you can join us.

Winners get to write history books. Nelson Mandela was on the right side of history and he also won his struggle. When he died Thursday, he died as a hero to most people.

I don’t know of a soul who’s all sinner or all saint, but history likes to paint with a broad brush. We don’t like to let people be human and see them as a mixture of good and bad. We want to glorify or vilify them. Current history has passed its verdict on Mandela, though. He’s a saint.

I think Mandela was more complicated than that. He was a leader in the movement to free black South Africans from a government that treated them as little better than slaves. He evolved over time into a sophisticated spokesman for his movement. And he was part of negotiating a deal which changed South Africa without the bloodshed that comes so often with struggles such as this.

But some people claim he was a terrorist and a communist, as his detractors said more than 5o years ago. A British historian claimed last year that he had unearthed evidence confirming Mandela’s membership in the communist party in South Africa. And the Soviet Union was widely believed to supply money and other support to further the rebellion in its early years.

Almost anyone who has led a rebellion has been guilty of atrocities or at least allowing terrible things to be done. The British considered the American revolutionaries to be terrorists, although they had slightly different language two centuries ago. (And some of the American revolutionaries certainly adopted terrorist tactics. Read about the man who history remembers as “the Swamp Fox” sometime.)

Your irregular fighter is a terrorist. Mine is a freedom fighter.

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Random recent thoughts that never led to longer pieces, sometimes because of time constraints:

I’m amused by the dishonest games that some companies and political causes play today related to Super Bowl ads. Here’s the new way to get attention. Make a cheap 30-second spot with a controversial message that you know the NFL will reject. (There are plenty of mainstream bidders for those ads, so the NFL doesn’t need to take a chance on causing controversy that it can avoid. Any savvy media buyer can explain this to you.)

Then submit the ad to the league and wait to be told that it’s not the sort of ad the NFL wants for the Super Bowl. After that, start yelling loudly about censorship and then get outraged people online to all share your banned” ad — an ad that nobody else would have watched otherwise. This way, tons of people see your ad and you’re not required to pay $4 million for an ad that you couldn’t afford anyway. Smart, huh? Yes, but very dishonest.

A gun company is doing it this year. PETA was doing it as far back as 2009. And others have been doing it since then. Some might see it as just being smart, but I see it as really dishonest, because the people who are complaining about being banned had no intention of spending $4 million to ran an ad. (Most of them almost certainly had no ability to spend that kind of money for 30 seconds of air time.)

Trying to write something that’s completely honest and true is difficult, because ego and “spin” try hard to get into the way. The more honest and true I can be with my words, the more simple and clean they feel to me. When my ego has an agenda, the words seem convoluted and slimy, even if they’re persuasive, like what you’d expect from a used car salesman. Writing anything that’s completely clean and honest is hard, but when it happens, it feels as though I’ve cleaned something on the inside. I wish I could feel more often that I’ve successfully done it.

I’ve recently realized that one of the biggest reasons I look forward to making a lot of money is that it will give me the ability to patronize the rare artists who I actually care about supporting in a semi-serious way. I don’t care about the trappings of wealth that matter to most people, but the idea of being able to underwrite the production of an album that would otherwise go unrecorded or a film that I want to see produced is a powerful incentive.

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