The Weird Online World of Saul Alinsky (and some good information, too)
When I was in high school, and later on in college, I spent a lot of time rummaging through used bookstores and often I’d come across early ’70s era mass paperback copies of Saul Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals or Reveille for Radicals. (Both books are still in print, btw, from Vintage Books).
Fast forward through almost thirty years of trickle-down economics, conservative “wrecking crew” attacks on government, deregulation…to the upcoming inauguration of Barack Obama.
I wanted to find out more about Saul Alinsky after learning how community organizing strategies strengthened Barack Obama’s campaign and, it seems clear, were instrumental in his winning the election.
I started doing some searching online and, as so often happens online, things got very strange very quickly. Here’s what I mean:
If you do a quick Google search on “Saul Alinsky,” you get 226,000 hits. To show you how bizarre things can get, if you do the same search and exclude the word “satanist,” you get 206,000 hits (those numbers will inevitably change as soon as I publish this).
In other words, there are 20,000 web pages out there that make reference to Alinsky in some connection with Satanism. Exclude the word “devil” from your search, too, and you’re really starting to get somewhere — You’ve whittled down the hits by about 11,000 more (he’s been called a lot of other unkind names, too, by the way: “communist fellow travel,” “communist guru,” and worse).
Where does all this Beelzebub hub bub come from?
As far as I can tell, these references stem from a literary allusion that Alinsky made to Lucifer in an interview he did for Playboy in 1972.
Truly, as Hunter S. Thompson once said: “When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro.”
* * *
Alinsky’s polemical style can trip people up because it’s so vivid and provocative. Then, too, he had a prankster’s sensibility that probably influenced everybody from New Leftists to Republican strategists like Lee Atwater.
It doesn’t take much Google searching to see that conservatives spend a lot more time thinking about Saul Alinsky than liberals do — or, at any rate, spend a lot more time blogging about him; In fact, if it weren’t for conservatives kvetching about Alinsky there would be much less online content out there.
Well, all this fringe content made me hunger for some accurate, level-headed information and commentary about this Chicago-born-and-bred community organizer who has been dead for almost forty years. Where could I find that?
You’ve got to do an awful lot of scrolling to find good information, but here are some suggestions:
- His 1972 interview in “Playboy” – great intro to his life story and persona, as well as his ideas
- A 2007 NPR interview with Alinsky biographer Sanford Horwitt (Let Them Call me ‘Rebel’)
- Info about a biographical film on Alinsky (“The Democratic Promise: Saul Alinsky and his Legacy”)
- Web site of the Industrial Areas Foundation (the community organizing group he founded)
- Wikipedia biography
