{"id":2811,"date":"2003-08-28T21:57:44","date_gmt":"2003-08-28T21:57:44","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/staging.armedliberal.com\/?p=570"},"modified":"2003-08-28T21:57:44","modified_gmt":"2003-08-28T21:57:44","slug":"defending-cruz-for-once","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/?p=2811","title":{"rendered":"Defending Cruz…For Once"},"content":{"rendered":"

OK, it’s time to make a confession. I’m remiss in not getting to this sooner, but Joe Katzman yanked my chain on it, and it’s time to say something.
\nI was a member of MEChA<\/b>. Yup, back in my college days in the early 70’s, back when it was being started. As you may have noted below, I have a bunch of Hispanic in my background<\/a> (even though my Spanish – now almost all gone in favor of French – sounds like California elementary-school Spanish, which it is), and while at school, I tended to hang out with the political kids. I was a member for a quarter or two, until my political interests became more theoretical, and I realized that talking identity politics with a bunch of poor Latino kinds from the Central Valley was a little hypocritical for the half white boy from Beverly Hills.
\nSo MEChA.
\nBack in the early days (as I dimly recall), the black students were well-organized, and they had their positions down. Simply being black trumped all other political arguments (remember this was at U.C. Santa Cruz, where Huey got his PhD). The Latino students felt …. how else can I say it? … left out. Brown Power and Chicano identity issues were beginning to get attention, and so, voil\u00e1, MEChA.
\nMy recollection was of a group with three themes: a political identity discussion group, a fairly mainstream ethnic ‘interest group’ and mutual support group, seeded with a tiny group of radicals, lacking only the courage to cross the line into terrorism. While that described MEChA, it also pretty much described every left-of-center campus political group, Jewish, Christian, feminist, gay, etc. etc. during the early 70’s<\/b>. Whatever brush MEChA can be tarred with can equally apply to the entire range of the campus Left from about 1969 to 1978, the time with which I had contact with it. By ’78 it had become institutionalized, as we see it today, with the ASB budgets diverted to identity-politics-pork.
\nBut in the early years, it definitely held an edge.
\nAnyone my age (50) ought to be able to look back on a campus littered with fervent leaflets talking about the imminent collapse of Western civilization as THE REVOLUTION arrives. I’m pretty sure that the undergraduate engineering group did some as well, I know the physics support group did.
\nI’m sure there were some nutball Aztlan fanatics among the early members of MEChA. I’m equally certain that for the most part it served as a benign support network for a bunch of poor Latino kinds, newly offered the opportunity of a U.C. education thanks to affirmative action, who have gone on to become realtors, dentists, Rotary members, and semi-corrupt state politicians.
\nSo while I’m no fan of Cruz in many departments, this is certainly a weak attack to make, and I can personally attest to that.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

OK, it’s time to make a confession. I’m remiss in not getting to this sooner, but Joe Katzman yanked my chain on it, and it’s time to say something. I was a member of MEChA. Yup, back in my college days in the early 70’s, back when it was being started. As you may have […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":8,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2811"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/8"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2811"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2811\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2811"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2811"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2811"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}