Baby Ralph and Baby Billy

Cleaning out my email box, here's a story from last fall.

On a trip last fall to California, just before the election...

I saw a talk hosted by author Stephen Elliott with special guest rock star/wannabe poet Billy Corgan.

Corgan can be a tough interview, slouching and sparring with the interviewer until he warms up. But definitely interesting and not afraid to be full of contradictions.

The crowd was younger than I thought it would be and aside from the digital camera flashes very polite, like high school English students. I should have expected as much. I saw the Pumpkins on one of their last tours, a stop in Rosemont Horizon as it was called then, about seven years ago.

Easiest concert EVER to buy beer, as the average age was about 16, and lots of kids were with Dad and Mom or had the minivan waiting for them afterward. MTV I guess.

The topic of voting came up, and the rock star said he wouldn’t be. (After all, he did once write that the world is a vampire - so what would be the point?)

He said the standard nonvoter line about how it doesn’t make a difference.

It reminded me of my viewing of Ralph Nader the day before at San Francisco State University. Old Ralph and Billy are on the money, so to speak, about the system being corrupt and needing to be fixed.

Not voting? It sounds romantic, but ultimately lazy (as is writing poetry without reading it first, as Corgan claimed he did, but that's another story).

Taken to its extreme, if everybody decided not to vote, then the system would have to change? I fail to see the logic.

Sure politics is corrupt. So is the business I am in, and you are in, and, most definitely the one that has paid Corgan’s salary.

But apathy doesn't fix anything.

Neither does being petulant like Nader. I'd have had more respect for him (and I do respect the great things he has done by being an advocate) if he had said in January he was going to run and worked his way to polling larger numbers. What he did when he did seemed merely an attempt again to muddy the waters (to Bush's advantage).

Again, taken to its extreme, what next, that things will get sooo bad under Bush's second term the system will have to be changed? If Ralphie Boy is right about him, he’s willing to take that risk?

Judging by the applause-o-meter for both Corgan's and Nader's statements at least in their own crowds, not a good number were buying it.

Nor were they buying Nader.

In one of the strangest moments (after Nader tossing aside a bottle of water left at the podium, or the socialists and LaRouchies in the lobby, or the sweet, chubby Palestinian kid with a speech impediment), after Ralph spoke, one of his buddies spoke then begged for donations in that PBS sort of way.

He got one college coed to pledge $1,000 (on Mom's Visa?) but not too many other takers (it's a campus for Christ’s sake -- he should have offered a kegger). And like PBS, if you pledged $75 you got a Nader book.

Needless to say, I bought neither Nader’s tome nor Corgan’s “poetry.”