Supporters of perennial presidential candidate Lyndon LaRouche are perhaps best known for their signs featuring Barack Obama with a Hitler mustache, and for their backing of Rachel Brown — the baby-faced gadfly whom Barney Frank famously compared to a "dining-room table" at a Dartmouth town-hall meeting — in her run for Congress.
But it turns out that some local LaRouchies have talents beyond a knack for public harassment.
Indeed, their renditions of classical works from Robert Schumann and other composers were good enough to retain nearly 40 random and possibly duped attendees in the Brookline Main Library last week, at a Rachel-Brown-for-Congress event that at moments transcended ordinary fringe craziness.
At a glance, the show flyers that Brown operatives hung around Brookline appeared to be largely apolitical, with a portrait of Schumann filling the page and the words CLASSICAL CONCERT in big letters. But a closer look quickly revealed something much more insidious: in addition to honoring Schumann's 200th birthday, the performance was tuned to metaphorically reject "the crazy Obama administration and moral degenerate 'Bail-Out' Barney Frank," whom Brown is now challenging in Massachusetts's fourth congressional district.
The content of Brown's half-hour diatribe, which came between the first and second pieces on the program, was no surprise to anyone familiar with her former work. To be found in Brown's trash heap of unintelligible talking points: "[Obama] would rather the nation collapse than admit he is wrong," American citizens are no longer being trained to make discoveries, and the United States should tunnel underneath the Bering Strait so as to connect Russia and Alaska. Brown also spent much of her time touting a "future-oriented Mars colonization" proposal, which might answer the question Frank asked her back in Dartmouth: "On what planet do you spend most of your time?" (Watch the entire loony performance — with rant — above.)
The senior citizens and non-English-speakers in the crowd seemed untroubled by, if not unaware of, Brown's comical indictment of her opponent and Obama. Everybody else just seemed relieved when she shut up and let her comrades bless the gallery with their gracefully executed classical selections. Two apparently well-off 60-something couples simply chuckled at Brown's inanity, perhaps unaware that her literature tied their lifestyle to the Third Reich: "The culture which [the notoriously anti-Semitic] Wagner represented," according to the flyer, "was later imposed upon and accepted by the failed Baby-Boomer generation."
In Sarah Palin's America, there's always a chance that an attractive nutcase could upset an entrenched incumbent like Frank in the September 14 primary. But like the representative said at a June 13 Brookline Democratic Town Committee meeting: "I don't feel I'm being all that generous when I urge people to listen to my opponent," said Frank, who does not wish to impeach Obama and is more interested in domestic policy than interplanetary issues. "I don't know if I do better when I talk, or when she talks."
