AS YOU’VE PROBABLY ALREADY SEEN, the New York Dolls came out last month with a cute song, Dance Like a Monkey, complete with matching video. In it, the lead monkey seduces a prim & proper woman carrying an “Intelligent Design” picket sign into freeing her inner simian and accepting evolution.

This inspired Rob Crowther, PR specialist at the Discovery Institute, to pen a desperately hopeful item, eagerly pointing at the fact that the “chorus … proclaim[s] evolution is so obsolete”.

Crowther’s Morton’s Demon must have blinded him to the ample noodle-time granted to the Flying Spaghetti Monster, and to Pat Robertson getting – how to put this – forcibly married to a gorilla. Trying hard to contain himself, Crowther cautions us that “The jury is still out on what it all means about their views on evolution and ID.”

Ah yes, desperate hope. Reading this triggered a bittersweet flashback to my younger, brash days as a Libertarian Party activist.

Those were the days: 1980. All those mainstream free-marketers may have been celebrating the start of the wimpy Reagan Revolution, but we Libertarians were the true vanguard of the revolution of liberty. Dick Randolph had spearheaded the initiative to repeal the Alaska state income tax, and was riding the issue into the state legislature as a Libertarian. Ed Clark had received 5.5% of the vote for California governor two years prior, and now he and his billionaire running mate, Charles Koch, were spending freely and getting a bit of notice in the Presidential race. The Libertarian Party was on the move – America’s Fastest Growing Political Party(TM)!

On election night, we saw that Clark/Koch had gotten 1.1% of the vote – in Alaska we got a very impressive 11.7%, half that of Jimmy Carter and more votes than media darling John Anderson. The LP was getting respectful press, and for the next several years we pursued a strategy of getting as many candidates on the ballot as possible. So what if most of us were paper candidates? When you looked at the ballot in that voting booth, almost every race before you had three names, competing head-to-head. We really did look like true contenders.

But over the years, it got harder & harder to see any real progress for the LP. Each election campaign rolled around, and there we were on election night, scanning the numbers to see if our candidates had done any better than the last campaign. The trouble was, all the networks had stopped reporting the numbers for minor-party candidates! We had become, simply, invisible on election night.

We were reduced to adding up the percentages shown for the major candidates, subtracting the number from 100%, and imputing from that the LP candidate’s vote. “Oh look, 99.04%… That means Joe Schmoe (LP senate candidate) must’ve gotten almost a whole percent! That’s much better than the 0.63% Mary Smith got 2 years ago. And the rural precincts haven’t even come in yet…”

Between elections, our hopes would be rekindled every time the news flashed over the libertarian BBSes that some new celebrity mentioned the word “libertarian”. Clint Eastwood once said somewhere that he was more of a libertarian than a conservative! See? There’s no reason to despair; the Fastest Growing Political Party is surely still on track to vanquish the old statist parties. Just one or two more election cycles… you’ll see…

Desperately hopeful.

For some of us, the writing was on the wall early on. For many others it took longer to face reality. I’m still mostly a libertarian on the issues, and I’ll always harbor a pang of resentment against the corrupt conspiracy between the two-party system and the MSM for suppressing the news of the impending Libertarian revolution – but even I eventually faced reality: The Libertarian Party’s time had come and gone. Turn out the lights. It’s OVER.

So, Rob, please, from someone who’s been there: Dance like a Monkey is not evidence that ID is about to emerge victorious in the culture wars.

p.s. Oooh, oooh, I think there was a mention of the LP on the Simpsons a few seasons back. Yep, no kidding! Can ANYTHING stop the LP now???