Once when I was a young man, walking off a hangover, I happened to cross the abbreviated lawn of what was then a diminutive Fresno City Collete Campus.

The totality of the campus was disected by a street. It was a Saturday morning, and a squared-off, regrigerated truck was stopped in the middle of the street disecting the campus. Usually, no one was there on a Saturday morning, but this morning there was a palpable crush of people queued up against the rear of the open truck. They seemed to be coming and going, like ants moving eggs from a nest going underwater.

As I approached I couldn't help notice that people my age were exiting the area with one or more packages of bacon in their hands. I stopped one and asked, "What's up."

"Get some bacon he said," it's for Patty Hearst, the SLA, you know."

I did know. I wasn't a political animal at the time, that's why I was basically in the area walking off a hangover, but I had read that Patty Hearst, heiress to the Heast publishing empire, had been kidnapped, by a group calling themselves the Symbionese Liberation Army.

Only the day before, one single day, the SLA had announced on TV that food was to be handed out to the people the very next dat or Patty would be the worse for wear. I didn't think much about it because I didn't think much about anything that wasn't abstract and came out of a book at the time.

But, there it was, the truck, the food, and the people. I was and am still not a vegetarian, so I made my way to the back of the truck and politley accepted two pounds of Patty Hearst freedom bacon. I had nothing against Patty, wished the best for her, and felt just a touch of pride that I had become politically involved by taking a bit of the heat off Patty by accepting the bacon.

Patty later became a victim of Stockholm syndrome as the beret-topped, rifle-toting "Tanya"; or she did not. Nonetheless, I always look back at that moment of political involvement, of that bacon, lettuce, and tomatoe, with mayonaise day, with a sort of mystical amuse.

"Pull back the paddles, turn off the juice, note the time, it's Flatline."

and the political nuts think its bad now

they shoulda seen Chicago during the convention

or Kent State