Horsing around with Monkey Business

It's hard to get into trouble just for speaking your mind in America these days. Well, legal trouble at least. One of the ways you can still get locked up is for inciting what courts call "imminent lawless action" with your speech. You know, things like telling someone to go out and kill another person, or burn down the nearest Krystal, or put spikes in trees and blow up bulldozers. Dave Foreman and the people over at Earth First! know that, and they're toeing the line about as well as they possibly can. In "More on Earth First and The Monkey Wrench Gang" Foreman is obviously playing dumb and saying what he needs to say to keep his quasi-organization out of trouble. He expresses vague support for extreme pro-environmentalist action (thereby staying true to the tenets of what he believes in and inspiring others) while carefully abstaining from advocating and embracing it (thereby keeping the feds off his back). It seems absurd to assume that Foreman actually has the kind of lukewarm stance toward "monkeywrenching" he feigns in this short essay; "I do not advocate it nor do I not advocate it". In the essay we read earlier this week, he was mad as hell and wasn't going to take it from the establishment anymore. He was even throwing out the phrase "Neo-Luddite" as early as the first paragraph. Foreman rebuts the claim that the environmentalist movement has been successful and rattles off a laundry list of problems immediately after stressing how important action is in philosophy. The call to arms cry at the end is missing because it would very likely get him arrested. So props to Earth First! for toeing the line, and toeing it well. They may be radical, but they're sure as hell not stupid.