PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION 2000 - OFFICIAL CANDIDATES

Stephen Gaskin

Those who were 1960's radicals will remember Stephen Gaskin as the San Francisco State creative writing instructor who gathered together 400 hippies and a squadron of old school buses and took off on a "speaking" tour of the U.S. bringing his psychedelic message to some 42 states. The caravan finally settled in Somerville, Tennessee where they founded an alternative community known simply as "The Farm." Gaskin's Farm is alive and flourishing in the year 2000 and Gaskin himself is actively seeking the Green Party nomination for the presidency.

If you can make your eyes focus past the tie-dyed flashing banner on his candidacy web page, you'll find that decriminalizing marijuana is no longer his first agenda - it's actually only number three on his platform. Universal Health Care comes first with the intriguing comment, "Everyone gets taken care of while we argue about the money." The same approach - let's just do it and sort out the details later is also applied to his education plank which would educate everyone through junior college on merit. Clearly he reasons that, if you just go ahead and start a good program, a good idea, a way will be found to pay for it - not unlike the way many Americans run their personal finances. Whether that would work on a national level remains to be seen, but this concept as well as his repeated statement that, "A CORPORATION IS NOT A PERSON. (and money is not its free speech either)" is going to appeal to a lot of grass-roots activists.

In the course of his campaign, Gaskin has also revealed a surprising side of his history. Discussing gays in the military, he offers a poignant, personal anecdote from his own days as a U.S. Marine in Korea, serving alongside a gay comrade. To our knowledge, he is the only candidate to speak from such firsthand experience on this serious issue. At 65, this aging hippie (he spells it "hippy") has a lot of name recognition among his peers stemming out of both his counterculture notoriety of yore and his steady stream of political and philosophical books. The Greens could do worse, though Gaskin's ideology and presentation will appeal more to the radical fringe than to the Green Party's yuppie constituency.

There's a certain warm nostalgia in knowing that, 30 years later, Stephen Gaskin is still on the bus.

- JS