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I read, with great personal interest, Eddie Dean’s article on Takoma Park’s rebel-in-residence Michael McCarthy (“Fringe Revival,” 10/31). McCarthy did not set out to serve as a Takoma Park city councilmember. He simply began his activism to point out the numerous hypocrisies of that city’s leaders and cohorts. McCarthy doesn’t hate hippies or anyone else. We both work at the D.C. prison complex in Lorton, Virginia. I assure you, if McCarthy hated all those groups that many in Takoma Park’s intelligentsia have purported, he wouldn’t have lasted in a place where unconditional love and support make all the difference—sometimes between life and death.

McCarthy saw something wrong, and with his letters and campaign for office, sought to right it. Win or lose, we will have made a difference, because we participated in, and supported, the greatest political process in history—democracy. As for those in Takoma Park, and elsewhere, who believe they can unconditionally and tyrannically rule for life—beware. McCarthy and other brave persons like him will not allow you to thrive in our form of government.

As for Larry Rubin and the like, I for one am glad they are around. Democracy could not, and should not, survive without those who seek its daily destruction. That system’s strength is in its polite—yet stern—resistance to despotism and demagoguery.

By the way, I am a Jew from Brooklyn, but I weigh 265 at best—soaking wet, that is.

Germantown, Md.