Have Conscience, Will Travel

Here comes Santa Claus, and look! Isn’t that Jerry Rubin right behind him?

On the calendar of secular saints, this is the busiest time of year for a Jewish boy from Philly who is the Peacenag of Venice, the city’s full-time social conscience, as persistent as prickly heat and sometimes more welcome.

There’s his speech today to the county’s child abuse prevention program. Friday is the John Lennon memorial observance outside Capitol Records. The new Toys R Us in Santa Monica opens Saturday, close enough to walk there with his picket sign.

Then he has penciled in the New Year’s Eve Jerry Garcia memorial fund-raiser, a love-not-war Valentine’s Day with a safe-arrow Cupid, the Three Mile Island anniversary in March, Earth Day in April, a peace march commemoration in June, Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August, and back around to Christmas--Christmas!

For Christmases past, he has melted down toy guns, steamrollered toy guns, swapped them for blue teddy bears, had a magician make them disappear. Yet this season, the high school dropout with a practical PhD in the photo op is running thin on ideas, hard-pressed to think up new camera-friendly gimmicks to swing the news media’s lenses away from murdered models and uncircumcised councilmen toward his idea of durable and enduring issues.

Why do you have to climb a building with a banner to get coverage? He wants to know. His is a unified field theory of activism. His brief includes nuclear war, nuclear waste, war toys, environmental ravages on land and sea, homelessness. His empathy is unalloyed: When he gives me a gun-swap teddy bear smelling of incense from his apartment, I randomly stick onto it the anti-war-toys button he also gave me. He looks horrified: “Not on his head! “

He is a 51-year-old man who can’t type, has no fax, and is overwhelmed at the thought of operating a computer. But his answering machine is fail-safe, and reporters all over town know that a good contrary sound bite is just a phone call away.

(The sound bite is pure reflex; he can’t help himself. The French nuclear tests get mentioned. “I’ve given up French kissing as a protest,” he says neatly. Cut, print.)

Every event generates a press release. Rubin cannot buy the answer that his cause du jour is “old news.” What, he asks, is old news about nuclear immolation, about toxic suicide, about kids “running around and pretending to kill each other?”

*

In a Santa Monica coffeehouse, Rubin boldly orders a cup of coffee. He has finally returned to the jittery solace of caffeine after 20 years; there is such a thing as being too extreme, he allows.

People come and go, women in wind-chime earrings, men in goatees and Neal Cassady sunglasses. Not surprisingly, some of them know him, for he has spent 16 years of weekends on the Venice boardwalk, schlepping folding tables and cartons of peace ephemera onto the bus to sell bumper stickers and post petitions and stamp the hands of passersby with a peace symbol in nontoxic ink, and in the process getting as tanned as a toasted marshmallow.

A woman stops by to fill him in on their showdown that morning over grading of a wetlands site. Everyone was going to lie down in front of the bulldozers for the press, but while the press showed up, the bulldozers did not.

He congratulates her on her unflagging optimism. Hey, she answers, thank you for everything you always do.

When he arrived in 1967 from Philly, a California guy said to him, “ ‘Talking to all you East Coast people makes me so hyper.’ I said, ‘Well, talking to all you California people after a while makes me want to take a nap.’ ”

The tan is camouflage; Rubin has never really mellowed. No matter is too minor for the scrutiny of his scruples, nor for the urge to communicate it. He is conscience-stricken on all our behalfs, our cod liver oil, dosing us whether we like it or not.

When Cesar Chavez’s name comes up, he allows as how he’s been dying to taste a grape, just one. Maybe an organic grape? He clasps his hands and looks up. OK, Cesar?

*

On the front door of the condo are two signs: “Please Remove Shoes” and “Fire Alert, Save My Pets”--his two cats, Pumpkin and Max.

Inside, he rummages in a large brown Kinko’s bag for press releases, and then replenishes with purified water a cookie sheet that sits in his Kenmore freezer like an Olympic ice rink. When Congress tried to pass a flag burning amendment, Rubin countered by freezing the flag he carried on a cross-country peace march.

In Philly, he was the kid the other kids laughed it, with glasses, the kid who had an epileptic seizure at his own bar mitzvah.

If people laugh at him now, too, he wouldn’t be surprised--Jewish guy in a Santa suit who stages hunger strikes at the drop of a budget item, who could sum up his well-publicized earnestness with the bumper sticker, “Stop Bad Things” if he had a car, which he doesn’t.

But if it takes them laughing to pay attention, to get on the news, what the hell. “I owe some debts to . . . whatever. Our planet.”