tsider Moves In

It doesn’t require a mountain of qualifications to be a city councilman, as members of city councils throughout Southern California have demonstrated for years.

It helps if one can tie his own shoes and remember where he lives, but even the inability to do that isn’t an obstacle to holding public office.

I know for certain that Jerry Rubin can do both. I have personally witnessed him tying his own sneakers and I also know that his wife, Marissa, has trained him to find his way home.

That sounds like city council material to me, and it doesn’t surprise me that he’s running in Santa Monica.

For those confused by the name, this is not the Jerry Rubin who was killed in a traffic accident six years ago. That Jerry Rubin, a wild-eyed Yippie-turned-Yuppie and member of the infamous Chicago 7, remains dead.

The live Jerry Rubin of whom I speak has been a social activist in and around L.A. for more than 20 years, involving himself in such varied activities as the antiwar movement and the rights of henna tattooers to maintain booths on city streets.

He is as familiar as sand along the Venice boardwalk and equally familiar on Santa Monica’s Third Street Promenade, seated solemnly at his table and looking a little like someone awaiting sentence.

At both locations he sells bumper stickers and badges relating to peace and love and other nice things to benefit the Alliance for Survival, of which he is a director.

If it makes you happy and doesn’t hurt, Rubin is for it.

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I have known him for just about all of the years he has been an activist. I have seen him march, chant, fast, feast, sing, plant trees for peace and otherwise wave dove feathers in the faces of those who rattle sabers.

He has gone to jail five times for peace, once notably for “squooshing” a pie in the face of nuclear physicist Edward Teller to protest the arms race. When the Cold War ended, he went after guns, pollution and other harmful stuff.

There is no question in my mind that Rubin, 56, is able to fulfill a commitment. To test him once years ago, I took him to lunch during the 49th day of a 50-day fast.

While his eyes misted as his observed my pastrami sandwich and while he watched every movement of my hand as it went from plate to mouth, he made no effort to assault me and wrest the sandwich away. He only said, in a voice made wistful by denial, “Eating is such a beautiful thing.”

I met with him at lunch again the other day. Though not fasting at the moment, he demonstrated an undeniable talent for civic politics, preferring to talk rather than eat.

What he was talking about was the fact that he was quite serious about running for the Santa Monica City Council, although he didn’t think he could win. He wasn’t even sure yet whether he’d be voting for himself in November.

In a way, he just wants to be out there calling attention to various issues, as though he were still marching or squooshing custard pies in everyone’s face.

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“I’m running a different kind of campaign,” he said as I ate and he talked. “I won’t accept any donations, I don’t want any endorsements, and I’d rather that volunteers did what they’re already doing instead of going to work for me.”

He has printed 5,000 fliers announcing his quest for the council and will meet with voters or anyone else at the Interactive Cafe on the first Thursday of each month, but that’s it.

“And sure as the Lord made Henry Ford, you’ll lose,” I said.

He shrugged. Confronting the issues was important, not winning; questioning, discussing, debating, demanding.

That’s what he’s always done. Over the past two decades, Rubin has attended hundreds of council meetings. He has stood, often alone, in the face of adversity and spoken his mind, disagreers be damned.

“I’m an outsider,” he said, “and will always be an outsider, even if I’m elected.”

I guess that’s what I’ve always liked about this guy who wears shorts and a T-shirt no matter where he is, although now he is wearing longer, more traditional shorts, rather than the briefer trunks he used to wear.

He is like a ghost from the 1960s, reminding us of the promises we once made to each other, to the generation and to the world. And reminding us, too, that we were once a society of outsiders, but now we’re fat, comfortable and on the inside.

Perhaps it’s time to let a real outsider in to turn us inside-out again.

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Al Martinez’s column appears Sundays and Wednesdays. He can be reached online at al.martinez@latimes.com