(2 pm. – promoted by ek hornbeck)
When I was growing up my mother talked on one or more occasions about the war between the two leading cooked cereals in her tiny piece of the world of Astoria, OR. I have no idea whether the war was limited to the tiny historical outpost, was regional or even .national but the entire market was split between two contenders.
Proponents on each side declared their cereal was better tasting, fresher, more nutritious, whatever. Both were prepared in the same vat and poured into different boxes.
Like today’s Democrats and Republicans.
Oh sure, the Democrats have Alan Grayson in the House and Elizabeth Warren and Jeff Merkeley in the Senate. Somehow I often forget [shame on me] Tom Harkin who says he told Obama before the inauguration that Obama might as well take a 4 year vacation if the Senate didn’t reform the filibuster rules.
The Republicans have no such people but the wagging tail is not the whole of a dog.
I wrote my usual despised whine largely about the highly lauded Mary Jo on a diseased stock board devoted to a battered stock
http://ragingbull.quote.com/mb…
before reading David Sirota’s masterful dissection of the appointment with reference to a number of other dissenters:
http://www.salon.com/2013/01/2…
For me, that column was a ray of sunshine on a very cold day.
We may have all the impact on the national conversation of grumbling in a dark alley that homeless people call home but at least we are not alone.
Best, Terry
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Five women gathered in a church to talk about the unimaginable at the time: womens suffrage.
It is now a national monument. Obama will likely never get there but he did pay homage from on high.
Not bad from one of the great imposters leading the sheep astray.
The powerful are powerful because they are powerful and will continune to be because there is virtually no opposition. The average person is happy to go along because there’s cable TV, games, sports, gossip, a steady stream of music on demand, video on demand and so on–what’s not to like?
As I’ve said endlessly over the past decade or two the problem is that the left in this country is badly divided and ideologically incoherent so that the powerful don’t have any clear opposition. Complaining and whining about how “it’s not fair” is pathetic.
I suggest that even those to the left of the Democratic Party center are just as phony. I’m not going to blame reproters on the left who do a yeoman’s job of getting the facts out–most of them are a very positive force. The people I blame are the theorists who simply are unable to create a clear ideology based on sound reasoning. The more government/less government argument is about as ideological as discussion gets in this country.
I’m not going to waste my time explaining realpolitik to leftists, it’s a useless exercise. But let’s be clear here, marching around saying “we” are the 99% is childish and useless unless you have both a clear program and a clear analysis–particularly whne 80% of the people are against them, not because of ideological reasons but for clear cultural reasons–seeing young bohos marching around who aren’t going to school aren’t working is just not going to cut it in America unless people could see a clear path that these people on the left were actually building something.
I don’t mean to go on and on about this, Terry, but I have been, for years absolutely discouraged not about Obama going right or any of that but about the left floundering in idiocy–all we have is good information but we are unable to weave a narrative around it or a clear course of action that is more than Quixotic. And we are most certainly not alone–that’s the tragic part–we should be a dynamic and robust movement and why we are not should be a subject of discussion here but it isn’t and won’t ever be.
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Herding cats is no easy task but I wonder if even we could agree on what a lefty is.
Christopher Hitchens and Alexander Cockburn used to alternate as lead columnists in The Nation. The pair spilled a lot of their ink attacking each other until Hitchens left, or was fired or something, by the “socialist” magazine that didn’t fit my definition of socialist any more than Bernie Sanders does.
Hitchens was clearly a liberal detested by most liberals for his hawkish views but the far more fiery Cockburn was the more difficult to define I think. In some ways Cockburn appeared to me as a kind of living replica of Jefferson, who was an insular, protectionist, irascible racist about as far from being a socialist as the outer reaches of the galaxy are from us. I gave up reading Cockburn and The Nation when Cockburn parroted Johnnie Cochran’s cock and bull “evidence” in the OJ trial. My stomach can take only so much punishment as I had found out with food poisoning in India.
What united Hitchens and Cockburn and Jefferson and anyone remotely liberal was the yearning for freedom and against tyranny documented in the immortal Declaration of Independence that has universal appeal even yet.
Thomas Paine is my idea of the ultimate liberal, whose stirring words kept the American Revolution alive in its darkest hours, according to George Washington, and returned to the fringes when the revolution was done.
The War of the Poets in 1913 in Ireland lasted what – a week, two weeks, three. One of two or three leaders who somehow escaped hanging became the president of an independent, reactionary government ruled by the clergy as centuries of war for independence succeeded and the bloodshed increased. Poets and other liberals don’t make great generals but they do somehow win even after death – and then fail miserably.
Is it any wonder liberals don’t hang well together but feed the gibbets and guillotines quite adequately?
Best, Terry