"Ken, you do have one thing in common with Hitchens: he doesn't watch TV either. He told me he once tried to say TV is something you appear on rather than watch, but it came out so old-fartishly he dropped it."
KL: Bully for Hitchens, but for me it would not be a political test. I avoid television in the fear that I'd never get any reading or writing done if I became addicted, as so many of my friends and comrades are -- like avoiding marijuana for fear it would lead me back to the hard stuff, tobacco.
Peter: "Whether we like it or not, I agree with Calvin Trillin who says we need leftists on TV - that's where most people get their news."
KL: Trillin is not a star in this household, but he is the foil of a family joke. Shortly after I moved to State College, Pennsylvania, Trillin came to interview me for his New Yorker article about the Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission spy files. He observed that I spent most of my time in the library, and reported that I had left Mississippi for that reason. Actually, I had followed my heart, and Trillin was obtuse not to have realized that (he arrived here when the air in our home was still electric with endorfins). Whenever a new acquaintance asks why I came here, my sweetheart butts in saying, "According to Calvin Trillin, Ken came here for the library."
Peter: "If Conniff and Hitchens and Doug are good at that sort of thing, I wish them all the best."
I do too, if they preach a radical message. Not having seen them at work in this arena, I'll say I hope they do, but fear that -- for Hitchens, at least -- it's a form of entertainment that identifies the left with snobbery, not with grass-roots insurgency and liberation. When has Hitchens ever rallied anyone to militant action? Perhaps the problem is that we have so few living models with any degree of mass media exposure, so that even some participants on this list view the crumbs as banquets.
Peter: "Cockburn has also made a good point by saying that there soon will be a crisis of oversaturation of 'Sabbath gasbags.' "
KL: That term was Trillin's coinage.
Peter: "Why can't leftists fill some more of the slots?"
KL: My old comrade from anti-repression organizing, Jeff Cohen, moved from L.A. to New York to set up a media monitoring group Fairness and Accuracy In Reporting that focuses on this problem. FAIR's magazine Extra! puts forth as solid a liberal argument as one could wish toward this goal, expending a lot of resources along the way, but has not yet displayed much success. But alternatives are daunting too, so I send in my annual pittance to help. At the founding convention of the Committees of Correspondence, Carl Davidson proclaimed the Internet as the answer to radicals' communication media requirements, but that too has been illusory thus far.
Peter: "Cockburn has taken a lot of flack, on this list even, for saying we shouldn't give up on the militia folks and their potential recruits. Here I agree with him. A teacher friend of mine has become friends with a fellow teacher who was once neo-nazi gang member in the working class suburbs of Chicago. This tatoo-covered, Jesse Ventura look-alike repented and even has a Jewish girlfriend now. He's still a crazy man, though."
KL: You are confusing two opposite political realities. It is important to agitate politically among the enemy's natural constituency, as I did for two decades among white Mississippians to win them away from white supremacy and to join in class solidarity. That is not at all Alex's view; he praise them, and urges the left to join with and support the militias, while confining his anti-racist rhetoric to his left fan club. But there is a different point to be made here about the failure of white so-called progressives. Back in the seventies, when we were organizing against the Grand Gulf nuclear power plant at Port Gibson, Mississippi, we held one of the largest demonstrations against nuclear power anywhere. Claiborne County was about 65 percent Black then, and still has a Black majority. Local folks did most of the organizing, but white Mississippi radicals also mobilized constituencies statewide, so that the demonstration had a respectable showing of poor and working class whites in attendance, among a mainly Black crowd. The failure was on the part of the national, mainly white liberal, anti-nuclear and environmental organizations, who did not take even token notice. This was especially scandalous because the Grand Gulf plant had been struck by a tornado during its construction, which cut a gash in the containment dome, and and enormous crack in the cooling tower, visible for miles. (Like an inverted Liberty Bell, that cracked tower became our Mississippi Catfish Alliance symbol.) They passed up an opportunity for magnificently symbolic protest because the organizers were Black, and the demands reflected the full spectrum of the local community's concerns.
Peter: "Granted, maybe my views on Cockburn and Hitchens are distorted by the fact that they are very pleasant and cordial in person, even to a 28-year-old nobody like myself."
KL: Stop thinking of yourself as a nobody and they'll seem less impressive.
Ken Lawrence