Amid all this worry of the state of the left's humor, it might be worth bearing in mind how form seems to determine politics in the mass media. Hollywood seems to be dominated by vaguely left-liberal sentiments, for instance. Talk radio is screaming right-wing. Network TV is idiotic centrist. "Alternative" weeklies seem to follow the Village Voice in tending to a kind punk-boho-pomo Marxism (although the NY Press is trying to turn that around). Rock music tends similarly to the left. Why on earth folk music should have been left is beyond me. After all, the volk is capable of being right wing as left, yet for years the entire folk movement was more or less in the orbit of the CP.
Dan Lazare
In a message dated 98-05-21 18:54:05 EDT, you write:
<< Louis Proyect wrote:
>Another thing to think about under the general rubric of leftists being
>INTERESTING. (Humor thus is only one way of keeping people's attention.)
>The left groups in the US are generally "vanity" outfits, like Pacifica
>radio programming or public access cable TV. Without the need to make a
>profit, there is very little feedback mechanism. In the SWP, a group that I
>have the most familiarity with, you had a subsidized newspaper. It lost
>money. Hence the question of its readability was irrelevant.
>
>That is one reason that Doug's LBO and Ken Silverstein's Counterpunch are
>so lively. They have to be if the rent is to be paid.
Lou, how promarket of you.
WBAI, Pacifica's New York station, raises almost all its money from its
listeners, and pays tribute to the central Pacifica organization in
Berkeley. Being listener-supported isn't too much different from what LBO &
Counterpunch are. The stuff that raises the most money for Pacifica,
though, is the health quackery, with the oily Gary Null in the lead. Colon
purification plays much better among the check-writing classes than does
the political economy of taxis or the status of life in Indonesia.
Doug
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Date: Thu, 21 May 1998 18:47:05 -0400
To: lbo-talk at lists.panix.com
From: Doug Henwood <dhenwood at panix.com>
Subject: Re: humor
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