>okay. okay. i can't stand the suspense anymore.
>
>Will __someone__ please tell the rest of us what this alterman guy
>said, so we can judge it for ourselves on its (de)merits.
Unfortunately, The Nation didn't put Alterman's column up on their website, nor did they post Katha Pollitt's excellent column in the new issue that responds to it. Since most Nation subscribers won't get their issues for a few more days, a couple of typed excerpts from Pollitt's column (I'm not enough of a masochist to type in Alterman's prose):
"[I]n his inaugural 'ideas' column in The Nation two weeks ago, Eric Alterman asserted that there are two lefts: the good, if perhaps overly Whitman-loving 'reformist left' - who used to be called liberals before that became a synonym for wuss - and the bad 'Foucaultian' (sic) left, whose chief exemplar is, of all people, Eleanor Roosevelt's biographer Blanche Wiesen Cook, whose previously unsuspected devotion to the divine Michel came as a ibg surprise to her fellow historians. The bookmark in my copy of The History of Sexuality is still where I left it (page 95) in 1996), but I suppose on Alterman's chopping block I'd be sliced as a Foucauldian too, along with - let's see - Patricia Ireland, Barbara Ehrenreich, Adolph Reed, the Last Marxist [Pollitt's name for her companion, Paul Mattick Jr.] and his fellow Ultraleftists, Doug Henwood [who?], Andrew Hacker, the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund and the long list of world leaders who have protested the impending execution of Mumia Abu-Jamal. (Like Michael Moore, Alterman identifies supporters of Mumia's cause with the far-out cultural left, as if saving black men from unfairly applied death sentences - remember the Scottsboro boys? - was not one of the oldest trops of the American left!) On the other hand, I like Walt Whitman's poetry pretty well - too much to be happy to see it reduced to a patriotic anthem, even for Queer Nation, which, let's not forget, is where old Walt would probably be residing were he alive today....
[Paragraphs reporting on "a practical investigation of the race-class-gender question" in Pollitt's neighborhood on Manhattan's Upper West Side, showing substantial sex and racial slotting and discrimination in labor markets, public services, police violence, and domestic relations, omitted.]
I work for a magazine that has hired exactly one black and one Asian-American editorial staffer, and one black columnist, in its 133-year history; except for Katrina vanden Heuvel, I am the only woman writer it has nurtured from a fledgling in the sixteen years I've been here, in which time maybe a dozen white men, and only white men, have been given all sorts of tries at all sorts of topics and slots. The business side has a better record, but even there all the supervisors and department heads are white. How explain these interesting data without the concepts of race and gender?
All you have to do is look squarely at the world you live in an it is perfectly obvious that - as a host of scholars and activists, whom Alterman dismisses as 'the racism/sexism/homophobia crowd,' have documented - race and gender are crucial means through which class is structured. They are not side issues that can be resolved by raising the minimum wage, although that is important, or even by unionizing more workplaces, though that is important too. Inequality in America is too solidly based on racism and sexism for it to be altered without acknowledging race and sex and sexuality. Everybody sees this now - even John Sweeney talks about gay partnership benefits as a working-class issue - except for a handful of old New Leftists, journalists and mini-pundits, white men who practice the identity politics that dare not speak its name."
Doug