"The white left in New York is moribund"

[Jim Westrich]

At 05:18 PM 2/12/99 , you wrote:

>Yes, I thought that was pretty funny, too.  The author of that Salon
>piece, Neal Pollack, is ID'd as "a staff writer for the Chicago Reader."
>I guess you can blame the "lake effect" for his rather modest NYC street
>smarts.


I know Neal (he's was a fellow Inkblot at Chicago Ink when I did some
things there).  He has interesting politics.  He is a nice guy and a good
writer.  He has some definite "progressive" leanings but little patience or
empathy for people to the "left" of him.  

He is a true champion of the little guy (he has written some very
thoughtful pieces on Daley's crackdown of street vendors) but never really
integrated those pieces into a wider economic context.  He likes to do
things from a very "streetlevel" perspective so in that context I don't
think he has a lot of patience for academics in general and academic
leftists in particular.  There is certainly a lot of merit in making
criticisms along those lines, but in my opinion not a big issue.

What he knows about New York I couldn't say.

Peace,

Jim
"It is a laborious madness and an impoverishing one . . . [to set] out in
five hundred pages an idea that can be perfectly related orally in five
minutes."
		--Jorge Luis Borges