heat and light

[Doug Henwood]

I'm getting offlist mail from someone who threatens to "create a scene"
unless I do something drastic to Carrol Cox for his slur against Rakesh.
Carrol regrets only the tone of his comment, not its substance, and is
silent on what the phrase "politically white" means.

This all pisses me off immensely. Apparently a group of leftists of various
sorts, all committed in some fundamental sense to a nonracist,
nonexploitative society, find it impossible to have a serious discussion
without escalating to nuclear level. It's no wonder we're so weak: the
model of war, as Foucault put it in the passage I posted here a few weeks
ago, seems to be applied first to people who should be comrades. Apparently
my founding wish of this list, that people engage across traditional
boundaries, was hopelessly naive. Boundaries are so comforting, especially
when you're losing.

Doug