<HTML>An explanation -- and apology -- is due for the strange format problems with my posts. I recently updated my version of AOL, based on all of the usual promises of improved features from them. I continued to send e-mail the way I always had, but have noticed more and more strange phenomena appearing when I saw my posts on listservs, such as the message appearing twice, in huge fonts and in technicolor. It was not intentional, and I am working at discovering and correcting whatever causes the problems. I am afraid that it is a problem we will be seeing more and more here and elsewhere as others on AOL make the shift. No apologies are in order, however, for the political content of the messages. Quite to the contrary. Like it or not, the constant whining about how poor, innocent Ralph Nader is being smeared, coming as it does after weeks of joyful and exuberant heaping of political abuse on the head of Gore and those who supported his re-election here, is as self-righteous as any piece of political discourse I have read here. It may get under some rather thin skins that their favorite terms of opprobrium can be so easily cast in their own direction, but hey, if you build your political house on sand and make it out of glass... I might have foregone the observation and passed by the temptation to play Edward Said and heave this particular species of political rock, if I hadn't found so many of them lying around from where they had been tossed on previous occasions. I know that cool and ironic detachment is de rigueur here at LBO Talk, where! ! nothing works like a one line put-down, but we all have our political passions, and if you are eager to find self-righteousness in others, then you sure as hell should abstain it from it in defending Ralph. And if you like to dish it out, you should expect to find it on your own plate. As long as we are on the subject of tossing rocks and such, if anything is tired and sanctimonious it is the screeds of noveau anarchists who think that they have invented out of whole cloth, a new politics which will sweep aside reformism, liberalism, etc. If there is an old piece of smelly shit around the American left today, it is partaking in the male adolescent joys of "kicking butt" by running through the streets with black flags and masks, busting Starbucks' windows, and proclaiming that you have invented some new form of revolutionary politics. If the term 'infantile leftism' didn't exist, it would have to be created to describe this type of self-absorbed, self-centered excuse for political struggle. It was pretty fucking stupid and self-destructive in the 1960s and 1970s when some of us on this list partook in it, running through the streets with NLF flags and football helmets and breaking bank windows, and it did no! ! t take very long to see that. It has only become more stupid and more self-destructive since then. If it makes someone a liberal to forego the sort of pseudo-politics of "shocking the bourgeoisie," then, good, we're liberals. Leo Casey United Federation of Teachers 260 Park Avenue South New York, New York 10010-7272 (212-598-6869) Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never has, and it never will. If there is no struggle, there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom, and yet deprecate agitation are men who want crops without plowing the ground. They want rain without thunder and lightening. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its waters. -- Frederick Douglass -- </HTML>