[Michael Pollak]
> This is an interesting question. My guess is that
> America is a society in which everyone can very easily
> feel full of impotent rage, even if you're near the
> top of the social ladder. Maybe even especially if
> you're near the top. If you're Thomas Friedman, you
> may be wealthy on an absolute scale, but you only have
> 1/1000 of the money of the incredibly wealthy people
> you hang around with.
I just want to point out here that what Taippi was originally contending was that the 'boring left' wasn't getting through to 'ordinary people'. I argued that in my view the 'left' wasn't like what Taippi said and for that matter the 'ordinary people' aren't much like the alienated rageful people he's writing about either. Doug responds that there are 'a lot of people' like that and then weakens it still more by saying 'don't tell me they don't exist'. Yes, *some* people like that exist. And now we are discussing Thomas Friedman.
OK, but, see, my criterion for a successful non-boring left is not that it win over Thomas Friedman. And it isn't even, for the moment, that it win over the "Falling Down" constituency, gun nuts, the cameraman Fisk ran into, etc. What we need to do is to get to the ORDINARY ordinary people, who are not super-alienated, who are often somewhat hip, who are, -pace- Chuck0, diverse, and who can get in a conversation with us about the war and don't think we are lunatics, and (a) bring more of them into activity and (b) get across some kind of 'left vision' to them however you want to phrase it. That's not undoable.
lp