Chuck Grimes wrote:
> I am not sure why my visceral hatred of the Right, just about
> everybody in the current US government, or on the news should bother
> Carrol, Chip or Kelley, but it does.
I stay home from some public meetings, because certain kinds of statements can make me blow my top in such a way that no one hears the content, they only hear the rage. Chuck's remark about feeling it in his armpits catches some of this. Even as I go on, I can watch myself from outside as it were and see what I'm doing and recognize its error and be unable to stop. It may be one side effect of depression or it may be something else. I'm not sure. The local BNCPJ has seen me blow up only once: we had the news editor of the local paper on a panel about news coverage of the war. He carried out a fucking filibuster; the other members of the panel plus audience remarks must have only equalled in sum his time yakking. I blew up. So I sort of know what Chuck is talking about.
But this "visceral hatred of the Right" generates extremely bad politics, politics that end up enhancing the precisely that power of the Right (or fragmenting the movement, as the Weathermen did in the late '60s).
I don't disapprove of hatred as a motive on the left. In fact I think it is probably the most important driving force. But the hatred must be of the sort one literary critic ascribed to Jane Austen, it must be "Regulated Hatred." And one supremely important reason for that is that unregulated hatred only touches the nincompoops (Kerry or Bush) who are fronting for the enemy. Do you feel that hatred, Chuck, for the million or so ruling class figures and important ruling class intellectuals whose names or activities are unknown to you. They are far more "The Enemy" than is Bush.
And hatred can also lead to grotesque distortions. The ABB movement (at least among professed leftitst) started out just that: Get rid of Bush and then go back to building a real left. I disagreed, but the argument was coherent and respectable.
But not the ABBs are bombarding us with all the shit that DP-tailers have bombarded us with in every election since at least 1932: There is a difference, forsooth, between the two parties. Of course there is. But I thought that wasn't the issue _this time_. This time was DIFFERENT. Apparently this time is not really different, and the REALLY IMPORTANT POINT is not that Bush is special but that we must cling to the difference between the two parties.
But everytime that an ABB proponent sings this song of difference between the _Parties_ he or she utterly discredits the ABB argument and reveals it for what it is, shamefaced tailing of the DP.
Rein in that hatred Chuck. Keep your eye on the prize as they used to say, a popular movement to stop u.s. aggression around the world.
Carrol
Every time some ABB makes that arguement, he or she disp