> So I guess neither you nor Kolko ever hoped to organize a union, or
> anticipated any need for Medicare. It's all about foreign policy,
> isn't it?
Not only that, but the Kolko-Wanzala foreign policy is essentially: "Let's elect the worst candidate we can find, and drive everything to hell." What happened to the idea of supporting Nader? Or is this the latest argument for supporting good old Ralph: a vote for Nader is a vote for the worst foreign policy you can imagine, which of course magically turns out to be the best foreign policy?
Shades of the Vietnam War era: way back then, as I recall, the "advanced thinkers" were propounding the theory that a really nasty war, prolonged indefinitely, would surely bring on the revolution. Well, what happened? It was a nasty war, all right, but it couldn't last forever (any more than the current war can last much longer, being equally as much a failure as the Johnson-Nixon war was), so it was wound up in an apparently humiliating U.S. withdrawal. But did that bring on anything like a revolution, or even a slight amelioration in U.S. capital's relationship to the world? The question answers itself.
Even more importantly, though, whatever happened to the idea that the role of a dissident left intellectual in a capitalist country was to argue that "another world is possible," and conceive of what that world might in fact look like? Whatever happened to the idea that the dissident intellectual's role was to inspire the people with a positive vision of what they could achieve if they worked for it? All the time I have been on this list, all I have seen from Wanzala and his comrades by way of a vision of the future is the single simple idea that the worse things get, the better. But what would "the better" be? What if Bush had four more years, and Cheney had eight years after that, and Rice had eight years after that (the first black woman president -- cheers!), and some neo-con idiot who is graduating from Georgetown U. or Harvard Business School this spring (I supposed she/he would be old enough to run for President by then) had eight years after that? Would things have gotten bad enough by then for something good to happen? And what, pray, would that good thing be?
All of this Alice-in-Wonderland substitute for political thinking is making my head spin! What was it that some stout, bushy-bearded fellow just shouted into my ear?
"Workers of the world, unite! You have nothing to lose but your hope that anyone but Bush and his descendants will be running the country, ever!"
Jon Johanning // jjohanning at igc.org __________________________________ A sympathetic Scot summed it all up very neatly in the remark, 'You should make a point of trying every experience once, excepting incest and folk-dancing.' -- Sir Arnold Bax