[lbo-talk] How Americans would respond

Doug Henwood dhenwood at panix.com
Sat Apr 30 12:13:35 PDT 2005


Carrol Cox wrote:


>
>
>Doug Henwood wrote:
>>
>> Now many of
>> us are backward looking,
>
>There you go again.
>
>Many of us are X? (How many? Describe some specific and important
>currents on the left -- naming core individuals -- who areX?_
>
>Therefor many of us are _not_ X.
>
>Don't you get tired of empty tautologies?

Don't you get tired of the same stupid wind-up lecture?

Did you ever read anything by Vandana Shiva or any of the gang around the International Forum on Globalization? With my own ears I heard Shiva, a globe-trotter with a doctorate, extolling the beauties of the farm ladies selling their own produce in India, sounding like some postmodern Marie Antoinette. Opposition to genetic modification is almost universal among greens everywhere. Tom Frank's work, as much as I admire it, is full of nostalgia for the old manual working class; you can see the nostalgia for the 1930s in the design of The Baffler (and in Tom's old bakelite dial phone, which finally died a couple of years ago). The thread about NLR the other day was all about the resignation of the people around that journal, once a beacon of the western left. What journals of the left cover science or technology in any intelligent or interesting way, except to worry about some imminent disaster?

Sometimes I think it's just a matter of how out of touch you are. What do you read? Whom do you talk to?

Doug



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