[lbo-talk] stupidest quote of the week from an American politician?

George Scialabba scialabb at fas.harvard.edu
Thu Jul 20 12:58:52 PDT 2006


Very eloquent, Jerry, and largely true. But I'm not sure I agree with you about this: "Pointing to elections in order to show how people are hoodwinked is almost meaningless." Why? I can understand being too disgusted, discouraged, or depressed to vote at all. But to vote Republican seems to me, for anyone making less than $100 thousand a year, foolish, and for anyone making more, selfish. I just can't reconcile voting Republican with being both intelligent and decent. Doesn't compute.

At 03:20 PM 7/20/2006, you wrote:


>On 7/20/06, George Scialabba
><<mailto:scialabb at fas.harvard.edu>scialabb at fas.harvard.edu> wrote:
>
> > But don't you feel the
> > occasional surge of indignation against your fellow citizens for
> letting the
> > wool be pulled over their eyes so regularly and calamitously? Doug politely
> > called this a deep conservative streak in American political culture; but
> > besides conservative principles, there's an awful lot of apathy,
> ignorance,
> > and prejudice out there, isn't there?
>
>I guess my surge of indignation is reserved mainly for Woj. I suspect
>that he writes the he does in order to provoke such red flows through the
>blood stream.
>
>Before I answer your question, I'd like to say that I spent a little time
>on this list arguing for treating the hypotheses of sociobiology,
>evolutionary psychology, behavioral psychology, etc. as good hypotheses
>that should be allowed to develop. Then smart, but highly uninformed
>intellectuals, such as Woj take evolutionary reasoning about human
>psychology and behavior and twist it into a justification for their
>favorite prejudice. It's like the people who know nothing about quantum
>mechanics using the science as evidence for "free will" or
>"indeterminateness" in a metaphysical sense of these notions. Ideological
>thinking can take any good idea and screw it up.
>
>As far as your question, George, both of us have had our share of really
>bad jobs. I can say that in my experience I have met some very
>interesting and brilliant people in these awful jobs.
>
>I just don't agree with Doug, etc. that people are as right-wing and as
>hoodwinked as they contend. A lot of the people I used to talk to in the
>old days of taxi driving were disconnected, unorganized, suspicious,
>stepped on, angry, and just wanted to be left alone. This is a reflection
>on all of us. People I met in the midwest, in places like Cincinnati and
>St. Louis while doing construction jobs there were the same way, unless
>they belonged to a church or a union. Then they held beliefs very
>strongly. But most people I meet believe in living their lives and not
>much else which means that they can end up believing anything at all. I
>don't find that people are particularly hoodwinked, except for the college
>educated middle class who tend to truly believe in Bush or Clinton or in
>the latest snake-oil salesman. When I was working in a working class
>jobs I never even met anyone who went out to vote, unless they belonged to
>a union. Pointing to elections in order to show how people are hoodwinked
>is almost meaningless.
>
>As a radical leftist I don't think the conservative streak in U.S. culture
>is necessarily a bad thing but this is a long argument. I just want to
>quote something I wrote a while back while thinking about Greil Marcus and
>Bob Dylan.... Call it "The Politics of Weird America"
>
>
>"There is little national politics in the U.S. worth the name of politics.
>Where most politics exists in the U.S. is at the local level and it is
>mostly a part of that old strange America that is continuously revitalized
>by waves of immigration and the mostly disorganized movement of people
>from place to place. I am not celebrating the politics of weird,
>underground America, the politics of local crusaders and madmen, of randy
>ministers and pacifist nuns, of both fear to the edge paranoia and hope to
>the edge of utopia, the politics of free love and of hatred of difference
>- the weird underground politics of the badlands and mountains, the urban
>crowds and the yearning suburbs can be both good and bad, but it is
>usually always there, usually unorganized but occasionally waiting to
>break through in some movement every fifteen years. Weird and underground
>America is something that our political elite and corporate managers are
>always trying to harness or control, or simply put into a marketing
>category. Suddenly, somebody will discover that suburban garage bands have
>somehow hooked up with gay performance artists in the city and have formed
>a subculture some where an there will be a deep need for a 'label' to put
>on the whole thing. Or suddenly city counsels across the nation will pass
>resolutions in favor of the Kyoto Agreement or stopping U.S. terrorism
>against some Latin American country that we are currently attacking, and
>the marketeers will try to find the likes and dislikes of the people
>behind this movement. ...
>
>"The politics of Weird America should not be sentimentalized or exalted,
>but it must be described and accepted as part of our reality. The politics
>of Weird America is liable to give us both populism and prohibition, the
>United Mineworkers and the latest racist outrage, Allen Ginsberg and
>Charles Manson, the best of the Black Panthers and the worse street thugs,
>solidarity movements of all kinds and anti-immigrant groups. The problem
>is this, in the U.S. the only people, who have any kind of 'national
>unity' in an institutional form are the political and corporate rulers.
>Thus the politics of the rulers is largely made by consensus and is off
>the agenda of choice for the rest of us. For this reason what is called
>'national politics' is reduced to gossip, marketing and superstition. The
>only kind of politics among the rest of us is highly local, yet with
>little institutional continuity, and often very quirky. It can be
>motivated by a belief in Angels and Aliens, or by an extensive collective
>knowledge of some region in the world that would be the envy of a State
>Department expert. Sometimes it can be motivated by both this knowledge
>and that superstition at one and the same time. Of course as I have said
>in the past, the only way around this situation is to organize, educate,
>and create viable institutions that will carry through the generations in
>a democratic manner. Easier said than done."
>
>So yes I agree with you there is a lot of prejudice, ignorance, and hatred
>out there along with everything else but until all of us actually do the
>hard work of organizing and educating ourselves and others, at work and in
>our neighborhoods, instead of allowing the default (dis)organization
>of television and the creation of necessary social networks by right-wing
>preachers, how are we to know what the rest of us really think or would do
>in the first place? Yes it is all of our faults that there is no real
>organization and no real national politics but there is a history to that
>fault and the explanation that explains the history as a matter of
>stupidity is a stupid explanation.
>
>Jerry
> (I am writing very fast so I can get back to work. There is bound to be
> a hundred typos as usual. Forgive me. Forgive my typos and bad syntax,
> should be my signature.)
>
>
>
>___________________________________
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