> Like Wojtek, politicians and capitalists are scared shitless
> by public action. I began to catch on, actually, about three
> years before I became active, when I read a newspaper article
Let's see. Politicians and capitalists are not afraid of sacking people, cutting their wages and benefits, screwing them on health care, busting their unions, exporting their jobs overseas, cutting public services, fixing the political system by bribery, gerrymandering, hook and crook, sending people to die in senseless imperial adventures, jacking up prices of life necessities to make fabulous profits, flashing their middle fingers at virtually every country and people in the world and so on and so on - but boo hoo they start trembling in their boots when they see a stone-throwing and window smashing mob.
The problem with you, Carrol, is not that you are a wannabe revolutionary - for most people are wannabies of one sort or another - but that your wannabe desire made you lost the sense or reality so badly that you think that the figments of your imagination are the only true reality that is out there. You are like a flea on a dog's back that starts thinking that it can steer the dog in the direction it wants to go, and ends up thinking that it is a part of the dog, speaking for the dog, and deluding itself that it-as-the-dog can threaten and chase cats and other creatures of the night.
On a broader note, what I like about HL Mencken is not his political or philosophical ideas, which I find to be on the simplistic side, but his extraordinary penchant for deconstructing 'mountebanks' - moralizers, ideologues, politicos, preachers, do-gooders, standard-bearers, reformers, rabble-rousers, people who pretend to represent something bigger than themselves or even bigger than life and wrapping themselves in national flags, ideologies or religious symbols. He is my role model in that respect. For some reason, I have a rather low tolerance level for 'mountebanks,' and a penchant for speaking my mind up when I see them - which usually earns me the label of a traitor and a public enemy of one sort or another. People do not mind being ripped off or bamboozled, but they get extremely indignant when their idols and celebrities are dragged through the mud.
I do not pretend to know it all or even most of it, I appreciate substantive criticism of my writing and suggestions for further inquiries, I do take such criticism and suggestions seriously. That is the main reason I stay on this list. In fact, I bought more books and other readings recommended by members of this list than by any other source. But when an old buzzard who has never met me, but apparently having lost the ability to tell shit from shinola is ex-cathedra pronouncing who I am, what my motives and politics are, and what should be done to me for expressing these politics - the only appropriate reaction, if any, is two words - bite me.
Wojtek