<html> <body> 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: <blockquote type=cite class=cite cite="">On 7/20/06, George Scialabba <<a href="mailto:scialabb@fas.harvard.edu">scialabb@fas.harvard.edu</a>> 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.) ___________________________________ <a href="http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/mailman/listinfo/lbo-talk" eudora="autourl">http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/mailman/listinfo/lbo-talk</a> </blockquote></body> </html>