"I detect some of the leftish impulse to deny that any improvement is ever possible in life."
[B.:]
Maybe -- but I'll be damned if that same black emotional well hasn't produced some really cool music, art, and poetry -- just bitter, bilious, splenetic, angry stuff:
Rudimentary Peni's "The Curse" (2004):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Pb1HC9J1IE
And I was re-reading a lot of the IWW's Little Red Songbook, 1923 edition recently -- damn, some of that stuff is *dark*. The blackened, dried blood of workers; the red flag shrouded and saturated with the blood of "our martyred dead"; marching through Hell to combat tyrants ('All Hell Can't Stop Us"); "when it comes to the ruling class, go as far as you like," etc. Maybe that is not gloom and despair, necessarily, but it's not like a lot of it leaves one with a very warm and flowery feeling, either.
And Perrin mentioned Black Sabbath's "War Pigs" on a recent post, also good dark lefty stuff. It reminds me of Heinrich Heine's observation on walking through an industrial factory in the 1800s and overhearing the hymns the workers sang as they work: "Really folks in our gentle walk of life can have no idea of the demonic note which runs through their songs." Robert Heilbroner quoted that in _Worldly Philosophers_. And Bertolt Brecht: "In the dark times will there be singing? / Yes, there will be singing -- about the dark times" -- one of World Burns to Death's mottoes.
-B.