On 3/1/08, Jerry Monaco <monacojerry at gmail.com> wrote:
> JM:> Why should anyone on the left pretend he was anything but a bad
> > influence on U.S. intellectual culture?
> he treats his wife and family but that is not what is happening
> here. There is no attempt to understand a contemptuous intellectual
> bully who established around him a coterie of college boys to look up
> to him. There is only talk about how good he was to his dog.
>
> Maybe Pinochet was good to his dog but who cares? Why should those of
> us on the left treat Pinochet as a dog lover instead of _anything but_
> a brutal dictator?
>
> To treat Buckley as a dog lover is to confuse the public and the
> private. To treat Buckley as someone good to his servants is to
> confuse his public role as an intellectual in the forefront of
> anti-working class intellectual propaganda with his private role as
> pater familias.
>
> I too love gossip but part of the function of gossip is to make us
> believe that we are still in a small village society with little class
> divisions. That is what gossip does for us in mass society. It helps
> us to confuse the private and the public in such a way that we forget
> the public role, the ruling class role, of this very public
> intellectual. So yes I would prefer that leftists treat him as a
> public intellectual who did all in his power to harm the bourgeois
> commonweal as well as the working class. But instead even among people
> I would prefer to think of as comrades this despicable reactionary man
> is treated as an object for gossip.
>
> Gossip is fun but it is also a systematic confusion of public and
> private. And this systematic confusion of public and private is
> important. It should be addressed by those of us on the left because
> it is how the U.S. rulers run their elections and make their
> entertainment. Instead of being analyzed it is imitated. It is
> imitated even by those who should know better.
>