Doug Henwood wrote:
>
> On May 21, 2008, at 8:38 PM, Carrol Cox wrote:
>
> > I agree with Jerry, which is why I've reduced my
> > reading of LBO to quick peeks at a sampling of posts. Even shag's
> > posts
> > are beginning to be eye-closers.
> >
> > It's going to be a dreary year for politics and political discussion.
>
> Why is it so hard to process several things at once?
I AM processing a rather large number of things at once; elections just don't happen to be one of them. I'm giving, for example, and immense amount of thinking to the exchange between you and Michael Pollak, in which Jenny Brown intervened vigorously, on single payer as an issue around which a left movement could be built. I've edited it into a 10-page Word document which I return to periodically to footnote, etc. It's one of the tools I'm using in my current thought on a number of "diferent" things- none of which, incidentally, will become of _great_ or continuing interest until I can discover what makes them not a collection of Issue 1+ Issue2 + Issue3....but a single issue which in turn expresses itself in those 'separate' issues.
You made a serious mistake in your very announcement of this list: you wanted the list to consider culture and economics (and politics), which you regarded, apparentyly, as three different topics which we should think about and then connect. That sort of mechanical mixture never gets anyplace. You will only unite culture and economics when you discover that they are in _reality_ already 'the same," and you cannnot discuss the connections until, as Ted keeps reminding us, they aren't two things which we connect in our heads but one thinkg internally related. Unless yuou come upon elections from some other perspective than the empirical study of elections you will never have anything useful to say about them that isn't just _mere_ gossip, thrown out with the day's newspapers.
Any schoolboy/girl cam easily think of a dozen things at once; the point is to find their unity.
Carrdol