On May 30, 2008, at 12:39 PM, Chris Doss wrote:
> I keep such illustrious company.
>
> --- Carrol Cox <cbcox at ilstu.edu> wrote:
> the leisure of an Arnold, Eliot, Bloom, Henwood-Doss
> to 'maturely' weigh all the1000 possible perspectives
> on the world
Me too!
I missed this the first time around. But this eruption from Cde Cox is rich:
> We were coming
> from nowhere and climbing in the ring with the strongest and most
> ruthless empire the world had ever known. Those young people who went
> back day after day to order coffee and get beat up (was it at a
> Walgreen
> or a Woolworth lunch counter) were I supposed pretty damned
> "juvenile,"
> but if they hadn't been lbo-talk wouldn't exist today. ("Let me
> sit on
> a throne at the side of the road / And sneer at the chumps going by.")
> We -- all of us who fought (and mostly lost) the battles of the
> 1960s --
> didn't quite have the leisure of an Arnold, Eliot, Bloom, Henwood-Doss
> to 'maturely' weigh all the1000 possible perspectives on the world; we
> needed something, QUICKLY, that made some sense of what we were doing.
> Some of us found it in Mao. Some in Stalin. Some in Gorz. Some in
> Trotsky. Some in ______ (whoever), and adapted it as well as we could
> to our immediate tasks.
The most ruthless empire the world has ever known? Really? The Brits were no slouches. Nor were the Romans. What a weird form of braggadocio.
Yeah, of course people do all kinds of things in the heat of the moment, and I'm not about to second guess that. But maybe it's worth reflecting on how things worked out and why. And maybe if there's the heat of another moment in the near future, we might be a little smarter in facing it.
Doug