But more seriously, it was coming to America. I was pretty much a dissident intellectual back in Poland, Solidarnosc etc. and as most E European dissidents - staunchly anti- Communist. My first doubts came when at some drinking party (drinking parties back then were a major forum for political discussion) one of the guests, a student at an agriculture school, asked the dissident intellectuals "What is it exactly that you do not like about Communism?" There was a momentary silence, and one of the dissident intellectual shot from the hip "There is no freedom." "No freedom?" inquired the ag student? "You can go and do pretty much what you want, drink, go fishing.." "Fishing, hah, hah, hah" shouted the dissident intellectuals, "He thinks that freedom means fishing, hah, hah, hah" As a good dissident intellectual, I laughed too, but I also saw that my fellow dissident intellectuals could not answer the simple ag student's question - all the could do was to ridicule him. After all, he was only a lowly ag student and they were liberal arts college dissident intellectuals. And I remembered that.
A few years later I ended up on this side of the pond as an FOB, in Grand Rapids MI. For a while, I thought it was some kind of mistake, that we ended in some third world country instead. Because for me America was New York City, Greenwich Village and San Francisco and California, and the hippies, and the sixties, and freedom.... What I found instead was Ronald Reagan and the pictures from Michael Moore's film "Roger and me" which could have been filmed in Grand Rapids, MI at that time. What a disappointment.
My cognitive dissonance widened when I got a job in the Defense Language Institute in Monterey, CA. I knew Monterey from Eric Burdon's song by the same name, but what I found instead was a big waste of taxpayer money and a bunch of FOBs at each other throats. A lot of shopping but not so many people in the streets. And not too much human interaction, let alone brotherly love Burdon was sang about. I started missing those parties with dissident intellectuals from the old country, so I started to read. I read a few books (anthropology, social science etc.) with obvious humanist-liberal tint, and then I re-read Marx. Or perhaps I read it for the first time - because I did not really read Marx back in the old country - I merely reacted to Marxism as handed down by party apparatchiks. And it made sense to me for the first time.
I could not say that reading Marx radically changed my mind - it did not, but it made obvious to me that the perceptions of social and political order that I used to take as given are subject to critique and revision. So I started to talk other dissident intellectuals who started arriving in America after the crackdown of Solidarnosc, and what I discover was that the they treat me as we were treating that ag student back in the old country that asked an inconvenient question - they tried to ridicule instead of answering.
So I found myself more at home with US liberals than with the old country dissident intellectuals. I started going to rallies - mostly anti-imperialist and antiwar ones (El Salvador was the big thin back then.)
Most of my friends were liberals and lefties and kindred oddballs - I felt much comfortable with them than with the all-American crowd. It is not that I shared their ideas - I often disagreed with them - but that I preferred their values and cognitive style (respect for reason, human rights, peace, non-violence, internationalism, and above all- questioning the received wisdom and the status quo etc.)
So that is about it - a big disappointment about America, or rather my youthful image of it, and slow drifting to the left until I found the intellectual niche that suits me.
Wojtek
On Wed, May 5, 2010 at 4:13 PM, Max Sawicky <sawicky at verizon.net> wrote:
> I came to college as a right-wing liberal in '67 thinking I would join
> ROTC, got radicalized by my freshman comp professor who was a recent
> Berkeley Ph.D. (He was kind of an a-hole; got thrown out of the
> department, went on to write some big books. Name was Peter Manso.
> You can google him.) Later he got me into Norman Mailer's New York
> City mayoral campaign, another step in the process. I decided to major
> in English instead of math. Rutgers English dept was also the home of
> Partisan Review, at one time a great radical publication. The big
> issues were race and the war. I came to radical politics via PR &
> modern fiction (Mailer, Burroughs, Heller, Baldwin) and beat poetry.
> But for politics I would have gone to grad school in English lit (got
> into Washington U/St Loo and U of Iowa or Indiana, forget which) and
> probably would have spent my life as an old fogie ranting about
> semiotics, post-structuralism, cultural studies, etc.
>
>
>
>
> On Wed, May 5, 2010 at 3:26 PM, John Treat <johntreat at lavabit.com> wrote:
> > I've always skewed leftish, however haltingly and imperfectly, but LBO
> talk is mostly responsible for any real radicalization I've experienced (and
> continue to experience). I've lurked for maybe a year, basically since
> googling across Doug's interview with James Howard Kunstler after hearing
> the latter on local radio here (South Africa). Have remained quite in awe of
> having the opportunity to listen in on many of the discussions here, and
> have followed and tried to absorb as many of the links as I could find time
> for. Have done lots of leftish things in my life (organizing farmers in
> Bosnia after the war, working against GBV in sub-Saharan Africa, defending
> rights of association and expression globally) but largely on intuition and
> without an adequate theoretical grounding. Still learning, but already
> profoundly grateful, especially to Doug, shag, SA, Carrol, MPerelman, and
> B&N.
> >
> >
> > On 04 May 2010, at 2:11 AM, shag carpet bomb wrote:
> >
> >> stories of how your consciousness was raised please!
> >>
> >> shag
> >>
> >> --
> >> http://cleandraws.com
> >> Wear Clean Draws
> >> ('coz there's 5 million ways to kill a CEO)
> >>
> >> ___________________________________
> >> http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/mailman/listinfo/lbo-talk
> >
> > ___________________________________
> > http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/mailman/listinfo/lbo-talk
> >
>
> ___________________________________
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>