In 1948 or '49 C.L.R. James predicted that an era of social change was on the way. He hung that prediction on one empirical fact: In each of the preceding 3 years membership in local NAACPs had increased significantly. Rosa Parks came 7 years later, and it was another 7 years before the Berekely Free Speech Movement. Another six years brought the November Moratorium, which according to a Chicago attorney formerly on this list might have saved the world. But the dystematic attack on the Panthers (after J. Edgar had been frightened by their Breakfast Program & ordered their criminalization) was already underway by then. Fred Hampton wasmurdered a month later. The corpse of the '60s was still powerful, even seeming to grow, for another two or three years, but essentially it was all over (confirming Andre Gorz's argument that a mass working-class movement (which is what the '60s wwere) had to achieve its goals in around 5 years, as it would lose force after that. (Workers, even those still students, do have to get back to work to keep themselves going: they can't go on marching for ever.) Few political predictions have ever been so richly fulfilled as was that of James back in the late '40s. A left liberal such as I was before 1965 could not see any of this coming, was consoled over Vietnam by the fact that only "regular army" so far were suffering casualties, and thought that while the Civil-Rights struggle in the South was morally justified it was probably premature. You would not, I hope, be too amazed at how much of the news of the world does not constitute "all that's fit to print." Almost everything published about "the '60s," beginning in the early '60s, has been a pack of lies or, even more sinister, a pack of irrelevant 'truths.' As I said in a post on another list a year ago (and this was the post that begin my correspondence with Ted Morgan), "If an article on the '60s mentions either Hippies or Weatherman in the first paragraph, the resdt will be a pack of lives." (I know of no exceptions.) An attempt by me to start a political discussion of the '60s on this list last year or early this year was deflected by someone quoting an idiotic statement by a prematurely senile Mario Savio that condencsed into one sentence nearly four decades of lying accounts of that period.
Now about those 10,000 that no one has ever heard of (and no one who reads The Lies of the Times will ever hear of): They have heard of each othr and they are the tipping point because they will scatter across the nation afterwards and go to work! They count more than 20 thousand well-intentioned Nobel Prize winners. The only people who read Krugman are those who get a warm fuzzy feeling from hearing their own opinons echoed by such a distinguished gentleman. Those who listen to the 10K are those who already agreed also, but either didn't know quite what it was that they were agreeing with or thought that nothing could be done about it. And some of them become part of that 10k+ who are not satisfied with merely passive right opinion or merely hoping that some group of politicians will be nice to them. Thigns begin to happen.
Wisconsin was no tipping point, nor was Rosa Parks. But a long fuse has been lit - a very long fuse and its results (if any) will not begin to show up on the evening news for quite a few years. Some of us around the nation are busy trying to keep that fuse burning. We will see. There are people in Wisconsin (and elsewhere) who are still talking to each other. It is amazing what can happen if that process of people talking to each other keeps growing.
Enough for this first post.
Carrol
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