But he's also ridiculously self-deluding, as many armchair radicals are, and it's his revolutionary pretensions which underlie his Puritanical pursuit of the many "soft-on-the-DP reformists" he perceives in his milieu. Like others with similar pretensions, but with very little practical political experience outside of small circle organizing in university towns and among the better-educated, he'd be quickly chewed up and spit out in a working class political party, union, or social movement of any consequence, where mastering the "art of defensive formulations" is essential to political survival. I mostly restrain myself from commenting on his frequent outrageously iconoclastic observations, but his light-hearted "enjoyment, win or lose" from afar of the desperate struggles of European and American workers was particularly offensive - even if it was, as I am sure, calculated to display to himself and others his unsentimental and unflinching "revolutionary" steadfastness.
On 2012-05-02, at 4:48 PM, Michael Smith wrote:
>>>> You're out there in fucking Illinois, where the unemployment rate
>>>> is 9%, far from Greece or Spain, where it's like 25%. Easy for
>>>> you to say.
>>>
>>> And easier still when you're not even among the 9%, but a
>>> comfortably retired professor of English literature vicariously
>>> "enjoying the battle" from behind a keyboard in a small town far
>>> removed from the loci of the crisis. The limitless self-delusion of
>>> the well-intentioned...
>
> I am often amazed at the intensely personal hatefulness
> of many posts on this list (and others). One is of course
> familiar with the *phenomenon* itself, which has been with us
> since the dawn of email gave us the transitive verb 'to flame',
> but I don't get the inner psychology of it: how folks can be
> so enraged by observations other folks make, and how they
> can be so deficient in self-regard as to let it *show*.
>
> Volto sciolto, pensieri stretti, comrades.
>
> --
> --
>
> Michael J. Smith
> mjs at smithbowen.net
>
> http://stopmebeforeivoteagain.org
> http://fakesprogress.blogspot.com
> http://cars-suck.org
>
> When one does a foolish thing, it is right to
> do it handsomely.
>
> ___________________________________
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