Not for calling Diane names…that’s just an excuse. I was banned because I suggested that she ask some hard questions of Noam Chomsky when she interviews him on her radio show in January, for generally not being on board with her from the moment that she backed the execrable JohnBoy Edwards in the Democratic primaries, and then right on through her acceptance…and in many cases, authorship… of many statements made on the site over the past several years suggesting that violent revolution of some sort is the only solution to the problems of the United States.
If you are at all curious about the finale, go here to see the last act of an ongoing mini-drama. From front-pager to bannee w/out changing a damned thing in my positions.
In her statement regarding this action, she claims that I daily called her a “star fucker.” I did not. I used the term once, in the following sentence.
Do not be a star-fucker, Diane.
The statement was not an accusation, it was a cautionary warning about the dangers of giving “stars” too much leeway.
My points…and I stand by them 100%…were that “the movement’ of which Mr. Chomsky is quite certainly the most famous member has absolutely, totally failed to make even the slightest dent in the encroaching right wing takeover of the US over the 50 years of its existence, and that hard questions need to be asked regarding that failure despite the undoubted talents and good intentions of its foremost proponents.
Diane is going through some hard times. I bear her no ill will, despite her imaginings, and I wish her the best.
In point of fact, I wish us all the best. When I write on these blogs, I write in that spirit. I fully expect the next presidential election to be another far-right victory. Maybe not Palin, but assuredly a return to Bushism. If we do not soon get our shit together on the left, it will be too late.
That’s all I have to say on the matter. I will not be returning there, and as I look over the history of leftiness blogging in general…from the demise of Daily Kos as anything but a twittering group of middle class faux leftists through the total incapacitation of My Left Wing by a cabal of Zionists and then down into what has become of The Wild Wild Left and the other so-called leftist blogs like Docudharma…as I look at the history of that so-called “movement” it occurs to me that some hard questions should be asked there as well.
So it goes.
Down like a motherfucker, it looks like.
So it goes.
Later…
AG
Paranoid accusations? Total agreement?
Whatever.
As you will.
As you must, actiually.
Later…
AG
Booman…as you well know I do not agree with many of your positions, your tactical preferences. However, you have stood the test of time extraordinarily well. Your balance is admirable and your aims are right on the money.
Thank you…
AG
Its always someone else, hey art?
Not your name calling and viciousness that gets you banned everywhere.
So you called me out here, hope it makes you feel so just and manly.
Oy vey.
Yes, booman people, Diane is a big fat meany who can’t take arty-boys hard truths…. either that or a blog-owner enforcing her own rules about the level of dialogue.
After many warnings, no less.
How very petty art. This is what makes you oh-so-popular and held in such high regard.
You act and write like an angry 13 year old who thinks he knows everything, than lash personally out at any one who points it out,
You need attention so bad it reeks. This is proof positive, and the last I will give you,
The flat-out truth.
So it goes.
Be well.
AG
Thats why all my admins came to the same conclusion, some of them asking me to your last tantrum of insults.
Mass imaginings are far more likely that it being you being an asshole.
And you choose your admins. Listen, Diane…no more need be said.
Go do what you have to do, and be sure that I will do the same.
AG
Booman…as you well know I do not agree with many of your positions, your tactical preferences. However, you have stood the test of time extraordinarily well.
Not that this is such a good thing . . . But as the left refuses to look beyond an obsolete analysis, and ask what is actually happening in the world, it becomes as irrelevant as the right.
(I mean obsolete, not incorrect: As circumstances change, the old analysis is side-stepped, and becomes insufficient.)
Conversation languishes; thought shrinks.
The left was totally defeated, swept off the map, long ago, but still hasn’t figured it out. When the Viet Communists were swept away, back in their early days (before the French war), they sat down to think. Developed new strategies which could (and finally did) win. But the left can’t do this–that is, refuses to do this: Cannot even face up to the fact of having been defeated.
Consider this: The banking crisis is real, but also was arranged by the bankers themselves. The greatest fraud in history, in which the housing bubble was engineered to sweep massive wealth upward from the poor (and middle class, just to sweeten the joke) to the rich. And who does the left side with? The bankers and their bailouts! I laugh bitter tears! Really it is over, as the mid-term elections should have made clear, There are no reality-based ideas remaining anywhere on the political spectrum.
The problem is that we don’t really have anything that would be recognized by the rest of the developed world as a left wing in the US. The infrastructure for such was largely dismantled by decades of red scares long before many of this blog’s readers were born. There is barely anything resembling organized labor, no recollection of what socialism or anarchism are (given that we often see a relatively right-wing President maligned as being “socialist” merely illustrates the sad state of US political discourse). What we get is a phony “left” that offers nothing but meaningless rhetoric while cozying up with their corporate masters. There is nothing to channel the understandable anger of those who have been screwed by this government and Wall Street except for the right-wing nationalism and nativism promoted by “Tea Parties”. There are leftists, don’t get me wrong, but they are too disorganized and isolated to get heard. I’m at a loss as to how to rebuild the infrastructure needed to mount any sort of effective resistance at this late date.
I agree, and this is part of what I mean by recognizing defeat. The red scares of the 1930s and 1950s were effective and each time, recovery was only partial. The New Left of the 1960s was nice, but it didn’t last long under heavy attacks of infiltration, bogus legal charges, and black (or false flag) propaganda.
So what can be done now? Not much, admittedly, but there are some things to start considering:
Sense is so rare.
So is hope in the face of the sheer, freaking mass of post survival-of-the-fittest humanity.
Downsizing is in order, but there will be a Malthusian downsizing before we are through, and survival will be the first order of business. The progressive collapse of the giant Ponzi scheme continues, from Enron through Madoff and on into the various “recessions” that have been making news for the better part of three years. The bubbles swell until they burst, and then there we jolly well are, aren’t we. Empty-handed and in debt.
The only useful tactic that I can see besides moving to a remote part of the world and becoming a dedicated, armed survivalist…something that is within my grasp if necessary, but not my preferred way of living by any means…is (as you suggest above) to “learn not to be dependent on our opponents.”
This has many levels. My own lifework is dependent on relatively large numbers of very highly skilled collaborators and also on an audience that is quite sophisticated musically, so I must live in a place where growing my own food, etc. is not truly feasible. But…and this has been happening more and more in the NYC serious music scene over the last 8 years or so…a downsizing of expectations brings by its very existence less dependence on the enemy.
Most of the real musicians that I know have observed what happens when the system takes over a musical group or movement, whether on a large scale as it did rap music or on the much smaller scales of individual musical organizations and grant-funded individual musical efforts. Invariably the juice is sucked from from the fruit by Vampire America and then replaced by a synthetic substitute, leaving only the outward form of the original effort. But underneath almost all of the mass media radar in NYC and around he country I see group after group of fine musicians making real music for relatively small numbers of people at a break-even financial state. It’s everywhere here. If I could afford to do so I could rehearse and perform every day of the week with truly great players in wonderful venues for just about minimum wage. But my position…and that of almost all of the others I know who are involved in this effort…demands that I do other work to make a barely adequate if not luxurious living, so I can only be involved in these projects about three or four times a week as a result. Which I am.
I also see this on many other levels.
In the countryside particularly.
The Ponzi scheme was…and remains…based on inflated expectations. “Get yours now with ice cream on top!!!” It’s going to be the “FUCK the ice cream!!!” people who survive this situation in my view, and if evolution is not through with us then it will be they…us and those that we teach…who will lead the way to a new paradigm.
Let us pray that I am right.
Thanks for your vision, Gaianne. I got yer “Thanksgiving.” right here!!!
Later…
AG