[Peace-discuss] Toasting the new year/decades pat

[C. G. Estabrook]

["...as a vital, compelling, creative force in American political life, the Left 
is dead and gone ... instead of improving their minds and political potential by 
reading the Eighteenth Brumaire."  I'm thinking we should take this 
recommendation literally.  How about a reading group in the spring term, 
concerning one of the best attempts to think about real world politics in the 
capitalist era, "The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon"? It's the work that 
includes the best summary of the Bush/Obama administration -- "Hegel remarks 
somewhere that history tends to repeat itself. He forgot to add: the first time 
as tragedy, the second time as farce." And it argues for the necessity to 
attending to both history and economics: "People make their own history, but 
they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected 
circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted 
from the past. The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on 
the brains of the living." (And the poets do usually get there first, but this 
is from 70 years later: "History, Stephen said, is a nightmare from which I am 
trying to awake.") Let me know if you're interested in a history/politics 
reading group.  --CGE]


	December 25-27, 2009
	Disappointments in Samarra
	By ALEXANDER COCKBURN

Hazlitt got gloomily drunk for a fortnight after the battle of Waterloo, 
accurately anticipating that decades of reaction lay ahead, now that Boney had 
been definitely put away, with the Holy Alliance in the saddle and the French 
contagion safely bottled up. Smart fellow, that Hazlitt. He should have stayed 
drunk for a month.

Sometimes, on the edge of a new decade, things look dismal but one has the 
feeling that something good just might be around the corner. The 70s for 
example: at their onset, Nixon was in the high noon of his first term, drenching 
Vietnam in blood, while his attorney general John Mitchell pored over plans to 
lock up the left at home. It looked as though darkest night was falling.

And yet there was a certain edgy, desperate hope in the air – and four short 
years into the 70s the hopers, no longer desperate but exultant,  saw Nixon 
clamber into a helicopter and take off from the White House lawn towards his 
version of St Helena, in San Clemente; and nine months later on April 30, 1975, 
Gunnery Sgt. Bob Schlager and 10 other Marines finally caught the last 
helicopter off the roof of the U.S. Embassy in Saigon.

Ah, those raucous, wonderful 70s! Those who missed them will never know the 
sweetness of life, as Talleyrand said of the Ancien Regime. Sweet and sharp.  I 
spent them in New York and there was no better place to be.

With the Eighties you could feel the air beginning to seep out of the tires. For 
one thing, Death kept missing his appointments in Samarra, after years of 
rigorous punctuality with Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, the Kennedy brothers. 
He’d already fumbled two dates with Gerald Ford, when his chosen messengers, 
Sara Jane Moore and Squeaky Fromme, messed up. On March 30, 1981, another of 
death’s chosen messengers, John Hinckley, tried to shoot Reagan and failed to 
get his man.

That would have been a game changer!  We’d have had three months of Ron instead 
of eight weird years when America plunged into fantasy, where it still resides. 
We wouldn’t have heard Ron give the Star Wars speech, or Nancy just saying No. 
Or Ron saying he expected Armageddon to come in his lifetime. Or Nancy running 
the country with the help of Mrs Quigley, her astrologer. We’d have had George 
Bush Sr…  surely a one-termer. It would have all been different…

But would it really? Clinton and the Nineties suited each other fine, and Bill 
gave us our last known dose of politics as fun, with the Lewinsky affair, but 
the decade would have had the same general contour – though a Republican 
president would have had much bigger problems getting the poor tossed off welfare.

And then in 2000 we had Bush and Gore, and the American people very reasonably 
couldn’t figure out which one to go for. The folks who knew Al best – the voters 
of Tennessee, went for George. And then in September of Bush’s first term we had 
a game changer here in America. Death finally rounded up a gang of messengers 
with a real commitment to getting the job done.

But game changer isn’t quite the word for the event that launched the Noughts. 
9/11 just speeded up basic tendencies which were already in train. Invasion of 
Iraq? The onslaught had been in full spate through most of Clinton-time via a 
lethal embargo and almost daily bombings – and the course of Iraqi politics had 
been set back in 1963 with the Kennedy administration okayed CIA complicity in 
the overthrow and murder of the Iraqi nationalist, General Kassim, setting the 
stage for the CIA’s man, Saddam Hussein.

The Afghan mess, now about to get messier, was set up in the late 1970s, when 
the Carter administration supervised the overthrow of Afghanistan’s one shining 
moment of hope, the left reformist governments that took power in 1978. That’s 
when Osama was ushered onto the stage of history, as one of the CIA’s men. 
Israel, the Palestinians? Rewind the decades back to Truman and beyond.

What made the American 70s exciting was that the left – in its broadest 
antinomian contours - had life in it, still pumped up by radical successive 
radical generations all the way back to the beginning of the twentieth century. 
The last time we saw that left in action was in the presidential campaigns of 
Jesse Jackson in 1984 and 1988 and the solidarity movement during Reagan’s wars 
in Central America.

In 1992 the left went hook, line and sinker for Bill Clinton and lost all 
independent traction. By 1996 fealty to the Democratic Party had become a habit. 
There was the brief flare up in Seattle during the WTO confab, but that turned 
out to be more of a final flicker than a new ignition point. Same story in 2000. 
Same again in 2004 (all in behind the Democrat Kerry, in case you forget) and 
finally, most deliriously, there was the left’s love affair with the salesman of 
hope in 2008, Barack Obama.

Yes, there are many candles in the darkness. Brave souls soldier on, whether 
battling the military recruiters, defending Palestine, or advancing labor’s 
cause. Gaze out across the political landscape and there are many vigorous, 
dogged people at work. But, as a vital, compelling, creative force in American 
political life, the left is dead and gone, many of its erstwhile or potential 
members  lost in the new Age of Superstition, fretful captives in the thickets 
of kookdom, whether in the form of 9/11 conspiracism – au revoir Cindy Sheehan! 
– or gazing aghast at Michael Mann’s bogus hockey-stick graph instead of 
improving their minds and political potential by reading the Eighteenth 
Brumaire. What a grim and revealing irony that it was the Medieval Warm Period – 
which Al Gore and the IPCC have sought to purge from natural history – that gave 
birth to some of the most glorious chapters in human intellectual and artistic 
achievement!

The corporations run the show and the only vivid opposition comes from Christian 
populists, who’ve bought several million copies of Sara Palin’s memoir.

The teens? Raise your glass along with Mr William Hazlitt.

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