[Peace-discuss] P.S.

[John W.]

On Sat, Feb 6, 2010 at 9:08 PM, C. G. Estabrook <galliher at illinois.edu>wrote:



> I take it that, unlike David, you don't agree with "what the authentic Left
> says," below?  --CGE
>

Christ, Carl.  First of all, there's no such thing as "the authentic Left";
it's a figment of your febrile imagination.  And of course I agree in part
and disagree in part.

1) Poor people and lower middle class people have legitimate
grievances.  Not ALL of the grievances they inarticulately try to express,
or borrow from Limbaugh and Beck, are even remotely legitimate.  One could
write a veritable BOOK on this statement:  "I've done everything right all
my life, I'm a god-fearing Christian, I'm white, I'm male, I've worked hard,
and I carry a
gun. I do everything I'm supposed to do. And I'm getting shafted."   But the
economic grievances generally are, and of course they affect black and
white, male and female, Christian and atheist, all of whom work hard and are
"doing everything they're supposed to do".

2) One could also write a veritable BOOK on the following statement:  "And
in fact they are getting shafted. For 30 years their wages have stagnated or
declined, the social conditions have worsened, the children are going
crazy, there are no schools, there's nothing, so somebody must be doing
something to them, and they want to know who it is. Well Rush Limbaugh has
answered - it's the rich liberals who own the banks and run the government,
and of course run the media, and they don't care about you -- they just want
to give everything away to illegal immigrants and gays and communists and so
on."  Suffice it to say here that everything ascribed to Rush
Limbaugh before the hyphen is correct, and everything after the hyphen is
false.

3) The following is also true with a couple of caveats:  "...gifts don't
come from above; you're going to win them, or you won't have them, and you
win by struggle, and that requires understanding and serious analysis of the
options and the circumstances, and then you can do a lot."  The caveats are
these: (a) a few gifts DO come down from above, but generally not political
progress, which is what we're talking about here; and (b) even with all of
this struggle, you don't really "do a lot".  You do a little, incrementally,
and then you're knocked back and you have to repeat the process over and
over again.
4) It's true that the crazy, oversimplified answers the tea baggers get from
Beck and Limbaugh make sense to them, and that the "left" has no answers for
them.  YOU have no answers for them that would make sense to them, Carl.
Rep. Tim Johnson makes far more sense to them than you do or ever will.  And
it's largely because the folks we're talking about - relatively poor,
largely uneducated, weighed down by literally hundreds of years of
stereotypical thinking and prejudices of all kinds - are simply incapable of
comprehending a relatively complex, nuanced, historically contextualized
world view.  As I've said before, I spent the first forty-three years of my
life with people like the Tea Baggers, and I still try to dialogue with
them, and they don't get it and they're never going to get it.  I should
qualify that:  a great many black folks get it, but white folks are utterly
clueless.

5) What is needed in America right now is precisely the opposite of
"organizing the masses".  What is needed is a President like FDR was -
someone left-leaning with a comprehensive plan and moral courage, who is
willing to risk political "suicide" and the scorn of the very people he's
trying to help in order to do the right thing for America, let the quips
fall where they may.   A President who isn't afraid to pack the Supreme
Court if necessary.  The reality is that almost EVERYONE would bitch and
moan and call him a traitor and worse, but 30 or 40 years from now they'd
wonder how they ever got along without Medicare For All and regulation of
financial institutions and a "progressive" income tax system and so on.

6) And then a new generation would be born who was quite ignorant of the
lessons of history, and the whole cycle would begin all over again....

....ad infinitum....

John




> John W. wrote:
>
>>
>> On Sat, Feb 6, 2010 at 8:04 PM, unionyes <unionyes at ameritech.net <mailto:
>> unionyes at ameritech.net>> wrote:
>>
>>
>>
>> On a positive note of where and how to focus on " Tea-baggers " are
>> economic
>> issues that effect them and their families directly and goes beyond the "
>> cultural " identity politics of ; guns, abortion, gays, etc..
>>
>> David J.
>>
>>
>> I don't see how, Dave.  Tea baggers are neo-conservative.  They want "less
>> taxes" and "smaller government", and have no clue that the government
>> actually grows larger during so-called conservative administrations.  They
>> seem unable to escape from their own identity politics, and unable to
>> grasp
>> the notion of the "common good" if it impinges even slightly on their
>> precious "liberties".  I may agree with a Tea bagger that America has
>> problems, chief among them economic, but a Tea bagger and I would never in
>> a
>> million years agree on solutions to the problem.   I've certainly tried to
>> dialogue with them.
>>
>> John
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> ----- Original Message ----- From: "C. G. Estabrook" <
>> galliher at illinois.edu
>> <mailto:galliher at illinois.edu>> To: "Brussel Morton K."
>> <mkbrussel at comcast.net <mailto:mkbrussel at comcast.net>> Cc: "Peace-discuss
>> List" <peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net <mailto:
>> peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net>> Sent: Saturday, February 06, 2010
>>
>> 7:23 PM Subject: Re: [Peace-discuss] Jokers to the right, maybe, but where
>> are the clowns?
>>
>>
>> I wish the Dems felt uncomfortable for the right reason - guilt for
>> consciously betraying the people who elected them: (1) money for military
>> thugs and contractors and death for the Middle East; (2) bonuses for Wall
>> Street and unemployment for Main Street; and (3) profits for insurance
>> companies and no health care even to the standard of other industrialized
>> countries. It's a sorry record - it's going exactly in the wrong direction
>> -
>> and it's no wonder that people are rejecting them at the polls. There'll
>> be
>> more of that in the fall.
>>
>> And who is the Left that the Tea-partiers are supposed to make
>> uncomfortable
>> or fearful? Here's what the authentic Left says:
>>
>> First of all, don't believe anything you hear from power systems. So if
>> Obama
>> or the boss or the newspapers or anyone else tells you they're doing this,
>> that, or the other thing, dismiss it or assume the opposite is true, which
>> it
>> often is. You have to rely on yourself and your associates --  gifts don't
>> come from above; you're going to win them, or you won't have them, and you
>> win by struggle, and that requires understanding and serious analysis of
>> the
>> options and the circumstances, and then you can do a lot. So take right
>> now,
>> for example, there is a right-wing populist uprising. It's very common,
>> even
>> on the left, to just ridicule them, but that's not the right reaction. If
>> you
>> look at those people and listen to them on talk radio, these are people
>> with
>> real grievances. I listen to talk radio a lot and it's kind of
>> interesting.
>> If you can sort of suspend your knowledge of the world and just enter into
>> the world of the people who are calling in, you can understand them. I've
>> never seen a study, but my sense is that these are people who feel really
>> aggrieved. These people think, "I've done everything right all my life,
>> I'm a
>> god-fearing Christian, I'm white, I'm male, I've worked hard, and I carry
>> a
>> gun. I do everything I'm supposed to do. And I'm getting shafted." And in
>> fact they are getting shafted. For 30 years their wages have stagnated or
>> declined, the social conditions have worsened, the children are going crazy,
>> there are no schools, there's nothing, so somebody must be doing something
>> to
>> them, and they want to know who it is. Well Rush Limbaugh has answered -
>> it's
>> the rich liberals who own the banks and run the government, and of course
>> run
>> the media, and they don't care about you -- they just want to give
>> everything
>> away to illegal immigrants and gays and communists and so on.
>>
>> Well, you know, the reaction we should be having to them is not ridicule,
>> but
>> rather self-criticism. Why aren't we organizing them? I mean, we are the
>> ones
>> that ought to be organizing them, not Rush Limbaugh. There are historical
>> analogs, which are not exact, of course, but are close enough to be
>> worrisome. This is a whiff of early Nazi Germany. Hitler was appealing to
>> groups with similar grievances, and giving them crazy answers, but at
>> least
>> they were answers; these groups weren't getting them anywhere else. It was
>> the Jews and the Bolsheviks [that were the problem].
>>
>> I mean, the liberal democrats aren't going to tell the average American,
>> "Yeah, you're being shafted because of the policies that we've established
>> over the years that we're maintaining now." That's not going to be an
>> answer.
>> And they're not getting answers from the left. So, there's an internal
>> coherence and logic to what they get from Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, and the
>> rest of these guys. And they sound very convincing, they're very
>> self-confident,
>> and they have an answer to everything -- a crazy answer, but it's an
>> answer.
>> And it's our fault if that goes on. So one thing to be done is don't
>> ridicule
>> these people, join them, and talk about their real grievances and give
>> them a
>>  sensible answer...
>>
>> Amen.  --CGE
>>
>>
>> Brussel Morton K. wrote:
>>
>> On the subject of the Tea Party and its racial overtones, see
>>
>>
>> http://www.truthout.org/white-racial-resentment-bubbles-under-surface-tea-party-movement56709
>>
>>
>>
>> One commenter of this article asks:
>>
>> /Is there much difference between the Tea Party and the John Birch
>> Society? There's nothing new here. It's rural versus urban.... I remember it
>> all from growing up in rural Michigan in the 1950's. Southern? I don't think
>> so. It's too easy to brand white southerners as the only racists in America.
>> Remember,
>>  Timothy McVey was from Michigan. The Grand Dragon of the Klu Klux Klan
>> was from a neighboring Michigan town in the 1960's. This is the racist
>> fringe of Libertarianism./ / / I wonder how Carl et al. feel about joining
>>  the chorus of Tea Party guests and advocates like Tom Tancredo, Glenn Beck,
>> and Sarah Palin, all notable at their convention in Nashville? Carl and
>> people like Cockburn seem to relish them, since they clearly make the Dems
>> and the Left uncomfortable and/or fearful.
>>
>> --mkb
>>
>>
>> On Feb 6, 2010, at 4:18 PM, C. G. Estabrook wrote:
>>
>> Clowns to the left of me! Jokers to the right! Here I am stuck in the
>> middle
>> with you.
>>
>> Yes I'm stuck in the middle with you, and I'm wondering what it is I
>> should do. Its so hard to keep this smile from my face. Losing control yeah
>> I'm all
>> over the place.
>>
>> [The Tea party movement - a crazy quilt of new growth forest, weeds, and
>> Astroturf - is growing up outside the limits of allowable debate policed by
>> the Republicans and Democrats, causing them some anxiety. They know the
>> interests they defend have less and less support among Americans.
>>
>> But where is the escape from those limits on the left?
>>
>> As all recent presidents have, Obama advertised to his masters - American
>> elites - in the Mendacity of Hope that he could successfully occlude the
>> contradiction between the goals of that small group and the mass of
>> Americans
>> ("Bring us together again!") and his principal - perhaps his only -
>> success
>> so far has been the co-option of the anti-war movement.
>>
>> Perhaps the Tea-partiers will gives an example - and maybe even the moxie
>> - to get it together again.]
>>
>>
>> Republicans seek 'Tea Party' allies
>>
>>
>> The Tea Party political movement in the United States has been gaining
>> momentum since early last year by appealing to conservative Americans who
>> want lower taxes and smaller government.
>>
>> Thousands of people are attending the first Tea Party convention in
>> Nashville, Tennessee. And its something the Republican Party has taken a
>> keen
>> interest in.
>>
>>
>> http://english.aljazeera.net/news/americas/2010/02/201026182135711755.html
>>
>
>

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