[Peace-discuss] P.S.

[C. G. Estabrook]

[1] The writer of "what the authentic Left says" indubitably deserves the title,
and he has a few friends who agree with him.

[2] Rep. Tim Johnson makes far more sense to me on at least one issue than his
faux-left Democratic opponent. He says he was wrong to vote for war in
Afghanistan and Iraq - and so is voting no on more money for war in the Middle
East. David Gill has not made such a pledge.

[3] Your picture of FDR - and worse, the lesson you draw from it - needs work.
Take a look at the late Howard Zinn's account in A People's History of the
United States and tell us how you disagree with it.  --CGE


John W. wrote:
> 
> On Sat, Feb 6, 2010 at 9:08 PM, C. G. Estabrook <galliher at illinois.edu 
> <mailto: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> <mailto: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> <mailto:galliher at illinois.edu 
> <mailto:galliher at illinois.edu>>> To: "Brussel Morton K." 
> <mkbrussel at comcast.net <mailto:mkbrussel at comcast.net> 
> <mailto: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> 
> <mailto: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


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