Commie Curmudgeon

Lately, I've been reading a lot of the columns by Paul Craig Roberts in CounterPunch. I'm not sure I understand this guy's history: former Assistant Secretary of the Treasury in the Reagan administration, former Associate Editor of the Wall Street Journal editorial page and Contributing Editor of National Review - what is he doing writing regularly for this leftist newsletter, and how is it that this guy from the Reagan administration can be writing things that I/we can agree with so much? Maybe he's been through some major changes, or maybe there's a logical straight trajectory to his work that I can't understand. But I find the words that he writes about the economy to be much more understandable - in terms of being comprehensible in a rational way - than most of what passes for "economic reporting" in the present age.

Having seen bizarre reports of improvements in "consumer confidence" (at least in some of the past few months) and other news that has been heralded by politicians and their journalist lackeys as an indication of a "good," "strong," or "improving" economy, I definitely appreciated these words in Roberts' article Their Own Economic Reality:

Consumers deeper in debt and fresh from their first negative savings rate since the Great Depression show high consumer confidence. It is as if the entire country is on an acid trip or a cocaine trip or whatever it is that lets people create realities for themselves that bear no relation to real reality.

How can the upbeat views be reconciled with the Bureau of Labor Statistics' payroll jobs data, the extraordinary red ink, and exploding trade deficit? Perhaps the answer is that every economic development, no matter how detrimental, is spun as if it were good news. For example, the worsening US trade deficit is spun as evidence of the fast growth of the US economy: the economy is growing so fast it can't meet its needs and must rely on imports. Declining household income is spun as an inflation fighter that keeps mortgage interest rates low. Federal budget deficits are spun as letting taxpayers keep and spend more of their own money. Massive layoffs are spun as evidence that change is so rapid that the work force must constantly upgrade skills and re-educate itself.

The denial of economic reality has become an art form.

I also appreciate the way that Roberts exposes the myth that the problems of underemployment and unemployment would be solved if only more people in the U.S. would get more training and better education. Having suffered through some of the worst underemployment myself even with my overrated college education, I can especially appreciate how Roberts exposes the fact that even people in "practical" fields such as engineering - or maybe especially those people with such supposedly highly valued skills - are finding that they have to struggle more and more just to get by.

The assertion that we hear every day that America is falling behind because it doesn't produce enough science, mathematics and engineering graduates is a bald-faced lie. The problem is always brought back to education failures in K-12, that is, to more education subsidies. When CEOs say they can't find American engineers, they mean they cannot find Americans who will work for Chinese or Indian wages. That is what the so-called "shortage" is all about.

I receive a constant stream of emails from unemployed and underemployed engineers with many years of experience and advanced degrees. Many have been out of work for years. They describe the movement of their jobs offshore or their replacement by foreigners brought in on work visas. Many no longer even know American engineers who are employed in the profession. Some are now working in sawmills, others in Home Depot, and others are attempting to eke out a living as consultants. Many describe lost homes, broken marriages, even imprisonment for inability to make child support payments.

I found it particularly, darkly amusing, after reading the above-quoted article, to encounter another article about the so-called "talent shortage" splashed all over the corporate newswires, based on a survey conducted by Manpower, a company which I always thought of as the biggest work-with-no-benefits-promoting temp agency (and certainly, I should know). Over at Yahoo News/Reuters, we got to see some pertinent quotes from the CEO of Manpower, Jeffrey Joerres himself, such as:

This is not a cyclical trend, as we have seen in the past, this time the talent crunch is for real, and it's going to last for decades.

But tellingly, the same article states in the next sentence:

Recruitment firms have benefited from global trends such as outsourcing and better economic growth worldwide.

Getting back to Roberts' reality check, here is a little more information about outsourcing:

Norm Augustine, former CEO of Lockheed Martin, says that even McDonald's jobs are no longer safe. Why pay an error-prone order-taker the minimum wage when McDonald's can have the order transmitted via satellite to a central location and from there to the person preparing the order. McDonald's' experiment with this system to date has cut its error rate by 50% and increased its throughput by 20 percent. Technology lets the orders be taken in India or China at costs below the minimum wage and without the liabilities of US employees.

Americans are giving up their civil liberties because they fear terrorist attacks. All of the terrorists in the world cannot do America the damage it has already suffered from offshore outsourcing.

Roberts hits even harder in a slightly earlier article, The True State of the Union. Here are a few words about the condition that the Reuters article seems to be referring to as "world economic growth":

The World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, is the cradle of the propaganda that globalization is win-win for all concerned. Free trader Stephen Roach of Morgan Stanley reports that the mood at the recently concluded Davos meeting was different, because the predicted "wins" for the industrialized world have not made an appearance.

Roach writes that "job creation and real wages in the mature, industrialized economies have seriously lagged historical norms. It is now commonplace for recoveries in the developed world to be either jobless or wageless - or both."

Roach is the first free trade economist to admit that the disruptive technology of the Internet has dashed the globalization hopes. It was supposed to work like this: The first world would lose market share in tradable manufactured goods and make up the job and economic loss with highly-educated knowledge workers. The "win-win" was supposed to be cheaper manufactured goods for the first world and more and better jobs for the third world.

It did not work out this way, Roach writes, because the Internet allowed job outsourcing to quickly migrate from call centers and data processing to the upper end of the value chain, displacing first world employees in "software programming, engineering, design, and the medical profession, as well as a broad array of professionals in the legal, accounting, actuarial, consulting, and financial services industries."

Although, these trends aren't hurting everyone - CEOs are thriving, as are certain members of government and their public relations generators:

The first world gainers from globalization are the corporate executives, who gain millions of dollars in bonuses by arbitraging labor and substituting cheaper foreign labor for first world labor.

For the past decade free market economists have served as apologists for corporate interests that are dismantling the ladders of upward mobility in the US and creating what McMillion [an economist] writes is the worst income inequality on record.

Globalization is wiping out the American middle class and terminating jobs for university graduates, who now serve as temps, waitresses and bartenders. But the whores among economists and the evil men and women in the Bush administration still sing globalization's praises.

And you might also take some encouragement if you're an army recruiter worried that the Iraq-related downward trend in enrollment may never stop:

The new job depression is creating a reserve army of the unemployed to serve as desperate recruits for neoconservative military adventures. Perhaps that explains the Bush administration's enthusiasm for globalization.

I learned from To The Barricades that Paul Avrich died. I never knew Avrich, but I knew a few people who did, and my old roommate used to have dinner with him every now and then. So I might make a phone call or two, offer my condolences.

I do know Avrich’s writing, and he is one of the most thorough and interesting radical historians whom I have read. Outside of Murray Bookchin (who I am hoping still has at least a few years left in him), Avrich is (or was) probably the only contemporary writer of anarchist history whose books I could refer to repeatedly.

Right now, I am browsing through my copy of The Russian Anarchists. Here is a touching summary, from the end of the book:

These anarchists were fated to be rejected, reviled and, finally, stamped out or driven into exile. Those who survived, though they suffered periods of disillusionment and despair, retained their idealism to the end. If they were failures by material standards, within their small circles they found personal warmth, comraderie, and high-minded devotion to a common cause; moreover, by liberating themselves from the conventions of a world they detested, perhaps they even attained as individuals some measure of the "higher order" they so desperately craved for all mankind....

Paul Avrich wrote a lot of material about the Russian revolutionaries, Marxists as well as anarchists. Unfortunately, not much of it can be found on the Net, but I was happy to stumble upon a fascinating article that he wrote about Bolshevik Opposition to Lenin. So, here's a good paragraph from that, too:

What then was to be done? For Miasnikov the degeneration of the revolution could be halted only by the restoration of proletarian democracy. He remained unshakable in his belief in the initiative and capacity of the workers, the class from which he himself had sprung. The defects of the regime could no longer be corrected by the Bolshevik leadership. Remedies, rather, must come from the working-class rank and file, both party and nonparty. Without worker participation in every area, he insisted, the attainment of socialism would be impossible. Lenin, by contrast, lacking Miasnikov's faith in mass initiative, clung to administrative solutions, rejecting any proposal that would have allowed a democratic breeze to blow through the party apparatus. This he considered more dangerous than bureaucratism itself. He relied, to the very end, on bureaucrats to reform the bureaucracy, setting one section of the apparatus against another.

For those who want to read more - a lot more - there is also a comprehensive Paul Avrich bibliography. Apparently, he has left quite a legacy.

Sometimes an Internet search can be pretty useless; other times, it can be very rewarding right away. This morning/last night, I might have encountered the latter case, while I did a little searching for good descriptions related to a point that I had made in my last post, which was also discussed somewhat in the comments section. (And by the way - if you'll pardon a little blogging egotism here - I am pretty happy with the comments that I received this time around - which nicely supplemented the points I was trying to make, supplying a lot of interesting information.) The thing that I said that I wanted to focus on more was, "Naturally, people would expect me to respond that way since I have for sometime been far more interested in workers' councils and other methods through which the working class goes well beyond conventional trade union methods of negotiation and limited top-down-organized strikes, in order to take direct collective control of the workplace, factory, community, etc." Somewhat in response to this, I would guess, Nate asked in the comments section if I've read much Stan Weir...to which I would respond, not really, but I’ve read a lot of stuff by a lot of other people that focused on some of the basic principles that Weir, from what I know, worked with himself... And then I did a nice Internet search around Stan Weir and Rosa Luxemburg and revolutionary workers' groups, spontaneity, etc., and came up with two very worthwhile quotes.

The first is from a speech that was made at the 2002 General Assembly of the IWW. (And that setting, by the way, is both appropriate and ironic, in different ways. But I'm going to cop out on that point and leave it up to the reader to guess why it might be described as both.) Specifically, I like these particular passages from a speech by Staughton Lynd:

...And in fact, in the moments of revolution or near-revolution during the past century and a half we find that poor and working people did not conduct the struggle through organizations already in existence when the crisis began. Rather they acted through new institutions, created for the purpose at hand. Typically, these new institutions brought together all the workers of a given locality and addressed the common interests, the class interests, of all workers in that community. Often such bodies originated as committees to administer local general strikes. Typically, as the crisis deepened, the committee would turn to positive tasks such as maintaining public safety, ensuring that essential medical services remained available, guaranteeing a supply of basic foods, and so on. Built from below, gradually taking on responsibility for the whole range of human needs, the network of new organizations became a dual power confronting the existing structure of government.

Such were the Paris Commune of 1871; the Russian soviets ("soviet" simply means "council") in 1905 and 1917; the Italian committees that administered the occupation of factories after World War 1; local general strike committees in Seattle in 1919, in Toledo, Minneapolis and San Francisco in 1934; and in Oakland and elsewhere in' the United States after World War II; the workers' councils of revolutionary Hungary in 1956; the inter-factory strike committees; first on the Baltic Coast, and then throughout the country, that came to call themselves Polish Solidarity; the workers' assemblies that met each day in France in the autumn of 1995 to decide whether to continue 'the strike for another day; and the workers' committees that dismissed local factory managers throughout Serbia in the fall of 2000.

[Now, we might add to the list occurrences of this phenomenon in Latin America – Argentina, Bolivia, Venezuela...]

The second quote is something that I stumbled upon in a journal that I know basically nothing about. That journal - which does look like a very interesting read, overall – is What Next, and the quotes come from an article, Punctuation Marks: A Story of Class Struggle, by Sheila Cohen:

An equally crucial aspect of the class struggle dynamic illustrated by 1905 is its creation of new, independent organisational forms unique to grass roots struggle. Again, this phenomenon is not confined to periods of outright revolutionary upsurge. In the decidedly non-inflammatory 1950s, US activist Stan Weir noted the development of "informal underground unions" in workplaces across the country, constituting "the power base for...insurgencies from below"; in Britain, similarly, workplace-based independent rank and file groups grew into the shop steward networks and industry-wide "combine committees" which lent thousands of workers real power during the rank and file upsurge of the late 1960s and early 1970s.

Rather more epochally, the Communards of 1871 soared, for two doomed months, to the heights of a "free town" based on factory occupations and constructed entirely according to the principles of direct self-government; workers involved in the semi-insurrectionary US "Great Upheaval" of the late 1870s generated, unknowingly, similar forms and structures. The self-organisation of Russian workers in 1905 was not so much consciously handed down as "spontaneously" reiterated in later struggles; zoom forwards a hundred years, from the Paris Commune, the Great Upheaval, and you have the interembrasa (inter-factory committees) of the 1974 Portuguese revolution, the Chilean cordones (literally "ropes") in which networks of rank and file workers organized factory occupations in support of Allende's doomed regime, and the Iranian shuras of 1979.

What is difficult for institutional loyalists to accept about such alternative structures is their espousal of the union form, rather than "the union," by the rank and file activists and workers who support them. As such they reflect the philosophy of most rank and file workers: "as a general rule rank and file loyalty was to the principle of trade unionism rather than to trade unions as organizations." Yet the most effective organizational moves are towards that form, that dynamic, rather than being embodied in static institutions.

Rosa Luxemburg's The Mass Strike supports the significance of these independent organizational forms. Quoting a representative of the Petersburg Soviet who reported, "Our trade unions are simply new forms of organisation for the direction of those economic struggles which the Russian proletariat has already waged for decades," she comments: "A proletariat almost wholly unorganised created a comprehensive network of organisational appendages in a year and a half of stormy revolutionary struggle." Struggle creates organization: "while the guardians of the German trade unions fear that organisations will fall in pieces in a revolutionary whirlwind like rare porcelain, the Russian revolution shows us exactly the opposite picture; from the whirlwind and the storm, out of the fire and glow of the mass strike and the street fighting rise again, like Venus from the foam, fresh, young, powerful, buoyant trade unions."

It was this "revolutionary whirlwind," rooted not in parties and programs but direct, materially-based class action, which created that most archetypal of independent working class organizational forms - the Soviet. Out of the "punctuation marks" strike of September 19th came the great October strike, the most clearly revolutionary of that revolutionary year; and out of that revolutionary strike, the Petersburg Soviet - a constellation, literally a "council," of workers' deputies from factory committees throughout the city. This "committee"-based form is characteristic, almost without exception, of every form of grass roots, non-institutional, "spontaneous" class struggle.

The only part of the quote from Luxemburg that I'm not sure might be so relevant today is this reference to "buouyant trade unions." (Plus, I haven't reached a full decision on the article as a whole - a bit too much of those guys Lenin and Trotksy creeping in - but the part quoted here is very good.) And I know some of my comrades out there aren't going to like this, but...I honestly think that we may be reaching a point, especially in contemporary "advanced" capitalism, where grassroots workers' groups might be better off not calling themselves unions anymore. In other words, one pertinent question to ask might be, in places where unions have essentially discredited themselves (to the point where most workers don't even want to bother joining them), wouldn't it be better for a group that does something different from unions as we know them not to call itself a union at all? I am aware that the situation might be a bit more complicated than the question that I'm framing, and varies from place to place. I guess it's true that unions can (and often still do) play a part in revolutionary (or prerevolutionary?) grassroots workers' movements. However, I am also very interested in learning about workers' groups that are set up in spite of often corrupt, authoritarian, and/or ineffectual trade unions, even in opposition to our concepts of unionism. That's one of the reasons that I have so often liked the works of a group from India called Kamunist Kranti (and I hope that people who've been reading this blog since it started don't mind that I’m repeating myself)... Their stories include some great examples of workers doing collective actions together in spite of both unions and management, who often appear on the same side in India (i.e., against workers, as they apparently do so often here in the U.S.).

And this is a good place to bring up another response to my prior post, which is not included in the comments section. This one comes from a mention in Chris Carlsson’s blog, Attitude Adjustor. Chris has made some very nice comments in reference to my comments about soldarity, but I think I especially appreciate this contribution to the discussion about unions:

Kudos to Commie Curmudgeon, too, for rebuking leftist depression over the decline of unions. Paralleling the ahistorical fantasies liberals have about Democrats, people committed to radical social change are too often delusional when they think trade unions are on their team. The vital distinction between self-organization (in workplaces or neighborhoods or otherwise) and the institutions which have developed in capitalism to stablize an exploitative daily life is too often lost or never properly understood. Of course we all need to figure out the new forms of politics and self-defense and utopian upheaval that can really overturn this barbaric world. But too many leftists in the U.S. are unimaginatively stuck in a moribund loyalty to forms and institutions that have been properly abandoned in practice by most people.

Thanks to Wood’s Lot for referring us to an article by Christopher Hayes in In These Times discussing the nature of solidarity. The most important thing that this article does is provide much-needed definitions of "solidarity" at a time when most people seem to have forgotten what the word means. In particular, I like these paragraphs, which talk about both "mundane" and "sublime" solidarity:

In its mundane sense, solidarity means a robust feeling of togetherness, a "one-for-all, all-for-one-ness" that holds fast a group of people in a common activity. It is best summed up in Benjamin Franklin's exhortation to his co-conspirators that they must all hang together or surely they would hang separately. This kind of solidarity is morally neutral. Union members refusing to cross a picket line exemplify solidarity, but so do white homeowners in a Chicago neighborhood signing restrictive covenants to keep black families out.

Sublime solidarity, on the other hand, embodies a powerful moral aspiration to realize the fundamental fellowship of humankind. The human subject imbued with full solidarity would treat each person the same way she would treat the interests of her closest kin. My father, a community organizer and one-time Jesuit seminarian, explains why solidarity is his favorite word by sketching a continuum that ranges from pearl-clutching pity through sympathy and empathy to arrive finally at solidarity, wherein you are propelled to do something for your fellow human beings, to act as if their interests were your own.

One thing that Hayes does which I have been trying to do for sometime is clarify the distinction between solidarity and charity. Hayes comes to the same conclusion that I have (as does Thomas Frank, apparently), that many prominent contemporary activists and their organizations approach the problems of the world with the attitude of charity, while solidarity is very different from that. In the past, I have tried to articulate why I believe that the typical contemporary liberal attitude of charity does not have the power of solidarity in effecting major changes in our world, but on at least some occasions, my efforts have been met with either bafflement or anger. Hopefully, Hayes' method of explaining these differences is a little more clear and less irritating:

Right now, our politics are atomized and transactional: we send checks, we sign petitions, we forward articles. We buy sweat-free clothes, recycle and look for vocations that don't collude too egregiously with evil. But we've unconsciously circumscribed the boundaries of political action. What is MoveOn's equivalent of a strike? As union membership and urban ethnic machines decline and the "netroots," overwhelmingly white and affluent, comes to represent the progressive movement, the left is in danger of becoming, as Thomas Frank wrote in Le Monde Diplomatique in February 2004, "a charity operation." That is, "people in sympathy with the downtrodden, not the downtrodden themselves."

As the American right offers that redundant canard "moral values" as its lodestar, the left should offer solidarity. Not retrograde brotherhood, or faith-specific fellowship, but something more robust and difficult and rewarding. The uplift of collective enterprise.

Hayes does make one statment that I really don't agree with, i.e., "If we lose unions, we lose the concept of solidarity itself. And it's hard to imagine we won't become worse people for it."

Actually, the trade union as we know it has never been the only method through which workers could organize collective actions and build solidarity, and it definitely should not be considered the only method now. Naturally, people would expect me to respond that way since I have for sometime been far more interested in workers’ councils and other methods through which the working class goes well beyond conventional trade union methods of negotiation and limited top-down-organized strikes, in order to take direct collective control of the workplace, factory, community, etc. Some people in the U.S. (who think they know what they’re talking about) would dismiss these other methods as being antiquated and utopian, but actually, the movements throughout the world in which workers are making the greatest progress and the left is advancing most - such as in much of Latin America at the moment - have involved many such collective takeovers, with the establishment of workers' councils and people’s assemblies. These efforts often involve some trade unions, but they also involve efforts outside of the unions and sometimes in spite of them (especially in spite of the union leadership).

One thing that troubles me about a lot of the more conventional American leftists is that they are so depressed by the decline of the standard, "traditional" forms of leftist organization - such as the trade union - that they’ve lost hope in, or have lost sight of, the idea that we can pursue other methods of building collective action, whether we look for entirely new methods or revisit seemingly older ones. Even in the U.S., we’ve seen some good examples of this happening, with the recent revival of interest in direct action and networked affinity groups. Much of the direct action and creative civil disobedience that emerged in a big way during the peak of our "anti-globalization" movement went well beyond the "transactional." However, the weaknesses of that movement, and its quick decline here in U.S., probably had a lot to do with the fact that it was comprised of too many young people coming from a background of affluence, many of whom were influenced more by an idealistic sense of charity, at least in the end (i.e., by a drive to help the less "privileged" or more "oppressed") than by a deeper kind of solidarity (as in, feeling that their fate was actually tied up with that of the people whom they were ideally most out to help - who, then, wouldn't be people they were just out to help but, rather, people with whom they would be joining in one common struggle). So Hayes' point does apply to this movement, too, in ways that I myself have complained about - but not really in terms of tactics, which went well beyond signing petitions and buying non-sweatshop clothes.

Quibbles notwithstanding, Hayes does get it right enough with regard to the main topic, solidarity, to be worth quoting, especially if it will help me to explain some of those points more clearly and avoid unnecessarily pissing people off.
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P.S. Curiously, "solidarity" never even seemed to catch on as a big word in the U.S. "anti-globalization" protests. I found the case to be very different when I went to the protest in Quebec City in 2001, when all those French Canadians were chanting "Solidarite!" Maybe it's just a language difference, because of those French cultural-linguistic roots. I’m not really sure...

I'm not sure it would even be appropriate to tell Grandpa Munster to rest in peace. But if we don't hear from him again, he is one the rare things known as a celebrity actually worth remembering. (And a great commie curmudgeon too!) Today, thanks to Infoshop Org and Alternative Press Review, I found a very funny and uplifting interview with Al Lewis that originally appeared in an anarchist newspaper called The Shadow. Here are a couple of good quotes:

So what was the first political activity that you were ever involved with?

I don't know. Probably when I shit on the grass in Prospect Park, I don't know. I don't know what that means. What is a political activity? What does it mean?

The first demonstration, for instance?

I was very young. My mother used to take me to Mayday parades. That was big in New York. It used to culminate in the old Union Square, not the shit they have now, where they've built it so you can't have a demonstration. But they used to have a hundred thousand people there in Union Square Park. I remember my mother used to go on the parades for the Scottsboro boys. Those guys were arrested in Alabama on the testimony of two prostitutes - we struggled to free them. I remember participating in demonstrations, and Tom Mooney and Warren K. Billings, the so-called bombing of the "Preparedness Day Parade." And then during the Depression, people were getting evicted, ten a day. We used to come along and break the lock and put the furniture back in again. We would storm the Home Relief Centers [what the Welfare offices were called then - Ed.], that or this person didn't get a check for eight dollars or something, and get hit on the head.

In the demonstrations back in those days were there ever problems with the police? Did they try to attack people?

Did you just come to this country? (Laughs) What are you talking about? The police are here to protect property. They're not here to protect the public! So, what the fuck are you asking me? Of course! Name me a period when the police....(laughs)

...

So what keeps you going?

What keeps me going? My belief! (Laughs) You see, what happens with you "Johnny-Come-Latelies" - and I'm not personalizing - is like you take people of the Sixties. After five or ten years, they didn't get the victory, "Oh, fuck it, man, I'll take this job down on Wall Street and make the fuckin' money. I didn't get the immediate fix." See, the junkie is better off than them. He gets the fix. As long as he's got the bread, he gets the fix. "We didn't win!" America only knows the "win."

But what do you think about the people of the Sixties who didn't go along with that but made money and used it for good purposes?

I haven't found that species. (Laughs)

--------------------

P.S. By the way, I also voted for him when he ran for governor of New York. In fact, he's the only guy I remember voting for in that election in recent years. (But we didn't win. What a terrible, shocking disappointment...)

There are a few blogs that make appropriate comments about Bush’s speech. Summerisle at Times of hate, Times of joy succinctly declares, "Bullshit, complete bullshit." Then, a couple of posts down, he points out, in response to a passage in the speech where Bush states, "We must never give in to the belief that America is in decline," that "This seems to me to be a subconscious communication of the truth. America is in decline. Our culture is doomed to unravel. Bush must know this on some level, or it would never have gotten into the State of the Union speech." (I might add that I agree, only I like to think that it is all of capitalism that is in decline and doomed to unravel or is already unraveling. Although I am aware that this idea, while containing within it the prospect of a lot more hardship coming up in the near future, might also ultimately be too optimistic.) Jim at Words Matter focuses on Bush’s definitions of the "hopeful society" and shows how Bush's actions repeatedly act against the goals that these definitions contain. And Jamie at Thanksgiving Is Runied gives us some quotes to show that being a "hopeful nation" is mostly not a good thing. (My favorite, from Shakespeare in Measure for Measure: "The miserable have no other medicine, but only hope.")

But Chris Carlsson matches my own thoughts on the matter best in a post at Attitude Adjustor while discussing an essay by Giovanni Arrighi entitled Hegemony Unraveling (which sounds very interesting, though I haven’t read through it yet), when he mentions "this weirdly insular moment in U.S. history, where an inarticulate fool like Bush makes a speech that focuses SO much attention and discussion among the chattering classes. (I couldn't even bring myself to join the demo in downtown SF to 'drown out' the Bush regime...more cannon fodder duty, no thanks!)" And he goes on later to say: "When the ebb and flow of scandal and appointment and war news grips political imagination, it's terribly difficult to get an overview, to appreciate our moment in history, to think beyond the personal and political dramas that will soon be utterly forgotten as the trivia they are."

...Which is exactly how I feel about the focus on George W. Bush’s speech.

Of course, discussing why we shouldn't be discussing Bush's speech is still discussing it, especially if I'm pointing out a few comments that I liked by peolpe who were discussing it. But those comments approached the event with an appropriate amount of wry humor, sarcasm, cynicism and/or ridicule. That's a little different from approaching Bush's speech with some kind of serious expectation (beause it's the supposedly important word from the supposed commander-in-chief), and actually commenting on it in a considered and serious tone.

If we want to talk about politics, there are far more important things to discuss than the latest drivel coming out of the mouth of bluntest instrument being wielded by the reactionary wing of the ruling class. That’s not to say that I'm always talking about more important things here; sometimes I write about complete trivialities that most people probably shouldn't be concerned about (unless you've developed some perverse interest in my personal thoughts and attitudes). However, I always think, it's better to write about something trivial that is a little different from what so many other people are writing about (and therefore, I like to think, at least a little more original or curious), than to write about the same triviality that everybody else is writing about.

The harm being done by the reactionary Republican policies is certainly not trivial, although I wish more liberals and "progressives" would acknowledge that these tendencies are certainly not limited to the present administration or even Republicans, and that the whole government and ruling class are simply taking us downhill (probably to a crash) through ever-so-slightly different means and possibly at different speeds. Nonetheless, it’s not a bad idea to point out the particular heinousness of this or that Republican legislation or executive act. It is, I think, kind of pointless to endlessly reproduce commentary and chatter about the words coming out of Bush during his pointless speeches. And I can’t help but be surprised that so many people are still paying so much attention to them. (Although, if we're talking about paid media pundits, I imagine that they're doing this because it's the safe and expected thing for them to do.) I suppose it's that surprise which has caused me to write this particular post, which in a certain respect is, admittedly, just more chatter being added to the din.