This has been a wonderful community to be a very small part of. When Matt and Chris said they were leaving MyDD, I knew I would be following them to wherever they were going. I thought they were full of wild and crazy ideas, but ones that could be implemented.
They knew that principles mattered because they set the course of events. Principles told you when you were veering off course.
My identifier on this site was this quote from a Matt Stoller piece during the 2008 election cycle
"Incrementalism isn't a different path to the same place, it could be a different path to a different place"
I have been doing politics in different ways at different levels for many years. From being one of the founders of the first women's "liberation" group in Boston, to marching in the streets against war and for equality, to helping to make films about the history of the left and its repression in America, to being involved organizationally with the abortion rights movement. Being a liberal, one who thought we should be loud about our liberalism....Well, it was often a very lonely place for an unreconstructed liberal like me.
You know that hackneyed phrase. "I haven't changed, I haven't left the Demcoratic party, the Democratic party left me,"? It is always used by right wingers to justify themselves...for whatever heinous betrayal of principles they have just engaged in. However for me, it's also true. I haven't changed, I am just the liberal I always was. It's just that the Democratic party has become less so. However, I keep refusing to accept that that is to be the final outcome, a constant drift rightward. So I try mightily to pull it back to where it once was
The community on the internet and on the blogs, alleviated that sense of loneliness. Actually it made me realize I wasn't the only one who was crazy. Crazy for freedom and equality and all those words everyone uses and abuses. To me the truest and most fundamental expression of freedom and equality are to be found in that space known as progressivism now and liberalism then.
Matt was very right about the dangers of incrementalism. If the arc of change is too long and too curvy, it gets diverted from its final object. Diverted by corruption, diverted by fatigue, diverted by a misplaced sense of comity, diverted by money and the distortion in power that money creates, and diverted by the idea that if change doesn't come now it will come later. Well it may, but it won't, by then be the change that is needed and that we liberals have fought for. It won;t be the change people NEED. The more it gets diverted, the less power real people have to make the change that is best for themselves. It is a downward spiral instead of an upward one. Patience is not always a virtue.
FDR made big change and he made it fast. It has had a lasting effect. We are still trying to fill in the gaps in the vision he brought for.
I want to thank Matt and Chris for the oppurtunity they gave me to write for this wonderful blog. When Matt asked me to write here, I replied I wasn;t a good enough writer. But he said I stuff to write about, that I was passionate about...so I did. I hope I got better.
I want to thank Paul Rosenberg for all his wonderful posts and the help he has extended to me since he's been editor. And to Mike Lux for being himself, smart, left but centered. And to Adam Bink for being himself as well and fixing my techno screw ups. ( Adam say hi to your mom for me)
I have been asked to write about abortion, choice and women at Crooks and Liars. I am thrilled to do so.
And I want to thank my colleagues here at Open Left when we won the Pub Quiz at Netroots Nation when we were in Pittsburgh in 2009. I never had more fun at a conference in my life. Maybe that's why John asked me to write for C&L;!
To the commenters on this site, I want to say that this is smartest, most insightful and most courteous group of commenters on the internet. I thank you for letting me write for you.
In comments on Paul Rosenberg's recent article for OpenLeft,
Asshole Alaskan Politician (D) Outs Top Anomymous Blogger, readers Anthony de Jesus, souvarine, julie, and Buckeye Hamburger criticize Paul Rosenberg's amateur appropriation of DSM-IV as a polemical tool, but...
In Mr. Rosenberg's defense, I have to say that psychiatry and psychology have been useless in the public arena for the last eight years, at least, and although Mr. Rosenberg's awkward essays in diagnosis probably annoy me even more than they annoy those critical commenters, because I'm occasionally on the receiving end of his tendency to demonize the opposite side of any given issue, Mr. Rosenberg's psychological essays nevertheless represent a continuing project to transform political discussion on the internet into something a little deeper than "gotcha" sensationalism.
It's almost a given that political discussion on the internet is shallow. A blogger who mentions Aristotle, Thucydides, Tacitus, Machiavelli, Theodor Adorno, Herbert Marcuse, Robert Putnam, John Rawls, Raymond Aron, Hannah Arendt, Paulo Freire, Jürgen Habermas, Slavoj Žižek, Thorstein Veblen, Benedetto Croce, or Max Weber is merely displaying idiosyncratic intellectual baggage, which most readers will comprehend not at all, no matter how many links are supplied.
We have nothing in common, except the news of the day.
In this condition of mindless dependence on whatever curiosity may have temporarily amazed the deculturated multitude of internet news-consumers, Mr. Rosenberg's amateur psychological analysis may be wrong, but it isn't misguided, and the triviality of almost all other political discussion on the internet can't be justified by claiming that anything deeper would trespass on the turf of academic or psychological professionalism.
Psychology, anthropology, sociology, philosophy, political science, and even history have been neutered in the realm of American political discourse, and if Mr. Rosenberg has the balls to resist our ongoing intellectual impoverishment, he deserves more praise than blame.
Newly promoted Chief Organizer Bertha Lewis, who wrote in this space last Friday, took a minute to express ACORN's thanks for the pushback to the progressive movement and we in the netroots.
I've been working on the side to help ACORN in the last few weeks, and I am also truly thankful everyone pitched in. The PFAW ad in the NYTimes was stunning, and I think Paul Rosenberg and the folks at Project Vote here in the diaries have been doing top-notch work. This really is what a movement looks like. I'd also like to thank ACORN for returning the favor through advertising on OpenLeft.
Bertha also asked for an Obama vote on the WFP line in New York, which I do every election. The Working Families Party is strongly supported by statewide labor, and tend to push forward issues like the Brodsky Telecom bill and publicly funded elections that get swept under by Silver and co. Because we have a fusion voting system in NYS, they do cross-endorsements (including for the state legislature), and you can vote for Obama on the WFP line, which helps them get more clout statewide.
Bertha tells me she forgot to thank Rep. Jesse Jackson, Jr. Props as well for his impassioned defense
Despite the interest The Dark Knight has evoked on the left and across the spectrum, I think it's a step backward into the cultural morass we've been hoping to escape.
For me, the film was only interesting when Heath Ledger or Maggie Gyllanhaal were on screen--two wonderful performances. Ledger will probably live in my memory forever--such a frail little man making the whole city turn upside down. Ledger didn't make the Joker larger than life, as Nicholson did. He seemed smaller and more vulnerable than anyone else, well acquainted with pain and eager to inflict it on others. After that performance, no wonder Ledger had trouble sleeping. The aura of his death hangs over his performance and the movie, but the performance would have been just as good, though slightly different, slightly less autobiographical and more constructed-seeming, if he had lived. The part was well written too, until the ending, when the character explained his nihilism in too much detail. I think Gyllanhaal gave the film's overlooked performance, savvy, charming, and touching in a part that could have been a throwaway--just another high-paying, no-effort job for a name actress reaching a certain age. But she made it more. In a way, her subjectivity held the movie together.
But the rest was a downer. All that ambivalence about things one shouldn't be ambivalent about--torture, surveillance, the rule of law. And the ending, stressing the need to lie to the people for their own good. Doesn't that sound like what we've had for the last eight years? Obama is preaching transparency, whereas McCain is selling lies. So many, he can't even keep them straight anymore--e.g., the football team he claims to have named in lieu of real soldiers when he was being interrogated. So many of the dynamics of this film are straight from the rightist playbook--the endorsement of national lies, the belief (as Rosenberg recently said) that a great nation can only be destroyed from within (Jews, Communists, gays, and Gypsies in Nazi Germany, Com symps and gays in Cold War America, Islamofascists now, ethnically marked mobsters in this film), the Girardian desire to sacrifice the riff-raff in order to strengthen the communal ties of the rest, the positing of a condition of perpetual cultural crisis.
This is self-evidently a movie from a very troubled country--confused, guilt-feeling, and using reactionary frames to understand itself and face the future. I think it's the opposite of Spielberg's War of the Worlds, or Greengrass's The Bourne Ultimatum, which may have been ham-handed (Spielberg) but had their hearts in the right place. The Dark Knight is ambivalent about Fascism. I know that it may play powerfully as a nightmare, but I think ultimately it is part of the problem, not the solution. It's sort of a bullshit diagnosis in the spirit of Giuliani. Stay afraid, it says. You're cornered, but you're dangerous and crazy enough to survive. Isn't that McCain's "bomb bomb bomb Iran" song, his idea of a hundred year war?
I see this film as continuous with a torture imaginary that arose after 9/11 and includes the TV show 24 and such film series as The Saw and Hostel. We want to see blood flow--theirs (consciously) but our own too. We talk about "Islamofascism," but that peculiar frame is a projection of our own angry feelings, our unconscious yearning for Judeo-Christian Fascism, the terror we ourselves wish to instill in others. This movie is shock and awe brought into the cineplex.
STATE BLOGS
