The Old Left and the New Democrats and other tedium

I’ve had some rumblings that point to yet another awakening, meaning that it is time to move on.

We have a young relative who is in the advertising business, and who is currently faced with the choice of working for an agency in a new city, Chicago, or working for an old employer whom he has left twice for greener pastures, or venturing out and forming a new ad agency with some like-minded cohorts.

I don’t know what his future holds. But when we sit with him, he talks about it, pesters us with questions, asks for our input. We are careful not to offer advice. We only ask him to consider this or that, to ferret out his own thoughts.

His thought processes are intertwined around conversations with others. That’s how he processes information.

For others, it is a ruminative process. Thinking is hard work, but some can do it while sitting in a chair looking out the window. They organize thoughts, create strategies, and then act. It’s quite a gift, but doesn’t come about by accident. These people are usually highly educated and have worked very hard at learning how to think. While education for most of us is a tool of enslavement, for these people, it is a path to freedom.

For myself, I’m an odd duck. I think with my fingers. I sit down to write and most times do not know what awaits. Often it is a revelation to myself. That’s why I regard writing not as labor, but rather as recreation. Our old and departed friend Bob Garner had a blog for a while, and was tortured by the thought that he had to write something every day. He quickly gave it up. For me, it is a privilege, and even if I have 300 readers or sixty (which is where it currently sits), I love doing it.

Here are the rumblings:

I was down at Pearl Street Mall here in Boulder last week, and remembered a place I had long forgotten: Left Hand Book Store. It’s down a flight of stairs, nested away. I was there when we visited some years ago, and thought it would be a privilege to live in a town that had such a store. Back then, I walked out with an armload of books. Last week, I could not find one book that even remotely grabbed me. I have no use for the Buddha, am not interested in the slaughter of the Native American population. Michael Parenti is a pseudo if ever there was one. Left wing economics is Utopian nonsense. And Chomsky … well, I admire the man and thank him for his many volumes, but he is old and his time has passed.

(Chomsky’s most important work, that I beleive should be read and digested by all, is The Responsibility of Intellectuals. (I do not presume to be one. I offer that up because most of that breed spend their lives in service of power. Their efforts do not serve human freedom, which is the proper function of education.))

The other incident was some volunteer work I do. Bob McChesney hosts a program on public radio in Urbana, Illinois called Media Matters. He’s a well known author, and consequently gets the most incredible guests, from Chomsky to Richard Dawkins Glenn Greenwald to Naomi Klein to … Albert to Zinn, I guess. I transcribe the program that airs on the fourth Sunday of each month. I’ve been very lucky – I have gotten Wendell Potter and Gore Vidal and Chris Hedges, and each was fun.

Last time I got Michael Albert. He’s an old lefty, and went on and on about a new society he dreams about, with empowered workers and shared wealth, free minds and free bodies. I first ran into Albert in the early nineties, and found him boring then. Here he is, two decades later, no closer to fruition, and unchanged. He still thinks it’s gonna happen. He still doesn’t understand people.

How can so much life pass by without learning a thing or two?

I take some pride in knowing that my life has been movement … from nothing to right-winger-states-rights to Reagan Republican to nothing to Chomsky leftist to Naderite to what I am now: nothing. The list of things I do not believe in is long. I focus my attention on my latest romantic breakup. In relationships we do not go from love to friendship. We go from love to anger to hatred to disinterest.

I’ve been focused on Democrats for a long time. It’s time to treat them with the disinterest they so richly deserve. Things are going to change here at this blog. No more dwelling on the futility of two parties or imagining an enlightened populace. I choose to run in interesting circles, read interesting books, and write about things that fascinate me, learning with every peck of the keyboard.

And no more health care or election fraud or agitprop or body counts. Those battles are long lost (and election fraud itself is so pointless, as even clean elections give us shit). And there is so much more to explore. Life is so much more interesting than that.

I am thankful that I encountered Michael Albert, as he reminds me of how bad (and boring) it can be to be an idealist. There is so much more to life than trying to lift people out of the trenches. Leave them be. I plan from this day forward to do two things: Try to focus on new and interesting stuff while at the same time making fun of right wingers.

It’s my calling.