Posted on 01/02/2005 2:33:24 PM PST by OOPisforLiberals
He's still a liberal, Jim.
I think that's true. But one of the problems is that a lot of those supposed values were coopted in the 30's by the Communists, who somehow seized all of the words. That is, they didn't value the meaning of the words, but they somehow were perceived as holding title to the words, with the result that anyone who was in favor of these things automatically had to be aligned with the left.
Um.... Every time I've heard/read Katha Pollit, she sounded like a dim high-school sophomore, who is best described by a passage later in the same essay:
Goodbye to the deluded and pathetic sophistry of postmodernists of the Left, who believe their unreadable, jargon-clotted theory-sophistry somehow helps liberate the wretched of the earth.Pollit is the airhead who wrote that she didn't want her daughter flying an American flag, because "The flag stands for jingoism and vengeance and war [...] the violent anti-Arab and anti-Muslim bigotry that has already resulted in murder, vandalism and arson around the country [...] and bombing ordinary people half a world away back to the proverbial stone age." What's really funny is that what the American flag actually stands for is *America* itself. So Pollit is expressing what she thinks *America* stands for.
She's also the idiot who got body-slammed several times in a radio discussion with Andrew Sullivan several months after 9/11, wherein he was in favor of a military response to 9/11 and all she could do was bitch about what was "wrong" with such a response. Sullivan finally had had enough:
Andrew: ... so if military response is not an answer, what would you do, Katha?Pollit then whines that Sullivan hadn't "given her enough time" to think of an answer, and in response he delivers the knockout punch: "If you haven't thought this through by *now*..."Katha: (long pause)... Well, um, there's... umm...
Andrew: Your stammering is quite eloquent.
Katha (joined by Moderator): Hey! Hey! That's just unfair!
That is, if she *still* couldn't think of a workable response to 9/11 *months* after it happened... Maybe she should get the hell out of the way and stop saying "no no no" to the people who *have* a plan.
I couldn't agree more. One of the founding principles of postmodernism is that cooption of the language is cooption of power. That is one reason for its concentration in such former intellectual backwaters as literary criticism. It was a lot of earnest people believing with all their hearts that if only everyone pretended that the emperor had new clothing on, he really did. The power of the collective here was the power to create its own reality. It doesn't really, of course. Half of the Left still believes that it does and the other half is mortally resentful that it doesn't. For which we non-believers are to blame, naturally.
Just as the fact that the Republicans in Congress voted more solidly for the Civil Rights Act than the Democrats has enshrined the Republican Party as the Party of Civil Rights?
After the election, I wrote a very nice letter to my few liberals friends. The election was so contentious, I actually had to put some friendships on hold as they were getting very nasty in their hatred towards Bush.
Silly me, I thought after the eleciton people would go back to being human beings again. WRONG. The note I wrote was just a generic note, praying for peace (IT WAS NOT, AND I MADE SURE IT WAS NOT A GLOAT NOTE). I truly thought I would be friends with these people again. I never heard back from anyone of them. Not one. Lesson learned. They are mean, nasty, unhappy people.
See..the Jews are starting to turn. It just seems that if you're Jewish you can't stand on the side of the Islamo-fascists who seek your destruction. I don't know, it's not rocket science.
These bozos wouldn't know who Chomsky is. All they know is they hate GWB. John Boy said to me re F911 that the Bush family had ties to the Saudi royal family. All I could say to him was check out the ties Bill Clinton had to Marc Rich. I doubt he got it.
It's not about Democrat vs. Republican. People on Free Republic love to point that out, how Republicans supported civil rights reforms while the racists were the Democrats. And it is an important historical point. It also helps explain why Democrats still tolerate racism in their ranks today.
But it is really a matter of Left vs. Right. And the prevailing civil rights image is that of young, white Marxists travelling to the South to fight for civil rights. Many of the black leaders of the civil rights movement were affiliated with communist organizations, and some still are.
Those southern racist Democrats were not leftists. I don't think they were really conservative either, as it was a betrayal of conservative principles in my opinion, but they certainly weren't "progressives".
This is the key. I strongly believe that the way to the hearts and minds of black people today is through more exposure of conservative values (many of which they already embrace). Conservatism is NEW, and the best way for the black community to achieve any amount of progress today.
Great point! I'd never thought of it that way. In other words, criticism went from being a sort of meditation on a literary text to a thing unto itself, unleashed and eventually becoming more important than the original text.
Probably some of the initiators of this (I.A. Richards, for example) didn't really have this in mind, but because the fundamental nature of Communism/leftist thought is ahistorical, their theory enabled literary criticism to could become a vehicle for any bizarre interpretation, reinterpretation or radical rip-off that the left wished to impose upon a particular work or even a particular phrase.
Okay. Got it. Appreciate your point of view and I appreciate your thoughtful response.
D'OH! I meant AGAINST, obviously. Hey, too much New Years...still...
I knew you meant that. Don't sweat it.
I'd hoped that the pride of the South had held up a bit better than that.
I feel for ya man... but imagine what its like for me in MA.
It took this guy 30 years to find Marxist evil remains the basis of Liberalism?
Jeez. Talk about slow on the up-take.
Well to be perfectly honest the 'Dixie Democrats' went over to the Republican side after the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which Southern Democrats viewed as a betrayal by LBJ. Nixon became president as a result.
Old labels, like old clothes rarely fit well with age.
Bush is "a devil
I really wish the left would make up its mind (major assumtion on my part). he's either the devil incarnate, or he's dumber than a post. So which is it?
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