Skip to main content

On Steps Taken Back pt. 2

I had a conversation with a woman earlier this week who feels that the democrats and republicans are basically the same party. I felt that way too until bush. In retrospect Clinton was actually a pretty good president, the most effective in my lifetime, unless you consider Reagan's success at making workers less secure and corporations stronger a good thing. I personally don't. She also said that the democrats won't speak the truth because, like the republicans, they are afraid of losing money and power. I disagreed with her at the time on several points, but find myself agreeing with her on this point, at least in part. I hear individual democrats making smart, precise, and thoughtful critiques fairly often. At the same time I feel they lack the seemingly unified voice of the political right. I also think that for too long the dems have rolled over for bush, instead of making principled stands because they were afraid of the political backlash. Bush has been politically vulnerable for a while now, but they still seem incapable of all making the same stand at the same time.

there have been suggestions that the democrats need their own version of the contract with America promoted by it's own group of young upstarts. I'm ok with that, but what I think they need even more is to start speaking the truth like they don't care if they are re-elected. They need to start speaking as if telling the truth means more than keeping their jobs, every last one of them. Some actually might lose their jobs in the short term, but the party would grow in the long term. They also need to speak the same truth from a common platform, a shared paradigm. At the heart of any platform should be the promise to restore the transparency of the government and to keep us safe without false wars and while maintaining our rights and principles.

------
To save on all of the effort I'll just say that part 3 was to be about the why of my blogging and decisions around that but I'll cut to the chase and just say that instead of writing just about politics and the news that makes me cry myself to sleep I'm going to start writing on the topics I usually write in other places, like comics, music, art, dance, djing, biting, mammals, queens, sexual frustration, how much I can fit in my mouth at once, the library card numbers that I remember from six years ago, the elasticity of smoke, queens, ny, honeyforms, music, and cartoons. Maybe. And I'm also going to try to remember to use the shift key.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

'Anti-racism', All Trap, No Honey: A Discourse About Discourse

One of the things that prevents me from writing more often is the sense that I'm just writing the same thing repeatedly from a slightly different angle. In a nutshell, all I'm saying is that moral idealism substituted for material goals will not lead to justice, but is an argument against materialism. I'm a dumb person's low rent Adolph Reed Jr. translator. I'm a "class reductionist" who understands that when the discourse is reduced to just class there's nothing as important as food, water and shelter that's left out. I often find myself contending with people who insist that there is, unable to name anything. They don't understand that they're making an argument against economic redistribution, or they don't care. There are no concrete manifestations of systemic racism or any oppression that are not dealt with through economic redistribution. When people say that economic redistribution won't end racism, what they mean is that
Post a Comment
Read more

Anti-racism - Class = Status Quo: The Neoliberal Argument Against Coalition

I was approached a few months ago around the idea of collaborating to make the progressive case for reparations. I've said before that while the idea of reparations is morally appealing I don't believe in them as an immediate political project. It's not clear to me that it's possible to build a coalition around a reparative justice focused on just 13% of the population. Encouraged by a recent Twitter conversation that included economists Sandy Darrity and Darrick Hamilton where they suggested that saying reparations will never happen is cynical I've begun trying to think of them as an eventuality and lay out the steps to reaching them. Doing this has made clear that our understanding of reparations as a form of compensation to the descendants of the enslaved is not the reparative justice that we think it to be. If we were living with the kind of understanding of justice that made reparations possible we would not be a nation where war, healthcare, education, and cr
1 comment
Read more

The Stories That Break Us, The Stories That Bind

Remember the mass shooter who planned and executed an attack on a gay nightclub in Orlando possibly because of his own unreconciled sexuality? It never happened. The mass shooting at The Pulse nightclub definitely happened, but the narrative around it was wrong from the start. I'm a poor consumer of mainstream news and still I was left with the erroneous impression that the sexual orientation of the victims was central to the event. It's understandable that even without consuming media one would conclude that this was an anti-gay hate crime. The victims were gay it happened in a gay nightclub. The story , like most of reality, is more complicated than the narratives we use to contain it. This illustrates the problem with a media more concerned with getting out the first just-so story that confirms our impressions and prejudices. It's worth pondering the ways in which this damages us. In the wake of the shooting, the media and public focused on certain details, many of which
Post a Comment
Read more