American Digest - "The older a man gets, the farther he had to walk to school as a boy.
American Studies
Radical Roots: Friendly Enemies from My Back Pages
On the single most significant achievement of the American Left in decades.
When I was young, smoking marijuana, hanging out with the Progressive Labor Party, running through the clouds of tear gas on Telegraphy Avenue, and convinced that any war that would send my long-haired, sensitive, poetic and acid-tripping self off to wade through rice paddies in Vietnam just had to be wrong, wrong, wrong, it was easy to see the United States through red-tinted glasses. So I'd fill up my Chillum , roll another Giant Doobie, plug in my Bongomatic and light everything up.
Once this gentle ritual sufficiently soothed my tortured soul I'd make my way (s l o w l y) to the nearest Vietnam Day Committee meeting and have a righteous rap session on how "the man can't bust our music or our movement." Then I'd float my way back home to listen to my red-diaper girlfriend rhapsodize about her pink parents and PLP parties that seemed strangely to center not on politics but on heroin suppositories. She thought "those were the days." I wasn't so sure, but she had cool Communist credentials signed off on by no less than the dowager princess of the American Communist Party Bettina Aptheker, so I was inclined to go along with her drivel in order to get along with her. Having a red-diaper girlfriend who was on the steering committee of the VDC was, in those days at Berkeley, better than dating the prom queen.
She was oppressed by the fascist war machine and so was I. So was every other college-deferment clutching coward of my time. She "said 'Yes!' to boys who said 'No!'" so I wanted to memorize all the ways in which we were oppressed. I didn't do so bad.
I also found that, like any good Berkeley radical, you needed, in this realm of unremitting oppressions so thick and so multiple that counting was foolish, some good friends. Some very good friends both at home and abroad. And so you looked around, not so much for friends, but for enemies of your enemy, the oppressive AmeriKKKa. You looked around the world using the dubious intellectual filter:
"The enemy of my enemy is my friend."
And when you did that you had no end of friends in the 60s and early 70s. Some of them even had armies, guns and nuclear weapons. They included, but were not limited to, The Soviet Union, The People's Republic of China, Castro's Cuba, socialist and communist parties stretching across Europe and down through Mexico, Central and South America, the Viet Minh, the Viet Cong, the Khmer Rouge, the Red Army Faction.... On an on through a litany of political dementia that you and your oppressed and draft-able friends saw as "fine and righteous" groups.
When you got done with feeling cool about those friends, you could go on to the enemies of your enemy that were not necessarily rooted in real estate, summed up in a stunning fashion by Paul Mann in his perceptive essay "Stupid Undergrounds." Take a deep breath:
Apocalyptic cults and youth gangs, garage bands and wolfpacks, alternative colleges and phalansteries, espionage networks trading in vaporous facts and networks of home shoppers for illicit goods; monastic, penological, mutant-biomorphic, and anarcho- terrorist cells; renegade churches, dwarf communities, no-risk survivalist enclaves, unfunded quasi-scientific research units, paranoid think tanks, unregistered political parties, sub-employed workers councils, endo-exile colonies, glossolaliac fanclubs, acned anorexic primal hordes; zombie revenants, neo-fakirs, defrocked priests and detoxing prophets, psychedelic snake-oil shills, masseurs of undiagnosed symptoms, bitter excommunicants, faceless narcissists, ideological drag queens, mystical technophiles, sub- entrepreneurial dealers, derivative derivistes, tireless archivists of phantom conspiracies, alien abductees, dupe attendants, tardy primitives, vermin of abandoned factories, hermits, cranks, opportunists, users, connections, outriders, outpatients, wannabes, hackers, thieves, squatters, parasites, saboteurs; wings, wards, warehouses, arcades, hells, hives, dens, burrows, lofts, flocks, swarms, viruses, tribes, movements, groupuscules, cenacles, isms, and the endlessly multiplied hybridization of variant combinations of all these...
That just about sums up the enemies of our enemy, AmeriKKKa, in the Vietnam era. As you can see we had plenty of friends. None of them are among my friends any longer and so I have, alas, far fewer friends. Indeed, as my strange political odyssey away from all that continues, old friends seem to melt away like the highland mist at high noon in the desert. It is sad, but still, with friends like those....
Over the decades since then the short list of regimes dedicated to the destruction of the United States either took a long dirt nap or are now shambling towards the graveyard of failed but deadly fascist ideologies. In this, the world has gone forward and, all in all, improved for the better. Those Americans of the 60s whose fantasies were lit by a dream of a destroyed United States have very few friends from the long list of countries dedicated to totalitarianism. And the list becomes shorter with each passing year.
Time and chance also makes the list of those Americans still dedicated to becoming life-long friends of countries and movements dedicated to the destruction of their country shorter every year. But they are still legion and have made lives for themselves in local and national politics, as well as in academia and the media, and continue their quest for an enemy of their enemy to make their friend. They are still the American Left and they have tenure, high position, or acolytes from which they draw comfortable stipends. Of late, they've taken more and more to coffee klatches with Islamic fundamentalists who, if they don't have the armies to bring about the destruction of the United States, have at least shown they've got enough hate to kill Americans here and abroad retail and wholesale. Besides, they're out shopping for a nuclear weapon and some smallpox, so what's not to like about these guys from an American Leftist's point of view?
Sadly the longer list by Paul Mann shows no signs of shortening, but gets longer by the day. And it is from within this list of Stupid Undergrounds that the American Left of today draws not only its strength but its fresh and much younger converts.
If it were only the denizens of these fringe groups that supplied the ideological cannon fodder of the American Left, it would be a small matter to marginalize them since their mindsets marginalize them from the square numbered "1." Indeed, just a few years ago, they could only exist within the rarified environment of on-campus humanities and ethnic-studies departments. Once removed from these hyperbaric chambers, their failure to thrive in the world outside -- absent a position in various media companies and Washington Wonk Tanks -- was manifest.
Sadly that is no longer the case since a very large organization has recently stripped down to the buff and made itself freely available to the tender mercies and tough love of the American Left. Indeed, the ideological rodeo that has captured this group is the single significant achievement of the American Left in decades. But with the elevation of Howard Dean, the deification of Ted Kennedy, the renovation of Nancy Peloisi, and the self-defenestration of Barbara Boxer, it is clear that the base of the American Left has now shifted from the fringe to the dead center of the Democratic Party.
It will remain in that position since it has brought with it not only its failed ideology and all the rag-tag constituents of the Stupid Undergrounds of America, but the very fuel source itself -- Bush Hate.
True, this brings with it a number of disturbing ideological contradictions to the center of the Democratic Party. These were best summed up recently by Pamela Bone in her essay The silence of the feminists
Dislike of George Bush's foreign policy has led to an automatic support of those perceived to be his enemies. Paradoxically, this leaves the left defending people who hold beliefs that condone what the left has long fought against: misogyny, homophobia, capital punishment, suppression of freedom of speech. The recent reaffirmation by Iran's Ayatollah Khamenei of the fatwa against Salman Rushdie has been met by virtual silence; as has the torture and murder in Iraq of a man who would be presumed to be one of the left's own - Hadi Salih, the international officer of the Iraqi Federation of Trade Unions. The hard left these days is soft on fascism, or at least Islamofascism.
Clear and present and very dangerous contradictions to be sure, but typical of the American Left when you recall that a popular slogan of the Left in the Sixties was, "Vive les contradictions!"
The conquest of the Democratic Party by the American Left which has now been consummated and will shortly be consolidated is, of course, bad news for the Democrats and for the country as a whole. A vital two or even three party system is essential to the long term balance of the Republic.
But this doesn't bother the Leftists of the party at all. They receive many things from this conquest, not the least of which is the damage it does, axiomatically, to the United States. They receive money, lots of it. Organizations, many. Mailing lists tens of millions of names long. Websites and online acolytes by the hundreds. And, most important, access to sitting Democrats in Washington and the state legislatures with power over them to advance their decidedly non-centrist agendas. In a very real sense, the conquest of the Democratic Party gives the American Left a base that it could never hope to win, and will now probably never win, at the ballot box.
Even though this regrettable transformation of the Democratic Party leaves it much smaller than it would otherwise be, it makes the American Left much bigger than it ever thought it could be. Those who have lingered all these years in the thick bong smoke of the 60s now have their fantasy within their grasp. They have made the enemies of George Bush and the New America at home and abroad into their friends and it is finally:
"Springtime for Lefties!"
Of course, it is a crowning irony to note that the proverb, "The enemy of my enemy is my friend." was originally an Arab proverb, as were, indeed, the fuming chillums of their youth.
But hey, as me and my hardcore leftist friends said way back then, "Smoke 'em if you got 'em.".
Vanderleun @ Feb 9, 2005 02:03 PM americandigest.org |
