Sunday, May 11, 2003
LEFT, RIGHT AND ELSEWHERE (the discussion continues)
From: MrPool@aol.com [mailto:MrPool@aol.com]
Sent: Saturday, May 10, 2003 11:04 AM
> First, I've deliberately started seeking out and reading
> work from a liberal/left-wing perspective. I want to see
> what they're saying, and why. The worst injustice we can
> do, at least intellectually, is to respond exclusively to
> the distorted mirror images of views seen through commentators
> who are deeply committed to positions we may share, but are
> antagonistic and partisan toward the Opposition, whatever that
> may be.
I agree and do the same. The three sources of left-wing material I regularly expose myself to are NPR, Salon and Pacifica, in "leftward order." Each has a different editorial policy. NPR is the most balanced, in three senses. By and large, they keep opinion out of their reporting, they also feature opinion from non-left sources and, with occasional exceptions, they don't feature the more radical elements of either left or right in their commentary. NPR's leftist orientation is subtle, but is heard, I think, in their editorial policy -- the kinds of stories they cover reveal the issues about which they are concerned, and their attitudes toward them. One often hears material about racial and gender issues, but almost never about matters of property rights, for instance, in their in-depth reporting. And, of course, one would never hear a pro-gun-ownership item on NPR.
Salon is explicitly leftist in their editorial stance but, to their great credit, they often allow non-leftists to express themselves in their pages (something the right-wing press almost never does). Perhaps because it's web-based, the rhetoric one finds in Salon is much hotter than one hears on NPR. Perhaps the most clearly leftist expression one sees in Salon is in their cartoon pages, where the most simple-minded leftist propaganda is expressed.
Pacifica is certainly among the farthest left media outlets in America. I regularly listen to Amy Goodman's show during my drive-time in the morning. Actually, Michael Dougan has chastised me before for doing this, accusing me of intentionally using Pacifica to inflame myself, a kind of political S&M onanism. If you don't live somewhere where you can regularly hear Pacifica programming, you just don't know what the American far left is all about. I do occasionally hear some good stuff, though, that I wouldn't hear anywhere else. For instance, last week I caught most of a long speech by Ralph Nader that was actually very well reasoned and delivered.
Oh, and for pure entertainment value, I read and listen to the Beeb.
From all these sources, I think I get a pretty good -- and up-to-date -- picture of the left here and abroad.
> And that does not include the shock jocks, the Political
> Entertainers, like O'Reilley and Limbaugh, and the current
> denizens, whoever they are, of Crossfire. Every political
> tendency spawns its own fruitcakes and loonies and extremists,
> and even basically good folks say dumb stuff from time to time,
> so it's important to have some idea of what The Opposition is
> actually talking about.
Actually, I have never intentionally watched, listened to or read anything from any of these sources in my life, another thing that Dougan occasionally chides me for. I have an irrational prejudice against the Fox Network, which is wrong-headed, I guess, since 1) they spawned The Simpsons, perhaps the best animated series of all time and 2) they have been superceded in the low-brow department by other, even lower networks since. I can't imagine why I'd ever listen to Limbaugh. I have occasionally caught bits of the shouting-shows on CNN when I was looking for news during major events. They have seemed uniformly shallow and utterly useless. Again. I can't imagine why anyone would want to watch this kind of thing other than for perverse entertainment value -- like watching mud wrestling between people with Down's Syndrome.
[snip]
> I wonder what you guys, especially on the right, have to say
> about this article:
> http://www.thenation.com/docprint.mhtml?i=20030512&s=greider
Since I have been cast onto "the right" by my friends (horrible dictu), I suppose I'll comment briefly:
From the cited piece: "These broad objectives may sound reactionary and destructive (in historical terms they are)..." "Many opponents and critics (myself included) have found the right's historic vision so improbable that we tend to guffaw and misjudge the political potency of what it has put together. We might ask ourselves: If these ideas are so self-evidently cockeyed and reactionary, why do they keep advancing?"
These items from the introduction reveal the problem. The author, William Greider, shares the leftist assumption that the statist trends of 20th century American politics were progressive and good, and that any meaningful attempt to undo them are regressive, oppressive and bad. Ever use pliers to turn a screw? Not very efficient, is it? The left, though tells us that any attempt to put down the pliers and go looking for a screw driver is a mistake, a step backward, a return to the evil past of unscrewed-ness. There's not much you can tell a person who accepts this as an article of faith. Of course, the better tool-box analogy is the old saw (ugh) that "to the person who only has a hammer, everything looks like a nail." The leftist assumption that state power is the only tool that can or should be used to address social issues is the beginning and end of dialogue for so much of what passes for political discussion in America. Elsewhere in the world, there's not even any dialogue, because there's no disagreement at all.
GB, THHotA
posted by Greg 9:09 AM
