On Sunday, December 2, 2001, at 02:04 , Ted Morgan wrote:
> Interesting to hear Bill's report on his Hazleton, PA experience. Kind
> of fills in some gaps on how this labor-intense area I live in moved
> from the great labor militance of John L, the Molly McGuires, etc. to
> the hopelessly conservative labor bastion it now is --a very peculiar
> politics to this Pa. outsider (who's nonetheless been here for 25
> years). Our local Labor Party efforts got virtually nowhere with
> organized labor in 5 years of trying. I keep running into what seem like
> residues left over from the decades of Red Scare tactics, etc.
> Ted Morgan
I guess a part of the question needs to be, how much of the actual
basis for 'trade unionism' at the turn of the century was about changing
the political terrain, and how much of it was merely about securing that
'american dream' - you know a house in the burbs, and all the gadgets
that the local stripMallHell can get them?
On the flip side of your nightmare, is the humour of the 'capitalist
overlords' who love to TALK about 'entrepreneurship' and all of that cool
hip 'free market stuff' - right up until they want to have someone else
manage the fact that the re-insurers just do not have the liquidity to
cover 'acts of terrorism' - and so find their 'socialist red roots' in
the Welfare State and run off to D.C. to get the government to 'give it
up' to provide the same sort FSLIC/FDIC sort of safety net for the
insurance biznezz, so that they can all get on with limiting their risk.
{ never mind the fact that the American Insurance Association is stuck
with its antiquated notions of about 'when one is at war' - and want a
formal declaration of such, against an actual nation state - rather than
the looser standard that the current congress has adopted for our current
war against themThoseYouKnowEvilDoers... and does this make the American
Insurance Association just one more leftist anti-governmental group that
should be under federal domestic survaillance for having come out as a
non-supporter of "The War!" ???? }
What if the 'Red Scare tactics' that you are noticing are merely the same
old anti-intellectualism that has been lurking around the system back when
folks did not need to translate the latin for the classical logical
fallacies
such as 'post hoc ergo propter hoc'.... And in this case point out that the
moment that 'unions' opted to not support the 'armed revolutionary
vanguard'
that they were merely one more 'labor brokerage house' just like all the
other 'big bizniz' solutions shilling labor units?
What if the real problem is that the clean and simplistic distinctions
between
the 'oppressed proletariat' and the 'exploiting management' puppet toadies
of
the Kapitalist Overlords just ain't as nice and neatly distinguished as it
was suppose to be - you know, class struggle and all?
What if america was only the home of the 'wild west mythologies' for a
small
minority of folks who just did not fit in - and had no real problem with
'going
native' with the 'natives' until the 'decent folks' showed up, and dragged
all
of that 'civilization' with them? And in like manner, the glorious and
heroic
stand of 'the cradle will rock' mythos is but one more populating of the
'new wild west show' between there, and the CyberSpaceWildFrontier that
has become the eStripMallHell ???
ciao
drieux
---
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b30 : Tue Dec 04 2001 - 21:18:47 EST