I have been thinking about the whole "here's what a left wing extremist looks like" business from Joe Klein - his list of the traits of America-hating bloggers, and I realized that, while I know of no bloggers who have even one of these traits (at least none of the big liberal bloggers - Atrios, Koz, Glenn Greenwald, Media Matters, Crooks and Liars - that are the real movers and shakers), I do admire certain left-wing groups, and subscribe to one left-wing publication, that might at one time have fit the description, in some stereotyped way.
First, I subscribe to The New York Review of Books which infamously published an article in 1968 or 1969, with illustrations, on how to manufacture a Molotov Cocktail. TNYRB continues it left-leaning reputation, although the days of radical chic (more on that in a moment) are long over; I like it because it is a glimpse into the minds of the New York-based intelligentsia. That, and it once ran my all-time favorite personals ad: "Will trade dog-walking for sex." Desperation, thy name is an upscale personals ad.
I have to admit some ambivalence about one no-longer-existent group, the Weather Underground. No fan of violence myself, and certainly not doctrinaire about anything in my life, especially politics, these adolescent faux-Marxists managed only to kill themselves, although they did, famously, once manage to put a bomb in a trashcan in the US Capitol building. Score one for audacity. Their fomenting revolution fomented nothing but FBI Ten Most Wanted Lists, and unfortunately because of their incompetence, killed several when their homemade bombs destroyed the building they were living in. They were more heat than light, but just dangerous enough to force the government to act.
A personal note. A good friend of mine, much older than I, told me a story about how, one day, as he was walking through Baltimore airport, he met an old friend. They stood and talked for a few minutes, exchanged an embrace, then went their separate ways. A few minutes later, still in the airport, my friend was surrounded by several nondescript men in suits who hustled him into a nondescript room. My friend was asked just one question, "Do you know that was the leader of the Weathermen?" My friend said that, yes, he did know that. He was held for several hours, then left to go on his merry way. The most fascinating part of this story to me is that my friend was so self-possessed that he did not drop any names to me, never revealed the source of his relationship, and could still after twenty years (at the time I was told the story) smile about it, rather than feel bitter or angry. Happy radicals are the most dangerous, you know, because they have fewer illusions to lose.
Another group about which I feel no ambivalence, which shall always hold a place of affection for me are the Black Panthers. Inspired by a combination of Malcolm X's rhetoric and Saul Alinsky's organizational principles, the Panthers managed to frighten many in the establishment, while at the same time do serious work in neighborhood self-policing, feeding the poor, running drug dealers out of neighborhoods, rescuing women trapped in prostitution, helping out schools in trouble, run homeless shelters and other social service agencies. Their militant stance - they dressed in camouflage fatigues and went around armed - was a direct response to the reality blacks in America still face, the violence of the unspoken rules of white supremacy that govern our fair land. The formula is simple - if they face an armed threat, why not arm themselves in self-defense?
The Panthers threatened no one except racist institutions bent on returning African-Americans to their status as non-citizens/non-persons in our society, and that threat was enough to scare the bejeebers out of just about everyone. The FBI did manage to raid the Chicago cell and kill the leader of the Chicago Panthers, and the rest were driven underground; this overreaction by Hoover's men, I have no doubt with the connivance of the Nixon Administration, was prompted by no more than the sight of black men banding together to protect themselves and save their communities when those communities were abandoned by the white power structure. The Klan can march down Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington (and if anyone doubts those yahoos aren't armed under those sheets they're just fooling themselves), but if a few - very few - black folk arm themselves, why it's the end of civilization as we know it!
While the situation the Panthers faced was very serious, and cost them the lives of followers, I still find something vaguely silly about the official overreaction to what was, in essence, members of the African-American urban community seeking to help themselves. After all, right-wingers like guns, they like self-help - they should have embraced the Panthers as fellow travelers. That they didn't, and still feel they were a domestic terrorist organization, just shows how empty so much of their talk is. Race makes hypocrites of us all.
As to radical chic. The phrase was coined after a series of soirees given in New York City by the very literati who people the columns of TNYRB which included leaders of the Panthers, future leaders of the Weather Underground, and Fidel Castro. This also sparked the term "limousine liberal" - a bunch of rich patrons doting upon real revolutionaries, treating them as pets, or perhaps animals in a zoo, while at the same time burnishing their own credentials as living and thinking beyond the edge of acceptability. Such shallow, thoughtless (in the literal sense of the term), pandering is laughable, but was taken to be very serious business at one time. Personally, the sight of Norman Mailer - fat, self-absorbed, drunk on gin - having a conversation with Bobby Seale would make me burst out laughing at the sheer absurdity of the moment. Seale was a person worthy of admiration. Mailer is someone, on the other hand, whose fame and renown simply escape me. A misogynistic hack, obsessed with Marilyn Monroe, he is still riding the rails of The Naked and the Dead, which has already been surpassed by other, later novels, for its realistic portrayal of World War II.
So, I suppose I am one of those extremists that Klein doesn't like. Of course, the fact that I have to reach back to groups that no longer exist, and were always peripheral to national politics anyway, proves that the straw radical Klein detests has ceased to exist. He, like the reactionary figures ruling our country since the first election of Richard Nixon, have been fighting this same battle, even while the rest of us have moved on to bigger and better things.
Like Noam Chomsky.
