I just stared and stared at that picture. Suddenly it was as if everything that socialist had been saying all those months clicked into place somewhere in my head, and I saw me behind that picture, I saw me knee-deep in blood and shit my whole life so that that picture could be taken. I don't know how to describe it to you, I don't think I even knew what it was that was happening, I certainly couldn't have put it into words, but something came rising up in me, so swift and so strong, it nearly took the breath out of my body. I can still feel it, the way I felt it then. As if it was coming right out of the center of me, as if it had been waiting there all that time, all my life, and now it had-just that fast!-run out of time."Excerpted from The Romance of American Communism by Vivian Gornick. I like that story because a similar thing happened to me. Very similar, and although I wasn't stuck in a slaughterhouse, I was doing some nasty work, scrubbing toilets and such. And I was significantly younger than Dick. Where is the Left in these harsh economic times? My eyes were opened.Īnd my question is, why doesn't this happen now? Why has the right-wing Tea Party movement been so successful in cashing in on class resentment? I soon learned what else was happening with this corporation around the same time I was working for them. I have decided the Left is largely IN ABSENTIA because the American Left now comes from the elite class itself their political convictions are basically a reflection of the warmed-over liberalism they obediently ingested while attending Good Colleges. They believe what they believe out of a sense of common decency, fairness and goodness. But not because most American Leftists have experienced classism themselves. The Left is therefore doing it FOR the poor bedraggled working classes. (They do not feel personally disenfranchised, they feel they are speaking up FOR the disenfranchised.)Īnd this is why they keep getting it wrong.
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