Vision Circle

uh..., what "right things" are you ascribing to the Clinton regime - past - and implausible future? Record breaking black additions to the U.S. prison population, rampant globalization, and DL dixiecratic centrism are about all I can recollect and ascribe. Best I could tell, Kerry took his playbook lock stock and broken barrel from Clinton.

Boxer's got 5.5 more years in her current term, and is hedgeing against catastrophic failure in Iraq. Kerry's got nothing else to lose and his seat's assured.

Obama will emerge as a republican American senator in the mold of Clinton/Kerry. He just happens to be black, similar shade as Colin Powell...,

I had to reread my own post for a second. I'm not ascribing any "right things" to Clinton, either past or future. But at some point politically we have to move people OTHER THAN BOXER to act right. The pressure that has to be exerted to move Obama is the pressure that we need to move the other centrists.

Obama did the right thing. From what I can tell, the Ohio protest was nothing but meaningless showmanship to Black Dem. voters to say, "See! We back you!"

It was meaningless in this situation.

It may have also been a kneegro wakeup call to Obama that he has to get "in line."

Well, if that's the case, then Obama gave them the finger.

In either case, good.

Politically, it helps his base of non-Black voters. As for Black voters, I don't think it's that big of an issue.

2. What type of extra-institutional pressures can regular citizens use to give Obama, Kerry, Clinton, Levin, etc. the space they need to do the right thing?

Cobb said some stuff the other day germaine to this question;

There is something very important and real about the connections between the powerful and the middle class that completes the cycle of humanity. If those links fail, then there can be no progress. There must be mutual trust and respect.

Which is basically embodied by the Clintons, particularly the slickmeister himself who was a protege of the late Pamela Harriman. She basically brought him up in the political life, taking him out of the bushleagues and into the majors, playing the part of his elite sugar mama and talent scout. We can easily surmise the role he played....,

Personally, I don't believe that populist politicians exist anymore outside the islamic world. (muslim clerics being the ultimate populist constituent magnets)

The American political class is nothing so much now as a highly social, superficially informed, disproportionately compensated group of professional managers of the interstitial congress between the elite and the unwashed. I view these creatures as more dissolute and stanky than any fully co-opted journalist ever could be. American political life was nicely summed up a long time ago by Chomsky;

"...free enterprise, [is] a term that refers, in practice, to a system of public subsidy and private profit, with massive government intervention in the economy to maintain a welfare state for the rich." : Noam Chomsky

The American trust subsystem linkage between the powerful patron, the middle class politician, and the politician's unwashed constituents is identical to the American trust subsystem conjoining pimps, ho's, and johns. In exactly that order.

I genuinely disbelieve that there is any longer any such thing as a popularly mediated space in which the the American political hizzo strolls. "Our" politicians work the stroll where their macks command. Like any good ho, the product they sell is 8 parts imagination and 2 parts (pork) friction. As long as they captivate the imaginations of their constituents, i.e., have a large group of regular customers too dull to see through the machinations of the "life" - then they're doing their jobs.

Viewed in these terms, there is little doubt concerning what must be done to muster extra-institutional pressure to make these ho's act right. Get your money long and your pimp hand strong and maintain the desire to do the right thing. errthing else is merely conversation..,

I'm reading a book called How Class Works. Makes the same argument. Very different prescription though.

Given the dearth of reviews at amazon.com, please tell me your take on aronowitz's alternative prescription (25 words or less)?

I guess I'm beginning to interpret your prior mention of diminishing $$$ in the philanthropic realm, Cobb's paean's to the *humans who count* kneeling down to ease we middle class schlubs, and P6's verbal logic on government intercession to force inclusion across the American social spectrum - in the light of objectivist filters I'd like to consciously deny the existance of...,

Turner Classic Movies did a Patricia Neal retrospective the other week and they showed Fountainhead in the wee hours. I watched this corny Gary Cooper non-acting mess for the umpteenth time and it activated old Birch school inculcated subprocesses in my liminal psyche.

If I had to spell out my primary concern it's that we are floundering in non-action. As a group we have overlong floundered in relative non-action instead wanting to be included. Whether by our bettors or the majority, or whoever else.

Bottom line for me, as a lifelong outsider, I think that on the basis of our shared principles, concerns, attitudes and outlooks, we have sufficient wherewithal to collectivize in any fashion we take seriously enough. The problem, as with most things, is mustering the seriousness to become willful and act.

The JBS acted on the issue of education because it was not only close to home and motivated them passionately, they also locked in on education because they saw in it, ala Gatto-ology and Ignatius Loyola, that that was the key to political change and influence, as well.

How Class Works is a reaction against the tendency of social scientists to either ignore class or to define it in a problematic fashion. This tendency leads to poor scholarship on the one hand, and neuters political possibility on the other.

I didn't know there was a movie based on The Fountainhead.

You actually attended the Birch school?

"Floundering in non-action." You ain't never lied. I really need to think seriously about the possibilities of the black homeschooling group we are involved with.

Patricia Neal in riding getup with crop, getting VERY hot and flustered with a stoic Gary Cooper pounding granite with a large pneumatic tool down in the quarry. Talk about your high camp fetish moment.....,

The movie is definitely worth seeing for the laugh out loud sequences alone. You know of course that Ayn Rand was a screenwriter for years before she got around to taking herself entirely too seriously. Her own libertinage and late life sexual humiliation is ironically foretold in some of her more florid cinematic indulgences...,

I was the 3rd kneegrow to attend that school, starting in the 7th grade. There is an interesting backstory attendant to how I got there having to do with their not-for-profit status and segregationist ways. Brah man number one was a Phillipa Schuyler type experiment. The experiment didn't work out. Brah man number two, was the school's initial 501C3 integration CYA compromise. I was the second "let's keep our not-for-profit status" compromise.

That school literally beat the spirit out of the other two brothers. As for me, I literally beat the devil out of any and all duppies who stepped to me. My mother constantly reminded me (or rationalized my situation to herself) that I didn't go there to make friends, rather, I was there to receive the best education available in our geography. By the middle of my second year there, I received no more challenges to my personal dignity. As a matter of fact, my uncompromising and unhesitating cruelty had the odd - and for me unanticipated effect - of making me somewhat popular.

By the time I was in the 9th grade, the school had admitted a number of black girls and now 25 years later has a relatively diverse student body.

Suddenly I want to see a picture of Craig, the sympathetic outsider. In a simpler world, you would be my priest.

I think, however that there is a qualitative difference between what the average Joe does for a dollar and what upscale Jason does for a hundred. If Jason has not taken on the nobility his position demands, then he is a greater threat to society. It goes moreso for the folks at the top.

This is the point of my essay American Wa'Benzi

Nobility must be understood as the paracletian surfeit, the panem nostrem supersubstantialem which, like bread itself, is obtained by work.

The holy spirit is apprehended incrementally as it is experienced. Gaia-like is probably not a bad metaphor, much as Christ can be *understood* as the human species archetype, the anthropocosmos. Fr. Kallistos Ware does a very good job of explaining such matters with recourse to fewer technical terms than most.

Squashed Philosophers notwithstanding, avoid augustine like the plague. He is one of the progenitors of the neurobiological sickness of faith. How is Jason even to know about nobility if no one in his social ecology possesses basic working competencies?

I had an interesting dialogue with a colleague yesterday who is a geneologist and forensic historian in her spare time. We were talking about 18th and 19th century social ecology and she introduced me to the concept of wagontrain charters. Is this term familiar?

It was completely new to me. I believe it has significant applicability to the question you raised here "It's Where You're At"

and the issues I pointed to earlier here about meaningful praxis.

In MANY regards, segregated black communities as polities were very much like wagon trains. In their self-organizing topologies, they not only achieved elevated (paracletian) levels of interpersonal communion, but also maintained far higher standards of collective utility.

There is MUCH to be said for those now lost communal topologies and why the black polity is now collectively floundering in non-action.