In last night’s spin class, the playlist included Bill Haley’s, “Shake, Rattle, and Roll. And much like when I heard it for the first time as a young teenager, it sent a wave of energy through me. Now I need such music to counter my lazy bones and inelastic muscles as I spin. But back then it was a release from the prohibitions on fun that came with living in a small town and growing up in the Catholic Church. Such music gave me and my friends, especially when fueled by the inexpensive beer that we illegally bought and drank on back roads, licence to dance up a storm at the local record hop with or without a partner. Often the latter was the case. But that didn’t seem to matter much because we were having fun and breaking social boundaries!
I notice an uptick in the unrestrained criticism from the left of President Obama. He’s smugly and simply dismissed as an unreconstructed “neoliberal” and nothing more. This is wrong analytically, tactically stupid, and reveals some racial insensitivity.
Nowhere in such critiques do we find any examination of the balance of political forces at that time nor a critical look at the role of the left and progressive communities. Why do either when it’s so much easier to heap blame on Obama? But it’s very ease should give us pause.
The country will take a moment of silence at 8:46 this morning. And rightly so. It was awful day. But as we mourn the thousands of lives tragically lost when passenger jets crashed into the twin towers in NYC, we should also remember the disastrous response that followed with all of its intended and unintended consequences. It’s wasn’t the country’s first foreign policy disaster, but it ranks up their as one of the worst. We — and the world — are still feeling its baneful effects. I’m reminded that in a moment of crisis, one has to be mindful of which political bloc is positioned to exploit that crisis for good or ill.
The ways in which Second Wave feminism left its imprint on our politics, economics, and culture over the past half century have been greatly underestimated in many quarters. I still hear people dismiss it as a “middle class” movement that was preoccupied with “individualist” preoccupations. And yet this multi-centered, many layered movement changed our society in countless ways and on so many levels in the face of stiff resistance. And not only from the right, although its opposition to women’s equality was and is fierce and sustained. In its camp now is the brazen misogynist and reckless authoritarian in the White House.
Below is a moving appreciation and obit of Leon Wofsy. The authors knew him well. I only met Leon, and regretfully so, late in his (and my) life, but I will greatly miss him. On my last visit to the West Coast I sat down with him for a chat. In that conversation, we discussed Trump and what it will take next year to beat him, the status of the left and the much broader democratic movement, and, not least, our experiences in the Communist Party. He left the party more than a half century before I did, but for many of the same reasons. His life was noble and purposeful.
