Twin Cities Daily Planet (https://www.tcdailyplanet.net/author/stephen-b-young/page/3/)
Today’s Pioneer Press (Thursday, October 04, 2007) on pages 1B and 6B took me quite aback.
I read there that Marv Davidov had taken a stance with which I fully agreed. This had never happened before. From my youth I have never had much truck with peace at any cost advocates, which is the camp in which I place Marv for his consistent, dedicated, anti-war, pro-peace advocacy.
An old chestnut of the Marxist left had it that captains of industry were the central committee of the ruling class in capitalist societies. The mythic stereotype persists in progressive circles that what is wrong with society flows from the selfish proclivities of its ruling elite – an elite that, in capitalist societies, grows out of business as lichens on a rock.
Remove the elite, this theory goes, and all will be well, or at least much better.
This month’s Vanity Fair magazine in the United States offers an opportunity to reflect a bit on this thesis about capitalist elites.
I graduated from college in 1967. My Fortieth reunion is coming up this fall. I am not going. The list of classmates already signed up to attend doesn’t reveal the attendance of many close friends from those days and I feel estranged from my college in general as it has become ever more wealthy and triumphantly elitist.
We were the first Baby Boomer graduating class, having been born, most of us that is, in 1945. So our lives and careers have lead the way for the success or failure of our generation.
I’m really angry at the new set of TV ads seeking support for President Bush’s war in Iraq. They use a permanently maimed veteran and the widow of another soldier to tell us that “victory is our only option” and that Congress should not “surrender”
I’m sorry but these worthy loyal Americans are being exploited, used to dull our minds and prevent us from thinking clearly about the war.
In early August, the Bush Administration – with no spin – put in place an exit strategy to end the War in Iraq. The United States and the United Kingdom obtained a resolution of the United Nations Security Council to expand the UN’s mandate to administer Iraq on an interim basis and to negotiate an end to conflict – both within Iraq among the Kurds, Sunnis and Shi’ites and within the region among the Sunni States (Saudi Arabia and Syria), Shi’ite Iran and Turkey.
The other day a large bridge in Minneapolis just collapsed without any warning. Thankfully few died in the completely unexpected accident.
On having our evening news program interrupted with the breaking news of a bridge collapse, my first thought was to recall an old book – The Bridge of San Luis Rey – which meditated on why those five people who fell to their deaths when a rope bridge in Peru broke and collapsed were in the wrong place at the wrong time – or was it the right place for some in a cosmic scheme of justice?
Ever since she and Bill appeared on national TV to defend their (his?) marriage and save his presidential campaign, I have been really puzzled by Hillary Rodham. What was real about her and what was an act?
A cold, calculating woman to be sure, an inauthentic striver – but what were her ghosts, her fears, the tap roots of her unstinting ambition?
She was a Ceasar clearly, either a Julius or an Octavian, bent on getting her way. But why?
Well, I know now.
I have called this blog the “Fifth Column” for what I hope is a good reason. I want to challenge political correctnesses and move the search for good actions and policies towards more substantial grounds.
I do believe in truth over appearances and harsh realities over pleasing cant. I would like Americans to be motivated by what is close to the firm, the real and the enduring, what Mencius called “being radical”.
Racial discrimination and oppression have long been the evil shadow side of American liberty. Not only historically with slavery as it morphed into state-based, Jim Crow segregation, or with contemporary fears of devout Muslims and of too many immigrants coming from Mexico and Central America, thinking about people in terms of their race or ethnic origin is still, for many of us, as American as the 4th of July.
Opinion: A hard but correct Supreme Court decision on Race
So when should we be able to discriminate according to race?
Once there was evil in the land – I mean Cambodia and not Minnesota (we have not yet sunk so far). And I do mean real evil – not the malevolent presences in Stephen King novels nor the incorporeal intent of Lord Voldemort tormenting Harry Potter – but ordinary flesh and blood evil – the intentional evil of evil human beings.
I refer to Pol Pot and his Khmer Rouge and their dreams of a truly good and virtuous Cambodia. Pol Pot set out to remove the Khmer people from sin by removing from the people all those individual Khmer who had been tainted by corrupted values or life-styles.