A comment from Frank Rich’s column, about Joe Stack:
If we are going to fight the corporate predators we have to do it together.
I used to be a member of a professional association for computer scientists, and they still send me an email newsletter once a week. It is revealing what they think of as “news”. It’s not the decimation of my profession, the decline of wages, any issues related to outsourcing or H1-B, the decline of computer science as a major. I have gotten this newsletter every week for years and those issues have not been mentioned once. On the other hand, every single week there is an item on efforts to expand the presence of women in the field.
Now I am a woman, and I appreciate these attempts. But what has happened with the rise of ‘identity politics’ is the total suppression of any issues related to preserving our middle class, and what that means for jobs: benefits, job security, outsourcing, stagnant wages, etc etc. It’s like we gained identity politics but lost the middle class.
I hate to use these words, I know they are loaded, but the truth is, we need class conscious politics to make a come back in this country.
It’s not a flawless comment, but it’s definitely better than Frank Rich’s column. He writes early on, “Stack was a lone madman, and it would be both glib and inaccurate to call him a card-carrying Tea Partier or a ‘Tea Party terrorist.’” So then why does Frank Rich write such a glib and inaccurate remainder of the column?
As someone who is guilty of shitting on teabaggers (did it just there!) at most every opportunity over the past year, I’m irritated when certain producers of the glib and inaccurate left lose control of their own language and feel content simply to play their roles in the unproductive surface-level dialogue that’s paralyzed the political mainstream. HE HATED TAXES — MUST BE A CRAZY GLENN BECK FAN!, for example. The left does realize that it, too, is allowed to complain about the IRS and tax code? Complain furiously over its breaks for the ruling classes? And the left does realize that there is such a thing as “left-wing violence,” too, and there’s 10x more justification for it right now than there is right-wing violence, but that’s a different story?
We still have no idea how to deal with insane violence in our own country. We love labels. You can create many labels and label things you don’t like with labels you don’t like.
Joe Stack was pissed off at the power structure and went nuts. Such is the case of every terrorist attack in the last 10 years. Stop giving them stupid other labels from stupid words in our stupid political lexicon.
At some point, shouldn’t we address the causes of bad things, even remotely?
