Bonus: More Listener Mail!
Added 2020-05-05 01:36:06 +0000 UTCFor you, our loyal subscribers, some additional material from our mailbag episode, including the long awaited official Know Your Enemy position on Bob Dylan.
Enjoy!
Comments
Arghhh. Patreon just ate the second half of my message. So what I was also asking was why this hasn't happened on the Left in the last 40 years. The Anarchist's Cookbook doesn't count. And while there are a variety of anarchist/lefty books out there, none of them seem to inspire the same kind of reaction as the right-wing/white-wing texts. Why is that, do you think? Capital was written over 150 years ago, and I suspect it's tough reading for some pissed-off adolescent these days. P.S. Sam, have you ever heard Mick Taylor's version of Blind Willie McTell?
pixlaw
2020-05-07 15:24:46 +0000 UTCAnother question for you guys, although it's not easily boil-downable, about cultural products. I was talking with my wife recently about a course she just taught about whiteness in the US. One of the things that's clear over the last 100 years is that the white/right has always used racist and pro-capital cultural productions as a way of recruiting people and solidifying their support. Think Birth of a Nation, think Atlas Shrugged, think the Turner Diaries. All of these seem to have the ability to cause some of those who encounter them to get obsessed with the messaging therein.
pixlaw
2020-05-07 15:09:41 +0000 UTC"this land is condemned, all the way from New Orleans, to Jerusalem" sums up so much of the Dylan self-mythology for me. The roots of American history and music, by way of Black musicians, explored by a thoroughly Jewish man, as if Dante was transposed to the 20th Century American South. The G-d of the Torah (note his ommision of the "o" in a recent social media post) inspiring Dylan and guiding him (Virgil-like) along his journey as he did with the prophets of old.
Keith Brinkmann
2020-05-07 04:45:47 +0000 UTCI love Blind Willie McTell!! (-Sam)
Know Your Enemy
2020-05-06 16:27:47 +0000 UTCI agree with your general points about Dylan’s politics (and the advice to ignore them) but wanted to note one thing. During a concert in Minneapolis on the night Obama was elected in 2008, he did make a rare statement from the stage: “Me, I was born in 1941. That’s the year they bombed Pearl Harbor. I’ve been living in a world of darkness ever since. But it looks like things are going to change now.” Reading it now it sounds almost like a cynical joke! But I think Dylan’s antiracism was/is lifelong and sincere. Well after his lefty folk era, he was still writing stuff like “Blind Willie McTell” — a much better song than the “finger-pointing” ones, too.
Bowen Dunnan
2020-05-05 12:52:51 +0000 UTCThe other is that I'd say we're stuck in transition, in that I think the older ideologies are rotting away, but, we haven't built new ones. Socialism I think hasn't finished evolving, from either a theory or movement perspective, enough to win, while Fusionism is burned out, Trumpian... whatever doesn't have the intellectual coherency to actually build something new, and centrism is trapped in the 1990s, with no ability to get out, evolve, ect., other than in rhetoric.
Killer300
2020-05-05 05:48:39 +0000 UTCWhich is that pessimism rots away the ability to get people to strive for more, i.e., they can't imagine a better future at all, from issues like climate crisis in the background. Essentially, its hard to imagine a better future of any type, much less one that allows someone like Bernie to get off the ground.
Killer300
2020-05-05 05:45:30 +0000 UTCBut for the larger stagnation, I suspect there are two things happening,
Killer300
2020-05-05 05:43:13 +0000 UTCOr Socialism for that matter. How plausible that is, I don't know, however, I would note that it presents another type of barbarism that doesn't really neatly fall onto our current political spectrum.
Killer300
2020-05-05 05:40:12 +0000 UTCTechnocratic state. Which I bring up because that's a horrifying option that isn't either more Neo-Liberalism, Fascism, or Nationalism.
Killer300
2020-05-05 05:36:00 +0000 UTCThe second question reminds me of reading a Marxist who suggested the future may be an authoritarian
Killer300
2020-05-05 05:35:10 +0000 UTC
