Monday, May 8, 2017

The Week After Which It All Started Going Down Hill

Image result for lyndon johnson signing voting rights act

I knew if I mocked the Left Forum I'd get outraged response from the play-lefties of the play-left. I'm busy.  Go read the glorious history of the Left Forum as told by itself, starting, ironically, with the words "In the Beginning" as if what comes after is to be declared good,  flowing out of the Socialist Scholars Conference which was established in the pivotal year of 1965, which might well count as the high water mark of the American left.  August 6, 1965 the Voting Rights Act was passed and signed into law.  It was also the year when Medicare and Medicaid became law one week before.  The American left has never had a week like that since then.  I will point out that was under President Lyndon Johnson, without whom none of it would have passed but who was reviled by the American left, then and after.

The  first Socialist Scholars Conference was held almost a month after that, September 9-11, 1965. While I would never attribute the power to the lily white crowd of mostly college faculty who mounted the mighty effort with having arrested any further progress, the entire period of its and the successor Left Forum coincides exactly with the first slow, then ever gathering speed of decline into the Nixon administration, the Reagan one, increasing corporate fascist rule and attacks on the progress up till 1965.  Things steadily devolved as gloriously, dishonestly, themed Left Forum conferences were mounted, one after another as the pageant of impotence and counter-productive declamation continued.  Many a session held on such pressing issues as declaring the innocence of the Rosenbergs, who knows what lacunae of Marxist theory being filled in to no end - though the one a year or so back by the guy who slammed people like Stephen Hawking for not being sufficiently rigidly ideological materialists is one I'd like a video of - I'd guess maybe four people might have show up to it.

They haven't put out their program of sessions and panels, etc. for the one they're going to throw next month, I'm sure there will be plenty to mock.  One thing that I'm even more certain of, nothing productive will come of it just as nothing productive comes from that play left in the form of magazine, radio and online scribbleage, columnage and babbleage.   The only thing that ever comes from the play left is counter-productive and self-defeating.  Go look at them rehashing the Bernie Sanders campaign, going on a year after he endorsed Hillary Clinton.  They can all go to hell as far as I'm concerned and the left would be better off for it.

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