Letters to the Editor
What Difference Does It Make?
Published Letters: 35
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In The Tank for Firestorms
[Read the article: The rubes and the elites]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Could all American political pundits agree to desist from using the word "firestorm", as long as the American military is involved in wars of aggression where actual, physical firestorms, in the first definition, are in danger of being caused: "A storm in which violent winds are drawn into the column of hot air rising over a severely bombed area."
Another 50 dead in Iraq today from a car bomb -- no word from Lind, Traister or Walsh (they were busy, you understand, surveying their friends on how badly Obama and his bots had blown things) on whether an actual firestorm ensued -- and the "progressive" American web site Salon.com wants to discuss the "firestorm" caused by Obama pulling an H.L. Mencken and ostensibly offending the cow states by observing how the policies of the same political party that continues to wage an illegal war in Iraq has turned much of middle America into the third world, and commenting on the ways an understandably bitter populace might seek to console itself.
Also, let's stop using "in the tank." It sounds nice and colloquial and distinctively American. Let's call it what it really is: betraying your ideals by becoming too closely aligned with a given personality so that one no longer scrutinizes critically with reason but defends unequivocally with passion.
I don't mind that Lind and Traister write such breathless faux sociological cultural critiques. I mind that I have to read them here. Joan Walsh betrayed her ideals and has no integrity. That's what being "in the tank" is and there hasn't been any question that Walsh has been in the tank for Clinton for several weeks. As long as Salon continues with her at the helm, the web site operates without integrity, without any ideals beyond Walsh's corruption. I don't mean corruption in the sense of theft, but in the sense of destruction. Joan Walsh is destroying Salon, even as she builds its readership.
What you read in the letters is a firestorm caused by Walsh's tankdom.
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More Fromm than Adorno, really
[Read the article: The rubes and the elites]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]If we're doing Frankfurt School today, let's let Erich Fromm have his say:
"The fact that millions of people share the same vices does not make them virtuous, the fact that they share so many errors does not make the errors to be truths, and the fact that millions of people share the same forms of mental pathology does not make them sane.”
Unless you're Hillary and/or Michael Lind. In which case it does.