[The Liberal Class] failed to defend traditional liberal values during the long night of corporate assault in exchange for its position of privilege and comfort in the corporate state. The virulent right-wing backlash we now experience is an expression of the liberal class’ flagrant betrayal of the citizenry.Dear Chris,
-Chris Hedges
Please replace "in exchange for" with "because of".
Editorially Yours,
IOZ
31 comments:
yesplease. more posts like this.
Editorially speaking I'd say stet. The second sentence assumes The Liberal Class changed its M.O., provoking a virulent right-wing backlash.
I like how the citizenry, betrayed by the false Hope and Change, have now fallen in the arms of the Sith. To the ballot box, to save the Rebel Alliance!
What we need now, I guess, is several months worth of posts mocking Chris Hedges for his failure to perfectly align himself with every minor facet of our worldview.
Wow, tough crowd today. Where's the "mockery?" Unless "mockery" means the same as "polite disagreement" these days.
stras:
BLAWG! man.
Hedges has a kick-ass Donkey tattoo on his actual heart muscle, IOZzy.
That's some mean shit poking fun at his awesome tattoo.
She kidnapped herself, etc.
Just tired of this blog's gradual shift in focus from "evil shit the state does" to "Obama supporters" to "fellow critics of Obama who are not criticizing Obama from the proper ideological niche." Between this and the Greenwald posts and the various recent intraleft dick-waving contests, it seems like most of the energy here has been spent shooting spitballs at people who agree with each other on 99% of everything that matters.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but there still are, like, a bunch of wars going on, right? Like, jackbooted American thugs are still occupying and bombing third world countries, the most powerful man on earth is still yukking it up at thousand-dollar-a-plate dinners while his remote controlled flying deathbots burn up poor-as-shit villagers halfway across the world. There are better things to complain about than people who are actually on your fucking side on this shit.
And maybe what it really is is that I need to stop reading this shit, because for all the leftists and anarchists I know in real life who actually get off their ass and try to make the world a marginally better place to live, reading this blog every day makes me feel like I'm surrounded by old fat white men slowly pickling themselves in their own unwarranted self-regard.
Nice bit there in Hedges' last paragraph.
However Hedges' is guilty of believing in the "good old days." and is busy fighting old battles.
Somewhat of an aside; I heard a portion of the CA governor debate and Meg Whitman saying she supports gutting pensions for state and local government employees except for the police. Her direct quote was "We won't take money away from employees who wear a gun..."
I appreciated the honesty.
http://ladypoverty.blogspot.com/2010/10/when-rulers-are-more-progressive-than.html
stras,
Who's complaining? IOZ was merely picking a nit, no harm, no foul.
And you talk about these wars THE TROOPS WE ALL SUPPORT are engaged in as if they're some sort of bad things....
oh snap. on our side? we're that popular?
have you seen the pics from Mexico, with the headless corpses hung from bridges? what about the shit people are doing in order to get us drugs in this country, drugs that clearly people want, but authorities insist on stopping? can you tell me what any President has done in our lifetime to stop that madness? how about Obama, huh? plus ca change, yo.
sides. my sides ache. please continue trolling the idiot Democrat and Progressive supporters, IOZ. more please, I'll have another. it's way worth my time and effort. I don't even have to leave my chair to piss off the people that need it. this is great.
"Traditional liberal values"? WTF? Look: there are traditional liberals in America. They are called "Libertarians", but only because the progressives stole their original label "liberal". Libertarian values date from the 18th century. There are also somewhat less traditional liberals: they are called Republicans. Their values date from the 19th century. (Many of them actually believe in God!) And then there are the Democrats, the party of progressive values, that is, the least traditional liberal values. Their values date from the 20th century.
The "liberal class" Hedges is talking about is the ruling class. A powerless few malcontents aside, they have no relation to or interest in "traditional liberal values". They are progressive through and through.
Hedges' essay makes considerably more sense if you read it substituting "ruling class" for "liberal class". Of course, many of the sentences are reduced to gibberish with that interpretation, as for example, "The ruling class... has no real function within the power elite." But this just highlights the distortion in Hedges' worldview: that sentence is gibberish even in the original.
apparently, if IOZ doesn't hurry up and kowtow to stras, things are going to get ugly. just how ugly? I hear that stras is a mean one-eyed snake!
Stras, for someone who believes that time and energy is wasted chastising people with whom you agree on most things, you sure do spend a boatload of time and energy chastising the eponymous tender of a blog you read every day, with whom you admittedly agree on most things, for focusing his derision on a particular subset of liberal political writers.
FREE SHOTS OF SELF AWARENESS ALL AROUND
well, not really a boatload. stras is coming to this conclusion today, La Rana, in this thread. or so it seems. not much time at all, if that is the case.
Resolved:
There is a directly proportional relationship between one's degree of ideological agreement with a given individual and the amount of time that one should spend chastising them.
(Although at a certain level of agreement the bukkake session turns into a circle jerk, not totally sure how to represent that mathematically)
The mechanistic desire for control... There's no love, no sex. In fact it's all anti sex. That's the meat of the problem.. There's no failure here. It's part of the design. The failure to overcome it is ours.
What the world needs now is a new Frank Sinatra, like I need a hole in my head.
Come on, stras. Are you really this one dimensional?
Hedges is a damned interesting figure, and IOZ is merely doing a service to those of us trying to figure out how somebody can combine so much valuable writing with such profoundly unexamined clunkers at the level of first premises.
The secret almost has to be that, in order to attain any byline at the NYT, one must first have demonstrated one's implacable, small-c constitutional unwillingness to think about What Must Never Be Thought About.
fun - perhaps i am lumping these together, but i seem to recall several previous complaints along these lines.
MD is right, you also may find interesting that after his adventures in central Europe he studied at Harvard Divinity School, home of his "liberal class."
In Hedges defense, both interpretations could be correct at once. Interesting that he called out Champsky the way he did though, I'd say that NC lost his place in the 'respectable' liberal echelon for arguing precisely what Hedges claims he avoided addressing.
Stras, you are tilting at some pretty tiny windmills here. Assuming you have a point, arguendo, it's not like IOZ is ordering the execution, imprisonment or exile of the ideologically impure.
STRAS: If you think IOZ and those he generally criticizes here agree on 99% of what's most important, then you haven't been paying close attention. At best, progressives complain about the abuse, but support the abuser. It's hardly an insignificant difference.
"In exchange for" is actually a much better term for what Hedges is describing than "because of."
"In exchange for" implies that the intellectual in question had some choice in the matter.
Faust received great riches in exchange for his soul.
Faust received great riches because of his soul.
Hedges phrasing implies betrayal IOZ's predestination.
The "liberal class" isn't Faust, Boito, the liberal class is Old Scratch.
Monswah,
Turned down any invitations to the Rachael Maddow Show lately? 'Nuff said.
Now, back to my chipping game.
--the real Donny
THATS a good edit, although Hedges at least, has become appropriately hysterical. Americans have to be excused for being ignorant because those of us not allowed on deck had to find the one or two tiny, all ut hidden portholes to see the iceberg.
@leonard
"libertarianism" was invented by certain culturally swinging conservatives in the 70's so they could go on fucking men and snorting coke off their penises,(not then widely accepted in the republican party) but continue advocating for fossil 19th century paleo economic policy and call it "new" (neo), so that self absorbed touchy feely primal screamers would warm to it.That caught on, everyone got a divorce and bought guns, then everyone got a cheesy hair cut and braided leather suspenders and voted for reagan. the end
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