Harry’s Place

Its the Old Farts who hold the power in the USA. Young Farts are just Useful Idiots who helped achieve a result. It looks increasingly to me that the Obama win might just have been the better result after all.

Does it feel good to be a born again progressive?
It looks like it.

Lordy, I hope The Age of The Grooviest Generation is finally drawing to a close.

Cooper’s good. When he posts about Chavez or Castro, he really brings out the crazies.

i’m a middle-aged fart.

I’ve been reading Cooper for a couple years. He was in Chile when Allende went down. He has a west coast perspective. Necessary to understand for a full grounding in what goes on in this big country.

I’ll put you over my knee if you keep this up, you young whipper-snapper.

“I’ll put you over my knee if you keep this up, you young whipper-snapper.”

come now riostard, we are neither those young red cheeked cherubs at Public School, nor the buxomy Taig house servant you felt the need to discipline at mummys big house in the country ( but she *was* a laggard).

No over the knees for us, or not without some sort of payment……

The next generation of activists have no relationship with the ’60s generation Left because the ’60s Left generation thought they would live forever. They were too self-centered to work at grooming and promoting successors the way their counterparts on the right unfortunately did.

“They were too self-centered to work at grooming and promoting successors the way their counterparts on the right unfortunately did.”

Which is just as well, considering how far up their own asses the 60’s activits were. For leftists they had an astonishing contempt for working people and thoise that were active in the Democratic Party did everything they could to drive working people out of the party, mostly over pet projects that catered to their own privileged upper middle-class worldview and their “needs” wihtout bothering even to expalin their aims to those stupid blue-collar types. They were descended from working people themselves, sometimes only two generations off the boat, and they may have imagined that they understood what “real” working people wanted. Their idological fights with their parents over every possible issue, so well documented in the self-absorbed films of the time, probably led them to think that respectful debate was pointless. Besides, with all their Ivy League education, which their vulgar, money-grubbing parents had provided them, made them superior to everyone, on every level, so what dialogue could there be?

In the States, identity politics drove the white working class out of the Democratic Party.

Now, identity politics are marginalizing the Repubs. To be a “Real American”, according to the recently ended campaign, one must live in a small town or on a farm and be presumably white.

Excellent post Gene. Love Marc Cooper. As you are able to update the blogroll can I point out that since HP had the upgrade Butterflies and Wheels has been dropped and really should be reinstated. Pretty please.

Here you go:

http://www.butterfliesandwheels.com/notes.php

Yeah, after all what would 60 or 70 year olds have to complain about? What on earth do old people have to share with anyone? Bloody pensioners. Be quiet and get out of the road! This is new wave, this is the bright, young, fresh Obama generation!

Oh Gene, you really have found your new hero. It’s rather too obvious. I hope it’s not coinciding with a mid-life crisis. :-)

Gene, ta.

Fuck off Benji.

This is a wonderful piece!
Roll up those sleeves, get ready for change, the new broom’s a-coming to chase out those old cobwebs, here comes the sun, out of the way you tired old men, here comes a big guy who means business, these boots are meant for walkin’, that progressivist aggiornamento’s comin’, we gotta make sure change and renewal happens, no more mistakes, all’s clear, the way ahead is right before us, it’s all about, er, being about something and…connexions, and it don’t do no harm to quote Marx as in Marshall Berman’s book, an’ what this all says, is… new is the old new, no wait, the answer,my friend is blowin’ in the wind. like, er… I mean, like what all this means is…uh…tell me someone, what DOES all this mean?…

“A deal of sounde and fury, signifying nothinge…”
uh, huh, an’ whassat supposed to mean…you mean, OBAMA might melt…? Oh, no…

Roll up those sleeves, get ready for change, the new broom’s a-coming to chase out those old cobwebs,…

Nov. 15 (Bloomberg) — New York Representative Charles Rangel said he’s revising his tax overhaul proposal to reduce U.S. corporate tax rates to 28 percent, down from the current rate of 35 percent.

Can I get an Amen, Brothers and Sisters?

This post is delusional. The terms “Left” and “Right” are meaningless and are only employed by idealogues to avoid talking about ideas.

I think it would be refreshing if all the 50-, 60- and 70-year-old progressives still hanging around and offering all their years of invaluable advice to Obama and his supporters would consider a different option: How about just getting out of the doorways and getting out of the halls

Well, as a supporter of Obama (although a critical one), the above unpleasantness is a reminder that some of Obama’s more zealous acolytes are rather less emollient and inclusive than the man himself.

This ageist nonsense was not the message of the campaign at all. It’s at these times that a particular tribe of neophytes can come to the fore, chuntering on about new dawns and new beginnings, and trying to excommunicate some from what they see as their newly reformed church - this strange sort of year zero mentality. It’s a passing phase.

Jesus, Benji, you’re not REALLY stupid enough to think this post was ageism. Notice what part of the text was bold faced ok?

Really, this comment section doesn’t need spiteful trolls. Either engage what authors actually mean or piss off and don’t come back.

As I thought - Marc Cooper’s blog has turned into a rather syrupy Obama fan page, complete with ‘live blogging’, gushing rhetoric, and dutiful defences of Obama against criticism. As is the partisan tradition, those that dare to criticise Obama are denounced as the “left”, traitors, i.e. not the real left, which is, of course, solely represented by the leadership of the Democratic Party, or groups deemed desirable by Mr. Cooper.

So, ironically, this really is the same old, same old!

I, too, am overcome by emotion as it all seems at once so unreal and yet so well-earned by all of us. I can only compare this to the sensation I felt exactly twenty years ago at 3 am one October morning in 1988 when Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet lost his own self-engineered plebiscite and was voted out of power.

Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear… That’s right, the swing of the pendulum to the Democrats in a US presidential election is comparable to the fall of a 15 year South American military dictatorship where political opposition was banned and folk disappeared, Marc.

It certainly is partly ageist in tone, Josh, although as I note, its wrapped into a general denouncement of progressives, or “progressives”: those who should not be praying at the new Church of Obama and the Real Progressives. He clearly calls for 50, 60 and 70 year old ‘progressives’ (a broad term) “still hanging around” to shut up and ship out (i.e. quietly die); it’s an explicit mention of age, and a negative mention of aging, etc. Strange, that was not a message of the campaign that I heard.

Not sure that would have gone down too well as an election message; we should be grateful that the calmer heads of Mr. Axelrod and Mr. Pouffe - and not the excitable Mr. Cooper - ran the campaign.

This is a blog, not, say, an official spokesman for the Obama administration. Therefor your “criticism” that it has a jokey tone that would offend people if used by the President of the United States or his spokespersons is, well, completely inexplicable.

Please fuck off.

This is a blog, not, say, an official spokesman for the Obama administration.

Well, indeed. However, I find it odd that you deny that Cooper’s rant was at least partly ageist. If he has a problem with folk’s ideology or positions, fair enough; however he explicitly mentioned 50 - 70 year old folk, and told them to piss off.

Obama, born in 1961 is, by definition, a boomer.

Martha Bridegam The next generation of activists have no relationship with the ’60s generation Left because the ’60s Left generation thought they would live forever.

Well. Many behaved as if they were going to die in a nuclear inferno.

I’m pretty sure that if it had been Benjamin instead of Marc Cooper who spent a week with the young union activists campaigning for Obama, they would have ended up switching their support to McCain.

‘reminds me of the perennial feud between Professors Farnsworth and the young upstart Wurmstrong on Futurama : 120 years old v. 140 years old.

At 60, all I have to add is that it is a good thing that we gave these young ‘uns of ours the example of abortion on demand, along with loads of other “rights.” Because the little shits are definitely going to have to come up with some sort of “forward” euthanasia option, just to help cut the bills! Benign neglect all by itself in the back ward at the nursinghome, of all of us retired professional, objectively God-damned and (all our lives!) non-productive, old, fools as the money runs out of our stolen IRAs, just plain ain’t going to be enough. The embarrassing Viagra business all by itself is more than enough condemnation of this braying load of aging and self-adoring halfwits.

As a very elderly non-fart, I think this piece is a fetid load of hot air.

Hi, Anticant! I’m getting on a bit myself… which bit you referrin to, man?
Cooper’s up at the top? Fetid? Yeah, but hot…no, it ain’t even lukewarm.
Or is it Bodwyn W’s just above yours? Well, I’m no professional, so I’m like to be worse off than he, but I ain’t putting myself in the gas chamber queue just yet! He hot? No, freezin.
Doesn’t he like his children? Don’t worry, “All that is solid melts into air” just like Marx/Cooper/Berman says.

Anyway, it ain’t just the New Old Left or the Old New Left or the Old Young Farts who voted for Obama: McCain tried to rubbish all those 9/11 Conspiracy cranks, and looky here;

http://www.rense.com/general80/manchur.htm

All that is solid melts into hot air!

Oi! Benjy’s a proper artifact of the modern British left. Like Spaghetti Junction. Or Spam.

Expecting to live forever or expecting history to end, it comes to the same thing as far as believing there’s no need to train successors.

I don’t agree with Jim’s followup, though. His criticism of ’60s activists sounds too much like generalized contempt for youth and education.