Pen-Elayne on the Web

Factitions

When Johanna Lawrenson, the late Abbie Hoffman's "running mate," was introduced at his "No Regrets" memorial service at the NY Palladium in the spring of 1989, she began, "When I first met Abbie, all I knew about the left was that there were factions." (It's a shame this service was just a few years pre-World Wide Web, it would have been nice to have an easily-searchable record of it rather than me having to rely on faulty memory. Although I can still recall Wavy Gravy singing, We are climbing Harpo's ladder / With an opera hat full of rubber chickens / He was a soldier of the clowns... So I suppose you really had to be there. But I digress.) This got a huge laugh as we all affectionately acknowledged how true it was. And I'm reminded of it once again every time I see lefties and liberals squabbling and splitting hairs.

A whole mess of people on my blogroll, and a couple who aren't yet but probably will be soon, have been discussing "liberal extremism." It started with Kevin Drum of Calpundit, and has received thoughtful responses from Atrios, Ampersand, Jeanne d'Arc, Pandagon, Mac Diva and probably a number of others. Check out their entries from the last week or so if you have the time, it'll require a bit of back-and-forth'ing but I think it's worth it. Near as I can tell, you should start here and maybe here on Kevin D's blog.

Okay, so here's my take on it: First of all, on "the Oscar kiss." Viewers will recall that, upon receiving the award for Best Actor, Adrian Brody bounded up and planted the world's tastiest smooch on the apparently unwitting lips of Halle Berry. So Drew Limsky does an LA Times op-ed talking about how undignified this was and how it made Berry no more than a joke and yadda yadda. I think this is totally unfair; haven't comics been joking about Berry since her hit-and-run a couple years back? And that Oscar speech she made last year, I think people with nothing better to do (PWNBTD) are still debating on how much was heartfelt and how much was acting. Besides, we "little people" have no idea if Brody and Berry even know each other; my impression was that they were more than acquaintances before he ever took the stage, but I'm not certain since the closest I've ever come to an Oscar-type celeb was seeing John Goodman at a Firesign Theatre party once and being too nervous to say hi. And were these same PWNBTD this up in arms last year when Julia Roberts practically humped Denzel Washington? Darlings, it's the Oscars, these things will happen, whether they're calculated or spontaneous. It has fuck-all to do with racial and sexual politics, and everything to do with glitz and glam and good-looking winners getting all kissy and huggy because that's what they do. So, point: Kevin D here, IMHO.

Anyway, so Kevin goes on to cite other ways individuals or groups embarrass the liberal cause. I think he's implying that the conservative cause has never been embarrassed like that, but as the extremely perceptive conservative Grover Norquist put it at the Nation Institute "What Liberal Media?" panel last week, conservatives were in complete disarray back in the '60s because of just this type of in-fighting, and they gradually decided to avoid the fighting in pursuit of power, got their act together, and now lo and behold they hold that power. In fact, come to think of it much of the panel was really about this kind of factionalism-that-divides - i.e., "there is a liberal media but nobody can agree on what it is because every individual liberal or lefty is coming at it from their own personal viewpoint, and they'd rather argue with those who are close to them than put up a united front and argue with those who are opposed to them."

Norquist fully expected, and hoped, that his advice to liberals to do what conservatives did (to take a step back and decide exactly what we want - continued factionalizing or the power to be able to do something about our country's direction) would be completely ignored. I see Kevin D offering the same type of advice. And I see many of us rejecting it. Not because it's bad advice, but because the liberal and lefty view of politics is all about freedom of dissent, so how can you willingly stifle healthy debate on so many fundamental and dearly-held principles and still claim to be in favor of a diversity of opinion? It's a vicious circle. I look forward to - yes - more continued debate on how to get out of it.