#1: I don’t know why the Left is so so jazzed about FBI raids on the anti-war movement. Shouldn’t we be thanking them for finding it? I mean, that was some serious investigative work. I’m 59 years old. I’ve been going to anti-war demonstrations most of my life. Since a few a biggies in the run up to the invasion of Iraq in 2003, the peace demonstrations I’ve attended have repeatedly attracted the same 34 people, all of whom hate each other because of differing interpretations of Marx’s Theses on Feuerbach, and they’re surrounded in a “free speech zone” by barricades and police on horses, and they always have a terrible sound system, so that pedestrians wince and go to the other side of the street.
The FBI thinks the Freedom Road Socialist Organization is a threat to the corporate state? Where do I join?
#2: A few months ago I was wandering around Barnes and Noble and found this giant, remaindered book of New York Times front pages down through history. I was astonished to find one from 1968, the day after a big antiwar demonstration in Washington, and the Times had splashed five big stories about the demonstration across eight columns on the front page, and most of the rest of the stories concerned some tear in the social fabric.
It was astonishing. The Left? In The New York Times? All over the front page? Those were the days, my friend. Maybe the fact that The New York Times actually covered the recent FBI raids will signal the rest of corporate journalism that they can go back to scapegoating the Left instead of ignoring it. Publicity is publicity.
#3: The New York Times is only five columns across now, so even if they go back to ignoring the Left, they have much less space to do it. I bought one at the airport last month, and it felt like a neighborhood giveaway. Why would anyone want to pay more money for less newshole? Did they hire Larry Summers as Chief Financial Officer or something?
#4: If The New York Times loses any more column width, you’ll be unrolling it like toilet paper.
#5: If somebody was paying me to write this, I’d look up that 1968 front page again and check my facts. Since nobody is paying me, I’m free to say what I want, but we all have to rely on my memory, because I have other crap to do.
#6: The FBI is a lot like the corporate prison industry. They’re going to lock us up because that’s what they do, not because they care what we did. If they’re going to repress us for nothing, we might as well get unrepressed.
#7: The economy has collapsed, and it’s going to collapse again, only worse. Our military is fighting criminal wars with the wrong weapons in the wrong countries. The police are off on a binge, tasering speeders and school children. When the revolution comes, it won’t be Right versus Left. It’ll be the Grossly Incompetent versus the Completely Ineffectual. The only ones killed will be innocent bystanders. All power to the Freedom Road Socialist Organization, whatever it is, and shun the innocent.