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Blogs

1

Michael Albert's Blog

Web Address: http://www.zcommunications.org/zspace/malbert
Bio: Michael Albert is a founder and current member of the staff of Z Magazine as well as staff of Z Magazine`s web system: ZCom (www.zmag.org). Albert`s radicalization occurred during the 1960s. His po... (More)

All Albert Blogs

First Draft Introduction to possible new book - Remembering Tomorrow (memoirs)

By Michael Albert at Mar 10, 2005


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At the suggestion of a number of folks I am trying to write about the past few decades actions, reactions, ideas, and notions as I have experienced them, using stories, anecdotes, etc. People call this sort of thing a memoir...but what I am doing is not about me, or even the times, so much as particular occurences and organizing and so on, with an eye toward lasting lessons. I just happened to be there, that's all. The book is currently titled Remembering Tormorrow. I admit I like the title so much it is unlikely to change. The rest, however, changes every time I look at any part of i. So, I am posting a draft introduction here, and if anyone has any reaction - from what are you doing, don't bother; to hey, this will be your masterpiece; and more important, if anyone has any advice, I'd happily hear from you. In the U.S. and around the world, social structures saddle us. Freedom lacks participation. Information lacks truth. Weather boils us. Water befouls us. Stomachs clench us. Jails crowd us. Bombs burst us. Cynicism deadens us. Complacency constrains us. People don't soar as they ought to. Life suffers. Too many die too early. Corpses from indignity, war, repression, and inequality are unwarranted. Over every grassy knoll are false graveyards. Shouldn't we kick it off? Shouldn't we show something better? That sentiment has moved me all my life. Where from? Where to? What new paths? A memoir recounts selected life experiences. It explicates the narrator. It explicates the times. It draws lessons. t doesn't conclude anything. A memoir should read like exciting fiction. A memoir should tell truth. A memoir should be brutally honest even affronting those mentioned, even degrading self. Are these standards sensible? Can I meet them? Do I want to? Me As Memoirist My writing a memoir faces numerous obstacles. First, I have an abysmal memory. My past is not eidetic. Even in high school I couldn't recall whole cloth. I couldn't historically account. Called upon for sequence and pattern I reconstructed from foundations as if doing mathematical deductions. Cramming facts was torture and never stuck. Names, places, dates, and even sequences transcend my powers. Things implant in the sinews of my mind, I am sure, like for everyone else, but my recall is thwarted by a horribly defective playback mechanism. Even prodded I can recall only fragments. Some memoirs include decades-old descriptions of people's outfits, weather, and exact words. Not mine. Some memoir-ists forget that kind of detail, but insert it in their stories anyhow, imagining it as it might have been. Not me. Second, beyond horrible recall, I don't introspect. My revealing inner motivations and rationales, much less inner demons, is largely fanciful. I don't protest introspecting. Neither pride nor privacy censor me. I simply don't explore internal terrain. If I visited a psychiatrist and managed to remain civil, there would ensure a cacophony of silence. More, I doubt people can understand beyond the most general parameters of their personal motives, so why try? We can understand overarching average pressures. We can understand obvious factors of private choice. We can't understand deeper intricacies of private variation. Third, I am intellectually pugnacious but I have no interest in condemning anyone whose path I combatively intersected. Why do that? I scrupulously avoid ad homonym history. No histrionic entertainment here. But fourth and perhaps most determinative of the nature of this book, I dislike personally focused memoirs. This both emotional and, I think, logical. Suppose I remember and convey some event in all its intimate personal details. Since I don't have the wisdom or talent of a great novelist, there is nearly no prospect my time spent on detail will deliver sought results. Idiosyncratic stories can fascinate, but unless brilliantly conveyed they rarely edify. From the primarily pointedly personal, readers might experience quickly fading amusement, quick drying tears, or Cheshire smiles, but what about picking up a few lasting insights? Dostoevsky graphically and intensively described emotional details and conveyed not only the pathos of a specific person but also lasting profundities about life and history. I can't do that. So what's the point of a memoir from someone with a poor memory, who doesn't introspect, who rejects personal fireworks, and who avoids personal revelation? When friends urged me to write personal stories about the past few decades, I assumed they sought stories of movements, activism, projects, and social thinking, as experienced from my spot on the wall. Their request was that I try to use personal remembrance to reveal historical patterns, possibilities, and thoughts. So, that's what I sought to do. Along the way, however, pressures mounted for greater than my preferred level of personal revelation. It isn't just the political experiences, thoughts, books, institutions, and movements that matter, friends advised me. It is also the little and diverse factors that propelled me down particular byways. I have to include that too, to help readers understand bigger issues and see larger connections of life lived by real people in real times. Personal context will familiarize and humanize. Okay, despite still strong reservations, I have tried to fulfill my friends' instructions. This is the seventeenth book I have authored or co-authored. This book is barely longer than some others. It required less research than most others. But it was harder to organize and write and entailed much more vacillating over whether it would be worth the paper it is printed on. Emulating My Muse As I began writing, I read a couple of books on writing memoirs from which I got the advisories noted above. I also read a number of representative memoirs or autobiographies that I might try to emulate. Among these were Tom Hayden's memoir Rebel that told about the New Left, Dave Dellinger's moving autobiography From Yale to Jail, and also Bertrand Russell's, Simone de Beauvoir's, and Ghandi's justly famous autobiographies. I read a few other sundry and less memorable works too, plus, finally, I read the first volume of Bob Dylan's memoirs. Dylan's book, despite being a-political, nonetheless greatly affected my plans. Dylan's memoir jumps from year to year. It is not stately but highly agitated and even slightly berserk. What gives Dylan's stories continuity despite chronological chaos is thematic flow. Emotional, intuitive, or musical links connect each spotlighted event to the next. Reading Dylan's meandering, circling stories, not knowing chronologically where I was didn't matter. I was thematically situated. I thought this reflected Dylan's artistic and literary genius. I figured Dylan first wrote a draft of the whole book in temporal order and then carefully found non linear connections to reorganize his stories oblivious to temporal order. In fact, I figured he probably had the two promised future volumes done as well. However difficult I thought that methodology might be, it seemed consistent with the idea that a memoir should not be about the narrator, the narrator's life, or even the narrator's experiences – but should be about a selected subset of the narrator's experienced perceptions and whatever insights and lessons the reader might usefully draw from them. I liked Dylan's book, but my pleasure arose largely from caring about Dylan himself. Dylan's themes and lessons meant less to me than Dylan's personal existence and choices. I even wonder how much his themes would mean to anyone who wasn't a musician and didn't specifically care a lot about Dylan. In contrast, few Remembering Tomorrow readers will be remotely as entranced by me as I am entranced by Dylan, or even entranced by me at all. Only a handful will read these pages to sate personal curiosity. For you, dear reader, I know there is either more here than Michael Albert, or Remembering Tomorrow won't be worth your time. Hell, if I was reading it, that would be my interest. By prioritizing the non personal, Dylan's non linear approach fits my needs even better than it fit Dylan's. So, sitting down to write, I favored temporal non linearity and began trying to mimic it even while fearing it would elude me. And then came a pleasant surprise. Writing episodes thematically is, at least for me, easier than writing them sequentially. I remember event x. Prodded by remembering x, I remember interaction y. That y is separated in time from x doesn't matter as long as y is thematically related to x. The non linear approach rejects comprehensively dredging up everything. It extricates only to provoke useful response. Dylan's method not only better highlighted the thematic, it was also easier recall and writing. Thanks Bob. I'm indebted to you again. What This Isn't I would love to read a really effective history of the last fifty years. It is sad that my generation hasn't generated such histories. Perhaps the task intimidates us. I know it intimidates me. Tom Hayden's memoir of the sixties relays many sequential facts, though I disagree with his understanding of the period and broader relations. Dave Dellinger's autobiography also conveys a lot of history, step by step, with a tutored, caring, and wise eye. But neither of these are remotely histories of the epic. Other partial works exist, some quite brilliant, but not an encompassing history. Remembering Tomorrow will not correct that problem. To get even a patchy history out of Remembering Tomorrow you would have to research many dates that aren't included and then rip the binding and sequentially reposition the pages in temporal order, filling in all kinds of detail which I only sparsely and intermittently include. Even then you would only have a mishmash of disjoint pieces, and often not the largest or the grandest pieces. A historical record is not here. This book's non-linear style helps make that evident. What This Is Remembering Tomorrow is a book in ten parts. Each includes various stories and episodes. Each tries to convey something worth remembering and hopefully using. Part One, The Old Folks Home at MIT, has five chapters about my time at a contextually stellar but objectively smarmy college located in Cambridge Massachusetts. It covers fraternity rush through tumultuous expulsion including hypocritical revisitation and tacky yearbook reminiscences not to mention learning science. There is, cognitive dissonance, sniffing glue, designing corridors, burning draft cards from the balcony, creating sanctuaries, finishing school logic, and career planning. Motives intersect and transcend both elections and riots. We meet Hahnel and early Marxism. We meet Hoffman, Living Theatre, dope, and even a little acid. We meet Vice President Humphrey, the Dead who are not so Grateful, and even Ali. Torching libraries is the thing. The Provost propositions me. Chemical production seduces me. Kennedy beckons me. Lucre sickens me. We see the roots of my vision fetish. We meet Dow and Bohmer. We experience multiform channeling. My election surprises. Everywhere there is war. Shalom shines, I am not so bright. Facing repression: in print, and eyeball to gun barrel. Pre-envisioning remembering yesterday. MIT, those were the days. Part Two, Early Days, has three chapters. We visit home. Brother gambles and I break loose. Wrestling wrangles. Sister navigates prodigal return. Parents beget me. School dazes. Religion manipulates - unsuccessfully. Neclear wrangles. Civil Rights creates history. Personal fighting creates anti-thuggery. Music tears, mends, and even defines my life. Part Three, Learning and Teaching, has five chapters. MIT and Harvard preen educational inadequacy. I become simultaneously an economist and not an economist. Is economics astrology? Odd byways illuminate academia. Cheating disciplines left life broadly. I test well but obey poorly. I teach with Chomsky. I teach at and get fired from U. Mass Boston and re-meet my boss decades later. Slippery slopes connect law, lechery, education, and politics. Teaching at prison educates me how threats work and why racism trumps reason. Walking butterflies convey key life lessons. ZMI is my best teaching and we will win. Part Four, Personal Dimensions, has six chapters. We visit doctor filth and endure sickening medicine for mother, dad, and me too. Hobby time leads to Sammy Reshevsky who was almost Bobby Fisher. College selection leads to Bill Bradley who was fully Mr. Basketball. Playtime leads to tennis handicaps, intellectual chasms, the sea's relentlessness, and even me being in the zone defying mathematician's proofs. Human capacities are tested and revealed. Reading yields writing. Guns intersect publishing. Personal manipulations, chameleon effects, and lawyers and doctors destroying selves and others leads to living a left life. Socializing or not, that becomes the question. Big and little thefts merge. Monumentally dirty refrigerator yields clean up crews and ruminations about being born or dying. My own wage slavery, three times over, fails to hurt, but luckily you don't have to endure cancer to know it isn't a walk in the park. Part Five, Publishing Others, has six chapters. We meet Ollman being Marx, Churchill with his head high, and Friendly Fascism defanged and re-fanged. Oddly, I write with Mr. Toffler. Ed Herman enters for a long stay and Chomsky gets his due. Mass media is revealed. Between Labor and Capital highlights Ehrenreich, antagonizes Aronowitz, propels Albert and Hahnel. The totality of oppression infuses life and informs publishing. Sargent's Women and Revolution, Churchill's Marxism and Native Americans, and lots of No Nukes keep the ball rolling. Sixties books reveal Dellinger and Hayden, I learn on Golden Pond. Katsiaficas writes a good one and the press avoids fatness. Finally there is cocky Cockburn, a little Hitchens, and Kovel's victory. Part Six, Racial Realities, has only two chapters. I get mugged on Halloween. Self image issues abound. Lydia gets mugged on our steps. MIT blackness instructs. SEP biases persist. Where does whitey belong? Who is singing the same old white boys song? And what the hell is going on in a left that is less diverse than the mainstream? Part Seven SexPol, tips a nod to Reich, visits some opposite gender relations, explores marriage, muses on children and aging, learns from Bread and Roses, and trips over pornography. And Lydia gets her due. Part Eight, Ship Building, has eight chapters. Bean town organizes from Old Mole media to rioting and conferencing. The Black Panthers rise, fall, and shine a light. Sects vary little on two sides of one ocean. My experiences in the action faction include SLF macho, Weather forecasts and storms, and planning mayhem. Washington warfare stretches from the Pentagon, through CIA insanities, to Hayden and Davis's Mayday mayhem, and finally to Poland - which is not Washington - with lessons for home. Social Forums bust Life After Capitalism. Mumbai's traffic, fear, and calm introduce Asian diversity. Florence art and craft differs from America, and doesn't. Lula has dinner. Me and Brazil's election, nyet. Me and the WSF, nyet. Building tomorrow's movement, not yet. We Stand for what. Plus here find the many sides of Jackson, Nader, and electoral politics. Part Nine, Institution Building, has three chapters. South End Press is born, foreshadows participatory economics, survives capitalism's pressures, endures human eagles and mice, and succeeds wildly. We entice money from clothing entrepreneur, Rockefeller daughter, and Hunter the headliner. House sales resuscitate, investment packages preserve, phone fund raising saves, printer profanity and standing down the IRS protect. Z spins off. Outreach gambles pay off. NFL owner pops up: plenty of pain, no gain. Z Papers is prescient and disastrous. ZMI is a winner. LBBS drains life, misses big bucks, morphs into Shareworld, misses even bigger bucks, morphs into ZNet, makes okay bucks. Finally, restauranting and keeping on keeping on. Part Ten, Mind Trips, has five chapters and a postscript. Marxism morphs to liberating theory with a major in economics. Vision overcomes resistance, generates parecon, debates Horowitz, and advocates participatory society. Strategy addresses vision, megaphone, stickiness, structural readjustment, umbrella, background, emphasis, timeline, sectarianism, and money problems. I rant about ideas and the left, visit Rimini, Italy, conclude on an upbeat, and append a postscript speech. That's it. It's probably too much. It is certainly way more than I had any intention to ever revisit.
Person

Re: First Draft Introduction to possible new book - Remembering Tomorrow (memoirs)

By Gammon101, Bwong at Mar 14, 2005 04:58 AM

Michael Albert may not realize, it was Stephen Hawking who asked "why can we remember the past but not the future?". Hawking's cryptic sounding question has to do with the nature of "time". Hope people don't mistaken Albert's book as a popular physics book because of the title.

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Person

Re: First Draft Introduction to possible new book - Remembering Tomorrow (memoirs)

By Yurallnuts, Realpc at Mar 12, 2005 17:44 PM

"The revolution is when the workers collectively refuse to work for the capitalists and start to work for themselves." I am sure you know that in the US lots of people decide to work for themselves. It is ludicrous to claim we are all forced to work for giant corporations. We are free to work freelance, to start a business and hire workers, or to start a cooperative with other workers. Anti-capitalists constantly deny this obvious reality.

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Person

Re: First Draft Introduction to possible new book - Remembering Tomorrow (memoirs)

By Yurallnuts, Realpc at Mar 12, 2005 17:39 PM

"Captalism says if we entrust our well beings to a self regulated machine(the market), optimnal happiness will ensue. This is Utopianism in the extreme." Oh come on, only lunatics promise optimal happiness in any system. Trusting the self-regulating market, within limits, is better than trusting everything to any kind of government. There is nothing utopian about this, and it is the antithesis of utopianism. And I'm sure you know that.

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Person

Re: First Draft Introduction to possible new book - Remembering Tomorrow (memoirs)

By Yurallnuts, Realpc at Mar 12, 2005 17:36 PM

" the whole sale private ownership of the means of production and natural resoureces such as land is a very recent development" Bwong, you must be kidding. Ownership of land and farm animals by individual families goes back to ancient times. Unless you were a serf or a slave, in an agricultural society, you owned land and animals. From the origin of agriculture to the industrial revolution, for thousands of years, private ownership of the means of production was typical.

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Occupy_iowa_city_rally

Re: First Draft Introduction to possible new book - Remembering Tomorrow (memoirs)

By Street, Paul at Mar 12, 2005 04:42 AM

Sounds like a neat project, full of lessons for those committed to lifelong and more than merely just academic leftism. I would be interested to get the first person story of antiwar movement in and around Boston, MIT etc. and much more. Yes, Ahnion, "realpc" has and diverted focus with his usual moronic facility. He is without substance (not all anti-radicals are, but he is)and I now recommend that ZNet commenters put him in the no-response deep freeze.

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Person

Re: First Draft Introduction to possible new book - Remembering Tomorrow (memoirs)

By Gammon101, Bwong at Mar 12, 2005 02:06 AM

More succinctly, capitalism = allowing the market mechanism to run society. This is a very recent Utopian idea very contrary to human nature and human history.

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Person

Re: First Draft Introduction to possible new book - Remembering Tomorrow (memoirs)

By Gammon101, Bwong at Mar 12, 2005 02:00 AM

"But no society evolves away from private ownership to collectivism" Private owenship of what? "Socialism", at least the way I understand it, does not mean you can't own your own car or underwear. On the other hand, the whole sale private ownership of the means of production and natural resoureces such as land is a very recent development, brought on by force against an unwilling public.All societies put strict restrictions on private ownership on this kind until the advent of captalism. Capitalism doesn't just means "private ownership" and "market". It means turning society itself into an adjunct of the market and allow unlimited right to "property". Capitalism is an analomoly in history.Itv is met with fierce resistance wherever it is introduced. You premise that capitalism naturally arises from "human nature" while attempts to reign it in stems from utopianism is completely upside down. The historical fact is the other way around. Captalism says if we entrust our well beings to a self regulated machine(the market), optimnal happiness will ensue. This is Utopianism in the extreme.

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Person

Re: First Draft Introduction to possible new book - Remembering Tomorrow (memoirs)

By Yurallnuts, Realpc at Mar 12, 2005 01:29 AM

It would take something worse than the great depression. I know that's what you are all waiting for.

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Person

Re: First Draft Introduction to possible new book - Remembering Tomorrow (memoirs)

By Yurallnuts, Realpc at Mar 12, 2005 01:27 AM

"I think he uses the word "revolution" metaphorically to mean transforming society through building alternative economical structures and consciousness raising, etc." You hope he and other anticapitalist mean something harmless by the word. But no society evolves away from private ownership to collectivism. People do not hand over what they worked all their lives for, or has been in their family for generations. They don't say "here, take everything I have and take my independence and let me join your collective where I will obediently follow the will of the majority, or of the charismatic leader."

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Person

Re: First Draft Introduction to possible new book - Remembering Tomorrow (memoirs)

By Gammon101, Bwong at Mar 12, 2005 01:00 AM

"A system where the economy is controlled by the government (whether a democracy or a dictatorship), and there is no free enterprise (or capitalism)" realpc Capitalism was born in violence and is maintained through violence and coercions. A system that commodify everything including nature, labour and social relations anything but "natural" and have to be brought on by force.The history of capitalist revolution was a lot bloodier than the pseudo Marxist revolutions you keep referring to. "Capitalism" is not just what you have inside the U.S and the industrialized countries in the last 60 years or so.

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Person

Re: First Draft Introduction to possible new book - Remembering Tomorrow (memoirs)

By Gammon101, Bwong at Mar 12, 2005 00:50 AM

If that is the kind of "socialist revolution" that Michael Albert has in mind, that would put him in the league of loonies such as the International Socialists(guys who distribute flyers in university campuses advertising the imminent socialist revolution between pot smoking sessions, who are these guys kidding?) But I doubt that is what he meant. I think he uses the word "revolution" metaphorically to mean transforming society through building alternative economical structures and consciousness raising, etc. In that case it makes a lot of sense.

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Person

Re: First Draft Introduction to possible new book - Remembering Tomorrow (memoirs)

By Gammon101, Bwong at Mar 12, 2005 00:48 AM

I don't think there is a chance in hell that you can "overthrow the government". For one thing, such an undertaking would not have any mass support. Without a popular mandate a revolution is illegitimate even in infinitesimal chance that you can pull it off.A small band of idealogues have no right to impose their utopia on the majority.

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Person

Re: First Draft Introduction to possible new book - Remembering Tomorrow (memoirs)

By Kreuzberg_anto, Moderne at Mar 11, 2005 23:50 PM

I fail to see any broad consensus amongst bloggers here for either government control of the economy or violent revolution. So really all that's left as a common consensus is no "free enterprise", which is kind of implicit in the notion of anticapitalist politics. "Close enough" indeed.

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Person

Re: First Draft Introduction to possible new book - Remembering Tomorrow (memoirs)

By Yurallnuts, Realpc at Mar 11, 2005 23:20 PM

In order to keep my posts under the size limit, I am using the word "Marxism" instead of describing in detail all the many varieties of socialism. A system where the economy is controlled by the government (whether a democracy or a dictatorship), and there is no free enterprise (or capitalism), and violent revolution is advocated if necessary, is what we generally mean by Marxism. That is what the bloggers here seem to advocate, and that is why I call it Marxism. Close enough.

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Person

Re: First Draft Introduction to possible new book - Remembering Tomorrow (memoirs)

By Kreuzberg_anto, Moderne at Mar 11, 2005 21:26 PM

realpc, yet again you retort with marxism, marxism, marxism, as though there are only 2 sets of ideas in the entire world, and marxism is the "other" one. Frankly, I'd be surprised if even a substantial minority of those who read here, write here, or participate in znet are actually "marxists", instead of belonging to the huge pantheon of different ideas and visions that makes up left thought. But that's beside the point, and unprovable anyways. The point is that your constant railing against marxism, and use of it as a counter-argument against other readers here does little more than make you look really dumb. Though perhaps that's unavoidable.

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Person

Re: First Draft Introduction to possible new book - Remembering Tomorrow (memoirs)

By Yurallnuts, Realpc at Mar 11, 2005 19:31 PM

If Marxism really were such a great idea, there would be successful examples by now. The American people would be happy to elect a Marxist government, if Marxism made any sense, and a revolution would not be needed. Marxism does not make sense, is not a good idea, and free enterprise will stay until someone gets a better idea. Marxism is not a better idea.

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Person

Re: First Draft Introduction to possible new book - Remembering Tomorrow (memoirs)

By Yurallnuts, Realpc at Mar 11, 2005 16:27 PM

The "perfect" society aspiring revolutionaries have planned would most likely be a big disappointment to the oridinary citizens, but the revolutionaries would be in their glory, as leaders of the great new oppressive state. That is the key to the mind of many aspiring revolutionaries -- they want to be in charge, because even if the system they create sucks, at least they will call the shots.

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Person

Re: First Draft Introduction to possible new book - Remembering Tomorrow (memoirs)

By Yurallnuts, Realpc at Mar 11, 2005 16:24 PM

You will have to kill the middle class, not just the rich. You will have to kill millions. I think many aspiring revolutionaries are kidding themselves, thinking their goal is to improve society. I suspect many of them want to create chaos and violence, because they despise the established order and want to see it burn. All of us who, while seeing many defects in the system, appreciate our relative freedom, would have to be killed.

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Person

Re: First Draft Introduction to possible new book - Remembering Tomorrow (memoirs)

By Yurallnuts, Realpc at Mar 11, 2005 15:21 PM

I was also entertained by his saying he "taught with Chomsky." That could mean a whole range of different things, but we are left to wonder.

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Person

Re: First Draft Introduction to possible new book - Remembering Tomorrow (memoirs)

By Yurallnuts, Realpc at Mar 11, 2005 15:19 PM

Ok, I regret making that comment. But he seems so self-fascinated, I couldn't stand it. Then I read his blogger description which calls him an "aspiring revolutionary." I assume an aspiring revolutionary dreams of killing people. I don't know, I have never known one personally. Also, I was at work and got bored. Sorry. I usually try to question the ideas expressed, not attack the fanatics who express them (even though they often attack me personally).

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Person

Re: First Draft Introduction to possible new book - Remembering Tomorrow (memoirs)

By Tantenn, Tâi-oân-lâng at Mar 11, 2005 08:04 AM

I rarely comment but I will now say this: before today I sometimes read and considered realpc's comments for the substance they might contain; after today I will not waste my time anymore. One could be a liberal, paleo-conservative, a neocon, a radical, whatever and be civil -- or one could be any of these and be foremost a troll.

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Person

Re: First Draft Introduction to possible new book - Remembering Tomorrow (memoirs)

By Protocol4, Nemo at Mar 11, 2005 03:45 AM

Realpc, I tried to be civil before, but this is too much. Piss off will you?

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Person

Re: First Draft Introduction to possible new book - Remembering Tomorrow (memoirs)

By Rekouche, Koceilah at Mar 11, 2005 01:44 AM

I'm looking foward to reading the history of Z and your times at MIT, and teaching with Chomsky. Also, as someone who's kind of young, I'm interested in hearing about how things seemed in the 60's while the civil rights movement was actually happening. Looking back, we can see how radical and revolutionary the time period was. But while it was happening, were the events surprising or did they feel natural? Based on those experiences, are there any signs of a 'new-awakening' of sorts that could happen today?

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Person

By Yurallnuts, Realpc at Mar 10, 2005 21:20 PM

Jesus. No, I didn't read all that, but I did skim part of it. When you become a revolutionary, who are you planning to kill? Or maybe you haven't decided that yet. Maybe you will just shoot randomly into crowds.

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