our "foot-soldiers"

[Terrance]

Paul Mackin wrote:
> 
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "Terrance" <lycidas2 at earthlink.net>
> > In the 1960s, a significant number of American Leftists gave up on the
> > revolutionary potential of working class people.
> 
> And turned to university students. Trouble with students is they grow up and
> become parents mostly with the same middle class concerns as the rest of the
> population and with disgruntled college age children of their own whom they
> must tell "I used to think just like you." Leftism never gets a lasting hold
> on anyone but the intellectuals. Academic Marxism. Good tool of analysis but
> forget toppling the system.
>         P


To tie this back to the Press and the current events,  NYC is still a
big labor town, but labor doesn't read the NY Times or the Voice (unless
they are reading the adds in the back), they  read the Post and the
News, not pro-labor by a long shot. Of course 
I'm not talking about the Labor schools or the Labor intellectuals
(mostly Marxists).  However,  the Unions now require workers to be
students. Union apprentices must study Labor History, OSHA, Race, Class,
Gender and Diversity, Marxist Economics...
Although most of the students are young, most of the students resent
this effort on the part of the Unions to educate them, in part because,
although they are college age,  they are not the disgruntled college age
children of the 1960s.  Also, they are very, very  resistant to Marxism.
Another complexity that can't be explained w/o the facts and history.
Looking at the current situation, we need to account for the current
situation and not get stuck in the situation that was the 1960s or 70s
or 80s or 90s. This is what Pynchon is so very good at imho. It's
exposing that  nostalgia that Judy noted and telling tales that have
been lost, but he reminds us that  the nostalgic spinning of history's
tops is not only harmful when it is sold from the Ray-Gun Right
religiously, but when it is peddled from the Left

America's foot soldiers indeed.