Re: Ishmael Reed: "What Progressives Don’t Understand About Obama" Keeping Cool & Caring" NYT

[Michael F]

Yes, all progressives are a bit confusing when you give them a forum
to engage with others.  They don't even agree that we are all equal,
for white people are evil and those with material resources are even
more evil.  The irony? most UC Berkeley profs make three times as much
as me and I am white...  Irony, paradox, or are they just full of
shit?  I've sat in on many Phd-level courses at Berkeley, a few
Literary this Fall, and mind-numbing, anarchist ideology is all that
is sold, which produces nothing but... "nothingness", the type of
"nothingness" in Pynchon's novels.  But then again, I've read my fair
share of Joseph Conrad and Dostoevsky and the Ancient Classics(which
these profs warp or eschew), so I can smell these "demons" or
"devils"(depending on which translation you read) a mile away.

What's wrong with being opposed to the iron-clad, cultural crippling
"conservativisms" of our day?  Why do we have destroy things in order
to rewrite the world at our own caprice?

Isn't this "nothingness" that I mentioned earlier what Pynchon
presents in his work?  I've never attached Modern Political meaning or
used a preferred ideology to read his texts.  I just sit back and
allow his texts to show how Modern ideas have contorted our world and
wracked the mind of individuals.  Pynchon's greatest use of humor is
at "us" Moderns who never even bother or even think to consider how
our minds work, and how this Modern concept of "ignorance is bliss" is
destroying us.  To phrase it best, Pynchon like no other writer
captures the epistemic catastrophe that is the Intellectual 20th
Century: ATD through Inherent Vice.

Please, rant-on Reed.  Give Pynchon more to write about...

Mike F.


On Sun, Dec 12, 2010 at 7:51 AM, Robin Landseadel
<robinlandseadel at comcast.net> wrote:
> Unlike white progressives, blacks and Latinos are not used to getting it
> all. They know how it feels to be unemployed and unable to buy your children
> Christmas presents. They know when not to shout.
>
> http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/12/opinion/12reed.html
>
> On Dec 12, 2010, at 7:41 AM, alice wellintown wrote:
>
>> The president, the coolest man in the room, who worked among the
>> unemployed in Chicago, knows too.
>
>