Markin comment:
I have been placing posts that link the current world-wide student struggles over budgets issues, war, democracy, etc. up with the working class struggle. One of the great lessons learned from the 1960s anti-war struggles was just this point. Learn it students, youths, and, yes, old-timey radicals too!
*****
Spartacist Canada No. 168
Spring 2011
Students Must Ally With the Working Class
SYC Speaker at Toronto Holiday Appeal
(Young Spartacus pages)
The following speech was given by comrade Orlando Martin of the Toronto Spartacus Youth Club at the January 28 Holiday Appeal for Class-War Prisoners in Toronto. It has been slightly edited for publication.
There is a video circulating online of one of many instances of state repression during the G20 summit in Toronto. In it, after forcefully grabbing a young protester, a cop demands to search his backpack. The protester, innocently expecting better treatment, says that as a Canadian, he has the right to refuse the search. So the cop simply says, “This ain’t Canada right now.”
What is Canada but a capitalist state and, as such, a dictatorship of the capitalist class against the working class, against the oppressed, and against anybody who dares to oppose capitalism? The G20 events were just one more example of what the Canadian capitalist state really is. The arrest of 1,100 people, the cop violence, the racist abuse of minorities, the singling out of Québécois protesters, the humiliation of women, gays and lesbians as well as the threats of rape perfectly mirror the racism, chauvinist oppression and violence that are integral to capitalist society, here in Canada and in every capitalist country.
Comrade V.I. Lenin, the great leader of the Russian Revolution, explained in The State and Revolution that “the state is a product and a manifestation of the irreconcilability of class antagonisms.” Its aim is the creation of “order,” which legalizes and perpetuates the oppression of one class by another. Against every other so-called Marxist or leftist group that explicitly or implicitly calls to reform the capitalist state, we emphasize that the working class needs to smash it.
A year has gone by since our last Holiday Appeal—another year of police brutality and repression against leftists. Two years ago the cops killed Fredy Villanueva in Montreal. Last year in Toronto, Junior Manon, an 18-year-old Latino youth, was brutally killed after being stopped by cops for a minor traffic offence. As expected, the Ontario Special Investigations Unit has cleared all officers of any wrongdoing. While minority youth are outraged and demand justice, they need to understand that capitalism cannot deliver justice to the working class and oppressed. Calls to jail killer cops, for the community to control the police, or for independent public inquiries, fool the working class into thinking that the capitalist state can be reformed. Even if these calls were realized they would do nothing to end the police violence that is endemic to capitalism. Junior Manon and other victims of racist cop terror will only get justice when the working class overthrows capitalism.
And then there is the brutal police violence against anti-G20 protesters in Toronto last year. What did the left do in response? Jack Layton, speaking of the smashed windows, railed that “the vandalism is criminal and totally unacceptable.” The radical liberal Naomi Klein called on the cops to “do your goddamn job,” which of course means more police brutality. And how about the fake-Marxists? Here is one example: the group Fightback, which claims to be the Marxist voice of labour and youth and also claims that cops are “workers in uniform,” ran an event on June 30 that featured speakers who actually praised the cops!
Let me tell you what we did. A day after the mass arrests, on June 28, we wrote and widely circulated a protest statement that denounced in the strongest terms the brutal police violence unleashed on protesters and defended all victims of state repression, including the anarchists in the Black Bloc, despite political differences (see “Protest Mass Arrests of G20 Protesters!” SC No. 166, Fall 2010). We wrote: “An injury to one is an injury to all! Free all the protesters—Drop the charges!” This is what Marxists do, and what non-sectarian defense work means.
While smashing bank windows and burning police cars are not crimes from the standpoint of the working class, such isolated acts are counterposed to the Marxist fight to mobilize the social power of a class-conscious proletariat to sweep away capitalism. At bottom, anarchism is a form of radical democratic idealism and has proven to be a class-collaborationist obstacle to the liberation of the oppressed.
State repression against G20 leftists was vivid at the University of Toronto campus. During a major raid on the U of T Graduate Student Union building, at least 50 G20 protesters from Quebec were arrested. Last September, political science student and activist Jaroslava Avila was arrested by ten plainclothes cops on campus. These arrests underline the Spartacus Youth Club’s call to get cops off campus and the necessity for young radicals to take up this demand.
What did the left on campus do after the G20 mass arrests? At the annual Clubs Fair, the U of T student bureaucrats allowed cops to have a table as if nothing had happened a few weeks before. What did we do? As soon as we saw this, we made a placard on the spot that read: “The SYC Says: Cops Off Campus!” We went right in front of the tables of the NDP and the reformists, denounced them for their faith in the capitalist state and sloganeered against state repression. The student bureaucrats and Ontario Public Interest Research Group organized a little rally the month after to appeal to the university administration to renounce the cop presence. The reality is that universities under capitalism are class-biased institutions that play a role that serves the interests of capital, not the interests of workers and the oppressed. No appeal to the administration is going to stop the repression of activists on campus. We call to abolish the administration! For student/teacher/worker control of the universities! Free, quality education for all requires the overthrow of capitalism through a workers revolution.
The Spartacus Youth Club also protests the witchhunting, censorship and repeated intimidation of pro-Palestinian students on campuses. Recently, our comrades in Vancouver issued a protest statement against a vicious campaign by Zionists and student bureaucrats to vilify defenders of Palestinians as “terrorists” and “anti-Semites” (see “Down With Anti-Palestinian Witchhunt at UBC!” page 6). Each spring, organizers of Israeli Apartheid Week also face smears of “anti-Semitism.” We say, Defend the Palestinians! Hands off their supporters!
Our message to the youth is to use their fighting spirit to ally with the working class, the only class able to emancipate itself and all the oppressed. Students by themselves cannot change the material conditions that create their oppression but the working class has the objective interest and power to overthrow capitalism.
In order to build the next Bolshevik party that will smash the capitalist state, end racist cop terror and open the road to an egalitarian communist future, we in the Spartacus Youth Club seek to win a new generation of youth to the fight for world socialist revolution. We are the training ground for future revolutionaries. Join us and be part of the struggle!
Showing posts with label COLLEGE STUDENTS. Show all posts
Showing posts with label COLLEGE STUDENTS. Show all posts
Saturday, April 02, 2011
Saturday, March 26, 2011
From The "Young Spartacus" Pages-No to ROTC on Campus!
Markin comment:
I do not believe, at least from the anecdotal evidence I have received from the younger people that I have talked to lately, that today’s students realize the importance of the struggle in the 1960s and early 1970s to kick off, or keep off, ROTC from the campuses. Of all the social turmoil, political fights, and disruptions caused by the disputes over the Vietnam War (and allied social questions around race, sex, and, a little, class) on campus the number one question after the ever present universal conscription draft on students’ minds then (male students in particular) was the many-stranded links between the university and what was then called (and still should be called) the military-industrial complex. Currently, absent a draft (although we all know that there is a de facto “economic draft” that is almost as insidious as the physically-imposed one), the most concrete way that students on campus (including on high school campuses) can slow down the war machine is by organizing to kick or keep ROTC off campus. In the end the military depends on their officer corps to stabilize their operations. When wars flare up the traditional academies are not nearly enough to staff that corps. We have every interest in making sure the American imperial state’s capacity to wage war is curtailed.
This article also spends a little time talking about the draft (universal conscription, or some such term). Recently I have also been hearing quite a bit about how the reinstatement of the draft is necessary. Am I hearing this from the American military? No, I think they are quite happy with an all-volunteer service with fewer malcontents than an army filled with “citizen soldiers” that still fills them with dread (and screaming in the night) from the last time they tried it in the Vietnam War period. Am I hearing it from military veterans who see such service as manly (or now womanly)? No. From right-wing ideologues worried about manpower shortages in an American imperial age with multi-front wars? No. I have been hearing it, and hearing it rather more consistently than I would like. from elements of the anti-war movement.
Why? The main argument runs like this. If there were a draft (presumably a male and female draft under current social norms) then today’s rather apathetic students would be pushed into a more pro-active stance against war as occurred as the Vietnam War continued endlessly on (well, almost endlessly, the DRV and NLF troops on the ground in Vietnam resolved that question finally). Wrong? Why would one, especially one who was arguing from an anti-war perspective , want to give the American military, the most destruction military power the world has ever known by orders of magnitude, addition cannon fodder on the off-chance that today’s pampered students might rebel against that condition. To ask the question is to give the answer, pretty or not. While I agree that it is frustrating to the nth degree to see the campuses so quiescent that is no solution. As this article point out our argument is- No Draft. And if a draft does come, then we, or I should say the young we, go into the military and raise that holy hell that the military brass hate to think about in their worst dreams. The rest of us will fight the war machine in other ways in support of you.
********
Workers Vanguard No. 976
18 March 2011
“Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” and the Imperialist Military
No to ROTC on Campus!
(Young Spartacus pages)
With the brutal occupation of Iraq dragging on, tens of thousands of additional troops sent to Afghanistan and increased “secret” drone bombings and CIA operations in Pakistan, the armed forces are looking for a “few good men and women” to serve in their officer corps. All U.S. troops out of Iraq and Afghanistan now! Hands off Pakistan! In his January 25 State of the Union address, imperialist Commander-in-Chief Obama invoked the repeal of the military’s anti-gay “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” (DADT) policy to bolster military recruitment: “Starting this year, no American will be forbidden from serving the country they love because of who they love. And with that change, I call on all our college campuses to open their doors to our military recruiters and ROTC.” Within days of the Senate’s December 18 vote to allow the repeal of DADT, university presidents, including at Columbia and Yale, scrambled to bring ROTC back to their campuses. Meanwhile, the media blathered on about how the military can contribute to the “diversity of the intellectual and moral climate” (Chronicle of Higher Education, 9 January). On March 4, Harvard president Drew Gilpin Faust reinstated Naval ROTC.
ROTC had been driven off over 100 campuses by the early 1970s, as opposition to U.S. imperialism’s dirty, losing war in Vietnam roiled the country. Since that time, ROTC has quietly crawled back onto many of these campuses or set up joint programs with neighboring universities. Unlike radicalized students in the 1960s, in the last few years, campus activists and liberals have narrowly focused their opposition to ROTC on the military’s discriminatory DADT policy. Most recently, lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) groups have objected to ROTC’s return because the military continues to forbid transgender people from enlisting.
As revolutionary socialists, we have a principled stance against the imperialists’ war aims and their armed forces, upholding German revolutionary Wilhelm Liebknecht’s call: “not a man nor a penny” for the capitalist military! ROTC is a training program for officers. It’s an appendage of the military, which exists to defend the bourgeoisie’s interests both through war and colonial plunder abroad and by violently repressing class and social struggle at home. While we fight against discrimination, including discrimination against homosexuals in the armed forces, our goal is not to clean up the image of the capitalist military but to destroy it, along with the racist and sexist capitalist order it defends, through socialist revolution.
Since our founding, the Spartacus Youth Clubs (and our predecessors) have mobilized to keep military recruiters and ROTC off campuses, and have protested military research and CIA and cop training on campus. The universities are not ivory towers, but part of the capitalist society they exist in—campus administrations run them to serve the interest of the capitalist class, in order to train the next generation of managers, technicians, government administrators and war criminals. Nonetheless, we oppose every attempt by the ruling class to turn the campuses into direct training grounds for agents of U.S. imperialism. ROTC, military recruiters and cops off campus now!
The Imperialist Military and Capitalist Society
Militarism and imperialist war are inherent to this class-divided society in which a tiny minority of the population owns the banks and industry and amasses profit by exploiting the labor of the working class. Imperialism is not a policy that can be reformed. The final stage in the development of capitalism, characterized by the export of finance capital, imperialism is a system in which rival advanced capitalist states are compelled by the need for cheap labor, natural resources and new markets to wage wars to divide and dominate the world. The U.S. imperialists, who sit on the largest stockpile of operational nuclear weapons and have a military budget greater than that of the next 19 countries combined, are the greatest danger to the world’s peoples.
The release by WikiLeaks last April of a video showing an Apache helicopter gunning down Iraqi civilians while the pilots gloated over the carnage provided a glimpse of the brutality of the U.S. imperialists’ military. And for those the imperialists see as domestic opponents of their war aims, witness the treatment of Bradley Manning, who is accused of leaking this video and other materials. He has been held in solitary confinement at a military brig since last May. Since March 2 his clothes have been confiscated at night. In the morning he has been forced to stand naked outside his cell to have them returned. Obama has endorsed this treatment, which is supposedly a “precautionary measure” for Manning’s safety. Free Bradley Manning!
The imperialist military is a microcosm of society, reflecting the class divide between the ranks and the bourgeois officer corps, as well as the deep-rooted racism and anti-gay and anti-woman bigotry of American society as a whole. Historically, black troops have often been keenly aware of the hypocrisy of U.S. wars for “freedom” and “democracy” while they are oppressed and discriminated against at home. As we pointed out in “Sex, Race and the Military” (WV No. 671, 11 July 1997): “Until the late 1940s, the military was rigidly segregated, with blacks by and large excluded from combat duty because of the bourgeoisie’s overriding fear of ‘Negroes with guns’.” As the massive need for manpower temporarily overwhelmed traditional racist practices toward the end of World War II, blacks began to be integrated into white fighting units.
In the U.S. today, the volunteer army relies on the economic draft to recruit the bulk of its rank-and-file soldiers. With dwindling access to higher education due to nationwide tuition hikes and the eviscerating of affirmative action, military recruitment is up. Many working-class and poor youth—disproportionately black and Latino—see joining the military as their only opportunity to get a college education or learn a skill. For black youth in particular, who face special race-caste oppression under U.S. capitalism, options are largely limited to the military, a McJob, prison or death on the streets.
As Marxists we oppose anyone volunteering for the imperialist military. We also oppose the draft. However in the event of a draft, as during the Vietnam War, we would oppose radicals refusing to serve in the military, which would only strengthen the ideological purity and political reliability of the armed forces. Instead, we say young militants should go with working-class and minority youth and continue their political agitation. (See “You Will Go!” Spartacist No. 11, March-April 1968.)
“Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell”
For more than a decade, the U.S. stood out among economically advanced countries for its policy of excluding open homosexuals from the military. Last December, Obama and the Democratic Congress pushed through the Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell Repeal Act just weeks before the Republicans took over the House, though the repeal may take months more to go into effect. When signing the repeal, Obama enthused, “This law I’m about to sign will strengthen our national security and uphold the ideals that our fighting men and women risk their lives to defend.” Referring to the many soldiers forced out of the military under the discriminatory policy, “Independent” Democrat Senator Joe Lieberman lamented, “What a waste.”
Anti-sodomy laws and “perversion” screenings in the armed forces have long been used to separate out the “sissies” and “sexual degenerates” from the “real men.” In 1982, Reagan signed a formal ban asserting that “Homosexuality is incompatible with military service.” Since the implementation of DADT in 1993 under Democratic president Bill Clinton, over 13,000 service members were discharged and thousands more have endured aggressive harassment, victims of the military culture’s particular brand of macho brutality and piggishness. Continuously vilified as rapists and pariahs, gays in the military are frequently the target of harassment, abuse and beatings.
When DADT was implemented in 1993, we wrote, “Allowing gays into the military with full rights is a simple democratic demand. However even if the formal ban is dropped, gays will still face harassment and violence at the hands of bigoted officers and fellow soldiers in this bigoted society” (“Right-Wing Bigots Mobilize Against Gays in the Military,” WV No. 569, 12 February 1993). This has been the case for women, who were granted permanent status in the military in 1948. Today, women are discriminated against in the armed forces and violence against them remains prevalent—sexual assault is twice as common as in the civilian population.
The systematic oppression of gay and lesbian people in the military—as in society at large—cannot be eliminated under capitalism. Hatred of gays, lesbians, bisexuals and transgender people flows from the institution of the family. Under the capitalist system, any sexual arrangement that deviates from the heterosexual, monogamous paradigm is demonized. The patriarchal family acts as the main prop of the oppression of women and regiments and conservatizes each new generation whose future is to become wage slaves and cannon fodder for capitalist exploitation.
In the past, many of those hoping to avoid fighting American wars of depredation relied on what was known as the “gay excuse” to get discharged. (Famously, comedian Lenny Bruce reportedly faked being gay on board the USS Brooklyn during World War II, claiming that he was “attracted physically to a few of the fellows.”) Today, enthusiasm for joining the military is one expression of a socially conservative trend in the gay rights milieu, one that seeks bourgeois “respectability” including by embracing patriotism and marital “family values.” A statement by OutServe, an underground organization of gay and lesbian active-duty soldiers, exemplifies this patriotic trend: “Today’s vote by the Senate is a step forward for America. Today our military is stronger, our nation is stronger” (outserve.org). Organizers of many gay rights demonstrations, including the International Socialist Organization (ISO), have promoted Dan Choi, a West Point graduate who was discharged after coming out on television. Choi, who often campaigned surrounded by American flags, revoltingly propounds the usefulness of gays to the imperialist war machine.
To swim in this stream, the fake-socialist ISO in many of its articles on DADT disappears the repressive nature of the military, while pushing liberal illusions that a mythical “progressive” wing of the bourgeoisie can be relied on to fight for gay rights. After joyously gushing over Obama’s election in 2008, last October the ISO grumbled that if Obama and the Democrats were “truly the champions of LGBT equality they have so often claimed to be, they would have kept their promises” to end DADT (Socialist Worker online, 18 October 2010). Now that Obama and the late majority-Democratic Congress have agreed to overturn DADT, are they now “truly champions of LGBT equality”? No! The Democratic Party, like all bourgeois parties, defends the system of capitalism, which perpetuates the oppression of women and sexual minorities. The ISO channels outrage over anti-gay prejudice and discrimination into impotent pressure politics by telling leftists, workers and youth that the capitalist ruling class can be held “accountable” to their empty proclamations.
What is urgently needed is a revolutionary workers party, organized in opposition to the capitalist Democrats, that would champion the rights of all the oppressed. You cannot end war or the economic conditions that force working-class and minority youth into the military without overturning the capitalist system in which these are rooted. We stand on the model of the October 1917 Russian Revolution, which not only pulled a country out of the first imperialist world war but also eliminated all laws against homosexuality. As we stated in our article, “Marxism, Militarism and War” (WV No. 857, 28 October 2005), “As Marxists, our goal is not just to get ROTC and military recruiters off campus for now, but to win students to the struggle to organize the social power of the working class for socialist revolution to get rid of imperialist militarism, and the capitalist system it serves, once and for all.”
I do not believe, at least from the anecdotal evidence I have received from the younger people that I have talked to lately, that today’s students realize the importance of the struggle in the 1960s and early 1970s to kick off, or keep off, ROTC from the campuses. Of all the social turmoil, political fights, and disruptions caused by the disputes over the Vietnam War (and allied social questions around race, sex, and, a little, class) on campus the number one question after the ever present universal conscription draft on students’ minds then (male students in particular) was the many-stranded links between the university and what was then called (and still should be called) the military-industrial complex. Currently, absent a draft (although we all know that there is a de facto “economic draft” that is almost as insidious as the physically-imposed one), the most concrete way that students on campus (including on high school campuses) can slow down the war machine is by organizing to kick or keep ROTC off campus. In the end the military depends on their officer corps to stabilize their operations. When wars flare up the traditional academies are not nearly enough to staff that corps. We have every interest in making sure the American imperial state’s capacity to wage war is curtailed.
This article also spends a little time talking about the draft (universal conscription, or some such term). Recently I have also been hearing quite a bit about how the reinstatement of the draft is necessary. Am I hearing this from the American military? No, I think they are quite happy with an all-volunteer service with fewer malcontents than an army filled with “citizen soldiers” that still fills them with dread (and screaming in the night) from the last time they tried it in the Vietnam War period. Am I hearing it from military veterans who see such service as manly (or now womanly)? No. From right-wing ideologues worried about manpower shortages in an American imperial age with multi-front wars? No. I have been hearing it, and hearing it rather more consistently than I would like. from elements of the anti-war movement.
Why? The main argument runs like this. If there were a draft (presumably a male and female draft under current social norms) then today’s rather apathetic students would be pushed into a more pro-active stance against war as occurred as the Vietnam War continued endlessly on (well, almost endlessly, the DRV and NLF troops on the ground in Vietnam resolved that question finally). Wrong? Why would one, especially one who was arguing from an anti-war perspective , want to give the American military, the most destruction military power the world has ever known by orders of magnitude, addition cannon fodder on the off-chance that today’s pampered students might rebel against that condition. To ask the question is to give the answer, pretty or not. While I agree that it is frustrating to the nth degree to see the campuses so quiescent that is no solution. As this article point out our argument is- No Draft. And if a draft does come, then we, or I should say the young we, go into the military and raise that holy hell that the military brass hate to think about in their worst dreams. The rest of us will fight the war machine in other ways in support of you.
********
Workers Vanguard No. 976
18 March 2011
“Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” and the Imperialist Military
No to ROTC on Campus!
(Young Spartacus pages)
With the brutal occupation of Iraq dragging on, tens of thousands of additional troops sent to Afghanistan and increased “secret” drone bombings and CIA operations in Pakistan, the armed forces are looking for a “few good men and women” to serve in their officer corps. All U.S. troops out of Iraq and Afghanistan now! Hands off Pakistan! In his January 25 State of the Union address, imperialist Commander-in-Chief Obama invoked the repeal of the military’s anti-gay “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” (DADT) policy to bolster military recruitment: “Starting this year, no American will be forbidden from serving the country they love because of who they love. And with that change, I call on all our college campuses to open their doors to our military recruiters and ROTC.” Within days of the Senate’s December 18 vote to allow the repeal of DADT, university presidents, including at Columbia and Yale, scrambled to bring ROTC back to their campuses. Meanwhile, the media blathered on about how the military can contribute to the “diversity of the intellectual and moral climate” (Chronicle of Higher Education, 9 January). On March 4, Harvard president Drew Gilpin Faust reinstated Naval ROTC.
ROTC had been driven off over 100 campuses by the early 1970s, as opposition to U.S. imperialism’s dirty, losing war in Vietnam roiled the country. Since that time, ROTC has quietly crawled back onto many of these campuses or set up joint programs with neighboring universities. Unlike radicalized students in the 1960s, in the last few years, campus activists and liberals have narrowly focused their opposition to ROTC on the military’s discriminatory DADT policy. Most recently, lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) groups have objected to ROTC’s return because the military continues to forbid transgender people from enlisting.
As revolutionary socialists, we have a principled stance against the imperialists’ war aims and their armed forces, upholding German revolutionary Wilhelm Liebknecht’s call: “not a man nor a penny” for the capitalist military! ROTC is a training program for officers. It’s an appendage of the military, which exists to defend the bourgeoisie’s interests both through war and colonial plunder abroad and by violently repressing class and social struggle at home. While we fight against discrimination, including discrimination against homosexuals in the armed forces, our goal is not to clean up the image of the capitalist military but to destroy it, along with the racist and sexist capitalist order it defends, through socialist revolution.
Since our founding, the Spartacus Youth Clubs (and our predecessors) have mobilized to keep military recruiters and ROTC off campuses, and have protested military research and CIA and cop training on campus. The universities are not ivory towers, but part of the capitalist society they exist in—campus administrations run them to serve the interest of the capitalist class, in order to train the next generation of managers, technicians, government administrators and war criminals. Nonetheless, we oppose every attempt by the ruling class to turn the campuses into direct training grounds for agents of U.S. imperialism. ROTC, military recruiters and cops off campus now!
The Imperialist Military and Capitalist Society
Militarism and imperialist war are inherent to this class-divided society in which a tiny minority of the population owns the banks and industry and amasses profit by exploiting the labor of the working class. Imperialism is not a policy that can be reformed. The final stage in the development of capitalism, characterized by the export of finance capital, imperialism is a system in which rival advanced capitalist states are compelled by the need for cheap labor, natural resources and new markets to wage wars to divide and dominate the world. The U.S. imperialists, who sit on the largest stockpile of operational nuclear weapons and have a military budget greater than that of the next 19 countries combined, are the greatest danger to the world’s peoples.
The release by WikiLeaks last April of a video showing an Apache helicopter gunning down Iraqi civilians while the pilots gloated over the carnage provided a glimpse of the brutality of the U.S. imperialists’ military. And for those the imperialists see as domestic opponents of their war aims, witness the treatment of Bradley Manning, who is accused of leaking this video and other materials. He has been held in solitary confinement at a military brig since last May. Since March 2 his clothes have been confiscated at night. In the morning he has been forced to stand naked outside his cell to have them returned. Obama has endorsed this treatment, which is supposedly a “precautionary measure” for Manning’s safety. Free Bradley Manning!
The imperialist military is a microcosm of society, reflecting the class divide between the ranks and the bourgeois officer corps, as well as the deep-rooted racism and anti-gay and anti-woman bigotry of American society as a whole. Historically, black troops have often been keenly aware of the hypocrisy of U.S. wars for “freedom” and “democracy” while they are oppressed and discriminated against at home. As we pointed out in “Sex, Race and the Military” (WV No. 671, 11 July 1997): “Until the late 1940s, the military was rigidly segregated, with blacks by and large excluded from combat duty because of the bourgeoisie’s overriding fear of ‘Negroes with guns’.” As the massive need for manpower temporarily overwhelmed traditional racist practices toward the end of World War II, blacks began to be integrated into white fighting units.
In the U.S. today, the volunteer army relies on the economic draft to recruit the bulk of its rank-and-file soldiers. With dwindling access to higher education due to nationwide tuition hikes and the eviscerating of affirmative action, military recruitment is up. Many working-class and poor youth—disproportionately black and Latino—see joining the military as their only opportunity to get a college education or learn a skill. For black youth in particular, who face special race-caste oppression under U.S. capitalism, options are largely limited to the military, a McJob, prison or death on the streets.
As Marxists we oppose anyone volunteering for the imperialist military. We also oppose the draft. However in the event of a draft, as during the Vietnam War, we would oppose radicals refusing to serve in the military, which would only strengthen the ideological purity and political reliability of the armed forces. Instead, we say young militants should go with working-class and minority youth and continue their political agitation. (See “You Will Go!” Spartacist No. 11, March-April 1968.)
“Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell”
For more than a decade, the U.S. stood out among economically advanced countries for its policy of excluding open homosexuals from the military. Last December, Obama and the Democratic Congress pushed through the Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell Repeal Act just weeks before the Republicans took over the House, though the repeal may take months more to go into effect. When signing the repeal, Obama enthused, “This law I’m about to sign will strengthen our national security and uphold the ideals that our fighting men and women risk their lives to defend.” Referring to the many soldiers forced out of the military under the discriminatory policy, “Independent” Democrat Senator Joe Lieberman lamented, “What a waste.”
Anti-sodomy laws and “perversion” screenings in the armed forces have long been used to separate out the “sissies” and “sexual degenerates” from the “real men.” In 1982, Reagan signed a formal ban asserting that “Homosexuality is incompatible with military service.” Since the implementation of DADT in 1993 under Democratic president Bill Clinton, over 13,000 service members were discharged and thousands more have endured aggressive harassment, victims of the military culture’s particular brand of macho brutality and piggishness. Continuously vilified as rapists and pariahs, gays in the military are frequently the target of harassment, abuse and beatings.
When DADT was implemented in 1993, we wrote, “Allowing gays into the military with full rights is a simple democratic demand. However even if the formal ban is dropped, gays will still face harassment and violence at the hands of bigoted officers and fellow soldiers in this bigoted society” (“Right-Wing Bigots Mobilize Against Gays in the Military,” WV No. 569, 12 February 1993). This has been the case for women, who were granted permanent status in the military in 1948. Today, women are discriminated against in the armed forces and violence against them remains prevalent—sexual assault is twice as common as in the civilian population.
The systematic oppression of gay and lesbian people in the military—as in society at large—cannot be eliminated under capitalism. Hatred of gays, lesbians, bisexuals and transgender people flows from the institution of the family. Under the capitalist system, any sexual arrangement that deviates from the heterosexual, monogamous paradigm is demonized. The patriarchal family acts as the main prop of the oppression of women and regiments and conservatizes each new generation whose future is to become wage slaves and cannon fodder for capitalist exploitation.
In the past, many of those hoping to avoid fighting American wars of depredation relied on what was known as the “gay excuse” to get discharged. (Famously, comedian Lenny Bruce reportedly faked being gay on board the USS Brooklyn during World War II, claiming that he was “attracted physically to a few of the fellows.”) Today, enthusiasm for joining the military is one expression of a socially conservative trend in the gay rights milieu, one that seeks bourgeois “respectability” including by embracing patriotism and marital “family values.” A statement by OutServe, an underground organization of gay and lesbian active-duty soldiers, exemplifies this patriotic trend: “Today’s vote by the Senate is a step forward for America. Today our military is stronger, our nation is stronger” (outserve.org). Organizers of many gay rights demonstrations, including the International Socialist Organization (ISO), have promoted Dan Choi, a West Point graduate who was discharged after coming out on television. Choi, who often campaigned surrounded by American flags, revoltingly propounds the usefulness of gays to the imperialist war machine.
To swim in this stream, the fake-socialist ISO in many of its articles on DADT disappears the repressive nature of the military, while pushing liberal illusions that a mythical “progressive” wing of the bourgeoisie can be relied on to fight for gay rights. After joyously gushing over Obama’s election in 2008, last October the ISO grumbled that if Obama and the Democrats were “truly the champions of LGBT equality they have so often claimed to be, they would have kept their promises” to end DADT (Socialist Worker online, 18 October 2010). Now that Obama and the late majority-Democratic Congress have agreed to overturn DADT, are they now “truly champions of LGBT equality”? No! The Democratic Party, like all bourgeois parties, defends the system of capitalism, which perpetuates the oppression of women and sexual minorities. The ISO channels outrage over anti-gay prejudice and discrimination into impotent pressure politics by telling leftists, workers and youth that the capitalist ruling class can be held “accountable” to their empty proclamations.
What is urgently needed is a revolutionary workers party, organized in opposition to the capitalist Democrats, that would champion the rights of all the oppressed. You cannot end war or the economic conditions that force working-class and minority youth into the military without overturning the capitalist system in which these are rooted. We stand on the model of the October 1917 Russian Revolution, which not only pulled a country out of the first imperialist world war but also eliminated all laws against homosexuality. As we stated in our article, “Marxism, Militarism and War” (WV No. 857, 28 October 2005), “As Marxists, our goal is not just to get ROTC and military recruiters off campus for now, but to win students to the struggle to organize the social power of the working class for socialist revolution to get rid of imperialist militarism, and the capitalist system it serves, once and for all.”
Tuesday, April 27, 2010
*The Jackson State Killings, 1970- Never Forget, Never Forgive- Kent State Too
Click on the headline to link to a "Wikipedia" entry for the Jackson State (Mississippi) killing of two students , and injuring of several others.
Markin comment:
Hey, am I the only one, except Bob Feldman, who has linked the Kent State and Jackson State student killings by the government together today as we mark the fortieth anniversary of those events. It was the same struggle by us and the same rationale by those in power. Remember all students (and others) were put on notice that the American government, federal and local, had you in their cross hairs if you decided to get uppity. Etch that in your brains for future reference.
Markin comment:
Hey, am I the only one, except Bob Feldman, who has linked the Kent State and Jackson State student killings by the government together today as we mark the fortieth anniversary of those events. It was the same struggle by us and the same rationale by those in power. Remember all students (and others) were put on notice that the American government, federal and local, had you in their cross hairs if you decided to get uppity. Etch that in your brains for future reference.
Friday, March 26, 2010
*From The "HistoMat" Blog- Student Struggles Over Budget Cuts- English Version
Click on the headline to link to the latest from the "HistoMat" Blog- Student Struggles Over Budget Cuts- English Version.
Sunday, March 14, 2010
*From The Pen Of James P. Cannon- "How To Organize A Study Class"
Click on the headline to link to a "James P. Cannon Internet Archive" online copy of his 1924 "How To Organize A Study Class".
Markin comment:
In light of the comment I made in one of yesterday's entry about the presentation of the short course on the Russian Bolshevik revolution this article seems timely. This article is from the days when Cannon was a central leader of the American Communist Party in the 1920s, another lean time for communists. A time though, as today, when study is most important to get ready for the days when the class struggle heats up and is less one-sided than it is now.
Markin comment:
In light of the comment I made in one of yesterday's entry about the presentation of the short course on the Russian Bolshevik revolution this article seems timely. This article is from the days when Cannon was a central leader of the American Communist Party in the 1920s, another lean time for communists. A time though, as today, when study is most important to get ready for the days when the class struggle heats up and is less one-sided than it is now.
Thursday, March 11, 2010
*From The Marxist Archives- Leon Trotsky On "Students And Capitalism"
Click on the title to link to a "Workers Vanguard" article, dated February 26, 2010 concerning the relationship between students and capitalist society.
Markin comment:
In light of the recent March 4th "Defend Public Education" national actions led by students, teachers and campus labor organizations it is good to note the relationship between students, the working class and capitalist society. Back in the 1960s we wasted a lot of precious resources, personnel, and, above all, time by being very, very unclear on that relationship. But hell, we are all in the same boat right this minute so this lesson might be easier to learn today.
Markin comment:
In light of the recent March 4th "Defend Public Education" national actions led by students, teachers and campus labor organizations it is good to note the relationship between students, the working class and capitalist society. Back in the 1960s we wasted a lot of precious resources, personnel, and, above all, time by being very, very unclear on that relationship. But hell, we are all in the same boat right this minute so this lesson might be easier to learn today.
Wednesday, December 24, 2008
A Rage For Pigskin- College Division
Commentary
In post- World War II America, the time of this writer’s youth, television and its seemingly infinite possibilities settled on mass sport entertainment as one of its pillars, a wise decision from a revenue producing perspective, if not from a cultural one. Needless to say sports like football that had previously had small, stadium-bound audiences for the most part soaked up the American television airwaves. That all by way of introducing this writer’s life-long fascination with the trials and tribulations of college football and the quest of the 'mythical' national college football championship that has provided fodder for endless arguments over the fairness of the system to produce a real champion in face-to-face combat.
Who knows when a kid first becomes conscious of sports and the difference between them. Maybe in some elementary school physical education class. Maybe in front of the television on some misbegotten Saturday or Sunday afternoon watching a half understood game that is beyond the realm of recollection today. Maybe it was some late night viewing of "The Knute Rockne Story" with Pat O’Brian as Knute and the late, unlamented Ronald Reagan as the heroic George Gipp. One thing is clear it was not from a shared experience with my father. This hard-pressed, harried man was too busy trying to make ends meet (and failing) to have the luxury of watching some esoteric game like football. So we will have to leave the genesis of my football mania as undetermined. Not unlike a lot of life’s habits.
Another source that we can eliminate was an ability to master the game or to perform it at any level short of the ridiculous. There may have been earlier tag football experiences but the first clear recollection of my lack of athletic prowess in an organized team situation was in the seventh grade in those days in my part of the country the first year of junior high school (now, generally, called middle school). There were actually very few sports opportunities at that grade level and football was it in the fall. I thus dutifully and, if I am not mistaken in the fog of history here, somewhat passionately went out for the team. Not knowing much about any of the positions I tried out for center. I think the assumption there was that since I handled the ball that was the key position.
The only problem with my theory was that I was probably even then something like forty or fifty pounds too light for that position. But I remained intrepid and stuck it out as about the fourth-string center that season. Oh yes, in the spirit of good fellowship, sportsmanship or whatever the coach let me go and strut my stuff that season-for one play. The opposing defensive player lifted me about ten feet off the ground with his straight-armed tackle. Needless to say I went abjectly went back the bench full of feelings and foreboding that this was not my sport. Of course in the whirl of today’s sports frenzy I would not have been allowed on the team, even in middle school. Perhaps we can trace the demise of a sense of good sportsmanship and fair play not from the fields of Eton, as in the old days, but in the football fields of America’s middle schools. In any case that was my last team sport experience, my sense of social solidarity and collective work came from other sources.
Let’s go back to that "Knute Rockne" movie for a moment. Although it is probably not the source for my love of college football it does play into the why of my love of college football rather than professional football. I have written elsewhere that as a youth I was somewhat agnostic about my Irish heritage (on my mother’s side) due to the overwhelming problems of existence that confronted our poor bedraggled nuclear family. However, and take this for what it is worth, I very early on attached myself to Notre Dame as a team that I followed. Why? It could have been as small a reason that their team nickname was “The Fighting Irish”. Whatever the reason from middle school to this day, during football season, I scan the newspaper scoreboard to see how the lads have done. In my youth, until 1964 (and for about 20 years now as well) they were not a very good team, certainly not the stuff of the Rockne/Gipp legend. But that is how allegiances get formed.
Like many another red-blooded American high school student in the early 1960’s (or now, for that matter, but you can speak for yourselves), aside for a passion for politics, I was as devoted as anyone to my high school football team. I believe that I went to virtually every game, home or away. That was a sign, among others, of being cool. It also cleared the path a little for my odd-ball political positions. Like being very strongly for the civil rights struggle in the South in a high school that was purposefully all white (even though black neighborhoods, although not in the town itself, were only a few miles away). Or being one of the few people in the town square on Saturday morning with a placard calling for unilateral nuclear disarmament. If that protest had been on Saturday afternoon during football season what would I have done? I will leave that to the imagination of the reader.
By a quirk of fate the publicly-funded college that I attended did not have its own football team. Thus, that Notre Dame allegiance got full play. Of course, although I had not been aware of it earlier this allegiance was not some personal aberration but a significant factor in the popularity of that team. There was, and perhaps there still is, a term for it called “subway” fans meaning that urban Irish types were devoted to the team from South Bend. There were certain bars in the Boston area that one did not go into on Saturday afternoon unless one was a Notre Dame fan, passionate or lukewarm. A highlight was the famous Michigan State/ Notre Dame game that the Irish won 10-10 (oops, tied- these disputes die hard).
After college my devotion continued although not for the "Fighting Irish" (except as they, occasionally, entered the national championship mix). I have spent many a misbegotten hour putting parlays together based on that Top 10 (in the old, old days), Top 20 (more recently) and Top 25 (now). There are infinite combinations that one can place bets on. My favorite (after picking the national champion straight up in pre-season which I have not been particularly successful at) is the top four combinations based on the Coaches and AP Polls. Also top eight and the top 25 (that last is more of an interesting bet than anything else and I got creamed last year with my ill-conceived selections). Enough said.
In post- World War II America, the time of this writer’s youth, television and its seemingly infinite possibilities settled on mass sport entertainment as one of its pillars, a wise decision from a revenue producing perspective, if not from a cultural one. Needless to say sports like football that had previously had small, stadium-bound audiences for the most part soaked up the American television airwaves. That all by way of introducing this writer’s life-long fascination with the trials and tribulations of college football and the quest of the 'mythical' national college football championship that has provided fodder for endless arguments over the fairness of the system to produce a real champion in face-to-face combat.
Who knows when a kid first becomes conscious of sports and the difference between them. Maybe in some elementary school physical education class. Maybe in front of the television on some misbegotten Saturday or Sunday afternoon watching a half understood game that is beyond the realm of recollection today. Maybe it was some late night viewing of "The Knute Rockne Story" with Pat O’Brian as Knute and the late, unlamented Ronald Reagan as the heroic George Gipp. One thing is clear it was not from a shared experience with my father. This hard-pressed, harried man was too busy trying to make ends meet (and failing) to have the luxury of watching some esoteric game like football. So we will have to leave the genesis of my football mania as undetermined. Not unlike a lot of life’s habits.
Another source that we can eliminate was an ability to master the game or to perform it at any level short of the ridiculous. There may have been earlier tag football experiences but the first clear recollection of my lack of athletic prowess in an organized team situation was in the seventh grade in those days in my part of the country the first year of junior high school (now, generally, called middle school). There were actually very few sports opportunities at that grade level and football was it in the fall. I thus dutifully and, if I am not mistaken in the fog of history here, somewhat passionately went out for the team. Not knowing much about any of the positions I tried out for center. I think the assumption there was that since I handled the ball that was the key position.
The only problem with my theory was that I was probably even then something like forty or fifty pounds too light for that position. But I remained intrepid and stuck it out as about the fourth-string center that season. Oh yes, in the spirit of good fellowship, sportsmanship or whatever the coach let me go and strut my stuff that season-for one play. The opposing defensive player lifted me about ten feet off the ground with his straight-armed tackle. Needless to say I went abjectly went back the bench full of feelings and foreboding that this was not my sport. Of course in the whirl of today’s sports frenzy I would not have been allowed on the team, even in middle school. Perhaps we can trace the demise of a sense of good sportsmanship and fair play not from the fields of Eton, as in the old days, but in the football fields of America’s middle schools. In any case that was my last team sport experience, my sense of social solidarity and collective work came from other sources.
Let’s go back to that "Knute Rockne" movie for a moment. Although it is probably not the source for my love of college football it does play into the why of my love of college football rather than professional football. I have written elsewhere that as a youth I was somewhat agnostic about my Irish heritage (on my mother’s side) due to the overwhelming problems of existence that confronted our poor bedraggled nuclear family. However, and take this for what it is worth, I very early on attached myself to Notre Dame as a team that I followed. Why? It could have been as small a reason that their team nickname was “The Fighting Irish”. Whatever the reason from middle school to this day, during football season, I scan the newspaper scoreboard to see how the lads have done. In my youth, until 1964 (and for about 20 years now as well) they were not a very good team, certainly not the stuff of the Rockne/Gipp legend. But that is how allegiances get formed.
Like many another red-blooded American high school student in the early 1960’s (or now, for that matter, but you can speak for yourselves), aside for a passion for politics, I was as devoted as anyone to my high school football team. I believe that I went to virtually every game, home or away. That was a sign, among others, of being cool. It also cleared the path a little for my odd-ball political positions. Like being very strongly for the civil rights struggle in the South in a high school that was purposefully all white (even though black neighborhoods, although not in the town itself, were only a few miles away). Or being one of the few people in the town square on Saturday morning with a placard calling for unilateral nuclear disarmament. If that protest had been on Saturday afternoon during football season what would I have done? I will leave that to the imagination of the reader.
By a quirk of fate the publicly-funded college that I attended did not have its own football team. Thus, that Notre Dame allegiance got full play. Of course, although I had not been aware of it earlier this allegiance was not some personal aberration but a significant factor in the popularity of that team. There was, and perhaps there still is, a term for it called “subway” fans meaning that urban Irish types were devoted to the team from South Bend. There were certain bars in the Boston area that one did not go into on Saturday afternoon unless one was a Notre Dame fan, passionate or lukewarm. A highlight was the famous Michigan State/ Notre Dame game that the Irish won 10-10 (oops, tied- these disputes die hard).
After college my devotion continued although not for the "Fighting Irish" (except as they, occasionally, entered the national championship mix). I have spent many a misbegotten hour putting parlays together based on that Top 10 (in the old, old days), Top 20 (more recently) and Top 25 (now). There are infinite combinations that one can place bets on. My favorite (after picking the national champion straight up in pre-season which I have not been particularly successful at) is the top four combinations based on the Coaches and AP Polls. Also top eight and the top 25 (that last is more of an interesting bet than anything else and I got creamed last year with my ill-conceived selections). Enough said.
Monday, December 04, 2006
OF POLITICAL CORRECTNESS, JOURNALISTIC HYSTERIA AND THE LIBERAL ACADEMY
COMMENTARY
THE LIBERAL ACADEMIC INTELLIGENTSIA IS UNDER ATTACK- APPPARENTLY FOR CORRUPTING THE MORALS OF THE YOUTH. LONG LIVE THE MEMORY OF SOCRATES
Over the past several months there has been an incessant drumbeat about the failure of American higher education to produce civically virtuous citizens. We know the usual suspects on the right on this issue. Former Federal Education Czar William Bennett comes easily to mind. Another is David Horowitz who after spending three minutes in the New Left about forty years ago has created a virtual cottage industry out of ‘documenting’ the alleged liberal bias of the American professoriate. The more johnnie-come lately types like Columbia Proessor Todd Gitlin have written whole books about the treason of the liberal intelligentsia for not marching in lockstep to every imperialist adventure any American government decides to engage in. Recently, within the space of one week two separate articles appeared in the weekday OP/Ed pages of the Boston Globe by regular columnist Cathy Young and then by guest commentator Elizabeth Kantor. What gives?
What gives is one of the old themes of the ‘cultural wars’ that have been with us since the first New Leftist of the 1960’s traded in his or her bullhorn and placard from the streets and adjourned to the nearest ivy-covered campus to bask in tenure-insured theoretical contemplation about the dangers of the world and the nasty betrayal of the struggle by the masses. If one really thinks about it the theme has been going on every since they made old Socrates take the hemlock. In any case, the commentators mentioned above believe that the liberal bias of the American professoriate has dulled the senses of patriotism, civic duty and history of today’s crop of students. For proof they rely on recent studies, particularly a University of Connecticut survey, which indicate that most college seniors know less about the world when they leave the leafy campuses then when they arrived.
But are the poor, bedraggled liberal professors with their quirky little theories, their alleged distain for the Western canon, their self-doubts and their penchant for bravely signing petitions for every worthy cause as their “radical’ acts of political awareness really the causal factor behind the apparent decline in civic virtue of the past half century. I think not. While this writer LIKES the Western canon and will freely admit publically for the first time, horror of horrors, that he LIKES John Milton’s poetry it has never hurt anyone to look at other bodies of literature and history from the’ forgotten’ of world history. Moreover, although the liberal ‘fight’ led by the professoriate to create pockets of ‘political correctness’ in the cloistered academy has sometimes set my teeth on edge it hardly is on the scale, of say- an average day of treachery by the Bush Administration and the Congress- in accelerating the decline of civic virtue.
Just to get a feel for what is going on among college students I recently walked around several campuses here in Boston, where you practically stumble over a college student with every turn you make. Here one can find all manner of student from Harvard’ ruling class in training to the lowly struggling junior college student studying hard to keep out of Iraq, and everything in between. That walk has led me to a very different conclusion from those faint-hearted conservative commentators. I witnessed first hand the intersection of 24/7 iPod nation, cell phone nation, and My Space Internet nation. That phenomenon, dear readers, is where the ‘death of civility’ is to be found. While on average today’s youth is probably smarter than previous generations there is just no time to go beyond the hyper-individualized trance necessary to balance all that technology. That long touted ride down that ‘information superhighway’ has taken a greater toll on the body politic than one might think.
Additional note: As an alternate theory to the conclusions from my tour above I offer this. The “enhanced” prospects for increased social life (read-party time) created by campus life and the mania for sports events such as big-time college football and March Madness college basketball should be carefully analyzed as factors in the decline of civic virtue. Hell, wait a minute- how is that so different from the generation of ’68, my generation. We did the same damn things? Let the college students breathe a little, make their mistakes and learn from them. Maybe we will even make a few revolutionaries in the process. Enough said.
THE LIBERAL ACADEMIC INTELLIGENTSIA IS UNDER ATTACK- APPPARENTLY FOR CORRUPTING THE MORALS OF THE YOUTH. LONG LIVE THE MEMORY OF SOCRATES
Over the past several months there has been an incessant drumbeat about the failure of American higher education to produce civically virtuous citizens. We know the usual suspects on the right on this issue. Former Federal Education Czar William Bennett comes easily to mind. Another is David Horowitz who after spending three minutes in the New Left about forty years ago has created a virtual cottage industry out of ‘documenting’ the alleged liberal bias of the American professoriate. The more johnnie-come lately types like Columbia Proessor Todd Gitlin have written whole books about the treason of the liberal intelligentsia for not marching in lockstep to every imperialist adventure any American government decides to engage in. Recently, within the space of one week two separate articles appeared in the weekday OP/Ed pages of the Boston Globe by regular columnist Cathy Young and then by guest commentator Elizabeth Kantor. What gives?
What gives is one of the old themes of the ‘cultural wars’ that have been with us since the first New Leftist of the 1960’s traded in his or her bullhorn and placard from the streets and adjourned to the nearest ivy-covered campus to bask in tenure-insured theoretical contemplation about the dangers of the world and the nasty betrayal of the struggle by the masses. If one really thinks about it the theme has been going on every since they made old Socrates take the hemlock. In any case, the commentators mentioned above believe that the liberal bias of the American professoriate has dulled the senses of patriotism, civic duty and history of today’s crop of students. For proof they rely on recent studies, particularly a University of Connecticut survey, which indicate that most college seniors know less about the world when they leave the leafy campuses then when they arrived.
But are the poor, bedraggled liberal professors with their quirky little theories, their alleged distain for the Western canon, their self-doubts and their penchant for bravely signing petitions for every worthy cause as their “radical’ acts of political awareness really the causal factor behind the apparent decline in civic virtue of the past half century. I think not. While this writer LIKES the Western canon and will freely admit publically for the first time, horror of horrors, that he LIKES John Milton’s poetry it has never hurt anyone to look at other bodies of literature and history from the’ forgotten’ of world history. Moreover, although the liberal ‘fight’ led by the professoriate to create pockets of ‘political correctness’ in the cloistered academy has sometimes set my teeth on edge it hardly is on the scale, of say- an average day of treachery by the Bush Administration and the Congress- in accelerating the decline of civic virtue.
Just to get a feel for what is going on among college students I recently walked around several campuses here in Boston, where you practically stumble over a college student with every turn you make. Here one can find all manner of student from Harvard’ ruling class in training to the lowly struggling junior college student studying hard to keep out of Iraq, and everything in between. That walk has led me to a very different conclusion from those faint-hearted conservative commentators. I witnessed first hand the intersection of 24/7 iPod nation, cell phone nation, and My Space Internet nation. That phenomenon, dear readers, is where the ‘death of civility’ is to be found. While on average today’s youth is probably smarter than previous generations there is just no time to go beyond the hyper-individualized trance necessary to balance all that technology. That long touted ride down that ‘information superhighway’ has taken a greater toll on the body politic than one might think.
Additional note: As an alternate theory to the conclusions from my tour above I offer this. The “enhanced” prospects for increased social life (read-party time) created by campus life and the mania for sports events such as big-time college football and March Madness college basketball should be carefully analyzed as factors in the decline of civic virtue. Hell, wait a minute- how is that so different from the generation of ’68, my generation. We did the same damn things? Let the college students breathe a little, make their mistakes and learn from them. Maybe we will even make a few revolutionaries in the process. Enough said.
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