BetweenARockAndAHarderPlace
My brother and his family came over for dinner last night
I'll call him Don here, which is his real name, but we'll pretend it's not.
If you think I am a waygone Lefty, well, you should hear Don talk.
I may support the labour movement and almost all it stands for, but my brother lives it and breathes it around the clock - literally.
Anyway, as the evening wound down (after the kids had done their performance of 'Cats' in the basement - one more good reason not to have Cable!) the talk turned, as was inevitable, to the upcoming Provincial Election.
The upshot of it was that Don bemoans the fact that our side seems unwilling to take it to the other side and 'give 'em a taste or their own medicine' on the Prop/Spin front.
You see, in a way, my brother got to the same place that Billmon just arrived at, only in Don's case his train pulled into the Smackdown Station a long time ago.
Four years ago to be exact, back during the 2001 election campaign, where Don spent endless hours sitting in stuffy Union halls listening to people like former Premier, and no longer Dipper, Ujjal Dosanjh wimp out and admit that we'd made mistakes without offering up anything in the way of significant Firewalls and/or Counterinsurgency Strategies to try and reduce the number of inciendiary spincycle devices and rhetorical bunker-busters that were raining down on us from all quarters of the corporate media monolith that has (or perhaps I should say "had") a stranglehold on information dissemination in this Province. And after the extreme drubbing we took in that election (77 to 2 for those who are not in the immediate vicinity) my brother decided that the only way to beat these people is to get down in the muck with them and start throwing the haymakers, non-stop.
Now, as you can see from my previous posts here I feel somewhat differently. While opininated, I try my best to be less strident, something that I hope is reinforced by my comments at other places in the bloggodome - a few of which you may have inadvertently run in to yourself in your cyber-travels*.
Essentially, for me at least, it comes down to this: I don't want us to win by building a more viscious Obfuscation Machine, even if it does serve to smackdown the Neandercons for good (or at least for another hundred years or so before they take another shot ressurecting the Gilded Age in all it's glory).
Why?
Because, I figure that if that were to happen the truth really would be on the ropes. What's more the ideological poles would start to bend towards each other which, ultimately, would be good for no one.....
And that is the position I took with my brother last night even though I know it exasperates the hell out of him, and even though I know that another redmeat Lieberal majority will not have nearly the direct negative impact on me and mine as it will on him and his.
But then later, after everyone had left, and I was doing the last of the dishes in a dark, quiet and comfortable house in a formerly working-class East Vancouver neighborhood where the mean house price is fast approaching $500,000 I got to thinking....is there a third way in the AgitProp game that allows you to 'Stick it To the Man' while simultaneously 'Sticking to the Truth', as it were?
And that's when the lightbulb went off (think I was scrubbing the potato pot at the time) and I came to the conclusion that it might be worth seriously analyzing my extremely minor role in 'T-Shirt Gate' which all started when an unexpected E-mail floated lazily out of the ether from Citizen K...........
......stay tuned for Part II, coming soon to a bloggodome near you......
___
* Exception to the rule Update: 'discussions' about any aspect, either real or imagined, of Intelligent Design, which drive me so far around the bend that I stop making any sense whatsoever; happened recently over at pogge's place where I came out sounding like an advocate, I think....still apologizing for that one.
.
No comments:
Post a Comment