Barlow and his big mouth
Unless you are a deadhead or a musicologist or a student of early internet communities, you will not have heard of John Perry Barlow; I am the first and the third, to a small degree, so I have. Therefore, when I read in All the Pages Are My Days that JPB had started a blog, I clicked onto it eagerly. And discovered a hornet's nest. The guy has been in the blogosphere less than a month and already he is the right's favourite political football! Catch it in midstream at "Narcissism and the American Left", by Armed and Dangerous. The statement that aroused the storm of debate was:
"We can't afford to lose this one, folks. If we do, we'll have to set our watches back 60 years. If they even let us have watches in the camps, that is." (Safire Takes A Shot At Us, by BarlowFriendz)
I actually agree with a LOT of what the original post in Armed and Dangerous is saying. Don't get me wrong, I still love JPB as a poet (and they call him an internet uberexpert too, but I don't think that actually requires technical or real-world brilliance), and no one is saying his heart ain't in the right place (on the left, yep, right where it belongs) but the essay pushed a lot of buttons for me. As you may or may not know, I have been in and out of leftist political movements since 1970, and the two things that always drive me crazy and drive me out are : 1) the way polemicists, mostly male, always pull the "ooh I'm such a criminal rebel, the establishment is scared of me and I'm going to be disappeared soon" routine and 2) the way the SWP or even less savoury groups take over everything just as it's growing big.
Looking back at JPB's statement, I say two things. First, there were so many better ways he could have finished that sentence "If we do, . . ." He could have referred to America's eroding image in the rest of the civilised world, to the lurking unsustainability in the economy, to the corruption in corporate circles or to the mostly hidden plight of the poor. To suggest that the greatest threat the Bush admin poses is to wealthy technocrat liberal big-mouths like himself is tragically solipsistic. Second, why 60 years? That would be 1943-44, really a heyday for leftist intellectuals. It bespeaks a certain ignorance of history I have come to expect in so-called intelligentsia of the hippie school. It makes the few of us who care about such things look bad by association.
