My problem with (just for example) the Air Americans is that they call themselves progressives and they're not. They are as stuck in their own spot on the runway of intellectual flight as Republicans are stuck in the hangar. In fact, it's sometimes hard to tell the difference. They are nowhere close to the left-hand edge of left, as their co-opting of the progressive label implies. Oh they say some great things on        The Air America squadron fire sometimes straight and sometimes wildly at specific individuals that need to be shot down and they expose specific shenanigans that should be exposed, but they always treat their targets as aberrations; they don't forthrightly renounce the system. Fragment after fragment, "youknow" after "youknow," stuttering wildly yet always accurately dodging the word capitalism, these hot-aerial acrobats fly all around but never land on the obvious conclusion that ugly capitalism is normal capitalism and business ownership of the country is the logical end of "free" enterprise.
       They protest on behalf of certain poor people in certain newsworthy instances as the victims of certain acts of cruelty or neglect that are obviously the regular, mathematically necessary side effects of competitive "free" enterprise under Democrats or Republicans, but, though they can pronounce the word poverty and propose band-aid solutions in very specific contexts, they never protest inequality, and they religiously fail to find poverty or inequality systemic.
        I once heard an Air America hostess declare that what "we" want is to lift the poor into the middle class, but how a bottomless class system is to be locked up without taking the "freedom" out of "free" enterprise or why "we" want such an obviously still unfair half class reshuffle she didn't explain. I never heard any Air American support Kofi Annan's efforts to declare inequality a human rights abuse, and I didn't expect to.
        It's not (as the Republicans say about Democrats) that they have no ideas, but, bold as they sound, like Democrats with brassy voices, they seem afraid to carry their ideas far enough leftward to legitimize them. And, like all Democrats AND Republicans, they're far short of a full deck of ideas. They occasionally mouth the words environment and ecology as if reading them from someone else's notes; but they betray no glimmer of understanding or concern about never-ending "free" enterprise "development" as a catalyst of eco-collapse, and they certainly can't pronounce overpopulation. They often sneer at Republican religious stupidity, but they also often invoke Jesus, and they sometimes even set political correctness aside and claim they're better Christians. Exactly parallel to that, they damn the Republicans for wrapping themselves in the flag, but they constantly wave the same flag while unctuously and often proclaiming themselves better patriots.
       It would be too weird (or too obvious) to call themselves better capitalists, so, in only blurred reference to the economic dogfight that is the centerpiece of American life, they curse only Republican pitbulls, demonizing the mean Republicans with details, while sainting the nice Democratic bystanders by omission of near duplicate details. Of course, that's no worse than should be expected inside the actually general capitalist arena. "Free" speech is often dishonest. What I'm talking about is the direction and effect of their dishonesty, which is to confuse and co-opt what little could-be-honest left is left in America by pretending to be progressive.
        They are NOT. They are as mainstream as the Republicans. They reside fully within the mainstream religious patriotic capitalist camp, which is divided between right wing Republicans and centrist Democrats. There's no left in it. Democrats, after all, range only from conservative to conservative liberal - i.e. centrist. The Democrats have absorbed some surviving 60's liberals and a meek mainstream version of 3 or 4 60's issues. But the truer progressives of the 80's (who've been erased from both the main-stream and somewhat alternative media's version of history), who were adamantly to the left of liberal and almost consciously PROGRESSING, are now, I suspect, a repressed nightmare of the post-1990 slightly liberal centrists. I remember some 80's progressives talking about "working from the inside," so maybe that's where they disappeared to. But no Air American ever publicly remembers living in a shanty and sweating with the poor to build anything in Central America or marching in the streets to stymie Reagan's Nicaraguan invasion plans. Obviously, if they were there, they've wiped U.S. progressive support of the Sandinista revolution completely off their revised memory slates, and I've never heard them support Cuba and I don't expect to.
        You can verify what I'm saying about Air America easily, but I could be talking about almost all the known American so-called "left" since at least 1990, couldn't I? My problem isn't just Air America. Air America is an example of something that's gone very wrong with the entire American "left." There are some young Americans in Venezuela now supporting Hugo Chavez, a quantum leap past wringing one's hands for lost theocracy in Tibet, but we don't hear much about them. The American "left," or the only part of the American "left" we regularly hear about, has certainly turned right. So decisively that I am entertaining a fantasy about it which, even though it seems a little on the far side, I'm going to share with you.
        In "Inside The Company," Philip Agee told us the CIA so thoroughly infiltrated some South American leftist student movements while he was there that CIA agents were both funding and leading those movements. They could do that because a movement needs supplies, transportation, facilities, refreshments, contacts, and leaders with time and resources to be leaders. So the CIA was literally paying their supposed enemies' piper and calling their tune - a leftist tune, by the way, to facilitate U.S. and U.S. puppet reaction.
        Surely, something like that can happen in America, too. Why wouldn't it happen? The right are wrong and often stupid, but their topcats are also rich so they have to be somewhat cunning, and they're certainly energetic, dedicated, unscrupulous and insidious, and they won't stop at anything to keep their wealth and power and, with their incredible wealth and power and their own embedded media covering for them, they don't have to stop at anything. The CIA stunt Agee described would be easier to pull off on their own turf.
        To get the attention and effectively keep the attention of any significant part of a crowd of millions takes some resources, and he who provides the resources sets the agenda. Obviously, a few people decide who will lead and set the agenda for both the Democrats and the Republicans. Obviously, the same people realize they can't prevent a grassroots leftist movement from existing (especially on college campuses) but that any grassroots group is greatly influenced by apparent friends who know how to raise money, who have the contacts to get them what little substantive publicity they get, and who boldly take charge of them.
        It's certainly true that the leadership of the American "leftist" movement on the national level is now restricted to an elite group, that individuals who go beyond that group's agenda are marginalized or squashed or effectively unheard of, and that the leadership, who certainly somehow have resources, have co-opted and are constantly, energetically (insidiously? cunningly?) rigidly defining and limiting the American "leftist" agenda to the politically correct. I think the main main-stream "left" today (not just Air America) have popularized a nice, safe box that the insidious, cunning, rich, resourceful right themselves might like to keep the "leftists" in.
        If that seems to me to be happening, and if the rich right could and would like to make it happen to keep the main-stream "left" toothless and nonthreatening to their wealth and power, then why not assume it is happening? After all, WHAT obviously very irresistible influence keeps the mainstream "left" from ever promoting atheism (or even logic) or communism (or even socialism - or even equality) or a one-world state or a human population and encampment reduced to and kept at a size that can subsist off the ecosystem without crushing it? WHO so pervasively and successfully instead dreams up and promotes the conveniently vague, nongrammatical, and development friendly liberal babble about "sustaining" development and growth and proliferating high-density housing?
        It's easy and maybe it's valid to tie the main-stream "left's" lameness to philosophical cowardice, to human genetic limitations, to the brain-tangle bound to result from a chimeric alliance of mismated movements, to the inevitable over involvement of confused youth, to the fatal effect of religiously democratic chaos on intelligent organization. Maybe all of that is the best explanation. Maybe the American left just scared themselves so badly in the 80's and were so embarrassed by the one-two punch of the fall of the Eastern Bloc and the 1990 Nicaraguan elections that they haven't yet gotten over it.
        There's no maybe about that last sentence. I suspect some post-1990 now centrist "liberals" reluctantly following me this far may have involuntarily shivered when they read it. But the humiliation and apparently brain-shrinking trauma of being smacked down and trampled when "the people" of Nicaragua they'd thought they were helping suddenly stampeded right back over them into the darkness didn't just happen. The effectiveness of childhood brain-binding and a steady diet of mainstream media propaganda for life set them up. That's a given. And it would only amount to a continuation and refinement of that given if there were and are equally cynical infiltrators at work now. Right?
        Actually, there probably are. This is a principal that supposedly always guides good investigative journalists: there may not have to be, but there probably are because there could be and because any cunning plan I can think of, somebody else can think of and execute. The motive, the means, and the will exist, so the end probably exists. If I had the computer skills of a Cecil Adams, maybe I could dig up the evidence. But whether or not I could prove that right wing moles have taken over and now run the left, and whether or not it's true, it might as well be.
        As for Air America, it may just be an unusually aggressive and profane main-stream Democratic Party voice that falsely calls itself "progressive" because it really doesn't know the difference. But, whether unfortunately or insidiously, it walks, quacks, and looks exactly like a right-wing mole luring naive youth looking for actually leftist causes down a virtual mole hole, so it might as well be a right wing mole.
        And the same is true of most of the post 1990 leadership of the lame American left. In fact, the left has always been healthier outside U.S. borders, especially south of the Rio Bravo, especially, ironically, now. Cuba exists, after all, and is regarded as a beacon in every Latin American and European country I've been in. Why are Americans never told that by their own so-called left? Why have the elections of a series of potentially socialist presidents in Latin America not even cast a shadow on the agenda of Air America (or The Nation) or the (merely) liberal Democratic dialogue in America? If I was in Howard Dean's shoes, my platform would be to join the UN and the new Latin American "Axis of Good," phase out the military, start treating the arms industry like the tobacco industry, promote much more aggressive and comprehensive world-wide strategies than the Kyoto Accord to try to restore the ecosystem (global warming is NOT the only problem), end the Cuban embargo and join Hugo Chavez (the kind of leftist leader America needs) in subsidizing the Cuban experiment to help perfect a socialist model the whole world can emulate.
        If that sounds too radical, excuse me. It's just the way we progressives talk. Come on, Air America! Take off! Straighten up and fly left. You won't see Jesus sitting on a cloud, but you'll get a better view of the complete absence of lines running across the ground or through the Air between America and the World.

-Glen Roberts

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