Organize Your Own Movement! My problem with the far left.

The far left is starting to really bug me.  I like Noam Chomsky just as much as the next guy, but get a grip!

The following is from a column on Common Dreams entitled “After Obama”: “President Obama has become the personification of the very Bush administration policies that Candidate Obama so roundly criticized.”

Is this guy crazy?  (He seems like a nice enough guy on his website.)  But comparing Obama to Bush is almost as zany as comparing Obama to Hitler.

Anyway, here is Mr. Chomsky on a post 2008 election wrap up on Demoracy Now:

It’s brand Obama. That his army was mobilized to bring him to office. They regard that as a good thing, accepting the Lippman conception of democracy, the ignorant and meddlesome outsiders are supposed to do what they’re told and then go home.

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the tremendous grassroots army that has been developed, which is now waiting for instructions. What should they do next to press forward Obama’s agenda?

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whatever it is, the army’s supposed to be out there taking instructions, and press work.

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What they don’t seem to realize is what they’re describing, the ideal of what they’re describing, is dictatorship, not democracy.

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The goal of advertising is to create uninformed consumers who will make irrational choices.

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And when they turn to selling a candidate they do the same thing. They want uninformed consumers, you know, uninformed voters to make irrational choices

I am a big fan of Chomsky.  I get where he is coming from.  Obama will probalby fall short of creating utopia.

But where is Chomsky’s “tremendous grassroots army”?  As brilliant as Chomsky is,  he wasn’t able to beat back Nixonism or Reaganism or Bushism.  I’m not sure if Chomsky could get legislation passed at the city council level.

Prophetic works and words are not enough. It is a start but it takes getting your hands dirty and fighting back.

And that’s why Obama won the election. Not because voters were “uninformed consumers” but because they wanted change and went out and organized to get it.

Filed under: Barack Obama, POlitics, community, germany, history, jesus, progressive , adolph hitler, advertising, after obama, Barack Obama, change, chomsky, critique, democracy, Democracy Now, dictatorship, far left, George W. Bush, grassroots, grassroots army, hitler, Noam Chomsky, Obama, organizing, social change, social justice

The Meaning of Lorelei

This week we celebrated Lorelei’s first birthday.  My wife and I couldn’t agree on a name that we both really liked until we came up with Lorelei.

We first heard the name because of Lorelai Gilmore from the TV show The Gilmore Girls.  This TV character was smart, witty, fun loving, adventurous, and independent. All values that Katy and I hold dearly.  And plus, the name sounded cool.

Turned out the name Lorelei has quite an interesting history.  The name Lorelei comes from a  large rock formation on a bend in the Rhine River in Germany.  This has traditionally been a dangerous spot for sailors and Lorelei, perched on this rock formation, would lure navigators of this river to their  watery doom with her alluring singing.

The legend was popularized by the German-Jewish writer Heinrich Heine in the poem Die Lorelei. During World War II, the Nazis tried to stamp out all Jewish cultural remnants, but this poem proved to be too popular.  Instead, Heine’s name was taken off as author of the poem and replaced with “author unknown.” Heine is famous for saying “where they burn books, they will burn people,” and this quote can be found at Yad Veshem and the U.S. Holocaust museum.

The name Lorelei has also popped up quite a bit in pop culture.  Lorelei is a comic book hero on a few different fronts.  In  the Lorelei series, she is  “A redheaded angel of vengeance who preys on those who would prey on the weak.” In Thor, Lorelei is a Norse God whoes “great beauty and seductive manner enable her to persuade virtually any male god or mortal to do whatever she wants”

In pop music, two Lorelei songs stick out (though there are quite a bit more).  Styx’s 1976 song, Lorelei, made it no. 27 in the charts and Ella Fitzgerald had a hit song called Lorelei too.  I like the Ella song much better.

Finally, Marlyn Monroe’s character in Some Like It Hot was named Lorelei. This film was named the greatest comedy of all time by the American Film Institute.

Filed under: Pop Music, film, germany, parenting , death, nazi, hitler, germany, Lorelei, Rhine, Heinrich Heine, Heine, Jewish culture, Jews, Die Lorelei, names, poem, poetry, Styx, Third Reich, book burning, sailors, sirens, Thor, superheros, comic books, Ella Fitzgerald, Holocaust, Yad Vashem, Norse God, Gilmore Girls, Lorelai Gilmore, Maryilyn Monroe, Monroe, Some Like It Hot, family