Maggie's Farm

For those who read Real Clear Politics site, one of today's offerings is from Todd Gitlin. Presented as being reported from the LA Times that's all we know of Gitlin. Know your sources! The article "tells" the reader how to view 1968,a most tumultuous year. But do we do it through Gitlin's filter?

Here is Mr Gitlin's bio.


Professor at the Columbia School of Journalism
Anti-war activist, author of book on the Sixties
Former president of Students for a Democratic Society


Born in 1943, Todd Gitlin is currently a professor at the Columbia School of Journalism. He is also an occasional contributor to The Nation.

After graduating from the Bronx High School of Science, Gitlin attended Harvard University, the University of Michigan, and UC Berkeley. He went on to teach at Bekeley for many years.

Professor Gitlin is the author of The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage -- a standard apologia for the 1960s, firmly committed to the view that this was a progressive rather than a destructive generation. As a chronicler of the events of that decade, Gitlin largely refuses to acknowledge the actual crimes committed by radicals like the Black Panther Party activists who were responsible for a series of robberies, arsons and murders, preferring instead to view their thuggery as actions that were provoked by a repressive society.

Gitlin is a former President of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), which was the largest student organization of the New Left in the early 1960s.

A strong supporter of the post-9/11 antiwar movement, Gitlin has stated that the very “essence” of American policy in the War on Terror is “monumental arrogance.” Not only is arrogance “the hallmark of [President] Bush’s foreign policy,” Gitlin writes, but “it is his foreign policy.”

Gitlin participated in the infamous March 2003 Columbia University “teach-in,” where fellow professor Nicholas De Genova expressed his fervent wish that American soldiers might be slaughtered en masse in “a million Mogadishus,” -- a sentiment that Gitlin strongly dissents from, but not enough to wish America victory in its war in Iraq.

Writing on the website of Mother Jones four months prior to the start of Operation Iraqi Freedom, Gitlin expressed his desire to build a “more substantial antiwar movement.” He also expressed his disappointment that the pro-Saddam orientation of the antiwar movement could only stand in the way of that task. He characterized the movement as reflective of “the Old Left at its worst,” and lamented that with leadership by the likes of Ramsey Clark and the Maoist radical C. Clark Kissinger, “the antiwar movement is doomed.” In short, Gitlin implied that the goals of the movement to stop any planned invasion of Iraq were worthy, and that only its current leadership was problematic.

After 9/11, Professor Gitlin wrote an article critical of leftists who opposed the war against the Taliban in Afghanistan, and he even unfurled an American flag and hung it from his apartment window for a few weeks. But he soon re-furled it because, “leaving the flag up was too easily misunderstood as a triumphalist cliché. It didn’t express my patriotic sentiment, which was turning toward political opposition…”

This opposition quickly turned into contemptuous condemnation of his country’s efforts to liberate Iraq. Gitlin wrote: “By the time George W. Bush declared war without end against an ‘axis of evil’ that no other nation on earth was willing to recognize as such -- indeed, against whomever the president might determine we were at war against,…and [he] declared further the unproblematic virtue of pre-emptive attacks, and made it clear that the United States regarded itself as a one-nation tribunal of ‘regime change,’ I felt again the old estrangement, the old shame and anger at being attached to a nation -- my nation -- ruled by runaway bullies, indifferent to principle, their lives manifesting supreme loyalty to private (though government slathered) interests, quick to lecture dissenters about the merits of patriotism.”

In a 2003 article titled “Varieties of Patriotism,” Gitlin reflected upon the decades he had spent harboring the belief that America was ultimately unworthy of his respect or allegiance. “For a large bloc of Americans my age and younger,” he wrote, “too young to remember World War II -- the generation for whom ‘the war’ meant Vietnam and possibly always would, to the end of our days -- the case against patriotism was not an abstraction. There was a powerful experience underlying it: as powerful an eruption of our feelings as the experience of patriotism is supposed to be for patriots. Indeed, it could be said that in the course of our political history we experienced a very odd turn about: The most powerful public emotion in our lives was rejecting patriotism.”

Coming of age in the era of the Vietnam War, then, was the perceived cause of what Gitlin described, on another occasion, as his persistent sense of “estrangement,” “shame,” and “anger at being attached to a nation.”


Parts of this profile are adapted from the article "The Anti-War Movement: Then and Now," written by Ronald Radosh and published by FrontPageMagazine.com on November 6, 2002.

Buddy,
You should find this very funny since you've been on the rigs.
It's funny with mild pathos.

I LOVE MY JOB . . . . . .

If you don't laugh out loud after you read this you are in a coma! This
is even funnier when you realize it's real! Next time you have a bad day at
work think of this guy.

Rob is a commercial saturation diver for Global Divers in Louisiana . He
performs underwater repairs on offshore drilling rigs.

Below is an E-mail he sent to his sister. She then sent it to radio
station 103.2 on FM dial in Ft. Wayne , Indiana , who was sponsoring a
worst job experience contest. Needless to say, she won .

Hi Sue,

Just another note from your bottom-dwelling brother.

Last week I had a bad day at the office. I know you've been feeling
down lately at work, so I thought I would share my dilemma with you
to make you realize it's not so bad after all .

Before I can tell you what happened to me, I fi rst must bore you with
a few technicalities of my job.

As you know, my office lies at the bottom of the sea. I wear a suit
to the office. It's a wet suit. This time of year the water is quite
cool. So what we do to keep warm is this: We have a diesel powered
industrial water heater. This $20,000 piece of equipment sucks the
water out of the sea. It heats it to a delightful temperature.

It then pumps it down to the diver through a garden hose, which is
taped to the air hose. Now this sounds like a darn good plan, and I've
used it several times with no complaints.

What I do, when I get to the bottom and start working, is take the hose
and stuff it down the back of my wet suit. This floods my whole suit
with warm water. It's like working in a Jacuzzi.

Everything was going well until all of a sudden, my butt started to
itch. So, of course, I scratched it .. This only made things worse.
Within a few seconds my butt started to burn. I pulled the hose out from
my back, but the damage was done. In agony I realized what had happened.

The hot water machine had sucked up a jellyfish and pumped it into my
suit. Now, since I don't have any hair on my back, the jellyfish couldn't
stick to it However, the crack of my butt was not as fortunate.

When I scratched what I thought was an itch, I was actually grinding the
jellyfish into the crack of my butt.

I informed the dive supervisor of my dilemma over the communicator. His
instructions were unclear due to the fact that he, along with five other
divers, were all laughing hysterically.

Needless to say I aborted the dive. I was instructed to make three
agonizing in-water decompression stops totaling thirty-five minutes before I could
reach the surface to begin my chamber dry decompression. When I arrived
at the surface, I was wearing nothing but my brass helmet.

As I climbed out of the water, the medic, wi th tears of laughter running
down his face, handed me a tube of cream and told me to rub it on my butt as
soon as I got in the chamber.

The cream put the fire out, but I couldn't poop for two days because my
butt was swollen shut.

So, next time you're having a bad day at work, think about how much worse
it would be if you had a jellyfish shoved up your butt.

Now repeat to yourself, 'I love my job, I love my job, I love my job.'

Now whenever you have a bad day, ask yourself, is this a jellyfish bad day?

May you NEVER have a jellyfish bad day!!!!!