In a message dated 07/30/2000 9:39:43 AM Eastern Daylight Time,
[log in to unmask] writes:

<<   As a final observation on the class question which once manifested
 itself openly and clearly drew its lines in the sand, nowadays it seems to
 have resolved into the question of advertizing and selling to the greatest
 portion of the population possible while maintaining the proper set of
 "do's" and "don't's" in order to remain as innocuous as possible. This of
 course takes money and lots of it to pay the drama coaches and spin doctors
 so the "liars in public places" don't get caught with their pants down or
 their flies unzipped. But "liars" may be too strong a word for lying implies
 that one knows something in the first place. "A tawdry cheapness shall
 outlast our days" wrote Pound, and it did  outlast his days. Furthermore it
 remains to be seen if it outlasts ours, and maybe this is the only whimper
 we will hear with no bang ever coming. No one will pull Pentheus down from
 his tree again.
  >>

in addition, the class war is now a hidden war, especially in developed and
developing countries.  the most insidious of warts regularly claim to be on
the side of the people, especially the poorest, while enjoying their despotic
luxury and doing everything they can to keep it, and to keep the poor
skewered and destitute.  the spoken left has replaced the action left, just
as revolutionary communists have been replaced by the revolutionary
bourgeoisie, as evidenced in former communists countries where hordes of
yuppies are now praised in the Official Press as the emerging class of note.
even on this list there have been paeans sung to democracy while the singers
have taken great care not to point out that such democratic movements are
merely smoke screens for the imposition of free market values, which are
anything but free, as even a cursory glance around the globe will reveal.
attempts to forestall this democratic calamity are greeted with anguished
cries of despair -- except in countries essentially unable to defend
themselves, where a different kind of anguish is visited upon these
non-democratic miscreants, as evidenced in Serbia, Granada, Panama, etc.
it's possible that in the very near future self determination will be an
impossibility, and that the grip of the global mastodons will be unshakable.
where do you think brother Pound would have in the midst of all this
economically induced carnage?  do you think he would have joined the
democratic revelers in their orgy of homage to the imposition of this bloody
rule which signals the end of even the possibility of personal freedom?
certainly it appears that our resident mole snake thinks so, or so he says,
over and over, and which he will certainly say again in another long-winded
blowout of synaptic failures.  but what do the rest of us think?  over the
long haul, who's been more repressive, more authoritarian, and more murderous
-- the followers of fascism, or the great democratic Satan otherwise known as
Western (nee American) Democracy?  don't be afraid of such a question -- it's
an act of comparative governance, no one is recruiting fascists here, or
advocating their return.  what do you think of the fact that while brother
Pound is being relentlessly pilloried for his sins, greater sins committed
under the rubric of democracy are being ignored, or worse, alibied for?  is
it possible to rescue Pound from the current onslaught of verbal shit to
which he's currently consigned?

jb...