Best of the left

>> Modern thought thrives in anthology of writings from The Nation

by JUAN RODRIGUEZ

It's not easy being left, to paraphrase Kermit. (It's a lot easier being vaguely Green; even Hannibal Lechter might hesitate serving spotted owl with his Chianti.) To criticize capitalism's excesses--if not some fundamental precepts--in this endlessly hyped "greatest economic expansion in history," is to invite ridicule and, worse, accusations of being downright unpatriotic. (Hey, we beat the Evil Empire, so get with the program!) Being right even sounds semiotically better than being left (behind?).

The Nation, the oldest weekly in the U.S. (founded in 1865), reminds us that "critical spirit" need not be doctrinaire. Reading The Best of The Nation, which spans the last tumultuous 10 years of the millennium, one comes away not with I-told-you-so smugness, but a sense that the flux and ferment of modern thought thrives in its densely packed newsprint pages.

Its "steadfast support for civil rights and civil liberties, opposition to racism in all its guises, and unrelenting struggle against militarism, imperialism, corruption and abuse of power" (as its cover blurbs) is mirrored by fresh, feisty, often elegant perspectives. This collection includes heavy hitters like Susan Faludi, Edward Said, Cornel West, Molly Ivins, Carlos Fuentes, Katha Pollitt (in my view, the most consistently perceptive feminist scribe), and Christopher Hitchens (acerbic gadfly with scalpel) but, wisely reflecting diversity of thought, it limits writers to one article each.

"Facts are stupid things," Ronald Reagan once said, and the left indulges in hand-wringing over its failure to communicate connecting-the-dots. Crippled by self-righteous excesses in identity politics--PC was a groundbreaking idea to revise the histories of women and minorities, to reflect that old white men were indeed the minority--leftists were marginalized as pointy-headed elitists. If the conservatives forced them to exit ivory towers to slug it out in the real world, this book is one welcome result, making the right seem like sloganeering one-trick ponies in comparison.

Ellen Willis, in "We Need a Radical Left," argues that building a democratic political movement "entails the hope that one's ideas and beliefs are not merely idiosyncratic but speak to vital human needs, interests and desires," instead of "deciding to put forward only those ideas presumed (accurately or not) to be compatible with what most people already believe." Yet, as Michael Moore notes, in "Is the Left Nuts? (Or Is It Me?)": "I want Mumia to live, I've signed petitions... But, for chrissakes, the woman working at Sears just wants to be able to spend an hour with her kids before she heads off to Denny's. Can't we help her? Do you want to help her?"

Many pieces pose questions, state conundrums, then negotiate the minefield therein. "Is there a relationship between homosexual liberation and socialism?" asks Tony Kushner (Angels in America playwright). "That's an unfashionably utopian question, but I pose it because it's entirely conceivable that we will one day live miserably in a thoroughly ravaged world in which lesbians and gay men can marry and serve openly in the Army and that's it. Capitalism, after all, can absorb a lot."

The anthology's most pointed analyses include: "The Gulf War as Total Television," by Tom Engelhardt; Mike Davis on the Rodney King riots ("the nation's first multiracial riot"); Paco Ignacio Taibo II on the Zapatistas; Kirkpatrick Sale's curious armchair-shrink take on The Unabomber's manifesto, printed six months before Ted Kaczynski was arrested; Gerald Early's meditative "Performance and Reality: Race, Sports and the Modern World"; Jon Weiner on how difficult it is for universities to publish documents on the tobacco industry; and the "corporate colonization" of private life in "Hip Is Dead," by Thomas Frank.

My favourite is "One Violent Crime," Bruce Shapiro's account of being stabbed, with six others, by a deeply unsettled man. This affecting blend of detachment and bleeding humanism brilliantly connects the personal with the political. Like The Nation itself, it makes you think.

The Best of The Nation, Edited by Victor Navasky & Katrina Vandel Heuvel, Thunder's Mouth Press/Nation Books, 607pp., $24.95