I feel like the word "left" has moved in retrograde, the opposite of such words as phlogistan which eventually became oxygen. Phlogistan stood for a concept while oxygen became the name of a material. The Left once stood for a material, compounded out of an international working class, and now stands for a concept, dancing in millions of heads like mine, educated and full of opinions.
Well, I can't do anything about that. But I do rather wince when my lefty opinion peeps do nothing but bitch. Bitching is fine and good, bitching is the tongue set free, but it doesn't cover the spectrum. We must have praise in that spectrum, or you sink into gloomy shit., which doesn't help anybody.
Once, when the left was a material force, an intersectional union on the way to remaking the world, it understood, and developed, occassion and celebration. The last Americcan politician to really understand that was Jesse Jackson.
So I feel it is high praise to say that Mamdani's Fourth of July Speech echoed with Jackson, was in a call and response relationship with Jackson's 1988 speech, and his campaign speeches in 1984. The Democratic party, still panicked by McGovern, turned its back on Jackson, who even extended his hand to that weasel Mondale - one of the worst candidates ever thrown up by the party establishment - and we are payng the price.
Mamdani is my president.
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