More Agreement with Mickey Z.

This time in an interview at the blog Transmissions…  I agree very much with all of this:

On ending the war in Iraq:

I’m sure some confluence of events will impact the durability and/or feasibility of the US occupation. I’m also pretty sure those events will not involve anything that we call “activism” today.

On tactics:

If I randomly walked up to a man, kicked him in the nuts, and then smashed his face down onto my rising knee, I’d justifiably be vilified as a dangerous sociopath. If that same man was brutally attacking someone I loved (or anyone, for that matter) - perhaps even with a weapon - and I came along on the scene and promptly acted out the above scenario, would I still be a sociopath? The trouble is, once you give anyone “permission” to anyone to use force, they often abuse it. No easy answers for sure. Maybe Malcolm X said it best: “We are nonviolent with people who are nonviolent with us.”

On the “Good Old Days”:

The danger inherent in the Good Old Days (GOD) myth is twofold. Like all myths, its mere existence makes other illusions easier to swallow. If the GOD invention is accurate, the wars fought, the businesses started and subsidized, the legislation passed, the culture created, and the leaders elected in the GOD get a free ride on its coattails. We become a nation of people gazing backward for innocence lost rather than looking ahead for lessons learned. This is the second danger of the GOD fiction: disempowerment. By accepting that “the greatest generation any society has ever produced” roamed the earth some 50 to 70 years ago, we surrender new ideas and embrace whitewashed nostalgia. The answers, we acknowledge, are found in the past; all we have to do is slam on the brakes and throw our SUVs in reverse. A valuable step in fostering a more forward-thinking approach would be to expose the GOD for what they were-a mixed bag of good and not so good-like all such “days.” If we don’t buy into the mythology, it’s harder to convince us that most or all the solutions lie in the past.

On his home neighborhood, Astoria:

As much as I’m probably displaying irrational chauvinism toward my “homeland,” I genuinely appreciate having grown up in a true “neighborhood,” one in which you walk to get where you’re going and thus meet people – a staggering ethnic diversity, btw - face to face and create bonds.  Astoria is where one can live in New York City without Manhattan’s skyscrapers and maddening pace (just 10 minutes away by subway).  I wouldn’t want to have grown up anywhere else and I wouldn’t want to live anywhere else right now.

I have some of the same feelings about growing up in The Bronx.  I went through some rough times there, but I’m also glad that I grew up in a place where I could walk to where I was going (which contributed to the strange handicap that I have - at least it’s a strange handicap for an “American” - that I never learned to drive).  My neighborhoods in The Bronx were also quite ethnically diverse.

Western Queens is even more ethnically diverse.  I like visiting Astoria, as it has many of those same qualities that I enjoy from living in the area of east Woodside/west Jackson Heights.  I like my neighborhood even more because it’s a bit livelier and grittier (especially on Roosevelt Avenue) and though I’m often a very quiet and reclusive person (or maybe because I am), there’s a lot that I enjoy about being able to leave my apartment and immediately find myself in that kind of atmosphere.  (At the same time, though, it doesn’t have all the congestion and the overt rat-race aspects that you find when you take the 15-minute train ride into Manhattan.)  And I would venture to say that Woodside/Jackson Heights is even more diverse than Astoria.  Also, as everyone knows, I’ve gotten a lot of enjoyment out of living right next to the big “Little India” of Queens.  (Astoria, I guess, is best known for its traditionally Greek population, especially the Greek food.  Which is nice, but as far as I’m concerned, it doesn’t come close to Indian food.  And in Astoria, it isn’t quite as common when you walk down the main streets to hear reggaeton coming out of one car and bhangra from the next - I still get a kick out of that.)

I saw Mickey Z. give a good talk at a place in Astoria a short while back.  The event was sponsored by some liberals and people whom I would call “soft progressives,” and during the post-talk discussion, there were times when I felt I might be considered disruptive, because I felt compelled to point out some issues I had with the standard soft-progressive ideas about tactics, supporting the Democrats, etc.  I also felt that I had to point out that Ithere was a little lacking in the discussion with regard to class struggle.  But Mickey was very welcoming and supportive of my comments, at least in part because - as evident in his writings - he agrees much more with me than with most of the people who were sponsoring him. 

I meant to talk about some of Mickey’s ideas and writings earlier, but I’ve been a bit neglectful of this blog, as I’ve been occupied by a pressured but futile job search (with a lot of thanks to the economic policies of our ruling business parties) combined with a lot of involvement in my other blog, the music and culture one (which has been influenced a lot by my living in this diverse neighborhood and the cultural things that I’ve encountered constantly in my walks into Jackson Heights.)

So anyway, a belated welcome to the writings of Mickey Z., and I’ll probably be posting even more words from him that I agree with, sometime soon.