Re: Altersuck

[Chris Brady <cdbrady@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

As the editor of a radical student newspaper I was invited by the
Institute for Alternative Journalism to attend the "First Media and
Democracy Conference? of 1996 in San Francisco.  The consensus there was
that ?alternative? included a predominance of progressives, radical
democrats, and left liberals, a respectable inclusion of outspoken
representatives from the multicultural rainbow, a contingent of
stalwarts from organized labor, and a spicy infusion of iconoclastic
left libertarians and confrontational Big-A-in-a-circle anarchists.

To give you an idea, the high profile, omnipresent publications during
the various panels and presentations were The Nation, The Progressive
and Mother Jones, with an accommodation for Z.  The tables were many but
no reds, i.e., no MR, S&D, S&S, or party tables, but AK had a vast plain
of books, pamphlets, catalogues, audio cassettes, video tapes, and
bookmarks laid out for display and sale, with posters of Emma Goldman
and book covers of the smiling Noam.  Strikingly absent was the panoply
of reds a nascent Marxist might expect at an ?alternative? event.  I
thought that at least Marxist public intellectual Michael Parenti, a
local citizen, would have a profile, but NO-o-O!

I did run into Herb Schiller there, however, and discovered his
participation on a panel was one of the experiences that countered the
frustration I began to identify with that conference as a whole.  I also
saw a wonderful biographical documentary film about the journalist
George Seldes.  And I met David Goyette of Red Sticks Press, a committed
Native Rights activist with a great sense of humour from Seminole
country, with whom I remained friends until his untimely demise a couple
of years later.

I?m not griping about the ?alternatives? who did turn out.  We?d expect
it.  But it was there that it began to dawn on me that the inclusive
creed of those particular leftists did have its limitations.



~~~~~~~
PLEASE clip all extraneous text before replying to a message.