The Vast Wasteland of Politics
            

            On the market, well, the Dow is blipping back and forth, Nasdaq is on a
downward trend, high-tech stocks are going down ... Not that I'm an expert.
Just looking at the numbers.

            Not to get heavily into the (Bill) Clinton thing, since I'm tired of it,
too, but whether Starr should be judged just an ordinary totalitarian federal
prosecutor or the central figure in a witch-hunt depends on whether you think
the Lewinsky affair should ever have been dragged into the Whitewater
investigation in the first place, which I obviously don't. A terrible sense of
public relations, I certainly agree with you there, but blaming the Clinton
spin machine for that insanely prurient report is something of a stretch. Gore
isn't really Clinton's victim, though, except in the sense that Clinton's
talent as a politician can't help but emphasize Gore's lack of same. People are
going to vote against him because of him, not because of Clinton. Let's
see--right now I suppose I prefer Bradley, but that's probably because Bradley
hasn't opened his mouth. Basically, he's of the same New Democrat ilk. I don't
see any particular reason to vote for Gore, who is fundamentally conservative
economically and socially, as well as married to one of our great
anti-popular-culture pests. At least Bush has smoked cocaine. No, I'll probably
vote for some third-party candidate and hope the Republicans will lose the
House so that whoever wins the presidency, nothing much will get done in the
next four years. From my point of view, so long as there is no functioning
social movement on the left, mainstream politics will continue to be a vast
wasteland and my main criterion in voting will be how best to stave off the
ultra-right lunatics.

            By a functioning left I mean among other things a left with ideas, a left
whose advocates can put forward an analysis of what's wrong with the
restructuring of the economy and the repressiveness of the culture, rather than
avoid looking at the quality of their own lives via sentimental moralizing
about what Neil Strauss' Springsteen review actually refers to as the "poor
huddled masses." This is what's really wrong with the review--and ultimately
with Springsteen himself. His wealth is beside the point; it's his moral
earnestness that grates. I confess I had skipped over that story, basically
because Springsteen at this point is about as newsworthy in terms of
contemporary popular culture as, say, Verdi. I don't follow pop music much
these days, but the genres that are most interesting to me in a larger cultural
and political sense are techno and hip-hop. And I can't say I find much
intelligent crit on either.