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Russ Smith and Ellen Willis

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from: Ellen Willis

The Vast Wasteland of Politics

Posted Monday, Aug. 16, 1999, at 5:35 PM ET

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.

the breakfast table
entries
12345678910111213141516171819
from: Ellen Willis

The Vast Wasteland of Politics

Posted Monday, Aug. 16, 1999, at 5:35 PM ET
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Russ Smith is the editor in chief and owner of New York Press, the Manhattan weekly he founded in 1988. He writes the column "Mugger" for the paper. Ellen Willis directs the cultural journalism program at New York University. Her latest book, Don't Think, Smile! Notes on a Decade of Denial will be published this fall.
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