I am really, really tired of every modern social bloc (be it BoBos or Generation X or Generation Next or Internet capitalists or modern cheesecake workers) being declared some kind of messianic Third Way which will somehow fundamentally shatter the old categories of left and right. I am even more tired of summary swipes at affirmative action, the assumption that distrust of the government or the two-party system is somehow dangerous to the future of American democracy, and the incessant claim that voting for representatives (as opposed to, say, petitioning, boycotting, and even gasp! direct action) is the only way to make political change. Nevertheless, this analysis of the politics of Generation X is an interesting look at several of the phenomena going on in today’s generational divide.

Oh my God, a Salon.com columnist has actually said something intelligent. Mad props to Andrew Leonard for, well, making the exact same point I was making: the kitschy appropriation of rhetoric and images from liberation movements, by foundering Internet corporations, is both outrageous and pathetic. As Leonard says (emphasis added), the Internet can have many benefits for democratic interactions between people,

But Napster, the company, is not about promoting democracy. Napster is about making a buck, or, to be precise, a whole lot of bucks, by exploiting a new distribution paradigm. The company’s use of ’60s rhetoric — such as its plan to hold a teach-in on April 2 to educate people on why it should be allowed to stay in operation — in the service of its commercial interests is repugnant and crass. And our personal right to be able to get stuff for free online? Come on, people. We’re not talking about stopping bombs falling in Vietnam, are we?

As a side note, it turns out that the Napster march will be on April 3–which happens also to be Michael Tchong’s self-declared Take Back the Net day. As it turns out, I’m not the only one that noticed the incredibly offensive appropriation of the name of Take Back the Night, one of the world’s oldest and most powerful marches against sexual violence. Tchong has quietly changed the name of his campaign to Back the Net Day. I hope he got to read some really nasty hate mail first.

The Dallas Observer has an interesting profile on Paul Kerr, a gringo leader in the immigrant amnesty movement. Last year he organized the largest street demonstration in Dallas’s history, with about 10,000 rallying to downtown Dallas for immediate amnesty for undocumented immigrants.

There is a person on IndyMedia beginning a series of articles on Building a Global Grassroots Infrastructure-1, development of the IMC network which promises to be a good exploration of how the Internet is enabling real democratic mass communications. In short, how we can take all the Internet execs’ phony rhetoric about revolution and start making it into a reality.

Not to pursue my unhealthy obsession with David Horowitz further, but I found a note on IndyMedia about an excellent article on Horowitz and the Myth of the Radical University.

Thanks to conservative author David Horowitz’s recent lecture at the University of Texas, I have new hope for radical political organizing on campus.

Many of us on the faculty with left/progressive values have felt rather isolated on what we all thought was a conservative campus. But it turns out that all this time we’ve been working in a nest of left-wing radicals who have over-run the place, leaving conservatives cowering in silence.

At least that’s Horowitz’s analysis. University faculties around the country, including UT, are skewed far to the left as a result of conservative professors being systematically purged, according to Horowitz, a one-time leftist turned right-winger.

My colleagues and I are hoping Horowitz will help us find where all these radicals are hiding; more company would be nice.

After doing activist work both in a staunchly liberal small liberal arts college in Michigan, and in a big, heavily conservative university in Alabama, I can only say Amen! to someone actually taking the time to point out that, contrary to popular opine, The fact, however, is that the typical American university is dominated by centrist to moderately conservative faculty members and administrators, with steady movement to the right in the past two decades.