Flight Paths

Gary Younge’s fabulous interview with Angela Davis, from the Guardian, Nov, 2007

http://www.guardian.co.uk/usa/story/0,,2207188,00.html

Lynne Segal’s memoir:
http://www.serpentstail.com/book?id=10805

‘Old Radicals’ isn’t a very good term. I’ve been thinking about it since writing this post – it’s kind of insulting somehow. These people aren’t old! We need a better term. Politicos? Middle-aged Radicals? Oh dear.

Interesting radio piece about the women in the Baader Meinhof – http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/womanshour/02/2007_49_wed.shtml – this piece will only be available until Tues 11 Dec.

The interesting part, I think, about “Old Radicals” is that the persistence of their so-called “Lefty” (I can’t recall any ever being on the “Right”) ideas seems to have depended largely on their age. Those who are now in the 60s right up to their early 70s tend, in my experience, to have maintained both their political loyalties and their strength of devotion to certain causes. I’m thinking here of people like Anne Waldman, the poet, and friend of Ginsberg and Kerouac, and even of Vanessa Redgrave putting up legal defense funds for the latest Gitmo British citizens returned to the UK. The younger lot often comment to me in interviews that their radicalism was part of what they now consider to be a mis-spent youth, an essential rite of passage as they see it, into adulthood and something that has since been sloughed off like so much dead skin. So, the FP protagonist, given the fact that she has young-ish children and full-blown domesticity may well fall into the latter category. Her activism might well have been born out of a youthful, unwise passion that was thrown out with the boyfriend who introduced her to the radical ideas. She is likely, is she not, to have upgraded her economic status to a male of a more solid, boring, kind, who is now her husband? An accountant, lawyer, IT middle management type who can afford the life in the ‘burbs she now leads.

Thanks CCragg. Haven’t started thinking about the husband yet, so this is interesting. Maybe he is like she was, someone who kind of ran away from politics. Or perhaps, like you suggest, he was someone she ran away from it all to, someone who was more like her own parents than she initially realised (though I have no idea what her parents are like!). Or maybe he’s dead and she’s a widow?!

Like you, I am interested in those people who are now in their 60s who have maintained strongly left-wing politics throughout. It’s a kind of cliche that people lose their politics once they get a mortgage, but in my experience, at least of that generation here in the UK, that isn’t true at all. Stuart Hall, Tariq Ali, Lynne Segal… but these people are complex thinkers.

Lots of radicals became Nu-Labour politcians. Some of them told me I was hopelessly middle-of the-road back in the 1970s. Now they condemn me as a mad leftie, because I haven’t changed. What does the main female character think of Blairism?

She is probably pretty middle-class to live in Richmond – and rather well off. She has probably told lies to get her children into the “best” state school and fought for personal advantage at the expense of the people whose rights she used to uphold. She may feel guilty, at the back of her mind, for putting her children’s interests before the interests of the poor, the dispossessed, the asylum-seekers – but how can she change back to what she was?

Changing back to what she was…. and of course, this is tied up with getting older and wanting to keep time at bay…

Also one thing to keep in mind (I write this as the son of baby boomers who stayed way on the left, but have friends who have made that rather stark transition) is that many lose the leftist ideologies when put in a position to gain in the world. I as a student consider myself very left but I also recognize that I have yet to truly worry about a future, I fear that once I have to face that world I may become more conservative and seek to better myself before my peers, though having consciencnous of that fact may help protect me from it.

Regardless I can relate one story of a family friend of ours who lost all his liberal tendencies following 9/11 (we live in NYC). For him 9/11 was an opposite wake up call where he came to a realization that his life was not safe and that he could lose it or the lives of his family in an instance (his wife worked across the street from the two towers, she is fine but we didn’t know that for a good seven hours). We’ve debated ever since 9/11 on the policies of racial profiling and the patriot act and in contrast to his pre-9/11 self he complete supports those programs now, with the attitude that they are essential to protecting our country. Because for him, defense is now most important, how can we have civil liberties if we can’t defend them?

My answer is how can we defend them if we can’t even practice them?

Huysmans