The American feminist author, commentator and political consultant (she "helped" both Clinton and Al Gore's presidential campaigns) Namoi Wolf is someone I've tried to avoid reading until now. I've read dismissive comments by American right-wing columnists and decided to accept their overwhelmingly negative evaluation of the woman.But I just read one of her articles, published in The Guardian several days ago. It's about the recent action by American police to break up the various ridiculous "Occupy" protests across the country.
Naomi Wolfe was arrested in New York last month due to her behaviour at the "Occupy Wall Street" protest, and held for an hour. A whole hour! This appears to have utterly unhinged her (but I'm guessing she was a few tampons short of a full handbag before her brutalisation at the hands of New York's Nazi attack-dogs):
So, when you connect the dots, properly understood, what happened this week is the first battle in a civil war; a civil war in which, for now, only one side is choosing violence. It is a battle in which members of Congress, with the collusion of the American president, sent violent, organised suppression against the people they are supposed to represent. Occupy has touched the third rail: personal congressional profits streams. Even though they are, as yet, unaware of what the implications of their movement are, those threatened by the stirrings of their dreams of reform are not.
Sadly, Americans this week have come one step closer to being true brothers and sisters of the protesters in Tahrir Square. Like them, our own national leaders, who likely see their own personal wealth under threat from transparency and reform, are now making war upon us.
(If you really feel the need to read the whole article, it's available here.)
Close textual analysis would be superfluous. Suffice it to say that anyone irrational enough to describe a collection of spoiled, featherbedded, workshy middle class American brats in severe need of a stern talking-to and a swift kick up the arse as the "true brothers and sisters" of people who've spent decades living under one of the Middle East's many fascist dictatorships (albeit, in this instance, one of the more benign examples) is morally insane.
I wouldn't have thought it possible, but I'm beginning to suspect that the shrieking banshees of America's Liberal Left are even more irrational and repellent than the home-grown variety.
Ms Wolf is a graduate of both Yale and New College, Oxford. Her lecturers and tutors should be thoroughly ashamed of themselves.
I'll end with one of Ann Coulter's typically trenchant observations: "Naomi Wolfe...cranks out one failed, moronic book after another. If you have no talent but you want to become a successful writer, be a liberal!"
Oh dear. It seems that "the very infrastructure of a common humanity that is being created" and bestowed on us by a bountiful Naomi Wolf is remarkably like the old infrastructure of common humanity.
ReplyDeleteAccording to this morning's Times, St Paul’s Cathedral protest turns Animal Farm, the Occupiers at St Paul's have a first aid team (who have asked for £1,200 for "walkie-talkies and trauma kits for treating stab and gunshot wounds") and a tranquility team and a finance committee.
Make that two finance committees, because now there are schisms in the first finance committee and an interim finance committee has been formed.
Ms Jones, who did a master’s degree in sociology at the London School of Economics, ... said that the maximum balance ever held by the camp was £17,000, but an anonymous whistleblower said:
“About two weeks ago we had £21,000 in donations and there must have been more now but they said there would be no more money for the food tent or the tranquillity tent and that the legal team couldn’t use taxis or buy stationery.
“We want to know where all the money has gone. The people who made the donations thought it was going to feed us but one younger mother has had to leave because they said there was not enough food.
“It is becoming a nightmare and people are starting to leave. It is becoming intimidating. If you don’t agree with what the leaders say they shout at you and can be quite aggressive. We are now being ruled by an elite inner circle. They are telling us what to think.”
Your post reminds me of the the comment made about another loopy feminist Camille Paglia. "The G in Paglia is silent, about the only thing about her that is."
ReplyDeleteThank you for the Naomi Wolf links. I particularly enjoued the following quote: "I see a paradox about time. By a trick of some kind of subjective filter, I always, reflexively, expect to see the face I had at 19" - and, apparently, the same reasoning power she had when she five.
ReplyDeleteAnd then there's this: "...curiosity always trumps fear." But evidently not when a big cop is spraying pepper in your face!
The St Paul's stuff is good too. There was a documentary on the BBC last year which looked at what happened to all the hippy communes that sprang up in the US in the early 1970s. They all broke down because of one simple fact: left-wingers are fascists who only applaud diversity when it is annoys their enemies - when they themselves represent authority, they cannot handle dissent, and it all gets very ugly very quickly.