Phony Dissent

FROM the stooge team at the intellectually bankrupt journal N+1 there's an air of unreality as well as much unintentional comedy.

An example of this is a recent post at editor Keith Gessen's blog-- www.keithgessen.tumblr.com/post/61136531/walzer-afterthoughts-- in which Jet-Setter Gessen lauds Michael Walzer of Dissent magazine as a "Menshevik."

Now, hold it a minute. This is game-playing. The real Mensheviks were underground radicals who spent their activist careers on the margins; harassed by authorities; their ideas shut out by their society. Many of them were imprisoned or lived in exile.

Michael Walzer on the other hand is a house intellectual who writes for a jargon-filled journal which is a threat to nobody. As a 501c(3) it's approved and regulated-- funded by rich people-- an organ of the state.

When the ULA did its "Howl" protest at Columbia University in 2006-- an event staged by real outsiders-- "Menshevik" Walzer wouldn't leave his nearby office to see what we were doing. To the system pet, we grubby undergrounders would've appeared and sounded completely alien.

Wake up, Keith! Do you have any sense of reality? You're one of the culture's most approved writers, part of a staff of New York salon intellectuals who wear their academic credentials like the badges of conformity that they are. Some of us out here aren't approved and aren't posing.

Say what you will about me, but what you get on this blog is the genuine article-- an authentic samizdat writer.