We cannot talk about the famous “Vast Right-wing Conspiracy” if we don’t understand the facts of conspiracy and the range of the word’s meaning. An abstract word has an array of senses such that one can’t assume which sense is operating in a particular context before examining its occurence in context. When one wants to deny a fact in politics one tampers with the semantics of language naming or describing it. One way  resorts to hyperbole or over-statement that seems to fall of its own weight, but if one actually confuses baby with the bathwater one throws out, baby does not disappear. Baby and bathwater are different things. Throwing sudsy water in the readers’ eyes does not make baby go away. Drop it out a window, baby cries in the wilderness.

Relation between words and reality is frought with anomaly and antinomy as well as ever-latent analogies, the roots of metaphor. Without deep metaphors and systems of metaphor we could scarcely gain understanding of anything, much less form attitudes toward them. Alas, these also make possible the rich tapestry of disinformation and twisted volition that constitutes the “Conservative Mind.”

What is a conspiracy? (1) A small group or network of people with common interest and particular goals who communicate and act in secret to bring about an immoral or illegal result. By such definition, a conspiracy cannot be vast. (2) An extended, loose network of several conspiring groups, all with similar views, hopes and aims, perhaps sharing national party identification. Such a conspiracy will contain many persons of no specific activity or involvement with core groups. Each core group contains leaders and followers while the core groups themselves provide leadership to loosely attached followings sympathetically in agreement with leaders in “the cause,” even to the point of obedience to suggestion and direction.

By definition, a conspiracy of this second sort can be vast. It may embrace whole parties and parts of parties in an amalgam of shared purpose. It may be international, as was the Communist Party. Some core groups will machinate in secret with significant impact on the relatively public following. It was this type to which Hillary Clinton referred. This much is transparent to any senior student in sociology or political science. Writers who prate unbelief in a vast, right-wing conspiracy play to ill-informed and unthinking people. This is unworthy of any who think themselves smart. Intellectually speaking, such folks drop their pants in public and moon the world. Each deserves a kick in his or her wisest crack.

Such hardness of judgments reflects one’s own hardness. Hardness is so defensive a posture even as a platform of attack, it merits examination as sickness. It signifies a lack of security in one’s own, real situation, even discomfort inside one’s skin. Guilt comes in various forms, vicarious as well as obvious. “Rugged individualism” goes beyond independent responsibility for oneself to the verge of psychopathological alienation from human community and any social responsibility greater than family obligation or minimal compliance with tax law. Even military draft in time of war is something to be avoided. Rugged individualists don’t mind hiding out on moral grounds as deeply conscientious objectors to combat. Some don’t mind engaging in pious fraud.

From what gets written in the so-called conservative media, starting with National Review and NewsMax (which are usually ‘cold-frames’ of self-assured and self-congratulatory backwardism) one might think anything suggesting social justice,  healthy community or balanced society is not wholistic centrism but socialist evil. As if the big owners and their well-heeled, hired managers are always correct in first serving their own interests and investors if they throw pittances here or there to charity or civic projects, for which of course in return they get some good press with photo-ops and commemorative plaques or framed documents for home or boardroom walls.

Scowling faces, bad-mouth and nay-saying are most of what we have seen or can expect, now, from the cantingly false “truth-tellers” who cry from a wilderness outlook ruggedly so far to their own right they must be too radical for good balance. They do all they can to contribute to public insanity and bad government. Theirs is nearly the antisocial, illiberal, half-crazed, loveless and empathy-lacking world of Ayn Rand.

As for Saul Alinsky, one would not expect people so disoriented to values other than pecuniary to understand or appreciate his views, lifework or his legacy’s value to this country. It was not to his disvalue that he studied the Chicago mob as a graduate student and got close to some mobsters without becoming assimilated into nefarious activities. Local critics learn only enough about him to make negative assessments, which is all they need or want from research, anyway. Their views are set in concrete.

Knowledge is where you find it. Alinsky did not use “shake-down artists” or “leg-breakers” to organize the lower classes or build movements toward populism. No matter how people accused him, he was too smart to fall for socialism or communism as such, but smart enough to grasp what was wrong with entrenched power and see what empowerments were needed by lowly working folks and the poor in order to reach parity. Be sure, our bad-mouthers never honestly looked into ACORN to see what went on. They just keep on getting half-informed slant from biased sources inside their own “data-bubble.” Only people inside it with them can be “right.” Everyone else is wrong. Just ask ‘em. Contrary to what they want to believe, Saul Alinsky, way before anything else, was a moral Jew and a good man. His critics are not even good Christians. Jesus himself would side with the late Saul Alinsky. Saul’s heart was in the right place, correctly on the left side of his body. One wonders what’s inside his detractors but fear.

At least locally, Alinsky’s critics (enemies is a better term) are unavowed but dyed-in-the-wool, white racists. This is demonstrated by the onus they place on universities that accept minority or mixed-race students and black faculty. Always they credit such heresy to the account of legislative social-engineering that has resulted in, as they see it,  unfairly discriminatory race-quota setting by admissions officers. The unfairness has grown especially large in the minds of those who see opportunities slipping away from their own kind, rather than see the unfairness that traditionally governed opportunity in general across this land.

One well-known, former lawyer in our midst beats up on the late Professor Derrick Bell of Harvard, labeling him incompetent, deficient in scholarship and poorly qualified for a post in such elevated surroundings among so many gifted legal minds. What are we to make of such critics who ignore the real history of Bell’s career and de-nig-rate him on their “personal” authority without documentation? I have little use for such writers’ over-inflated self-esteem and hubristic pomposity. Bell was loved by his students for good reason. He had worked for William P. Rogers’ Justice Department in Civil Rights. He served as visiting professor at NYU and Stanford after having worked for the NAACP with Thurgood Marshall and served five years as Dean of University of Oregon’s School of Law. But, he’s quite undistinguished and can’t possibly deserve a tenured chair of law at Harvard. Right?

Is it possible that LaSalle University School of Law is one of those campuses one can buy one’s way through, if not with money then by credences of right-thinking, the “correct” ideological stance on major issues? Our noted former lawyer and continual know-it-all may be worth a great deal to his family and party, but to our country, he is surely worth less than a little toe on Barack Husain Obama’s right foot.

Speaking for myself, I saw the evils of soviet-style communism and the troubles latent in pure socialism well before my twenty-fifth year. UC Berkeley helped me toward populism, not idiocy. Only facists call me socialist. Benefits and obligations must find proper balance. That’s progressive. Go blind to your obligations or slip away from them, that’s not conservative, that’s backward. When you avoid recognizing your true obligations, you are willfully dishonest. But, it’s always the other guy. Right?

Are we quaint relics of some eloquent age, the goals of which are forgotten? Are we unwitting tools manipulated by secret agencies aiming to control and subjugate all our creative potential by confusing and misleading any who can exercise it? May it be that there are networks of scoundrels working to foist anti-poetry and pseudo-art upon us? Or can these be merely the works of silly people following easy ways?–People who hope sheer rhetoric can win for them what honesty cannot? Has moneyed interest itself become an agency of manipulation? Of course it has. Beauty and humor are alien to it save whatever illusions of beauty and humor money can buy. These will be stylized and thin, selected or designed to reinforce the paradigms of elite wealth.

People are fooled and misled by talk or writing that hides some things by highlighting other things to distract them. By focusing on points of discourse which hucksters cast in slanted light, shadow conceals part of the full vista. Thus the perpetrator achieves that ill-balanced appearance of a subject his biased aim requires, even to the foisting of a false sense of reality. But, whose shadow is it? Ultimately that darkness belongs to the speaker or writer who chooses to use rhetoric instead of plain truth to project his prejudicial view. Employers of rhetoric are unbalanced people who dwell in the shadows they project. Partial opinions result in the mental fragmentation from which they spring. An uncritical audience reflects the semantic distortions of the projector.

Such writers can be so negatively poetic as to evoke our laughter. Laughter and positive poetry are good. Real poetry kicks away your crutches, makes you spread invisible wings or take a spear in your ribs. It may give you goose-flesh or raise the hair on your neck. Real poetry is not intrinsically defined by objective traits on a page, but by a particular relation to, or affinity with an individual psyche or sensibility. Each person’s perceptiveness or susceptibility differs partly from that of others. One negative consequence is that uncritical appreciation tends to promote so much tactful tolerance and latitude, rationalized as sophistication, as to let fake poets lay out trash on a page in expectation that inexperienced readers will find it interesting or smart.

The most successful poems appeal beyond individual awareness to the slightly greater objectivity of a cultural psyche and noumenal factors which are usually unconscious in us. The same holds true of good political speech and writing. Good public discourse suggests and promotes a greater life for all of us in a better world than most folks have known, not just a perpetuation of lifeways that serve a few at the expense of everyone else. Good talk does not cleave to an ideology of exclusion and superior status. Good earns its own way. It discovers, adapts, gives and serves. It does not expropriate and hide its acts or disguise itself for predatory purpose. Goodness has no special ideology or religion, but its enemies try to reduce it to something scummy or dangerous so as to prevent its works from happening or its accomplishments from getting recognition.

Only a view abstracted to great elevation can see humor in the twisted machinations of negative minded, selfish, egotistical people against humanity and its future on a viable planet. One has to get very high, indeed, to laugh at such folly. Standing at street level, we must weep tears. An observer from beyond Saturn’s orbit would likely find little or nothing on earth of interest or worth feeling amused about. However, I was amused to learn that one forum writer, who poses as conservative, suddenly awoke to the fact that Republicans need not elect a replacement for President Obama, but only keep their present grip on the House and take over the Senate to obliterate democracy and rule by corporate wealth-power alone, imposing antiquarian and misogynist values.

How sweet that will be for investors who can’t see their own feet for the big bellies that block shoes from view. That writer virtually admits to sensing at last that the GOP has no candidate to beat Obama in the general election unless several million voters can be confused, scared, discouraged, bought or disenfranchised. The closer the electorate can be chiseled down to the base of far-right and fundamentalist evangelical voters, the more offices can be taken in default of accurate representation at the polls.

That aforementioned writer either ignores or cannot feel the temper of our times. The American public is fed up with the old status-quo and with people who brought this country close to ruin, who now stand itching to do it again. Remember: relatively innocent though they were, the royal families of Bourbon France and Imperial Russia could not secure themselves against revolutionary wrath. Our wealthiest narcisists today imagine themselves in charge of their fate. They have all the tools of state and federal government to secure their positions against unsettlement. No sensible person wants violence. But, there are forms of violence to which some people are insensible. And these are the people who most apply subtle violence to others. Their advocates abuse us in mind and heart. It is all they know how to do.

“State-of-the-art” outlook today no longer envisions spirits running around loose from bodies any more than we see candleflames flying around loose from candle-wicks. That belongs to an antique view still infecting many people only because it has survived from prehistory by staying embedded in most religions. Such religions inhabit people and inhibit the mental freedom and creative imagination needed to think their ways out of bondage to enduring customs and rigid habits of thought and speech. The sum of these customs and thought-ways is by definition one’s “culture.” Culture can cripple us as it simultaneously empowers. Unexamined, we live as if clutched in “the dead hand of the past.” Like a water-surface ignorant of belonging to a lake, we magnify ourselves in a false notion of existence.

The tragic vision of those Greek playwrights can bring us close to humane wisdom. Society and politics would benefit from a classical education, but now we are far too embued with pragmatism. Our times now bind us to practical mentality and behavior except in the fields of rationalization by which we justify what we are, have done, and want to happen. In these, we exercize the greatest flights of fancy and deceit, so great we typically fool ourselves and live to extend our foolishness to others. We can afford to do that because “we are always right.” We’re the good guys, honest and true. Right? And, if it happens we actually know better and see ourselves truthfully, who cares? Everything and everyone else is so screwed up, what does it matter how we are or what we do in the world. Right? Our political ‘religions’ give us “cookie-cutter” knowledge of all things important: our “cut-off” knowledge inside a bubble wherein we breathe and re-breathe our own speech-exhaust and that of our associates. Our thoughts are so importantly original. Right?

All the negativities mentioned can be classified as invidious. Envy and resentment are only parts of invidy. Invidy includes “schadenfreud,” the obtuse and shameful enjoyment of seeing harm and misery befall others whom we despise. Invidy springs from those who see themselves better than another, another who may seem to dominate their awareness. Invidy reduces humanity and pollutes goodness of heart and mind.  (Old China had one word for mind and heart, not two.) Invidious feelings and motives shrink individuality, ruin families and destroy whole tribes and nations. Negative emotions harm and spread harm. They reduce blood flow to the cerebral cortex while increasing flow to the brain-stem and cerebellum, the so-called “crocodilian” brain, that vicious, self-serving animal in us. People of questionable goodness promote aggressive hatred and foster fearful imagery. Invidiousness short-circuits sociability and creative adaptation. It gradually damages the brains of all parties involved in it, giving or receiving.

If the fruit of tragic vision is wisdom about human affairs, so, too, comic vision yields relief from tragic consequence. It lets humanity overcome rigid custom while chance events overturn expected order, forcing people to band together creatively. Not snide snickerings out of covert sneers, but laughter, deep, free and spontaneous, is the greatest  medicine we have and the most integrating experience we can know. Sheer joy is its closest cousin. Laughter is the remedy; joy signifies the health it helps to attain.

The sickness will not go away. The big cooky of Republican “leadership” has crumbled into a chaos so disgustingly crumby that the party will not recover in the forseeable future. It doesn’t matter one iota what happens henceforth in these state events. Republicans’ sole hope will be for the national convention to reveal a heretofore unnoticed, heavy hitter. It will not be Chris Christy. No fat man has gained the presidency since Cleveland and Taft. The sad fact for Republicans is, they have no heavy hitter of prior national repute standing ready who might be acceptable to all fragments of the shattered party.

There will be a massive effort, already in motion, to devastate democracy and the Democrats by flooding the media. Advertising with pac-man money will not avail. Surely we remember all the times Republicans harped at Democrats as “big spenders” who thought every problem could be solved by “throwing money at it.” Just as surely, the GOP’s big-spending backers will fail this time because the public can only be fooled so often, in spite of Rove’s notions, and it is already saturated with foolish adver-tainment. “Occupy” is everywhere. Spring is on the way. We are not going to take it, any more!

Yes, Obama has not acted perfectly in all ways, but we see the alternatives. The “Big Money Maniacs” will at last learn a sore lesson, and so will our sore losers from the last election, i.e., our local nay-sayers. Moreover, the sore winners of Tea Party seats in the House will feel the ground under them liquify in the earthquake that is coming. Far-right religiosi had best pray for the predicted End of the World to happen right around election day, so that the Rapture will short-circuit any hope for the “leftist utopia” they despise and fear. No one should have anything nice, say the backwardites, or reside in a good circumstance who hasn’t worked their ancestors to death for it. And if they themselves sweated some blood for it along the way also, good for them, say we all.

Remembering how many years I suffered spiritually under Republican administrations, I sympathize with today’s nay-sayers and carpers against Obama and all his works. The pain they endure is too deep for them to manage philosophically or intelligently, for they are anything but “liberal.” They can only make verbal war on Obama and on democracy itself, like the Supreme Court majority, while pretending to uphold it by actually upholding nothing but misrepresentative government.

People deeply depressed tend to lose capacity for complex understanding and intricate thought. They are at war. They struggle against that of themselves which perpetuates depression. Issues turn simple. They think their pain stems not from conditions within but from circumstances outside impinging on their inner lives. They don’t grasp that the pain results from uncontrolled stuff inside them. They have to project their inner war outward on to the external world. Jim scarcely senses the big fight going on in him. Otherwise, he might write humorously above the fray in ways we would all enjoy. But, Jim is a one-trick pony. He only knows how to be a victim of all he feels is unrighteous.

Instead, Jim feels compelled to skate on the edge of truth about Obama, claiming that he is totally devoted to labor unions against all good things possible for this nation. Jim falls into travesty, claiming our president cares little for truth unless it serves his agenda. But, that’s always been the GOP strategy. In fact, it’s Jim’s main tactic. I say, tactic, because it’s not properly strategic. It’s doomed to fail, because too many of its chickens are now coming home to roost, and everyone knows it but the “basest 30%” who will always be in denial about what the whole country knows.

Jim accepts every sort of estimate or half-truth that supports his assertions. He thinks the Keystone II pipeline offers 20,000 American jobs and that these are rejected because Obama won’t make a “hard decision” against labor!  See how simple Jim’s picture gets? He leaves out the really meaningful, long-term issues: Air. Water. Land. Jim impugns Obama’s loyalty to working people and the poor as cover for Jim’s own dedication to trans-national money held by much of our one-thousandth of 1%. Jim’s self-importance is inflated vastly beyond his real ability and worth to the world. I suppose it takes one to tell one. Would Jim be helped by others besides himself telling him how great he is? I wish he had the quality, character and strength to run for office, himself, but that might cost him something. Maybe he’s not so great, after all. Nor so smart.

Your queries are in good point, but I’ll start more broadly than with Jesus and Paul. In the “Enlightenment Era” increasing numbers of intelligent people came to have less concern for personal souls than for human lives. This shift of perspective on relative values persists to this day and still increases, though many individuals and groups hold out against the change. Still gripped by ancient concepts and the feelings they evoke, these people shun much of the present world and strive to return to, or revive, an older one to which they imagine themselves more attuned, and which in their view affords utopian preparation for God’s kingdom on earth and “conclusion to the human drama” with Judgment and disposition.

At main issue seems continually to be how people regard and treat each other. In the economic frame, people are commodities to be processed, used, bought, sold and discarded; disregarded for all but extrinsic considerations. In the religious frame, (western or Christian version) people vacillate between cared-for ‘sheep’ to be shorn as often as wool can grow, or ‘soldiers of the cross’ supporting a church and extending its belief or rhetorical control system to others, especially children and conceptually vulnerable adults, helping them to ‘participate in the body of Christ-Jesus. ’ Our culture presents children with imagetic toys to enjoy and grow past. For instance: the tooth-fairy, Easter bunny, Santa Clause, halloween witches & ghosts, young George Washington’s chopped-down cherry tree. Less imagetic and more abstract are papal infallibility, divine inspiration of biblical texts and specially transmitted ‘authority’ or ordination of church leaders. Still more abstract is the virtually unconscious premise of dual or ‘bifurcated’ reality in which Nature ‘descends’ from Supernature. Things of Nature have little or no impact in determining things Supernatural, but Supernatural ‘things’ (so far as they are distinguishable) have great or total effect on Natural things.

In unitive thinking, the split disappears. Physicality becomes spiritualized and spirituality becomes physicalized. Consciousness is a reflex of life-process itself outside of awareness. The problem of body-mind relation vanishes when one grasps bodily consciousness or conscious embodiment directly. For reasons of mental structure and conceptual indisposition, many people cannot bridge this gap. They are fixated within antique forms or frames-of-thought inappropriate to a world later than about 1600 C.E. They display what in General Semantics is termed “hyper-intensionality.”

True-believers persist in the notion that all will be well if only they can make their vision universally shared by all earthlings, ignoring perhaps the fact that they have had two thousand years to make it so, without yet succeeding. If the Good News were truly cogent and persuasive, it would have prevailed. History shows otherwise. To blame the devil for Christianity’s failure is a cheap-shot, easy way out. Satan evolved in our culture for just this role, to “take the heat” off of our deficient competence, projecting it down and away while forcing us to try to perfect ourselves responsibly. Now, taking responsibility for upholding good standards cannot be bad unless one goes about trying to push it on others. The extreme height of this impulse was displayed in the Spanish Inquisition, of horrid memory. Religious ‘McCarthy-ism’ stems from the profound ignorance of bigots who need to be avoided or cured.

As to the historical Jesus, your question raises issues not only of epistemology and historiography but of philosophical understanding and knowledge in general. It  interests me that you pose your question in the frame of identity: “Who do you believe

the ‘historical’ Jesus to be (?)” Jesus (or Yeshua, Joshua) may have been as common a name in the Aramaic world as “Hay-sus” in the Latino worlds. Without believing it, I think there may have been conflation, historically, of more than one person so named, one having lived late in the second century B.C.E. and another early in the first century, one or the other of whom the Essenes referred to as “The Teacher of Righteousness.”

The Jewish diaspora did not happen all at once after 70 CE but was happening as early as during the 2nd century BCE. Even earlier, small enclaves of Jews scattered out along major trade routes and cities of the Near East and circum-Mediterranean area including Anatolia, Greece and Rome. When Paul “The Apostle” and some of the disciples traveled they found, among Jewish communities, already-established groups identified as the “Church of God.” They revered Jesus and were composed of Essenes, Ebionites and even some gentiles. Hence, Paul did not bring Jesus’ story to them. He brought the story of his own, revolutionary Christ-vision, putting (as it were) Jesus’ face on his trans-historic figure of divine mercy for all Jews and gentiles alike. [“Church” did not mean to them what it means to us; it applied to associations, guilds, clubs, etc. Ecclesia was equivalent to “clutch”(as in coffee-klatch.) ] It seems unclear whether “our” Jesus (executed ca. 33 CE) was the one revered in the Klatches of God, or an earlier Teacher similarly terminated and perhaps also (legendarily) resurrected.

If Jesus was an historic person, not a myth gradually coalesced out of obscure sources responding to human needs of the early 1st century, Jesus was a man, not God. Trans-historic Jesus, like God, has mythic standing. If Jesus symbolizes anything human

it is a potential power, freedom and goodness innate within us, meaning He can only be you and me, or anyone who will partake of humanly spiritual and saving motives. By “saving” I don’t mean for some metaphysical, heavenly future. Only the ego needs it.

As for Paul, I view him as more clearly historical than Jesus, but intrinsically as ambiguous as a coin in your pocket. Two faces and an edge. One face is that of a brilliant, socio-spiritual engineer who invented a religion (out of ancient, “gentile” sources and a then-recent, Jerusalem drama) responding to dissatisfactions with the High Priest’s circle and Roman rule, similar to those felt by the Essenes of Qumran, etc. Another face is that of a clever, personable charlatan, selling snake-oil to all buyers, trading on self-importance and saying whatever it took to skin through dangerous situations. Even the New Testament records his self-presentation as duplicitous. According to Acts (by Luke?), Paul takes sole & full credit for his new story of personal revelation from Jesus himself in arguing that no one “converted” him. In Galatians, he gets cured of his blindness in Damascus and coached by Ananias (on interpreting his road-event? Church of God doctrines?) Either I buy a half-rotted fish or I don’t. Early in life, I felt that Paul comes off like a wishfully well-meaning know-it-all and a stuffed-shirt. I just can’t buy that stinky fish. God don’t make him sweet in my nose, nor does Jesus put a good face on divinity, for me. Give me the fresh air of science and the sweet smell of fudge.

Thus, for instance, if a government administers a civil economy based on interacting class-roles, then the classes require (1) distinct moral identities, (2) interlinking or complementary if not common definitions of the situation, (3) harmonious images of each other reinforced by actively considerate relations, (4) clear perception of mutual obligations and (5) the will to sustain all these with love for others and pride in each one’s own conduct thereby. Lose or abandon any one of these five requirements, then that civil economy turns uncivil and fractious. 

We contemporary generations grew up in both an increasingly uncivil polity and a fractiously unsocial economy. Yet even a capitalism combining free stock-markets with heavy controls over production and distribution can work well and equitably under these five conditions indicated above. A government can be Monarchic, Feudal-Corporate (i.e. fascist), Representative-Oligarchic, Plutocratic, Social-Democratic or indeed any other conceivable form of power management — it does not matter. Property and the means of production can be managed privately, administered publicly or in various mixtures as happen today — and the system will work smoothly. 

Troubles begin with rampantly irresponsible individualism, abrasively defensive or aggressive group feelings usually incited by inconsiderate disrespect, such as gets inflicted on general community by quasi-conspiratorial class-buccaneering. What if a government administers a civil economy based only on differentially interacting individuals? What applied to classes in the previous case now applies to individuals. (1) Distinct moral identity, (2) shared definition of the general situation, (3) harmonious images of others maintained by considerate behavior, (4) clear understanding of obligations to government, community and others — perhaps as part of the definition of general situation, (5) benevolence toward others and pride in personal conduct.

How can people understand others whom they categorize as hateful? Hatred is reductive. It primes the human animal for combat and domination. There is much more intelligence and understanding among Occupy Wall Street participants than people supporting the “one percent”give them credit for. A fraction of the 1% try to defend themselves by attacking the 99%+ as confused and misled, but it is the fraction of 1% who are misled, having confused themselves about values, along with plain facts on almost all the important issues, past and present. They are infected with greed because they are intensely fearful both of truth and the future. They distrust everyone but their own set. In fact, they hate everyone they distrust, but cannot admit it’s all too complicated for them. Yes, there are, as always, a few bad actors and anarchists in the crowd, but it is wrong to characterize the whole movement that way. OWS is practicing the moral non-violence of Mahatma Ghandi: Awaken To Yourselves!

“Those coming of age in this era of Occupy’s Obamavilles are not asking for an opportunity, nor do they demonstrate the price they are willing to pay or the sacrifices they will make. Instead, they are demanding it, and if they cannot earn it because of obstacles more self-perceived than real, they are going to take it.”

Dennis seems to assume OWS participants are all youngsters. What we’ve seen is age-inclusiveness. He seems also to assume the obstacles to good employment are merely perceived, not systemic. Also, his backwardite viewpoint demands that he project OWS participants as lazy beggars invalidly aggrieved.

“They do not feel a living is earned; they believe it to be a right. They do not see the government as the entity that ensures fairness of opportunity; they see it as the provider of opportunity. And they see the state as the entity that determines how big a piece of the pie everyone deserves — a division not based on contribution but on ‘fairness.’” / “Most crucially, they feel they are best suited to” [define fairness.]

Dennis avoids seeing that the OWS movement is making appeal less to government than voicing disgust with corporatism and the wealthiest bank-culture of grabbing everything in sight at any opportunity. Still more generally, he wants to paint the movement in conspiratorial colors as produced by some Occupy Boston leaders who gave a platform to Marxist speeches. Ah, well. Poor fellow, we must discount his fearful defensiveness of the sacred few. He feels he’s one of them, and this prevents him from seeing that OWS is much more a grassroots phenomenon than one “led by the nose” by conspirators. It shows he lacks broad understanding, both, of our society and of conspiracy. It is easy to paint a “community of interest” as “conspiratorial.” But, Dennis likes easy rhetoric more than honest analysis. OWS begins in North Africa and the state of Wisconsin, and spreads via social media, cellphone and news reports. It doesn’t require any “slimy cadre of half-secret manipulators” as did the Tea Party’s “astroturf manufacturers.”

By the way, Dennis, does enduring cold outdoor temperatures night after night, then getting punched around, shot with rubber bullets, tazers, tear-gas canisters, pepper spray, thrown down in cuffs and jailed for constitutionally allowed actions, qualify as “paying a price” or offering no personal “sacrifice?” Also, Dennis, it seems notable that for one so lacking empathy as yourself, you can divine the feelings, attitudes and beliefs of all those OWS participants across our country as readily as if you had taken your views from a cookie cutter. You would be a fine voice for justice if you could find any within yourself! Try to critique things in this country that really deserve it.

It evokes an experience of something worthwhile. It makes you want to quote it to others and read it again. Poetry offers a sense that over-arches its details without over-reaching them. It resides or occurs within them, above them, beneath and around, never quite beyond them. It never gets lost in details or away from details.

If it lacks music it must at least hold interesting phrases, clever figures of speech, apt metaphors and reference to sensible things, things which are beautiful and necessary or ugly unneeded things transformed in the poem to fine and vitally meaningful feelings. If it lacks this power or transformation, it is no more than jugglery of empty words, most likely to be lost in translation. It was not even chopped-up prose. Poetry is a thing of heart, mind and the senses. If a poem has heart, mind and offers sensory appeal, it will shine through translation. If a person has heart, mind and good sense, he or she will shine through all situations and vicissitudes.

Poetry founded on pseudo-class generates discontent in the excluded audience unless that part of the populace is so skillfully manipulated into false consciousness that it may be managed with total success as a domestic animal. Otherwise, mock-class rouses opposition to itself on ethical grounds and is vulnerable to critical attack unless it has become monolithically cohesive and preponderantly the majority. A social class based on pretended quality that reduces only to money stirs resentment among those with less or poorer property. A poor person may have higher quality and more class than a multi-billionaire, though the rich person be surrounded with utmost, material elegance. Poems of pseudo-class glitter with name-dropped places, persons and possessions, so much so, sometimes, that it becomes clear, their authors show virtually no class at all.

Classes are artifacts of sociology and political science. True class can be found at every level of finance in society, just as people with no class whatsoever can be found at every level from bottom to top. Classiness cannot be bought. It is gained only by good rearing and education in humanity both in school and from wide experience of life. It has become glaringly noticable that real class has become scarce on the political Ultra-Right. (Yes, the same holds true for the most extreme Left. Nor do we see any really good poets at either end. We see a few versifiers, ironists and poetasters, most of them on the Right buyable or paid-for like “think-tank” denizens. On the too-far left, poets throw their stuff into underground ‘rags’ of small circulation.) Class is created by ethical and moral value, not market values. Market values split the people down into classes. Poetic value puts everything together again.