Posted on 03/09/2008 7:58:59 PM PDT by 2ndDivisionVet
I'm dancing on the top deck with a 71-year-old feminist and psychotherapist whom I've come to think of as the Twirler. We've spent two days attending seminars on The Nation magazine's Alaska cruise; we've talked about the Bush presidency and prison reform and single-payer health care. Now, at almost midnight, my fiercely intelligent and opinionated new friend is putting all the heady political talk behind her by bodily twirling.
"If I start to get dizzy, then I twirl in the opposite direction," Charlotte tells me as the live band revs up its throbbing Motown beat. "I won't fall."
"Good, please don't," I say. "And plus, we need you to be fresh for the Supreme Court seminar tomorrow."
When 460 of the more ardent readers of a 142-year-old leftist weekly get together on a cruise ship, things can be a little topsy-turvy. "It's like an SDS reunion on the Love Boat," said a guest speaker, Mary Mapes, the former CBS news producer who helped break the Abu Ghraib story among others, before being fired over her involvement in a 60 Minutes piece on George W. Bush's military record.
During a weeklong cruise from Seattle up the Alaskan coast last August, Mapes and 11 other speakers—mostly Nation contributors and journalists, but also Ralph Nader, Richard Dreyfuss and Rocky Anderson, then the mayor of Salt Lake City — tackled the Big Topics, all within the confines of the Holland America Line's amenities-drenched Oosterdam. Cultural dissonance was much in evidence — picture a self-described "atheist Socialist Quaker" marveling at an ice-carving demonstration; picture Birkenstocks in the piano lounge.
"Do you think we'll ever see Ralph_Nader in the hot tub?" I asked a fellow cruiser.
"I don't think so," he told_me. "Every time I've seen him he's disinfecting himself at the Purell hand-sanitizer station."
(Excerpt) Read more at sun-sentinel.com ...
***Gee, I’m so crestfallen that I missed it. I hope they paid Al Gore their carbon credits for the cruise.***
They don’t need to. With all that hot air and wind from the liberals they need only sails to move around.
I’ll bet that boat had a list to port all throughout the cruise, XD
P. J. O’Rourke took a cruise to Russia with a boatload of Nation pinkos. It’s the “Ship of Fools” chapter in “Republican Party Animal”:
Notice that they went on a foreign flag ship with a non-union crew. They could have chosen an US flagged ship with unionized labor and had a nice 7 day cruise around Hawaii.
Typical left-wing bas...ds.
There are just too many “deep thoughts” in this article. I feel totally unqualified and unprepared to even contemplate any of those thoughts. I’ve never felt so humbled.
What cruise company is US flagged anymore?
That’s funny, I don’t care who you are!
The comment which sums up the moral vacancy of the left came early in the article, when Mary Mapes called the cruise an SDS reunion, meaning that in a clever and humorous manner.
I just read a long review of the SDS in an article posted on the Internet. Their origins are Communist, although there was some infighting during the early years about whether or not the Soviet Union should get some of the blame for the Cold War. By the late 1960s, though, it appears that the SDS was completely coopted by radical leftist groups whose goal was the destruction of the United States and American culture.
Interesting that is the metaphor for those people on the cruise.
One other thing: If I used a forged document anywhere in my duties as a teacher and then tried to pass it off as genuine, my career would be over. My certificate would be taken away. My pension would vanish. And I wouldn’t be on a fabulous cruise this summer.
If there’s one thing I’ve learned in all my years about the left, it is this: there are two sets of standards, one for them, and one for the rest of us, and the one for them is far more forgiving.
Well, that's gotta stink, right there.
I’m always impressed with how cavalier liberals are about the whole communism thing. They go ballistic at the slightest whiff of imaginary fascism, but when it turns out that last Tuesday’s peace rally was organized by a communist front group, well that’s no big deal. A quarter of their congressmen belong to the Progressive Caucus which has open ties to the Socialist Internationale but, again, no biggie...in fact it’s kind of cool. It’s stunning how these people can align themselves with a hostile ideology and still consider themselves patriots. And it’s impossible to shame them about it. You’d think that having it pointed out that you were marching with totalitarians last Tuesday would rattle them some. But, nope.
"The Institute of U.S. and Canadian Studies is supposed to have subscribed to the Village Voice for six years in an attempt to find out about life in America's rural areas."
They sure do gloss over what she did, dont they?
My favorite PJ chapter in my favorite PJ book. I often thought that the postings on DU sound like his shipmates letter to his wife.
The Soviets thought that the Village Voice would help them learn about rural America? LOL! I imagine some KGB guy reading it and getting all puzzled.
Well, peasants live in villages, don’t they? There’s a good chance that P.J. just made this up, or else is using someone else’s joke.
That’s too old to have been a hippie flower child. Could have been a beatnik, though, and/or a red diaper baby of 30’s Commies.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.