May 2, 2004
WHAT DO THE NEW DEAL, PEPPERED MOTHS & JULIA ROBERTS HAVE IN COMMON?
Last of the True Believers (DAVID HAFETZ, 5/02/04, NY Times)
MOST New Yorkers, Deirdre Griswold concedes with a smile, probably think Marxism is, as she puts it, "finished." It's enough to make an aging Socialist revolutionary chuckle.The Soviet Union collapsed and other radical leftists may have grown disillusioned, but as she sips tea and dips into a fruit plate at a diner on Seventh Avenue in Chelsea, Ms. Griswold exudes the impregnable optimism of a true believer.
For four decades, Ms. Griswold has edited Workers World, a small weekly newspaper (circulation most weeks 6,000, though up to 15,000 for demonstrations and special events) that reports the news with a Marxist-Leninist twist and a dash of Stalinism. The newspaper, which speaks for the far-far-left Workers World Party, is published in a loft on West 17th Street. Dedicated to ending capitalism, the paper regularly trumpets, as one issue put it, a "coming social earthquake." A recent headline is typical: "Battles Rage Across Iraq: Resistance Broadens After Pentagon Atrocities." It's the kind of publication that would be heartened by last week's New York Times/CBS News Poll showing that Americans' support for the war in Iraq was sharply falling.
Though her paper often roars in protest, the editor in chief, now 67, with reading glasses that dangle past her white hair, doesn't exactly look ready to man the barricades. A retired instructor of computer applications, Ms. Griswold speaks with a schoolteacher's practiced patience and sounds as enthusiastic parsing the imperialist nature of the United States' involvement in World War II, not to mention the war in Iraq, as discussing where to find good granola on the Internet.
"I'm happy-go-lucky," Ms. Griswold says, then taps her cheek in mock wonder. "Well, maybe that's going too far."
Ms. Griswold seems at peace with the compromises involved in living as a Socialist revolutionary in an unrelentingly capitalistic city. The comrade owns property - an apartment in Washington Heights, which is used by her daughter, Katherine Stapp - and has worked day jobs that once included typing portfolio reviews for a Wall Street firm. She collects Social Security checks from the government she detests. And although she dislikes shopping, Ms. Griswold often catches herself gazing at store windows and evaluating what she calls "the schlock." She's only human, she says.
Never easy to admit when the paradigm shifts out from under you, eh? Posted by Orrin Judd at May 2, 2004 11:05 AM
The old Pravda is now a nationalist news agency. But a new Pravda, edited by the improbably named Timothy Bancroft-Hinchey, is a trip down memory lane.
Posted by: Peter B at May 2, 2004 12:36 PMMs. Griswold is not alone. Many still carry the essence of her ambitions under a respectable cover, such as registered Democrats.
Posted by: genecis at May 2, 2004 12:48 PMAnd why are these people not considered the same as those who have longed for the good ol' days of segregation, no matter how benign or unintentional? (Trent Lott anyone?)
Posted by: Raoul Ortega at May 2, 2004 4:47 PMWell, she's a heck of a lot more marginal than Lott was.
Paradigm shift originally was applied to formal, rational theories; and Kuhn's hypothesis about how paradigms do shift turns out, on close inspection, to have little merit.
Applying a feeble metaphor to something that while formal was not rational (that is, never connected to an assemblage of credible evidence) does not get us very far, does it?
Posted by: Harry Eagar at May 2, 2004 5:59 PMThe only Griswolds I can recall seeing in the media (aside from Chevy Chase's character in Vacation) are this one and Frank Griswold, head of the Episcopal Church in the USA. I suggest it is high time to confront the Griswold Peril.
Posted by: Guy T. at May 2, 2004 6:15 PMYet Darwin shifted a paradigm, even if only temporarily.
Posted by: oj at May 2, 2004 7:36 PMThing was Marxism should have been declared dead in the 19th century when Leon Walras (the greatest economist you have never heard of) proved the existence of a general equilibrium. Of course, nobody noticed in the 20th century when Arrow and Debreu further formalized it.
Posted by: Robert Schwartz at May 3, 2004 1:25 AMGuy T:
Griswold's was also the name of a small hotel chain out here on the outskirts of LA some years ago. The one by the 91 freeway in Fullerton used to be a favorite site for small local SF cons (nicknamed "GrizzyCons").
Actually, Orrin, he didn't. The old paradigm of special creation was already dead.
There was no "paradigm shift" because there was no persuasive paradigm to shift to.
Darwin did not represent a shift but a de novo approach.
Nor, to take another shot at Kuhn, did Darwinism have to wait a generation for the old guard to die off. As Raup has shown, Darwin published in 1859 and in Britain was triumphant by 1862.
Posted by: Harry Eagar at May 4, 2004 12:15 AMBut unsuccessful here after what, about five or six generations?
Posted by: oj at May 4, 2004 12:26 AMIn your dreams. Darwinism has no competitors.
Posted by: Harry Eagar at May 4, 2004 2:39 AMNeither does phrenology. Americans don't believe in Darwinism.
Posted by: oj at May 4, 2004 7:11 AMI didn't say Americans believe in Darwinism. Of course they don't.
I said it has no competitors. It hasn't.
Posted by: Harry Eagar at May 4, 2004 5:21 PMIt doesn't need a competitor, it's just wrong. We don't yet know what causes speciation. It's been judged unfit, in Darwinian terms.
Posted by: oj at May 4, 2004 5:55 PMOJ, your desperation on this subject is grand comedy. Did a flat-earth holdout mentor you?
Posted by: Larry H at May 4, 2004 10:11 PMLarry:
No, I reached a certain age and realized that if something is too silly to be believed then it likely isn't truem, no matter what all the teachers said. Strangely enough, I then realized that no one who's mind I respected believed it either, including doctors, lawyers, biology phd's, etc. It was like discovering the catacombs in Rome.
Posted by: oj at May 4, 2004 10:46 PMI had the same feeling when I finally read Scripture.
Posted by: Harry Eagar at May 5, 2004 11:56 PMToo late then--you'd been indoctrinated into the whole panoply of Stalinist, Darwinist, 1940's liberal orthodoxy. A captive mind seldom thrives.
Posted by: oj at May 6, 2004 12:04 AMThat came later. I'd been indoctrinated into the Tom Dooley school of modern history.
Posted by: Harry Eagar at May 6, 2004 2:20 AM