by Star Tribute writer Paul Scott: My grumpy left getting tedious in its harshness

I'm a lefty. But lately, instead of inspiring me, the left keeps making me feel awful about the world.



My latest lefty-awful moment happened on Martin Luther King Day last week, as I turned on an MPR call-in show. The subject was the peace movement, and host Katherine Lanpher's guest was New York-based professor of sociology and commentator Todd Gitlin.

An older listener had called in to say he had lived through World War II, had seen what happened when you appeased a megalomaniac, and was starting to get uncomfortable about the reflexive opposition to war with Iraq. He was comparing Saddam Hussein to Adolf Hitler, of course, and mentioned that he remembered Neville Chamberlain's visit to Berlin. Greatest Generation be damned, however; after a minute or so Lanpher told Grandpa to get to his point, argued with him when he asked for more time, then cut him off and turned the mike over to Gitlin.

"The caller can't possibly remember Neville Chamberlain going to Berlin," said the eagle-eyed professor, "because Chamberlain went to Munich. And the rest of his statement is about that accurate."

Touché!

Gitlin has himself written about the alienating ways of the peace movement, so it was disappointing to see him assume the stance that minds are changed through argument and ridicule. After a point-by-point refuting of the comparison between Saddam and Hitler -- steadfastly avoiding any acknowledgment the caller might just be a fellow member of the human race, responding to his very real and affecting experience in life -- our thoughtful radio expert submitted his rhetorical coup de grace: "The analogy crumbles," he said. "It's made of proverbial sand."

I felt bad for the caller -- how shabbily the two had treated him on their little morning show here in the waning years of his life. I also began to wonder where the left gets its harshness -- a know-it-all style of dark grievance-dom that has increasingly come to define the peace movement. It was on my mind because I had seen this belief system in full bloom two nights earlier, as I watched a replay of the day's big Washington, D.C., antiwar demonstration.

At the march, speaker upon speaker proclaimed the supposed true motivation behind the current U.S. build-up: The rush to war is about oil. The rush to war is about U.S. global aggression. The rush to war is about Bush Jr. finishing the work of Bush Sr. The rush to war, according to the very name of the organizing body behind Saturday's protest march -- International ANSWER, or Act Now to Stop War and End Racism -- is about race.

The soup of causes, theories and pronouncements made my head spin. It also made me wary of my spokespersons. Much has been made of late of the unlikely bed-partners at these marches -- how the merely conscientious must sit through the orations of the terminally consternated. How the presence of former Milosevic-defender and attorney general Ramsey Clark shouting for impeachment might just alienate the less-cynical pastors, housewives and earnest teenagers who had boarded buses to Washington.

I just wish that every gathering of my lefties didn't have to become such a tedious exercise in cause-linking, chant-bullhorning and supposed truth-telling. I have the fantasy of a progressive cause with no Youth and Student Coordinator, no West Coast Representative, no brother from the movement in the country to the south and no presumption that words like Solidarity, Network, Action and Uprising are always to be treated as gospel, the code words that say we are all the same.

The Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. didn't play this game. Look at his face, full of dignity and calm while being pushed into the police station counter like a petty thief. Far from being consumed with rhetorical swordsmanship, crowd counts and secret agendas, he seemed to gain confidence in standing up against the simple, obvious truth -- the whack jobs that the Southern whites had become. He may have come out against the Vietnam War, he may have embraced a peripheral cause or two, but I can't imagine he would have strayed from the optimism of his dream to support the grab-bag of activism and sour outlooks of the scoundrels who would try to use the moment to sign us up for less defensible causes. (Long live the Palestinian people? Isn't theirs the cause that bombed a Sbarro?)

And I can't see him doing something so ineffectual or insecure as pointing out a mistake about an event that happened 70 years ago, not when there was a potential friend to be made.