Eight years or one lifetime ago, I was comfortably doing my Teaching Computers thing in the small towns and large reservations up around where Krazy Kat and Ignatz Mouse and Offisah Pup lived in olden times.

One day I was helping an older black guy. We got to talking, and he told me his thoughts on the upcoming election. He was leaning hard toward Trump because he admired him. “He’s a businessman,” said my elderly student, savoring the word as if success in business were the most desirable thing in this world.

I papered over my distaste with professionalism and immediately swung things back to the screen in front of him where he was supposed to being learning how to use Microsoft products or some damn thing, in order to complete his rehabilitation back into a useful office drone, which of course was not ever going to happen. But wasting his time in a college classroom was a good deal for him and me both, in the short term.

Trump won that election because enough people like my student, especially in places like Milwaukee and Lansing, either had their heads turned by visions of having a gold toilet of their own someday–or were just so fed up with being lied to and taken for granted by Democrats that they stayed home by the thousands and disengaged from electoralism altogether.

They joined the half of America that has come to realize that joining team red or team blue is not worth the price of the ticket, because joining either of those teams means people like them will lose the game either way.

I say “them”. Maybe I should say “us”.

Depending on how we’re carving up the word “Sides”. There are a million ways to do it.

For today I want to set aside the 75% of America, more or less, who are either checked out or won over by some variation on a MAGA theme, and zoom in on the “Left” … side. Where I live, and where I think most of you do too.

Even among this fraction there are factions. The internecine warfare among them interests me personally and intensely. We can argue about Ukraine or presidential dementia or apartheid in Israel all day long and I won’t get tired, and most days I won’t get seriously mad either; ahem.

Two examples of this will be enough to overflow my page for the first Tuesday in November.

DEBATE: Was the CPC Ukraine Letter a MISTAKE? (w/ Joe Cirincione)

In this one the estimable Briahna talks with some old white blueNoMatterWho type about some of these wedge issues on the left. He does a great job of standing up for his side, and the whole video clip (apparently from a longer interview that you have to pay to see) is a nearly perfect example of the split I’m talking about, without the kind of fog and FUD and personal bitterness that you will get in any given “Jimmy Dore vs. TYT” style rumble.

Then there’s the one I saw on the Twitters today. (I’m supposed to be there just to post links to my own clips and GET OUT, but spectacular firefights like the current one over hashtag #pelosigaylover are like crack for my kind of addictive personality.)

Here’s Caitlin Johnstone:

The whole story is at https://caitlinjohnstone.substack.com/p/destroying-western-values-to-defend

And here is one of the responses she got:

I think the difference in perspective comes down to one key thing.

If the System is working for you, spiritually and economically, you call this a Democracy and generally trust and defend it.

If the System isn’t working for you, you call this a colonial Empire, mistrust it, hiss when it scores a little victory (like blowing up the Nord Stream pipeline), and feel a lift when you hear that somebody somewhere countered its excesses successfully.

I’ve tried to be fair as I wrote this, but you know which Side I’m on I’m sure.

Nothing interests me more than hearing which side you are on, and at some level deep down: Why.