THE GRUMPY LEFT: This writer in the Star Tribune is getting tired of the Judean People’s Front aspects of, well, lots of lefty causes:

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. . . .

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.

(Via Fraters Libertas).