“Carrying pictures of Chairman Mao
Ain’t gonna make it with anyone anyhow”
–John Lennon

In the 1970’s I knew folk in the communist remnants of the 1930’s movement
that reached its high water peak in Lyndon Baines Johnson’s Great Society.
The daycare I worked at had a Mao Tse Tung advocate who was just sure that
Mao’s cultural revolution was the real model for revolution and social change.
He and his Maoist sect knew they were politically correct and that I was just
a petty bourgeois pretender cavorting in the callow counter-cultural charade.

How revolting in the 1980’s counter-revolution (to a revolution that was just a vision)
to hear political correctness plucked out of Stalinist discourse and turned around
to be used as a weapon by former Trotsky-ite neo-con defenders of feudal monopoly
against the human rights libertarian movement that birthed a series of movements
over at least 21/2 centuries (actually all the way back to the Magna Carta in 1215)
the ever growing effort to abolish slavery and enshrine human and labor rights as law
first nationally and then internationally what could be more basic The Bill of Rights,
the Emancipation Proclamation, and Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s Four Freedoms
followed by Eleanor Roosevelt’s U.N. Rights Proclamation and the Civil Rights struggle
but we’re just politically correct, just another agenda in agenda world where there
every hen house is guarded by its very own fox and every interest has its own territory
AKA the Common on which all life depends so how can you leave your Politically
Correct agenda at home when home is the Common on which all of our lives depend?

 

James Van Looy has been a fixture in Boston’s poetry venues since the 1970s. He is a member of Cosmic Spelunker Theater and has run poetry workshops for Boston area homeless people at Pine Street Inn and St. Francis House since 1992. Van Looy leads the Labyrinth Creative Movement Workshop, which his Labyrinth titled poems are based on. His work appears weekly in Oddball Magazine.