you have to treat others as if they mean well even if you suspect maybe they don’t.

How great to see this articulated.

Not to make it about me :) but the biggest lesson I got from my involvement with the occupy movement was the importance of giving everybody the benefit of the doubt when it came to their own experience – even if you suspect there’s an agenda behind their words. If an agenda is truly there, you will discover it soon enough. But to start from a place of suspicion is guaranteed to kill solidarity.

And solidarity is the most important goal – achieve that and the struggle is won.

how well it could work, with an experienced facilitator or two and people most of whom had some idea what they were doing.

My experience with the occupation here in my town very much bears this out – but mostly in negative way I’m afraid (not always, though).

Facilitators who were not only skilled but trusted – to be fair and agenda free – were the one thing that allowed actual, useful work to get done. This however is dicey, since it’s tailor-made to create a defacto hierarchical caste.

I haven’t read your book, but what are your thoughts on enhancing facilitation while keeping things inclusive and flat?

Far more interesting, in my very humble and untutored opinion, is what the GOP will do to keep the genuine, dyed-in-the-wool, bull-goose crazies out of the running once the running really gets started.

The Karl Rove/Chamber of Commerce crowd has little, if any, control over what happens at the GOP local precinct captain level. That’s where the Tea Partiers have installed themselves and latched hold, like barnacles on the hull of the sinking Republican schooner. Whatever offerings rise to the surface from those primordial waters are gonna make Michelle Bachmann look like Madame Curie. Think Louie Gomert. Think Todd Akin.

What chance is there that those folks are interested in moderating their positions because of Reince Priebus’s autopsy? What are the odds they’ll really reach out to latinos? What possibillity that they’ll change their tune on marriage equality?

There’s going to be one hell of a fight between the GOP corporatists and the Teahadists. If only I had the popcorn concession when THAT show gets started. I could retire rich.

Don’t know know if this article is what you mean:

http://mypage.direct.ca/w/writer/anti-tales.html

but consider it brought.

This is odious to be sure but as messaging, the billionaires have a hard sell here. While it isn’t too difficult to get children mad at their parents, their grandparents are another matter.

People love their grandparents nearly unconditionally and all we need to is remind people that these rich bastards want to take away the retirement that grandma and grandpa worked so hard to set aside.

I don’t think we should by shy about it either. Calling the Pete Petersens of the world “granny-killers” is fine by me.

I can’t tell you how much I am excited by this stance – which appears to be a big premise of your book.

One big problem I have with my progressive brethren and sistren is what downers we can so often be.

And advantage that the right has is that they actually offer a vision for the future. It’s a nasty, snotty, stunted vision – “We’ll make sure the gummit never gives your tax money to people you don’t like, and then won’t life be great”

Trouble is, our “side” doesn’t articulate a vision at all. We’re great at identifying what sucks. And we’re more than happy to point those things out. But that makes us like your friend who is always complaining. You like them well enough, but you can only take them in short doses.

I will buy and read your book immediately.

Sometimes it helps to read it aloud. The great poems – and even the not so great ones – have music in the sound and cadence of the words.

At this point having Yeats’ The Second Coming as your favorite poem is so trite and hackneyed – being nearly quoted to death as it’s been – but good god, it still makes the hair on my forearms stand up:

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: a waste of desert sand;
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Wind shadows of the indignant desert birds.

The darkness drops again but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?