IN THESE TIMESPlease consider subscribing to the print edition and supporting independent media: http://www.inthesetimes.com/subscribe/ A Socialist in the Age of Triangulation
I had my first glimmering that Jimmy Weinstein was special the first time I met him in the flesh. It was in the mid-'90s, in New York, a time before the fad for the Atkins Diets made what he was about to do seem unusual and even wondrous. He ordered a hamburger--I was used to people his age ordering salad with dressing on the side or "egg beaters" or dry toast or whatever--and he poured half a shaker of salt upon it. He did things his own way: a socialist in the Age of Triangulation. I really knew Jimmy was special after I moved to Chicago. He had a book coming out, and In These Times asked me to review it. I said I wasn't interested because I disagreed with it: He thought the Soviet experiment had some nobility in it, and I thought it was shit from start to finish. Something extraordinary happened after that: Jimmy Weinstein sought me out as a friend. This, it seemed, was the requirement: I was someone he knew he could argue with. Thinking about his life, that makes perfect sense. Setting up new staging grounds for arguments--Studies on the Left, Socialist Review, In These Times, the Modern Times bookstore in San Francisco, or even a dinner in a Caribbean restaurant where he spun out scenarios for an America without a military-industrial complex in three easy steps while I sat across the table from him and made my case for why that would make the economy collapse--was his life's work, from the beginning to the end. I can't think of a calling more noble. Rick Perlstein is the author of Nixonland: The Politics and Culture of the American Beserk, 1965-1972, which will be published next year. |