Audience of Two
We've probably all had the experience of reading or watching something broadcast to the world, and wondering: "How big an audience could that have?" I remember having this sensation distinctly when I saw the movie "The Rapture" back in the early nineties. This flick, featuring Mimi Rogers and David Duchovny, is roughly one-half very graphic sex and one-half Book of Revelation. I mean, how many sex-addicted premillenial fundamentalists could there be out there?
I had a similar reaction today to a TPMCafe post by Max Sawicky. Ostensibly (and eventually) a negative reaction to Mike Tomasky's "common good" cover essay in the American Prospect, Max seemed mainly agitated by a brief reference to the famous 1960s New Left group Students for a Democratic Society, which, as "an SDS alumnus," he considered very off-base. But the fun thing is that Sawicky in passing took shots at several SDS factions.
I immediately buzzed my colleague The Moose, who shares my hobby of Marxist esoterica, and got him to read the post. Then, like the Hardy Boys on a mystery adventure, we spent twenty minutes trying to figure out from Max's angry words which SDS faction he might have belonged to. We decided it had to be either (a) RYM II (for Revolutionary Youth Movement), created when RYM I morphed into the Weathermen, or (b) the Draperites, a Trotskyist offshoot of the better-known Schactmanites (the Moose's own college fraternity).
As we stood in the hallway feeling smug about our sleuthing work, I finally said to the Moose: "You realize what a couple of dorks we are?" He agreed. But thanks to Max Sawicky for an inadvertant bit of Friday afternoon entertainment.
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