An Answer Posted Only Because I Wrote This Fifteen Long Years Ago

 

Saturday, September 09, 2006

What Does ‘olvlzl’ Stand For?

Posted by olvlzl

The question has come up again, what does “olvlzl” stand for. While the temptation is strong to echo Groucho Marx and say, “he’ll stand for a lot” the fact is no one seems to be pushing that particular envelope at this time of my life.

Some of you may remember a commenter on many of these leftist blogs who went by the name EPT, a name chosen to honor the author of The Making of the English Working Class. As an aging gay man EPT was quite innocent of the fact that it was also the name of a product that was associated with urine. Having been ribbed about that and, shortly after, having had the letters olvlzl come up on the random letter generator of the comments board of the blog Mercury Rising, EPT decided to see if there were any ways those letters could generate ribbing or anagrams. Finding none, he impetuously chose them as his own. Fate seemed to dictate it.

Echidne’s blog takes as its theme the great subject of feminism, it encompasses the lives and interests of more than half the human population. If feminism was represented in the way that subject deserves to be it would be ‘masculinist’ blogs that would be noteworthy as an alternative viewpoint.

My blog, olvlzl, has a much more modest theme, how the left can change its behavior to win politically. That theme, though more modest, requires that the ways that leftists characteristically act, speak and think be investigated to see possible self-defeating follies. What do we do that makes our agenda, so much in the interest of the vast majority of people, fail so regularly at the polls. It’s not all what they do to us, a lot of it is what we do to ourselves. A lot of what we do allows the right to caricature us, to lie about us in order to defeat us. As in the two longer pieces posted below it is also a matter of us giving them the rope to hang us with. That is a situation that cannot go unchanged either for what they do to us or what we allow them to do to us for whatever noble sounding reason. It is sometimes noble sound that signifies very little.

That is what the pieces I’ve posted here this weekend are about. If they are unsettling, this essential change without which we will never win, is bound to be. I hope that your disagreement and ideas will help to further the work of finding the way, they have taught me a lot in the four months I’ve been doing this. Most of all, I hope we will find ways to win. Everything depends on our winning elections, taking office and changing laws. Everything.

Update: Looking back, I don't have the same respect for E. P. Thompson's book or the idea of a "working class" now that I did then.  The term seems to me to be mostly to set apart the working poor from the destitute and to turn the immediate near destitute against the class that does them the least instead of the most harm.   I also fell out with most of the crowd I electronically hung around with back then, though not Echidne who I hope returns to writing soon.  

My investigations into what the left did wrong and observing the unedited thinking of many college-credentialed, would be lefties taught me a lot of things that drove me farther left, into economic justice based in the Jewish religious tradition,  a higher view of life and, so, human life than any ideological materialist-atheist-scientistic POV can ever produce.   But the answer to the question remains the same as it did then.