Siftings

• Michael Scott Moore is a novelist, though he’s more broadly known as a theater critic. If we have him well spotted, he’d like to turn that around, preserving his reputation as a thespiculator, but winning more fame as a storyteller in his own right.

He’s a georgist, judging from the pixilated pin he wears on his website, radiofreemike.com. Mike writes the theater column for the SF WEEKLY, one of the two big weekly skreed sheets in San Francisco. He has a way with words and so, as we recommend his first novel to you (Too much of nothing), we’d like to repeat what Mike says of the political left for he says awfully directly what we often merely stammer.

“The left as a whole, in [my] opinion, went wrong more than a century ago, when George Bernard Shaw (among others) turned away from Henry George. Henry George was the last pure voice of the non-Marxist left, a guidepost for Einstein and Tolstoy, and a San Francisco journalist who made economics sensible to the masses with Progress and Poverty, in 1879, before that book was ploughed into obscurity by translations of Das Kapital. In the meantime, of course, Marx has also gone down the toilet. But his turgid sensibility clings like a winding-sheet to the radical and academic left--in the form of political correctness, identity politics, and obsessions with class-most of which [I] consider[] bullhonkey.”