Oh, Christ.

One question.  That’s all I ask, really.  Just one question.

When did the Democrats become the party of the f*cking petit bourgeoisie?

Naw, fuck dat noise. Naw, fuck dat FUCKING PETIT BOURGEOISIE horseshite.

Ahem.  What was I saying?

Oh, right. 

So, I somtimes teach a class that, among other things, purports to prepare a person for the art of deconstructing a state of the union address.  Literally. 

What, then, am I to make of a speech whose major points — and please, PLEASE, correct me if I am wrong — consisted of telling the American people that the Democratic Party is the party of small business entrepreneurs, of “free trade” with Columbia (Columbia?  Really?  This from the nation that brought us illimatible synonyms for “purple heart,” and “goof ball” and “kibbles & bits?”), of “clean coal” and “bipartisanship?”  What precisely do we trade with Columbia?  ’cause I will guarantee you it doesn’t add up to our current accounts deficit. 

Fuck dat noise. 

Really? What am I to make of such a speech?

That our president wants to make nice with a bunch of jasper jackasses?  That “oh, really, if I’m only nice to you, maybe we can pretend that it’s just about ‘values’ and “civil disagreement” and not “oh, right, you fucking hate negros and homuhsexshuls” when your talking about “welfare” and “heritage” and “tradition?”

Some very simple advise:  if ever you want to deconstruct a public speech, then ask yourself a question: what does this have to do with the price of labor? I realize that’s old school Marxist, but trust me.  It helps to cut through the bullshit real quick.  And the quickest way to understand where a president stands on the price of labor is to know where he stands on (a) free trade, and (b) universal health care.

More later.  I promise.  I am too, too, distraught to make full comments at the moment.

Geen reactie’s, je kan de eerste zijn »

One of the consequences of growing up the child of activists is that one has always to reckon with a legacy of high moral seriousness. Scratch that. Of course, I should suppose everyone experiences this sort of dilemma. It is therefore probably a species of oedipal self-indulgence to claim that there is anything special about the angst of explicit and implicit comparisons between one’s own and one’s parents’ ethical accomplishments. It is even, perhaps, a marker of moral hypersensitivity to regard this sort of comparative angel-wrestling as fundamentally whiny, even onanistic. Young Werther’s sorrows, after all, really only interested Goethe. Lotte could have cared less.

In any case. 

I was thinking my relative lack of lifetime ethical accomplishments as I was (surprise!) reading Didion. Specifically, her small eponymous book on El Salvador. It is a depressing piece of reportage, opening with an extended passage from Conrad and heading downhill from there. It is depressing precisely book because what “happened” in El Salvador in the early 1980s was awful, and made no less awful because what “happened” there “happened” with the full consent and aid of the United States government, our government. 

I was young when the events there happened. My memory of them is largely connected to candlelight vigils on the steps of Memorial Auditorium in the rain, and the putative knowledge – shared in hushed tones – that people we knew might, just might, be harboring illegal political refugees in their homes. These memories are vague, of course, and probably inaccurate. We went to many candlelight vigils when I was a kid – it was rather the done thing among the leftist activirati in the 80’s – and it not entirely beyond possibility that what I have in my memory is a vigil on say, nuclear disarmament, or disinvestment in South Africa. It is also not entirely beyond possibility that my “memory” of family friends harboring illegal political refugees is a mish-mash of poorly-understood adult conversation and a school assignment involving Anne Frank.

Those rumors of bravery, of “making a difference,” have always echoed in the back of my mind.  We didn’t hide activists then – or at least not Salvadoran human-rights refugees. Ours was, to my young eyes, a more pedestrian sort of sanctuary: just-graduated cousins out from the South doing their wanderjahr in California, recently-divorced state workers who needed a pied-a-terre in town during the week, agricultural inspectors in between their tours of the migrant labor camps, former colleagues recuperating from major surgeries, political consultants who never quite got the big appointment lined up after the campaign, even (once) an actual homeless person. But no Salvadoran human-rights refugees. 

It is in its own way a testament to my parents’ generosity that they opened their home to such a parade of oddments (I should note at this point that the arrangements were usually not wholly altruistic. Rent was paid in every instance I can recall except for the homeless guy). But even in the din of that parade I could here the echo, the sense that we could always be doing more. No one had to hide in the closet when the FBI made a courtesy call. For that matter, the FBI never made a courtesy call. You see, perhaps, what I mean when I refer to moral hypersensitivity, to political penis-envy. That a twelve-year old could feel inadequate when the INS fails to raid their house says everything about being twelve, and nothing about the comparative moral accomplishments of said twelve-year old’s parents.

And yet. That sense of ethical unease, the echo in the back of my head, followed me to graduate school. Now I should say that I most certainly did not go to graduate school with the intent of “changing the world,” of becoming an activist. I read Weber my senior year, and taking him to heart, embarked on the decidedly different task of disenchanting the world. In one way this goal is morally purer than engagement in the hurly-burly of politics; one does not have to make compromises in academia, at least not the obvious ones one makes in politics. Read differently, however, it is a refusal, a passing of the cup, a decline to the invitation to participate in the only struggle worth getting bent out of shape over. Either way, choosing academia was fraught with its own oedipal twists, not least because my father was thrown out of graduate school for organizing a union among the janitorial and grounds-keeping staff.

So, you see, that echo was there when I read Jeffrey Paige’s Coffee and Power with what my professor thought was a refreshing knowledge of the issues, especially in one so young. It was there when I learned that a colleague’s grandfather had been forcibly “re-educated” when he made the mistake of publishing an article in a journal later deemed inappropriate by the authorities. It was there when another colleague, sick of reading dry, depressing sociology of education articles, left after one semester and enrolled in an M.Ed. program with the intention of becoming a high school principal. It was there when I applied to be the “public service fellow” at the graduate student union. And it was most especially there the night yet another colleague – himself the child of leftist academics in an unstable Latin American country, because every one of us had had to wrestle with his own angel – told me the following joke:

Q: Why has the United States never had a military coup?
A: Because it doesn’t have a US embassy.

This joke, I would remind the reader, was funnier in the years before Bush v. Gore. It was hilarious as first-year graduate student, in the second Clinton administration.

Geen reactie’s, je kan de eerste zijn »

Instead of getting three days off a month, without pay — which is the equivalent of a 15% pay cut…

The proposal is to work those days, but for 5% less money now (which is to say, permanently.  Or, if you prefer, a demotion) plus 5% less money that I may or may not get back someday.

This is what is known in the trades as a “shitty deal.”

1 Reactie »

Every once in awhile you play unwitting host to a bedroom farce.

Geen reactie’s, je kan de eerste zijn »

Paganism is stoopid. 

Yeah, that pretty much sums it up.  I’ll let ya know if anything changes.

Now I know why they didn’t make us read it my freshman year of college.

Geen reactie’s, je kan de eerste zijn »