Meltdown In The Academy

[Steelhead]

Diana York Blaine thinks I'm about to Plath myself (not knowing I'm much
more of a John Berryman fan and would prefer to off myself on ice, not
gas):

>Better check for carbon monoxide leaks in your hut Steely cuz you've
>Stopped Making Sense. you fly
>off the radar and start accusing academics of complicity in global
>meltdown.

Ah...well...to my mind academics have been an engine driving the global
meltdown for some time now. Don't think I'm the first to point this out.
Gee...Have you ever heard of Hannah Arendt? Dwight MacDonald, perhaps? They
wrote quite abit on this topic back in the 1950s. It seems Herr Himmler got
his start in academe, while Oxford and Cambridge were producing their own
advocates of eugenics. On our side of the pond, Yale and Georgetown seem to
specialize in the breeding of spies and sleuths. Stanford gave us Dr.
Edward Teller and his nuclear fantasies. Sure, MIT houses Chomsky, but look
what else they've given us:  the infrastructure for Star Wars. Harvard
hands out degrees to the butchers of Latin America and invites Guatemalan
generals to teach at the Kennedy School of Government. The University of
Chicago offered Bellow and Norman MacLean, but is much more notorious for
Milton Friedman and the Chicago School of Economics, which is now
restructuring the global economy with such resultant misery for 95 percent
of the Earth's population. The Agriculture Universities work hand in hand
with the chemical agriculture business, assuring us a pesticide (and
cancer) laden future. The State University system of California is
neck-deep in genetic manipulation research.  And on and on. Complicit?
Guilty in the first degree.

>I'm tempted to think this is a joke, which makes you less
>interesting but certainly safer to walk the streets.  Let's get some
>perspective:  one of the 12 books I taught to 35 students this term was
>Piercy's. It was also one of the only times in their Texas lives that
>anyone dared to challenge Big Business, Big Money, Big Oil--just like you
>like to do so much.

Actually, you're selling Texans way short and, in my opinion, insultingly
condescending to your students. I'd never send my daughter into your
classroom with that kind of attitude. (But she never listens to what I've
got to say, anyway, the girl is intent on heading to Berkeley.) I've spoken
on Texas campuses many times over the past 10 years and there is a firm and
fairly developed understanding among most of the students I've met there
about what's driving the economy, our politics, the assaults on human
rights and the destruction of the environment. And I'm not just referring
to the kids down in Austin, the Havana of the Lone Star State. There is a
wonderfully vibrant progressive and populist movement in El Paso,
Galveston, Amarillo, and Houston. Dallas, I admit, is something of a black
hole. But who knows better the power and cruelties of big oil than the
people of Texas. Talk to the daughter of someone who works one of Shell's
big rigs in the Gulf some time. Or the son of a black oil field worker from
Paris or Witchita Falls. You'll find out more about the evils of big
business from them than you'll ever get in any drivel from Marge Piercy's
pen. Or make your class read the Texas Observer--one of the nation's great
weekly papers (this week's edition just happens to have a story by yrs.
trly. on the CIA and Drug Trafficking)--which has been publishing
in-your-face copy about the multinationals for 30 years. Ronnie Duggar is a
brilliant editor and Robert Sherrill is, in my opinion, the best
investigative journalist America has yet produced. Sherrill's voice is as
sure and seemingly omniscient as Pynchon at his best. Both Texans, radical
thinkers, humanists. There's also the irrepressible Jim Hightower and, of
course, Molly Ivins.

>But somehow I become part of a great plot against
>mankind because of it.  This, my friend, does not compute.  I WISH I had
>that much power.

Academics of the so-called progressive sort have forsaken what little
*power* they once had by titillating themselves--though one can hardly
imagine their students being quite *so* excited--with the mindless
pleasures of critical theory, deconstructionism, post-deconstructionism,
Lacanism, phenomenology, blah, blah, blah. Today's literary criticism and
college literature classes are about as interesting and useful as early 70s
sociology. The Humanities have been de-Humanized. It's as if Pointsman were
teaching a class on the poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins. Imagine that. At
least the social historians, such as the recently mentioned Donald Worster
(who aside from being a brillant historian, is also one of our best
writers...check out Rivers of Empire for the true story of Polanski's
*Chinatown*) actually have a broader purpose to their work, unearthing the
lost voices of the governed, isolating the dynamics of social change,
tracing the hidden lineages of power.

But if you want the real scoop these days don't make the mistake I did and
major in English and/or History. Get a business degree. Why? Not to make
millions. As Chomsky sez: If you want the truth about the news, read the
Wall Street Journal or the Financial Times. They print undistorted news
because the ruling Elites need unfiltered information for rational
decisionmaking.

>But even if I did I wouldn't use it to destroy the
>planet and anyone who fairly reads my posts knows that.

This is a largely a straw man post that skirts the real issues. No one said
you were "destroying the planet." But there is such a thing as fiddling
while the Amazon burns.

>Chill dude.

Not a chance.

Steely