From Politics To Academia, Oh My
Currently I am chewing toast with cream cheese and dreaming of coffee. A few moments ago I was reading this blog article about the right-wing blogosphere and rumormongering. It’s scary stuff. I mean, a left-wing blogger is more likely to uncover truth behind stories of detainment without charges or torture. A right-wing blogger is stuck hysterically repeating, “God is good and we must kill our enemies!” And who does that sound like? Congratulations, Republican Fearmongers. You have become what you claim to be so frightened of.
I’m more libertarian than anything else (what do you expect from someone who underlines and highlights passages in Chomsky on Anarchism?) I’m fully aware I have a bias and political leanings–after all, if one is breathing, one has a bias and political leanings.
I’m just chilled whenever I read right-wing propaganda by the unhappy thought that one could change a few of the nouns and have something virtually indistinguishable from German right-wing propaganda from, say, 1933 onward to about 1945. Or Soviet propaganda during and after Stalin’s purges. I always want to take a bath after catching a glimpse of Fox News or reading a theoneocrat’s ramblings. (That’s an abbreviation of Theocratic Neoconservative Plutocrat, btw. It’s not trademarked. Feel free.) A hot one. With lots of bleach.
The thing that utterly mystifies me is how right-wing fundamentalists build themselves a fort to keep out the “enemy”, which generally involves a good deal of the population of the US as well. (It’s a persecution complex married to an us-against-them complex, spawning hysteria.) Then they have the temerity to call themselves “true patriots” and claim they’re defending Our Great Country. One wonders if Tom Paine or Thomas Jefferson would agree.
On a slightly related but much cheerier note, I just finished reading Vive la Revolution, a history of the French Revolution written by a stand-up comic. I took this one down slow, in little chunks, to savor it. Mark Steel says that history is drained of any interest by schools and teachers nowadays, which I think is regrettably right on the money. I myself was always interested in history, but it wasn’t until I escaped the public school system and started finding research material on my own that I truly fell in love with all the murder, incest, torture, double-dealing, one-upmanship, cloak-and-dagger, and other fun stuff history of any type is just loaded with. (The “slightly related” bit is the sections on Tom Paine, who hied himself over to the French Revolution and was almost guillotined in the Terror. How come they never tell you in school how pre-Revolution France financed our own Revolution? Makes the current waves of Francophobia a little startling, doesn’t it?)
I’d Thursday-Revue this book, but it’s too good and I can’t wait to recommend it. I had a great time reading it, and having read all sorts of scholarly textbooks and popular histories of the Revolution* (Twelve Who Ruled, Citizens: A Chronicle of the French Revolution, The Terror: The Merciless War for Freedom in Revolutionary France, The French Revolution: A History, so on, so forth; I particularly recommend Carlyle just because he froths so prettily and hell, he rewrote the book from scratch) I found very little in the way of error and much to mull over in alternative readings of events based on primary sources. So, history can be responsible and interesting. Academic doesn’t have to mean dry.
I do wish more academic writing had a sense of humor, but I gather that’s a distinct handicap when it comes to having ivory-tower-dwellers read and grade one’s work. Good writing is flexible, clear, and occasionally drolly humorous (like Gibbon on a good day); academic writing seems to follow the principle that the more obscurantist and unclear one can make a sentence, the greater its weight toward a good grade. In other words, if you can confuse your professor, you stand a better chance of being graded higher.
I fully understand this isn’t true for all teachers (SarahF, I am thinking of you) but it’s a larger trend I’ve noticed too many times not to mention. I conducted a particular experiment in high school once–I wrote two papers, one clear as I could make it and in the simplest words possible. The other I wrote with a thesaurus at hand, with as many five-dollar words as I could scrounge up and the worst sentence structure imaginable. The first paper got a C+; I submitted the second paper as a “correction” to the first and it got an A.
The irony of the situation is, all the five-dollar words I scraped up for the second paper were antonyms of the proper word I wanted in the sentence. I questioned the teacher to find out if he gave me an A for the effort involved or just because he didn’t bother to check his dictionary. He enthused about my writing ability and wanted to submit my paper for an essay scholarship prize.
I think that was the point at which I lost all faint lingering respect for the school system as a whole. Individual teachers, like Madame Pointec or Mrs. Macdonald, still got high marks from me for their dedication. But on the whole, I just gave up. I decided if I was going to be educated, I was going to do it my own sweet self. Thankfully, at about that time I qualified for the Running Start program and was tipped into community-college classes that earned me high-school credit at the same time, and THAT was a relief, let me tell you. The first time I ran across a zany PoliSci prof who had escaped from Communist Yugoslavia in the back of a diesel farm truck under a load of potatoes–and started every class with telling us a bit more about this escape and the mechanism of fascist repression–I was overjoyed. The fact that he graded my papers kindly was a relief, too.
Well, I’ve wandered all over the map, haven’t I. Time to go settle down and pore through a bit more of the Frankenstein cut-and-paste that is Book #5, pre-clarity-edit. Mmmh. Another two-three thousand words to knock out today. Aim high, Lili, aim high.
We’re expecting a li’l bit of snow today, and everyone’s excited. There’s school closures aplenty and happy children looking expectantly at the sky. Which is, I daresay, the way it should be on a chill, blustery January day. Peace out and stay warm, Readers.
* I am waiting for Fatal Purity to be released in paperback. It can’t happen soon enough.
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