Jeff Blankfort is not and never has been an academic, although he has
been a high school teacher, a very different matter entirely. There is
at least one subject -- Israel, Palestine, Zionism -- on which he knows
as much as any academic around.
Bill Mandel
drieux just drieux wrote:
>
> > on 03/28/2001 06:24, Jeffrey Blankfort at jab@tucradio.org wrote:
> [..]
> > There should be no question that Horrorwitz knew exactly what the
> > reaction would be to his advertisements, and so he gets a million bucks
> > worth of free publicity and perhaps, something approaching that added to
> > his bank account from the deep pockets neo-fascist right.
> >
> > Jeff Blankfort
>
> I remember this lovely cartoon from Punch, in which a math instructor
> attempts to present 'relevancy' for his math class - based upon the
> then chic academic concern about all portions of the academy being
> 'relevant' - which from memory may not have always been the correct
> phrase d' jure.
>
> But I find it almost comical that 'neo-fascism' has come back into
> the forefront in the current 'failing market economy'.....
>
> Have we decided to actually define 'fascism' in any new and improved
> post-modern deconstructionist language enhancement, or are we still
> planning to use it solely for its emotive value, and the glorious
> appeal it offers back to the great days of the last good war, and
> sucking up to the generation that we really want to replace, so that
> we can get their gigs - which if I recall in the akademik game is
> their chair in their department, and with it the right to fill up
> the rest of the seats with our cronies rather than the last set of
> cronies - a point made redundently comical to those of us from the
> WarMonger Community, who recall the desperate struggle the WWII era
> vets had wresting crontrol of the VFW/AFL halls from the hands of
> the WWI/SpanishCivilWar Era vets, only to get whined at by the
> Vietnam Era Vets, who have at times been the same for the current
> Persian Gulf War Era Veterans, who's 'era' is still open.... check
> it out with Congress's Veteran's Affair WebPage happy kampfr's....
>
> So before we all start panicking that this time around the kiddies
> might actually IMPLEMENT 'wild in the streets' - that AIP classic
> genre piece, the sin que non of all that was 'best and brightist'
> in the whole
>
> tune in, turn on, drop out
>
> motif of marketting - maybe we should wonder whether or not academic
> freedom had merit on its own accord - independent of the need to
> unseat the 'incumbents'.....
>
> But maybe that sort of analysis leads us into the intellectual horrors
> of wondering, to aloud, why it is that the 1950 Columbia Encyclopedia
> explained that the era of entreprenuers had ended with Henry Ford, as
> the corporation system provided the new and improved .... but some how
> the whole 'entreprenuerial arts' lead to the dot.com crash, and as such
> clearly must be replaced by the 'corporate state'..... or we might have
> people out there foolishly seeking to
>
> create the conditions you describe
>
> and they might not always vote with the correct implementation of the
> party line, whether it is the
>
> "party on the left, meets the party on the right...."
>
> and we spin up our old vinyl and chant:
>
> "We don't get fooled again....."
>
> ciao
> drieux
-- =================================================================== Do you teach in the social sciences? Consider my SAYING NO TO POWER (Creative Arts, Berkeley, 1999), for course use. It was written as a social history of the U.S. for the past three-quarters of a century through the eyes of a participant observer in most progressive social movements (I'm 83), and of the USSR from the standpoint of a Sovietologist (five earlier books) knowing that country longer than any other in the profession. Therefore it is also a history of the Cold War. Positive reviews in The Black Scholar, American Studies in Scandinavia, San Francisco Chronicle, forthcoming in Tikkun, etc.
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