Now it is time to link to On Shame, the best post ever of all those I have read. Read it at its home, because I am only reproducing the opening riff. After this it gets truly deep.
After unabashedly complaining about having an single income family, of which she is not the earner, that puts her in the top 25% of the N. American economic bracket and whining that after spending $600 on food, living in a $600,000 home, and spending at least $300-$400 on entertainment and misc. (her budget not mine) that she doesn’t have enough for anything else, Bitch PhD not only remains unapologetic for thinking not being able to afford her every hearts desire and having to consider going back to work (that’s right she has the privilege to not work and still pay all her bills but thinks she is poor) is akin to the millions of people in N. America who are homeless, unable to pay all of their bills, filing bankruptcy to stay afloat, eating in soup kitchens or reduced lunch programs, being treated like scum by gubment programs for losing their jobs or needing assistance for gubment programs that their tax dollars help fund but she dares to ask what shame do other people have that have been “unfairly” placed on them by others.
Rather than take up bandwith at her blog I will put my shame list here. This is not a list of shame I have placed on me but real shame, the kind she should and 145 commentors on her blog should have for refusing to address the difference between poverty and wealth, by misnaming desire as need, and by ultimately reinforcing the idea that right or left the bougeoisie will always be more invested in their economic comfort than the reality of the true economic and social inequality in this country.
Axé.
coldhearted scientist وداد 
I read Bitch’s post the first day it went up and I was speechless.
I should say that the other best post I ever read was “On How and Why I Went to College” by ChasingMoksha.
It’s an interesting post. I often have a lot of difficulty commenting on issues that are situated within the American cultural context, because I really have no experience of the culture. So, I don’t really understand why people are staking their particular claims. The fairly recent feminist blowout about radical feminism versus sex-positive feminism has a cultural sub-text which eludes me. I have read BitchPhD’s stuff, and found it didn’t particularly grab me, but I can’t be sure of why. I really couldn’t have brought it back to any particular wrong-headedness economically or culturally. Anyway, so I understand more now, having read the whole post you linked to. Yet, somehow I still do not understand enough. It still relates to a foreign context, for me.
I do understand what poverty is, though. I am, you know, in Australia, technically unemployed. I have been for a long time — ever since I was a victim of workplace bullying here. Yet, recently I was able to give a small amount of money to a Zimbabwean who deserved it more than I. This person travelled all the way to another country on this very, very piddling amount. He tells me he had the experience of a lifetime. Amazingly, he is a full-contact fighter in martial arts (something that takes immense courage and for which I have limitless respect). He would not have been able to go to the martial arts seminar in Maputo had I not paid for it. So, this kind of thing really makes you realise the difference between having merit and having money. Here is some of what he said:
“I really want to thank you so much for making this possible for me. Without you I would not have been able to go and it was an experience of a life tym. Dont worry you are going to get plenty photos dear and even from my classes here, I am starting next week, just got the timetable today.I am going to work hard to buy a camera this term. Dera you are so blessed,thank you very much I just dont know how to say this enough. I want to send you a small present, it may be small but the meaning behind it is big and comes from my heart.”
What it’s about, largely: middle classes calling themselves poor and resenting the times they have been called out for this reason, while vaunting their utter lack of awareness of how most of the world lives.
Y’all, I mean to start a “meme” about this, what have you been shamed for and what are you actually ashamed of?
If anyone wants to start it before I do, be my guest.
To add insult to injury, Bitch added a new post attempting to shame the shamer by daring anyone who is not perfect to protest. Who in this world is perfect? No one. However, there is a thing called degrees. And the movement of one degree to the left or right can make a whole hell of a lot of difference, not to mention how much a few degrees over can make. And the commenters are the worse. People are flaunting and disguising it as a reason to feel remorse even though they are clearly nowhere near thinking about remorse.
I am literally in a state of paralysis. I have thought I wanted to be a PhD for so long that now that I have seen more of what it entails I am just stuck and confused.
OK,
First. I have just started teaching my new American arrivals. Mostly Mezo-American and Mexican, some Caribs in the bunch.
I think I made the right decisions in and that Providence stepped to save me from Presbyterian University.
All of these things that you and Shame hit on I am perusing in a survey on American Education that I am taking at my little state sponsored school that I love.
And I guess . . . Damn! What kind of psycho-racial-sexual crap and I living through. Choices. Choices. Choices. Choices. Choices. Gut Instinct. Bitch PhD? If all this is true, it is worse than Martha Wash and the Black Box scandal (I still bought the CD).
I’m going to have to read the original blog, to see if I can understand it. heh.
The red rubber ball
The red rubber ball
Out of the white/pink sheath
Squirts into her lips the delicious
Liquid
My sister the dream’s penetration – siesta
Multidom in buttock
Multifarious in sumptuous breast
Oblique in cupid lips my obelisk
Penetration
Lightning’s capitalist orgasm my crocodile
Skin itches massacre after massacre crying
Snake!
Snake!
Ok, I read the BitchPhD thread. So it seems that people are somehow concerned with their images, and that this relates to shame. They are worried about a discrepancy between image and reality. Is the shame felt for the most part in the reality doesn’t live up to image or that image doesn’t live up to reality? I think it is mostly the former — which describes the preoccupations as philosophically Idealist; bourgeois.
UNDER ANAESTHETIC
I do not feel the wound
The house dresses on my heart.
I do not suffer the nightmares
The house is exorcising from my head.
You would I remember the Struggle
This meuseum, memorabilia of massacres;
But television on my mind has imprinted
Worse day-to-day horrors I am only
Startles, wounded, by the spectacle of kisses
and kindness.
Yeah. One thing – Kitty – I know a lot of people who have quit professordom in disgust, and Unbeached quit graduate school in disgust, but the ones who quit professordom in disgust do not regret doing the PhD.
Reasons to do a PhD if you are into studying and have a decent situation for it are, you really do get a lot of free time in which to study … if your situation is right.
Mine was – good school, good program, good place, and I was funded. You are old enough to see through some of the B.S. and your husband/kids will help keep you sane. And you have the out of quitting at the M.A., or at M.A. + 36 hours. And you can use the Ph.D. to go work for a think tank or something instead of a university … or do a joint Ph.D./M.L.I.S., a powerful degree which lets you run a research collection.
Thanks for turning me onto Woc PhD.