Thanks to Undine, we have a way for everyone to help with my strike: click on the links to my Blog Supporters! This will help remind my advertisers that I do have readers. I need the revenue because I work at a public university in Bobby Jindal’s state.
In gratitude I will post some notes toward a post, inspired in reading Luis Villoro, Retos de la sociedad por venir.
Because I am on strike, I will not organize or explain them. But because you are helping me with the strike, I am typing up some notes I took in the margins of the Times-Picayune.
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+ Villoro 130: To be “on the left” is not to subscribe to a particular set of ideas but to have an “actitud vital” of “disruption” and a practice of questioning. A transformative practice.
+ Me: Yes, a critical consciousness. Part of being an intellectual. But both academia and Reeducation are on the right in Villoro’s description, then — they are about reiterating and/or becoming a reiteration of the dominant establishment, and not about the “comportamiento emancipador” to which Villoro refers as a Left behavior and attitude.
+ Me: That could mean I am not so mean, so criminal, so deserving of insults, or so mentally ill as I am often accused of being. It could just mean that my views on matters are more challenging than people are comfortable with. This is very interesting.
+ Villoro 132: To be on the left is not a theory, it is a moral posture. This bears thinking about. He also suggests somewhere in the same essay that to be Left or not is also a choice about whether one is going to do anything or not, sacrifice anything or not (and for what).
+ Me: All right, then Socrates was right and it is more therapeutic to read philosophy than it is to do many other things. I see what I got from Reeducation and it was essentially a right wing prescription. It was not all right to be: (a) intellectual – critical; (b) urban; (c) questioning (you were supposed to be conformist and what Villoro calls “reiterative/reiterating”; (d) to know how to solve problems / have a can-do attitude; (e) and of course, it was not all right to be “scientific,” or to think objectively and independently in any way.
We know the things listed in the last paragraph and I have listed them before in this blog, but every time I read anything interesting I have them come to me as a revelation again. I should paint a canvas of them and hang it in my doorway.
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+ Villoro 141: On Nietzche’s will to power. Is power always the oppressive power over others … or does Nietzche really mean here THE POWER TO EXIST? This part of the essay bears rereading.
+ Me: I have already figured out that Reeducation’s main message was that one had no right to exist. What it said was that one must give up all power. And one of my main disagreements with academia is with the idea that one should be able to function perfectly IN AN ABUSIVE SITUATION, as though it were a supportive one, or that one should repress oneself in all areas of life except in one’s specialty, wherein one must be most original.
I do not understand at all how one can put so much energy to repression of 90% of one’s self and expect this NOT to affect the other 10% (not to mention how that use of energy would cut into research time and focus).
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But I am still on strike. Click on my Blog Supporters! When I get paid we will have Reading for Pleasure Wednesdays again, and wear white on Fridays. On the weekends, we will sing.
Axé.
coldhearted scientist وداد 
OT, although not entirely: I am on strike from this blog, but not from my job. The general news is so bad that I am just so glad to have a job. Men working here!!! (Yes, I am a working man.)
Those who are culturally on the right say, “but of course! I could tell eight years before i met you that you would turn out to be such and such a type of person!”
Those on the left, say, rather: “Who are you? Why do you react as you do? What is the meaning that you give to it?”
Yes. “eight years before I met you” … hilarious.
I’m putting words into their mouths!
But what I’m getting at is the way right wingers grasp who you are “intuitively” or maybe they would say “instinctively” since intuition sounds too much like the quality of a girl.
They keep getting it wrong, but they keep on puttering along, oblivious.
Words in mouths, I know, that is why the “eight years” is so funny.
I am famously non judgmental and I think it’s essentially a valuable trait but I do give people all too much benefit of the doubt and credit, it seems.
Ideally I would refine this out of my non judgmental nature — or add a filter for this.
Clicked through advertisers! Hope that the strike ends successfully and soon.
Thank you Katie and thanks for your moral support! Me, too!
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More therapeutic ramblings for my manifesto in the doorway:
1. Quoted from above: I see what I got from Reeducation and it was essentially a right wing prescription. It was not all right to be: (a) intellectual – critical; (b) urban; (c) questioning (you were supposed to be conformist and what Villoro calls “reiterative/reiterating”; (d) to know how to solve problems / have a can-do attitude; (e) and of course, it was not all right to be “scientific,” or to think objectively and independently in any way.
We know the things listed in the last paragraph and I have listed them before in this blog, but every time I read anything interesting I have them come to me as a revelation again. I should paint a canvas of them and hang it in my doorway.
2. My friend last night said: he struggles with internalizing things people say, and with the “buttons” they push. In Reeducation we were supposed to take seriously everything, FEEL THE PAIN, and also DOUBT OURSELVES. So we were supposed to take seriously the possibility that mean people were right, and also feel the pain/ get angrier at them if they were just mean. Let them be destructive, even open the gates for it, and then resent them. Not to do this was to be too objective, to scientific, too rational, too much of a “thinker,” and also it was to be in denial.
All of this was of course exactly wrong and what I learned from this friend is something I should have known — this thing about dealing with projection from others, and so on, is common, it is not that I am “dysfunctional” and unusual to have it, and it can be dealt with more calmly and with less guilt and self doubt.
MY GOD Reeducation was crazy / did not know how to live life / etc.
Also: I am sort of rethinking it.
I’ve moved a lot of my personal vituperations onto Facebook because I want to go public with them under my name.
And I am still blogging at my research site, which I want to spend more time with.
And I am thinking I should maybe start working on the novel version of this.
But for now at least we are still going to have Reading for Pleasure Wednesdays, and sing on the weekends. As soon as I get paid. We’ll see … I’ve tried to quit the blog before and not succeeded, but it feels different this time, feels like I’m about to quit because I want to, not because I should.
Or maybe move to one serious post a WEEK, + reading for pleasure, + singing on the weekends …
AND ALSO (perhaps this is the best idea) … move back to the original concept which was not NEARLY so complex as the blog became: post a poem a day, something to set the mood I want.
I will see.