Episode 1428
Kazakhstan's Oyan protest movement / Paolo Sorbello
Jan 20 2022
I, when you look at the, the different versions of this narrative, whether it's in say, uh, uh, the, the books of, uh, James Lindsay, um, who's antiwar warrior or all, all the films of people who were kind of involved, uh, in the Tea Party movement, you'll see that there are, there, there are some, uh, historical facts, uh, involved there about really the, the, the unraveling of, um, sort of post-war American order, the, the sort of, uh, the new deal order that was, you know, sort of hastened by, uh, uh, uh, by Reaganism and the kind of cultural norms that emerge from that.
So I think that these different, um, conservative and reactionary intellectuals are, [00:21:00] um, responding. To really a, a, a crisis of a certain, uh, um, uh, arrangement of American national life. But I think that the, um, uh, the blaming of it on, um, sort of cultural deviance like the Frankfurt School or, or on work professors, it, it, um, means that they kind of can distract people from sort of more structural or more economic factors.
intellectual historian A.J.A. Woods, author of, The Cultural Marxism Conspiracy: Why the Right Blames the Frankfurt School for the Decline of the West (Verso Books) discusses their book on the day it is published. A.J.A.’s writings on conspiracy theories and reactionary politics have been translated into four languages and appeared in Open Democracy, Patterns of Prejudice, and Marx & Philosophy Review of Books.
"Rotten History" from Renaldo Migaldi follows the interview.
After all that, we receive an update from Loyola University Chicago SEIU 73 Faculty Forward co-chair Paige Warren about next steps bargaining for a fair contract... read more
Deborah Goodman
Apr 15
Labor Struggle in Higher Ed: An Update from Loyola University Chicago SEIU 73 Faculty Forward Union
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Jan 12 2022
Posted by Matthew Boedy
Welcome to the Moment of Truth: the curse that is the drink.
I’ve been feeling pressure to be optimistic lately. My friends encourage. A listener, a communist mailman in New Jersey, insists. Henry Giroux opines. My mother sent me a book by Jane Goodall called, “Hope.” It’s a lot of heat.
I have no choice but to go to my happy places to seek out this elusive optimism. The happy places in my mind, of course. I can’t bring you to my happy places in the material world. I could so endeavor with words, but those words would be the product of the experiences of my happy places cycling through my mind as I compose them. So, one way or the other, you’re stuck with the happy places in my mind.
Here’s an amusement: a friend told me, “People can now eat pig hearts or get them as transplants, but they must choose only one of the above.”
I replied, “What if you get the transplant, dine for a couple years on aromatic herbs, truffles, and oils, and then have it removed, prepared, and served to you?”
He suggested that some scientists, more hungry than ethical, have been urging pig-hearted transplantees to eat a lot of basil and to be sure to leave their organs to science. He also said that the restaurant he’s creating the new menu for wanted to do a pig heart dish, but due to the new demand for pig hearts the price has skyrocketed.
Hearts are notoriously rubbery and full of cartilage. He and I once made calf’s heart soup in a medieval convent converted to a residence for social workers in Kilkenny, Ireland, and that sucker took hours and barely became remotely chewable. As for his restaurant menu, I told him he’d be better off with a softer organ. “Although that’s not what she said,” I quipped at the end.
Speaking of tender organs, recently a friend of ours, an old writer almost exactly twenty years my senior, by the name of Jay Wolpert, passed away. He wrote the 2002 version of “The Count of Monte Cristo,” and “Pirates of the Caribbean, the Curse of the Black Pearl.” He loved cinematic sword fights in a swashbuckling vein. He was a big fan of Stewart Granger in 1952’s “Scaramouche,” which he screened for us back when he still could remember who I was. I don’t know what a swashbuckle is, and I don’t think he ever told me.
I met him in the last few years of his life. We... read more