Michael,
Before I start: I teach your work -- and Hamper's (there are some interesting battles over Rivethead in my classroom) -- in classes that are a mix of middle and working class students; I often get children of factory workers, since I teach working class lit (among other things) in a state newly full of factory workers, but rarely the children of the most suppressed factory workers -- in my region, the chicken processing plants -- nor of the strata of fast food workers/janitors/day labor, who never make it to schools like mine.
I am also, as I said in a thread before, very interested in humor -- in teaching and in organizing.
You said: Part of these attitudes, I understand is class-based. Those of us from the working class know what you think of our "underdeveloped" politics. We think you're a bunch of smarty-pants and we know you've never really worked a day in your life when we shake your hand and feel how smooth it is, how clean the fingernails are. We have to stop thinking less of you because you really do mean well and are working to create a more equitable distribution of the wealth. [Kenneth Mostern] This, for me, is the key issue between us -- and the key issue in what it means to talk about your identity politics, which assumes that what workers think is not only important (of course I agree) but also correct.
You feel my hands, and you are right -- I have never worked in a factory. (I did drive a mail truck three days a week for three years working through school, by somehow my hands came out of it perfectly bourgeois.) And you haven't the slightest idea that neither of my parents went to college (at least not at the "normal" age), that my father the bank teller was fired immediately before his pension would be vested -- no union, of course -- and hasn't worked since, that my mother struggled to keep the family together and eventually graduated, two years after me, at 50. But in another way, you're right -- I was the smarty pants kid, the one who went to working class public education, didn't really talk to anyone (until I was 15, when everything changed, but that's another story), hid myself in books and fantasies and masturbation, and was, through some miracle, lucky enough to get out that way. I learned to speak "their" language better than "my own", in some ways for better, in some for worse. A working class striver just like you. And now I'm a professional marxist theorist, an incoherent category if there ever was one.
The point, I hope, is not that you should "like" me. The point is the inherent sectarianism of your position when you insist on labelling anyone who thinks they've thought through something in a useful way a "smarty pants". That kind of anti-intellectualism is the kind that, to be frank, that makes it impossible for me to speak to my father (you got personal, I'll get personal), while not doing one thing to get him off his butt and away from that TV. (He isn't/wasn't watching TV Nation, either.)
The question for me about your work is -- does it make people think? Call it my pink uncalloused hands, if you will, but I say the workers -- us -- won't accomplish anything until we think. That's not opposed to unions and sit down strikes; its part of the process. I teach your movies because I can use them, in the context of many other kinds of work (much of which is "smarty pants"), to get people to think. And I ask you to not make sectarian comments publicly that work against my engaging in that process.
Your humor is definitely a part of our thinking. This list's theory, I hope, is as well.
With admiration,
Kenny
Kenneth Mostern Department of English University of Tennessee
"Talent is perhaps nothing other than successfully sublimated rage."
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