DeLong: America's Date With Deflation

Bradford DeLong jbdelong at uclink.berkeley.edu
Sun Aug 25 17:17:45 PDT 2002



>----- Original Message -----
>From: "Bradford DeLong" <jbdelong at uclink.berkeley.edu>
>> >Ah Brad, tribune of The People! ;-)
>> >
>> >Carl
>>
>> You know, you and Paul Krugman are the only people I've talked to who
>> have even *noticed* the possibility that that choice of metaphor was
>> not entirely innocent...
>>
>> :-)
>>
>> What happened to close reading? To deconstruction? To post-modernism itself?
>>
>>
>>
>> Brad DeLong
>
>================
>
>Consumers attention spans have shifted; understanding the spectrum
>of gambling opportunities is now
>the rage......
>
>Ian

But the possibility of a rhetoric dense in meaning? Of writing into which threads of allusion are woven? Of multiple levels of authorial intention? I weep at the failure of those of us Effete Ivory Tower Transnational Progressive Rootless Cosmopolite Intellectuals to have the narrow elites--let alone the broad masses--understand our layered and subtle discourse...

I mean, if Paul Krugman can argue that Mickey Kaus has lost his ideological moorings and is proceeding down the path to perdition all the while spending his days rationalizing his ideological transformation to himself as a "good thing," and can do so by making reference to a play by Romanian Absurdist playwright Eugene Ionesco called "Rhinoceros," the day of the literary intellectual is not yet gone. Surely we should struggle to preserve pre-modernist, modernist, and post-modernist High Culture as parts of our Plan for Human Liberation, shouldn't we?

Brad DeLong



More information about the lbo-talk mailing list