> It makes me feel like the faculty advisor to the freshman
> debating team -- the _high_school_ freshman debating team --
> to say this, but attacking someone personally when their person
> is not at issue suggests that you can't deal with their ideas.
> It doesn't work rhetorically except when it's an appeal to
> some authority, like the prejudices of the majority, that is,
> it's a symbol of power; or it's terribly witty. But neither
> of these is operative here.
I totally agree with you. The outburst you're referring to was just that, and I can't say that I'm terribly proud that it will remain on display in the archives. Ah well. Comes with wearing emotion on your sleeve. Sometimes you say or do something you'll regret.
In the past I have dealt with Yoshie's ideas, such as they are, and I find she's stuck in an academic dream world unconnected to what people really do here and now. It's one thing to list social maladies and prescribe a Marxist cure. It's another to get your hands dirty with the people you supposedly wish to elevate and discover what they are actually like. I usually avoid dealing with Yoshie because I know where it will lead. But sometimes my darker side gets the better of me.
> In any case, you've only deepened the mystery. First of all,
> _all_ leftists, at least American leftists, are elitists, in
> the sense that they think they know better than the great mass
> of America's good citizens how we all should live and what we
> should do. I certainly do, anyway. Beyond that, I don't see
> what blue-collar jobs are supposed to do for anyone. I've
> had quite a few of them, and the only one that was at all
> enlightening was the U.S. Army Infantry, where I was an NCO.
> (_There's_ some working-class cred for you!) That was because
> the guns and the power relations were right out in the open
> and rubbed in everyone's face every day. It was almost as
> instructive as a prison in that regard, and the conceptual
> basis of the deal actually got through to me after awhile,
> slow as I am.
I was in the military, too -- 3 years of naked power structure. Know that world all too well. Radicalized me, in fact.
As far as elitism is concerned, I see what you're saying and have shared that view for much of my adult life. But where does it get you, or us? Elitism in the service of a good idea is still elitist, and in the end only reinforces the nastier parts of ourselves.
> But generally, as far as I'm concerned, work stinks. (Except,
> of course, when you're doing something you like or believe in,
> but I don't mean that kind of work.) It ought to be minimized,
> not glorified. I'd like to know why you think cleaning toilets
> as a profession is important to right thinking; in my experience
> it's pretty opaque. Just about all the people I have known
> who were involved in that sort of thing, including me, saw only
> a golden ladder in front of them, inviting them to climb up
> higher on the wonderful pyramid of Capital, away from the
> toilets and the other toilet-cleaners.
I clean toilets five nights a week. Dozens of them. Does that make me special? No, not really. And I know I won't do this for the rest of my life. But what I like about janitorial work is that it's tangible -- there's no pomo interpretation of what you do. Either that sink's clean or it's not. And I like seeing the end result of my labor: bathrooms sparkling and restocked; carpets vacuumed; stairs swept; garbage cans empty and relined. The guys I work with (the better ones, anyway) share this pride in the work, and it's the first time in my life that I've ever felt this way while earning a paycheck. Somebody's got to do it -- why look down on it?
> I hope this toilet & gravel stuff isn't one of those Chairman-Mao
> "send the pointy-headed intellectuals back to the farm" things?
Funny -- back in my flabby, sitting-at-the-desk-all-day period, I used to play an old Michael O'Donoghue game in my head, "Celebrity Death Camp," only I'd throw pundits in there as well. Now, I wouldn't think of sending the pointy heads to perform manual labor. They'd only fuck it up, and I'd have to redo it.
DP