[lbo-talk] Re: Know your enemy

[joanna bujes]

At 11:58 PM 04/17/2003 -0700, you wrote:
>All of this reflection leads to a terrible sort of conclusion. That if
>the official academy is allowed to re-write history along the lines of
>the neoconservative twist---which is already at least two decades
>along anyway---then very likely any semblance to the history and
>culture I learned will most likely vanish. What I learned will simply
>not be the accepted view, but some kind of radical, suspect, and
>ideologically skewed interpretation.

I reiterate that the servants of the ruling class may decide to write 
history any way it serves their purpose, but it won't wash. When I was in 
graduate school I was made to learn this "history," or rather to slide down 
that slippery deconstructionist slope that leads to their "history" and I 
left academia in disgust. There are many others who did so as well. And, 
when you lose your best and brightest, when they decide that your 
presentation of reality is hogwash...then you go the way of the 
scholastics...down the hole of oblivion.

The point is that a society with any hope of survival must have a layer of 
"selfless" artists, teachers, thinkers who articulate and express the 
social vision that make it a desirable, vital thing. Advertising only 
simulates this activity and it isn't enough. Your understanding of history, 
art, and culture will not vanish. It will simply go underground. It will 
survive and be communicated by people who care about, dare I say it, truth 
and beauty.

Joanna