On Sun, 30 Nov 2003 11:27:37 -0500, marc rodrigues <marc36 at graffiti.net> wrote:
>
> I was flipping through the channels last night when I came across c-span,
> which was showing an "ISI gala". I happened to come across it right at
> the moment where a taped message from dubya bush was playing. what I
> heard was pretty damn amazing. the text of what he said is here:
> http://www.mmisi.org/galatext/president_address.pdf
>
> this raises a few questions in my mind:
>
> -who/what is the ISI? are they just rank white supremacists ("Western
> Civilization, Our Philosophical and Moral Tradition")? what does bush
> mean when he says that they are pushing this crap on students and
> teachers (their website includes the quote, "Education means not merely
> the imparting of information to the mind but the shaping of the mind and
> of the personality"... woah...)? what relationship does the ISI have with
> colleges and/or high schools, or determining or influencing curriculum?
>
> -does bush (and people like him) actually comprehend all this stuff about
> markets and "free enterprise", or is it just understood as something that
> "people like him" are supposed to say?
>
> -how does the right believe its own garbage about leftist media and
> leftist indoctrination at the campuses, if its so obvious that all 3
> branches of government and so much more is so firmly in their pocket?
> this is like having the president speaking at some monthly review forum
> on imperialism. if this "bias" does indeed exist, it's apparently not
> doing a very good job at convincing anybody or changing anything.
>
Yes, Virginia (allusion to Sanity Claus) there is, thank gawd, for us and the Kultur and all it does to be a counter-hegemonic disruption to all the Right-Wing Idiocy From The Three Branches and The Three Newtworks (hey , I like that!) And Cable, exist, and it has since the seventies a domination of the academy, at least the humanities, sociology departments, English Depts., History faculties, by the Academic Left. Even the Poli Sci Dept. at UCB, historically dominated by Cold War Liberals and Rightists, has a ton of lefties now.
You'll have to look at more academic rightists writing, Marc, to get beyond such a caricature of ISI. I've skimmed their Old Right journal, which the SFPL gets, Modern Age, for a while now. Paleo-conservatism is not my cuppa tea, but, scholarship influenced by Russell Kirk (see one of their writers, George Nash, "The Conservative Intellectual Movement In America, " which ISI (hey on the keyboard, I almost just made another error, made it ISO!, heh!) has an anti-capitalist tinge, too.
Recent ISI books I'd recommend which show a greater comprehension of the Trotskyist and Stalinist Left, than way too many lefties show for neo- conservative ideology and life tragectories and motivations, the bios of James Burnham and Frank Meyer of NR, and the anthology on the Hiss case and the divisions it caused in the ranks of the political intelligentsia. (See esp. the piece by Ron Rosenbaum on the evasivness of Alger Hiss in person).
White supremacist? Well, these aren't KKK members. And, though I have always liked the reply of Gandhi to a British reporter, "What about Western civilization?" "It would be a good idea!" 'cuz after the Holocaust (cf., "Dialectic of Enlightenment, " Adorno/Horkheimer or any book on the Vietnam War atrocities of the USG) and My Lai and all other slaughters by upholders of , "The West Is The Best, " line vs. the East, whether Soviet or Islamic or Asian (cf. Roger Scruton, "The West And The Rest, " ISI Books), there is a critique of multi-culturalism from the left, as well as the Right and Center, that would heartily dissent from such a simple-minded assertion that any critique of identity politics and multi-culti is, eo ipso racist running dog opinion designed to shove Blacks and other "people of color" (a phrase now enshrined in corporate capitalist diversity speak, that occludes and essentializes class and other differences within and between poc "communities" Korean-Americans have the highest rate of business formation in AmeriKKKa amoung Asians, (just read this in a book review in, "Public Opinion Quarterly, " Summer 2003 of works edited by/written by, John David Skretny and Joel Fetzer and Carol Swain) Laotian, the least. Should Rich Koreans, simply by virtue of national origin, get an advantage over a white kid from a poor family in West Virginia?
>"Education means not merely
> the imparting of information to the mind but the shaping of the mind and
> of the personality"... woah...)?
Doesn't every educator, aspire to shape the mind and souls of their students? Whatever ideology they have? The better teachers on the Left, on their reading lists and in class discussions (unlike the character at UCB that said, "Conservatives {and liberals, too, I'd imagine, even more so, esp. left-liberals and left socdems) need not apply to this section...") always include the best works from the Left, Right and Center so as to sharpen and deepen the Left identitty and analysis of their students. A Young Republican I knew in high school told me the adult GOP'sters in their cadre development process told the kids, "Read The Nation." I gave my friend in high school issues of Monthly Review and Socialist Review anfd the Review of Radical Political Economics. He gave me his National Review's. Did we change each other's minds? No, but, at least we both had a better sense of where the fuck we were both coming from.
Marc>...what relationship does the ISI have with colleges and/or high schools, or determining or influencing curriculum?
The same right we have to go to and elect school boards. "This Is What Democracy Looks Like!" Stop whining. If Phyllis Schlafley elects a school board majority (and she is against the Partiot Act) what is stopping leftist and liberal parents from doing the same? Here in S.F., Eric Mar of DSA (and in the Chinese Progressive Association, which is what former local members of Carrol Cox' maoist mofos League of Revolutionary Struggle, morphed into after LRS collpsed~ see Max Elbuam book from Verso on the NCM~, is an open leftist on the board. Currently, btw, their is a struggle on the Board, led by Eric Mar, to throw out the Black Woman Superintendent, a Willie Brown ally, that corporate liberal demogogue fink that just called Matt Gonzalez, our Green candidate for Mayor vs. the homeless bashing DLC panhandler of the Getty fortune, Newsom, a Racist in front of an audience of Black preachers in Bayview Hunters Point that His Willieness hasn't delivered sheeit to EVER except patronage jobs to the Black Bourgeoisie and Convicted Crooks.
> -how does the right believe its own garbage about leftist media and
> leftist indoctrination at the campuses, if its so obvious that all 3
> branches of government and so much more is so firmly in their pocket?
> this is like having the president speaking at some monthly review forum
> on imperialism. if this "bias" does indeed exist, it's apparently not
> doing a very good job at convincing anybody or changing anything.
Hiring decisions for faculty and lecturers, tenure and grad school admissions, like any other arena not subject to democratic deliberation by ordinary voters, you don't think that we lefties, just like righties and centrists, don't hire other leftists that they have a comfort level with? http://www.google.com/search?q=harvard+mansfield That will continue the , "Long March Through The Institutions, " ("Red Rudi" Dutschke phrase for '68 generation "growing up" and seeking to win that Gramscian war of ideas) rather than abstain from fighting the Right and pushing the Centrists leftwards.
If the Left and liberalism, more broadly, is so much weaker than it should be given our domination of many public high schools and public universities curricula, when it comes to decisions that those who bother to vote make on which pols will represent us, as I get older, I agree w/ more and those that like Daniel Bell in, "Marxian Socialism in the U.S., " (see the reprint w. the intro by Michael Kazin) that whatever the repression of COINTELPRO and the Palmer Raids and sending a thousand Wobblies to the Arizona desert to die and all the rest, (see the novel, "Bisbee."), which has been severe (see, "The War Against Labor and The Left, " by Sexton, the Ward Churchill anthology, "Political Repression In Modern America, " by Goldstein, if memory serves, "The Seamy Side of Democracy, " by Alan Wolfe, " the books by Frank Donner such as, "Protectors of Privilege Red Squads and Police Repression in Urban America, " I'd have to say that too many leftists cannot/will not examine the faults internal to the AmeriKKKan left, in our sectarian pig-headedness and disingenuous evasions of when the idiots and thugs on the left have betrayed left ideals, both here and abroad. And invoking the more than obvious crimes and greater slaughters of the USG is never gonna hide the fact that not taking a careful, soul- searching inventory of what we have gotten wrong in the past in the name of fighting the greater enemy and, "Unity on the Left, " "No Enemies On The Left, " always invoked by those w/ the longest knives, lowest ethics and often the biggest trust funds
https://ssl.tnr.com/p/docsub.mhtml?i=20031103&s=wolfe110303&e=1 Teach Your Children by Alan Wolfe Family Circle : The Boudins and the Aristocracy of the Left -- Susan Braudy (Author); Hardcover
who can browbest those of us born w/o such advantages, makes me livid. As y'all can tell. Michael, League of Militant Menshevik Mambo Dancers (M-L-M) Heh, multi- level marketing...can I sell you some Amway products? Or a copy of Socialist Worker or Revolutionary Worker? (Loyal reader that I am of the PWW and RWOR and Workers Vanguard, Thomas Seay to me on Turkey Day, slyly 'sez, "How many of these rags you read?!") Too many...Thomas and Ian and Doug and Shane... http://www.timwohlforth.com/edge.html On the Edge. On the Edge: Political Cults Right and Left By Dennis Tourish and Tim Wohlforth
-- Michael Pugliese American imperialism has been made plausible and attractive in part by the insistence that it is not imperialistic. Harold Innis, 1948 http://www.monthlyreview.org/sr2004.htm