> Not centurions, really - they're officers. We're trained to be loyal
> to our commanders and scared of external threats.
Probably the division of labor used to be, university life was officer training, and high school was boot camp. It's a little more complex today, but not that much more complex.
I'm thinking a lot these days about Mordor, a.k.a. the US Empire -- its brutal rise and its pathological decline. (Must be all the zombie videogames I'm playing - sharpens the ideological sensors... plus this Adorno translation).
I'm thinking about how my own background -- as a privileged, white upper middle class male professional-in-training -- was conditioned, on so many levels, by the Empire. Its mediatic surplus, its brutal wars, its maximum efficiency and minimal morality. Unconsciously molding, shaping, forming.
How this reaches into people's minds. How whiteness = maleness = Empire. What does it mean to be under occupation from the day of one's birth. To dream the Empire's dreams.
To be exiled from my own profession. Universities I'll never work at. Classes I'll never teach. Because the servants of Empire -- with painfully few exceptions -- have been taught to prefer the solidity of woe to the frailest sign of weal.
Caliban was a Comparatist. I've been taught theory-language, and my profit on't is to curse.
So I curse thee, Empire.
-- DRR