yah. I find it fascinating, the question of what counts as real leftist work, and the demand to get things done. I go into a lefty space, and I feel like I never left my job! Which is why I responded with the question about measuring output. It's exactly the kind of question you'd expect to have asked of you on the job... yay!
Was quickly skimming through a book I found on the new book shelf at the library yesterday, _Nerds_ (David Anderegg - would sorta recommend it as light reading and/or for someone with a nerdy kid). In it, the author traces anti-intellectualism in American life, pointing back to Emerson who felt that ministers who merely read books and wrote about them were third-rate and probably shouldn't reproduce. heh.
Maybe our first macho macho man diatribe, this: "Meek young men grow up in libraries, believing it their duty to accept the views, which Cicero, which Locke, which Bacon, have given, forgetful that Cicero, Locke, and Bacon were only young men in libraries ... bookworm(s)."
Not to be too harsh, but books are OK, Emerson relents a bit later in his address entitled "The American Scholar." Still, it's just not as good as reading "god directly" (by which emerson is referring to Transcendentalism I suspect) and as "we all know": "the human body can be nourished on any food, though it were boiled grass and the broth of shoes, so the human mind can be fed by any knowledge."
not only that, men who think are really women according to the gospel of the day:
"The so-called 'practical men' sneer at speculative men, as if, because they speculate or see, they could do nothing. I have heard it said that the clergy" (scholars of their day) "are addressed as women; that the rough, spontaneous conversation of men they do not hear, but only a mincing and diluted speech.
quoting Hofstadter, "As the two sides fashoined the public images of the candidates (the contest between Adams and Jackson), aristocracy was paired with sterile intellect, and democracy with native intuition and the power to act."
>On Wed, Sep 17, 2008 at 2:37 PM, Chris Doss <lookoverhere1 at yahoo.com> wrote:
>
> >
> > I hazard a guess that what was meant is that more people in the US are
> > responsive to ideas couched in Christian concepts than in Marxist ones.
> > Which is almost certainly true.
> >
> > --- On Wed, 9/17/08, heartfield at blueyonder.co.uk <
> > heartfield at blueyonder.co.uk> wrote:
> > >
> > > In pie-charts in the sky? Angels dancing per head of pin?
> > > In St Peter's
> > > Scales?
> >
> >
> >
> >
> > ___________________________________
> > http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/mailman/listinfo/lbo-talk
> >
>___________________________________
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