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This is just an open letter on several topics...
No kidding. You can only get away with that with very tight friends who have known you through thick and thin. Otherwise its very hard not to take, ugly fuck, as an insult.I've seen ravi's picture and he is an attractive man, probably a great dad and husband. So it never would cross my mind.
What is this about? Indian guilt? Okay, you're an ugly fuck who lives in Jersey. So there!
I've learned that the famed Jewish guilt is near universal. It just takes different forms. There is an Irish guilt. There is an English guilt. There is Italian guilt.There is New England guilt..There's a Mexican guilt. There is a Black guilt. There is a Chinese guilt. There is a Japanese guilt.. J and Wojtek introduced me to East European guilt. I've yet to form a clear picture of Russian guilt. I'll need that someday, on list lets loose.
I watched what Arab guilt looks like. It was a radical woman who organized the first big demo in Cairo by lecturing the men to be men leaders and show up. I laughed out load. She was very good at it. Waving her finger and everything.
Everybody has one of these psychological systems that takes the place of corporal punishment.
I preferred corporal punishment as a kid. Just beat my little ass and get it over with. That months long shit is worse.
Hopefully on a amusing note. I've been trying to remember where I first heard cunt. I was twelve. This was advanced swearing as a graduate seminar.
It was my mother. She had quite a tongue. After a couple of double shots her construction worker self came out. She had said it about another woman. I think one of her supervisiors from work. I got the idea it was a word not to be used by men. It always seemed like a special reserve word for use by women only.
To keep her calm, I used to ask her about herself as a girl and young woman. She usually had some slightly off color story with a joke buried in there. I've often wondered what made her so angry. I think I know now.
She grew up in an era 1920s-30s when women were not expected to go to college. And if they managed, it was for school teacher (which she was) or nurse. They had special schools in Utah, called Normal Schools where she went to get her teaching degree. California didn't recognize these as equivalent to a BA. So she had to repeat the upper division course work.
She had originally wanted to be a doctor, so in California she started back in pre-med and naturally UCB flunked her out with organic chemistry in the late 1930s. They had a lot of reasons to move from SF to LA.
Just as I was becoming a teenager, she got a dream job, teaching kids in the county hospital system for long term care, i.e. childhood TB. She wanted me to be a doctor. Your kidding? She was saddened a lot. But cheers mom, your grandson is a doctor. I wish her some happiness in the flow of dreams.
More than fifty years later the damned chemistry dept was at the same game when her grandson went through. A woman chemist is still a rare find. But we do have women doctors.
BTW, I watched the video and it was good to hear McNally put events into a solid marxist historical context. He made a point about Marx seeing the 1848 revolution and 1871 commune. I was struck almost immediately when I first started to try and read Marx. This guy has been to see the revolution, or mass collective events that can rise on their own to confront power.
I am not sure McNally made this point-connection clear enough. What he saw was what I saw. Ordinary people were organizing the social institutions themselves in Taquir.
I think the point to talking about the proletariat has changed is an important one. I could see an interesting unity in Egypt between some of the younger working class who did and didn't go to school beyond high school. There was some very good solidarity there, and very little potential for clashes over self-interest. .
It's going to take a lot of work to build that kind of solidarity in the US. It might come on its own as more and more people get caught up in the grinding machine of capital on steroids, aka neoliberalism.