Change

I've always been a reader.

Got my start reading the funnies in the Guelph Daily Mercury in the late fifties.

Eventually got to the two Pauls, de Man and Feyerabend. I especially liked Feyerabend.

In the popular rendering of working class folks, we're a bunch of semi-literate yobs. There's an element of truth to that.

But there's always been a strong community of readers among us.

Like Johnny, who managed to get through most of the Globe and Mail crossword puzzle every day for thirty years. At work.

Or Andy, the pipefitter at Irving's shipyard in Saint John who happened to hold a degree in German Literature.

Or Dudley, who worked the pipe-bender at Kearney National during the week and partied with Johnny Wayne and Frank Shuster on the weekend.

I'm still reading. Mostly I read stuff on my laptop these days, but I still indulge the luxury of the printed page from time to time. Like when the internet goes down.

Which is why I happened to pick up a copy of The New Yorker this evening and read about the legacy of the Sackler family. That legacy includes hundreds of thousands of opiod OD deaths and hundreds of millions in philanthropic gifts.

The two are intimately related.

That's the second time in a month I've read a mainstream take-down of the Sacklers.

And the mainstream has been busier than I could ever have imagined dismantling the legacy of Weinstein and his myriad fellow travellers.

Who ever imagined such a thing?

What's next?

A New Yorker critique of US foreign policy?

A NYT disavowal of capitalism?

A WaPo editorial slamming the occupation of the West Bank?


We are on the cusp of great changes.

Hold on to your hat... and keep reading.

Counterpunch and the great "tits" scandal

I have a hunch that the folks at Counterpunch are more than pleased to have a scandal of any sort.

Mostly they publish left-friendly diatribes for the benefit of a choir that's already converted. There's never a scandal because nobody who would be scandalized reads Counterpunch in the first place.

But apparently they stepped in one with a recent essay by Ruth Fowler. She used the word "tits."

Oh-oh!

One of the first references to the "scandal" was this effort.

Brecht.

Deleuze.

Guattari

Nietzsche.

Derrida... Holy fuck! I thought I'd time travelled back to a fourth year critical thinking seminar!

But the Sophist makes an important point, one that I have in my own small way been trying to make on this blog.

Here is the evil truth about political correctitude; the more we hew to what is "politically correct," the easier it is for those with real power to pretend that everything is OK, progress is progressing, and history is unfolding as it should.

Just as an example, we all dutifully avoid the use of the n-word today. This comforts many people. Oddly enough, those it comforts least are the black-skinned people who continue to suffer a systemic racism readily evident in incarceration stats, poverty stats, education stats, you name it.

Same with the Towellers. The Towel-heads are deemed to harbor some irrational hatred of our freedoms, an irrational hatred that has given rise to al-Qaeda and a thousand other manifestations of anti-Western psychosis, when in reality this hatred is driven by the last hundred years of having the virtuous West steal their resources and murder their children.

Not so irrational when you look at it in that light.

I was sorry that the Sophist didn't include Paul de Man on his reading list. Reading de Man's writings on reading gave me a boner, and still does, which is remarkable in itself.

In fact, I momentarily considered writing a blog-post titled "niggers and tits" just to capitalize on this wave of anti-PCness.

But de Man besmirched himself with the aura of antisemitism, and that remains a bridge too far, even for the Sophist.