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Wednesday, January 26, 2005
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THE MIGHTY ENGINE OF PROFIT
It’s not that hard to be happy (to continue the theme of the post directly below). Not as long as the Kirkland Project at Hamilton College exists. You can sort of trace their line of thought at Kirkland. Having failed to appoint Susan Rosenberg (see UD, 11/13/04 and 12/8/04), they sought revenge upon the New York City policemen and others who blocked her appointment. They came up with the idea of bringing to campus a professor of ethnic studies at the University of Colorado who will discuss an essay in which he writes that because the people in the World Trade Towers on September 11 worked for “the mighty engine of profit,” they were not “innocent civilians” but “little Eichmanns.” One look at Kirkland’s latest find tells you what Kirkland sees in him. Kirkland’s tactic has worked. People are again upset. A Hamilton College spokesman says: “To deny students the opportunity to encounter people outside the academic community is to fail to provide a liberal education.” UD finds this a peculiar statement. The latest Kirkland find is not from outside the academy, but is a department chair. If the spokesman means outside the academic mainstream, there’s nothing more mainstream than professors using language that would make Leonid Brezhnev blush in order to denounce capitalism and deconstruct its sponsor: "I don’t want other people in charge of the apparatus of the state as the outcome of a socially transformative process that replicates oppression. I want the state gone: transform the situation to U.S. out of North America. U.S. off the planet. Out of existence altogether. …[So] let’s just start with territoralities often delineated in treaties of fact—territoralities of 500 indigenous nations imbued with an inalienable right to self-determination, definable territoralities which are jurisdictionally separate. Then you’ve got things like the internal diasporic population of African Americans in internal colonies that have been established by the imposition of labor patterns upon them. You’ve got Appalachian whites. Since the U.S. unilaterally violated its treaty obligations, it forfeits its rights—or presumption of rights—under international law. Basically, you’ve got a dismantlement and devolution of the U.S. territorial and jurisdictional corpus into something that would be more akin to diasporic self-governing entities and a multiplicity of geographical locations." The mighty profit engine currently values these sorts of comments at about a dime a dozen. But will Kirkland’s strategy backfire? Sure, they’re smiling now, they got a little of their own back … But what happens next? If the free market’s maw chews this guy up and spits him out the way it did Rosenberg, then what? There’s really only one Contestant Number Three, UD thinks, and she should be available in six months or so. |