I'm on leave this term so I should be more relaxed. It's not happening.
How is it that the supremely politically correct will choose to make working conditions harder on those less fortunate? An ongoing issue in academia is treatment of 'contingent' faculty (such a harsh term; it occludes the forces, the choices, that collude in the production and maintenance of dead-end jobs, dead-end jobs for Ph.Ds with mountains of debt, dead-end jobs that themselves amplify their own dead-end-ed-ness, zombie jobs, jobs that make zombies; contingent--it hides exactly what is contingent upon what, making us neglect the way that what is contingent upon X is dependent on X, determined by X). Some of the privileged convince ourselves that increasing the workload on contingent faculty is just a necessary condition of these hard times; really, they are lucky even to have jobs; really, we are doing them favors--aren't we the best? aren't we so good, so pc, so righteous? They choose to work here. They choose these jobs (nothing worse than nominally Marxists who preach market salvation). We are already paying them. Such events convince me ever more that class is the (deliberately) neglected condition (as well as the precondition) of the politically correct. Support every identity, but not the working conditions, no way, no how. It's hard to love people who are worried about money, work, labor time. They seem greedy, too earthy, materialist; they make me feel uneasy. It's easy to love victims of past injustices--we don't have to do anything but be indignant.
It's not quite the end of the world. I finally saw 2012. I liked it more than I expected. I didn't realize that the world didn't end. Just civilization. Just our world. So the survivors get to start over, make amends, build something else. Can't change with the people we have. No way, no how. Gotta start fresh. Kill 'em all. Let God sort 'em out--or contingency. We are the people who cannot imagine a new world with us in it; we have become people with no future because we cannot imagine a future populated with the people we have become. We can't imagine getting out of this place.
Zombies and vampires. The walking dead and the blood-suckers. A devastated planet. An increasingly cancerous system--literally, it gives people cancer and funds cancer awareness groups to insure that they will make people unaware of carcinogens in the environment.
Deadlocks. Dead ends. Everywhere I look there are unbearable stand-offs. People who are defensive and agreed, self-righteous, irrational. It's almost as if the end of the Bush administration as cloaked the crazies in righteousness and left the rest of us adrift in the numbing inertia of spin. Gotta hang on to something. Anything.
Prisoners' dilemma. If we are all trapped, that's the game we play. And we play it like economists and psycotics.
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