From: LeoCasey-AT-aol.com
Date: Fri, 16 Feb 1996 22:18:05 -0500
Subject: Shining Path Ain't Shinola


I have just gotten tired of that ceaseless play "Waiting for the Digest" and
signed on for the regular function, with (alas) a blizzard of postings.

And it seems like everything is just where it was when the digest collapsed.
I tried to catch up on the archives, but they don't go much past what I had
seen when the play began.

I would like to comment on the complaints to Carlos about his use of the
'shining shit' appellation. I admit that there is something rhetorically
repetitive and thus inevitably boring about the way in which Carlos employs
the term, but I also think that there is something in the Shining Path which
naturally gives birth to the scatological imagery. To wit, I must confess
that I wrote and posted the following rejoinder which seems to have gotten
lost in the 'digest collapse'.

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Louis G. writes:
Leo, if there is one thing I have noticed about you, it is your (un)enviable
talent of utilizing reductio ad absurdem to ideas you find unpalatable. Your
pithy moralizing is particularly offensive; "morals" are not platonic,
pre-existing ideas; rather, they emerge out of the struggle between groups
and classes. 

Leo:
Some ideas just start out as absurd; you can't reduce the irreducible.
Frankly, this Shining Path shit makes me feel a rush of Uncle Lou Proyectese
coming on; at times, I am positively Dumainesque when I sit before the
keyboard. I just want to say "Take your head out of your ass and clean the
shit our of your eyes" when I see these pathetic, mind-numbing rationales for
organized political murder.

Louis G.:
In reading of your "students'" analysis of constitutional
issues, my first thought was, "I'm glad you're not my teacher."

Leo:
Well that makes two of us. Come to think of it, I don't think my students
would be very pleased either to find an apologist for organized political
murder in their midst either.

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Now, Uncle Lou, can you understand why you might be a source of inspiration
at these moments? Isn't Carlos' real crime not the use of the scatological,
but  the lack of rhetorical imagination which afflicts the sectarian, such
that a middling line is beaten into the earth with constant use? I mean, he's
such a died in the wool Trot that even when you are on the same side of the
question, you want to loosen him up a bit.

But one thing I know for sure: Shining Path ain't no shinola.



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