Date: Mon, 19 Aug 1996 16:33:08 -0400 (EDT)
From: louisgodena-AT-ids.net (Louis R Godena)
Subject: Re: a revolution of knives and forks?




        
>Aside to Carrol Cox:  I find it curious that a CPUSA
>member would consider my questioning a Trotskyist about whether
>The Big T could have avoided bureaucracy during centrally planned
>industrialization anymore than could The Big S as evidence of
>"platonic Marxism" or "fascism."   I think that you had better
>give Big Gus a call at the office.
>Barkley Rosser

Mr Rosser,

For the --nth time,  Carrol Cox is not a member of the CPUSA,   a fact for
which we are both, each in our own way,  thankful.

Waxing nostalgic,  I can say that we have had quite a few Profess--er,
teachers in our time,  however.    I was reading a new biography of Daniel
J. Boorstin,  late of the University of Chicago, and,  later still,  our own
Librarian of Congress.     Dan had been a Party member back in the forties,
when he was at Harvard,  and taught at the Samuel Adams School--the Party
Center and bookstore--along with the likes of Granville Hicks,  F.O.
Mathieson,  Robert Gorham Davis,  and Wendell Furry.     Of course he later
recanted,  though with more aplomb and with greater urging than did,  say,
Eugene Genovese and other former "radicals" of the Beat Generation.
Indeed,  Genovese's graceless,  sniveling unctuousity very much sets the
tone for the 90s academic,  whose motto,  if inscribed on a banner, would
surely recall that of the NPR crowd: "The Best Lack All Conviction". 

Then of course,  there is Dirk Struik,  the embattled MIT Professor,  who
fought tooth and nail against both the US and the Commonwealth of
Massachusetts for a decade (finally "exonerated" by the Supreme Court in the
Steve Nelson case in 1956),  who remained unbowed throughout the most
frightful and intimidating era in our modern history,  and who,  on the
recent occasion of his 100th birthday anniversary,  read from the Communist
Manifesto at the Annual Convention of the Massachusetts CP.

What a contrast between him and those who, in their "puerile" fashion,  go
sucking after academia all throughout  their ugly,  graceless lives in
pursuit of their impecunious, shitty careers,  forever reminding us in their
mousy, nasalized little voices that,  indeed,   THEY would never dirty their
hands in any political organization that actually went out and did
something.    Instead,  it is endless seminars,  and papers,  and articles,
and conferences, and...and.

Fucking assholes.



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