Episode 1437
Fire and the modern world / Daniel Immerwahr
Feb 10 2022
I, when you look at the, the different versions of this narrative, whether it's in say, uh, uh, the, the books of, uh, James Lindsay, um, who's antiwar warrior or all, all the films of people who were kind of involved, uh, in the Tea Party movement, you'll see that there are, there, there are some, uh, historical facts, uh, involved there about really the, the, the unraveling of, um, sort of post-war American order, the, the sort of, uh, the new deal order that was, you know, sort of hastened by, uh, uh, uh, by Reaganism and the kind of cultural norms that emerge from that.
So I think that these different, um, conservative and reactionary intellectuals are, [00:21:00] um, responding. To really a, a, a crisis of a certain, uh, um, uh, arrangement of American national life. But I think that the, um, uh, the blaming of it on, um, sort of cultural deviance like the Frankfurt School or, or on work professors, it, it, um, means that they kind of can distract people from sort of more structural or more economic factors.
intellectual historian A.J.A. Woods, author of, The Cultural Marxism Conspiracy: Why the Right Blames the Frankfurt School for the Decline of the West (Verso Books) discusses their book on the day it is published. A.J.A.’s writings on conspiracy theories and reactionary politics have been translated into four languages and appeared in Open Democracy, Patterns of Prejudice, and Marx & Philosophy Review of Books.
"Rotten History" from Renaldo Migaldi follows the interview.
After all that, we receive an update from Loyola University Chicago SEIU 73 Faculty Forward co-chair Paige Warren about next steps bargaining for a fair contract... read more
Deborah Goodman
Apr 15
Labor Struggle in Higher Ed: An Update from Loyola University Chicago SEIU 73 Faculty Forward Union
Follow
Weekly Mailing List
New interviews every Monday
Feb 3 2022
Posted by Matthew Boedy
Welcome to the Moment of Truth: the wooden stake that is the hammer. Very difficult to use.
It snuck up on us one day while we were listening to Pete Seeger and reading the diary of Anne Frank, and listening to Bessie Smith and reading Edward Said, and listening to Chumbawamba and reading Frantz Fanon. The agents of rot swarmed in. They came at night. They used the silence and darkness to conceal their purpose and their protocols.
Or, maybe it was obvious. You were listening to Martin Luther King, Jr. inspiring you to action against the smug, violent, comfortable bosses, leaders, and owners. The FBI and the Ku Klux Klan could be plainly seen hovering around him, making threats that had nowhere to go but into execution. And then he was killed. Everyone was getting assassinated except the people who really needed assassinating. They were cruisin’ for an assassinatin’. They were clammoratin’ for an assassinatin’. They were dunning for a gunning. But they never got it. Only the decent people did, plus John F. Kennedy.
Rachel Carson, Joe Hill, W.E.B. du Bois, Jacques Cousteau, Virginia Wolfe, Malcolm X, Eugene V. Debs, Shirley Chisholm, Fanny Lou Hamer, Ho Chi Minh, did they all live in vain? Were they all killed by werewolves? The current thinking is that they were. Were they all killed by the same werewolf? Current theories say, “probably.” Does that mean they all live on as werewolves now? Yes. E.O. Wilson recently became a werewolf, in case you missed it.
What exactly is a werewolf? A lot of ignorant people will try to tell you. On a podcast called “Supernatural,” a not-very-persuasive voice named Ashley Flowers tried and did a crap job. She began by asserting that “we always cast extremely attractive men to play them in movies, like Michael J Fox, Hugh Jackman, and Taylor Lautner.”
Okay, Michael J. Fox was in Teen Wolf. Taylor Lautner was in that Twilight garbage. Hugh Jackman? Is she mistaking Wolverine for a werewolf because of his suggestive facial hair? No, right, he was a werewolf in Van Helsing. I didn’t remember that either.
The writer of that first clause, “We always cast extremely attractive men to play them in movies,” must have a pop culture memory the depth of Zambonied fruit leather. The original actor to play the Universal pictures wolfman was Lon Chaney, Jr., not a glamorous ingenu by any measure. Actually, downright... read more
Feb 3 2022
Jan 31 2022