l'il mni and the big, bad class war

l'il mni and the big, bad class war
Topic started by neembu on Mar 29, 2008 10:18:04 am
L’il Mniphirsay and the Big, Bad, Class War

A week ago, I ran across one of my fave advice columnists online, Cary Tennis and his exchange with a young adult gay MFA grad considering doctorate programs. I posted it because the advice seeker asked good questions about the US uni ranking system and because Tennis’s response did not mince words and spoke authentically to the frameworks, experiences and contemporary debates taking place in academia among those who can critically engage with these issues. Tennis did something you don’t see often and what was received by l'il mni with as much outrage as rightwing and unchallenged bigots like Pat Buchanan to a poorly decontextualized and extrapolated sound bite of ex Marine Rev. J. Wright: apparently his *** began to burn.

Why did l’il mniphirsay’s *** begin to burn? Dear reader, perhaps it was because l’il mni is filled with creamy goodness and does not like to be told otherwise. What’s “creamy goodness”? you ask. In the tradition of that great misogynist Socrates, I will tell you, my daughters of Plato: artificial ingredients and filler, the only truly newly Americanized citizen substance. By the way, l’il mni, mubarak on your citizenship. Hopefully, when you’ve recovered from your brain arresting gratitude, you’ll be able to talk to other Americans coherently.

But back to our discourse, dear reader. Apparently, l’il mni was incensed by my daring to post Tennis’s fairly accurate response, so incensed that he could not actually engage any of Tennis’s references or facts. Let me recall them for him and you. Tennis pointed out the advice seeker that the history of higher education itself has been one predicated on class privilege. Anyone who knows anything about the purposes of higher education (which clearly excludes l’il mni) understands that it’s predominant function was to groom the sons of landed gentry for governing roles in business which included not only the independence of the original colonies from Britain, but also the development, practice and exploitation of the Atlantic Slave Trade, (which I’m sure l’il mni finds so poignant that it has because l’il more than a side note in an Obama speech) to now. If l’il mni cares to read the narratives of Frederick Douglass, perhaps he would learn that literacy for Af Am enslaved people was made illegal. “Illegal!?” you say? (In my imaginings dear reader, you are endearingly inquisitive, an ideal thinker)Yes, illegal from the Stoneboro Incident and combatted to Jim Crow and Brown vs. Board of Education. One might find a Phillis Wheatley who had to prove her and thus the intellectual genius of Af Ams before Thomas Jefferson, and other sons of this exact gentry. L’il mni’s big mistake is to assume that somehow the American educational system is not in inherently classist structure, or to just ignore it and be grateful for the crumbs thrown outside the gilded nest of ivy league offspring. The university (or some did more than others) opened it's doors to "non traditional students" (women, working class people, veterans, immigrants) in the seventies, a potentially revolutionary result of some of the great work of the counterculture sixties.

Poor l’il mni did not understand the distinction that Tennis made b/n the privilege and aesthetic of the existentialist crises that melodramatic green face powder wearing queen T.S. Eliot documented in his poems and the truly egalitarian, truly visionary scope of that other queen Walt Whitman. Someone inform l’il mni that before he dares bakwas about a field he knows even l’itler about, he’d better be ready to get called on it. Scholars place geniuses like the aforementioned Douglass and Whitman within the category of true American literature precisely because they were able to transcend the limitations of vision of this privileged American framework in innumerable ways within their lives and their work. But far be it from me to cast pearls before swine, being such a “middling” scholar. Perhaps we are better off letting the new citizens of America parrot these to the manor born phrases.

What is even funnier is that the anon interactor l’il mni gives us, like in obama’s race speech a l’il girl who gets to go to ivy league. Through some ajeeb reasoning process, l’il mni thinks that pointing out the reality of the class structure of the higher educational system means that we begrude those students who are able to make into the ivy leagues. That somehow we mean to “destroy excellence”. Dear reader, even I cannot follow the tenuous line of this logic which sounds suspiciously like a variation of “the commies are storming the Bastille!” without an iota of ironic acknowledgement. What’s more it is a particularly clueless set of notions to accuse academia of since it’s most interesting thinkers labor towards knowledge systems that value leveling the playing field, not through the devaluation of the ivies, but through the deliverance of course and curricula that support rigorous scholarship without private grants, library and lab wings from America’s wealthiest families, without the self interested largesse of pharmaceutical grants. Almost impossible, you say? But that’s the reality of what we are dealing with.

I can’t verify the claims of lil mni’s girl who got into the ivy league, if such a story is true. But I can verify a truth that should, if l’il mni has a shred of decency, curdle his blood. At our college, the only doctorate program available for working class students and which has enrolled and graduated several brilliant students was denied federal funding for the next few years. Would it be cynical to observe that “our students” are meant for fighting for oil and not their own educations? Do you think that class war does not exist every day in the lives of million of ordinary people? Shame on you for you ridiculous b*, l'il mni.