And self-aware. Instead of berating myself and feeling guilty for playing a juvenile Fashion Story game on my Kindle, I remember that playing the game allows me to employ a non-destructive, positive coping strategy that gets me through the last 2 weeks of the semester with zero stress.

The only problem is that I have to make sure students don’t see me decorate a fashion store on my Kindle because I’m not prepared to educate them about coping strategies.

I wrote the following on a student’s essay (in Spanish) and decided to quote myself on my blog to preserve these ideas for humanity:

Dear Jack,

every language is a universe of its own. In order to speak a language, understand it and write well in it, it is not enough to pass through on a package tour that only allows you to see the exciting world of a language from the window of a bus. You have to become a citizen (or, at least, a permanent resident) of this strange and fascinating universe. You have to gain an understanding of the laws that govern it.

No language is exactly alike another language. It isn’t possible to find an exact, word-for-word rendering of any sentence or paragraph. If you write a sentence in English and then look up every single word in a Spanish dictionary, you will not end up with a meaningful sentence in Spanish. All you will create will be a sad jumble of meaningless words that refuse to comw together in a coherent whole.

Cliff Arroyo asked the following important question about something I said in a previous post:

Clarissa: According to the Soviet mentality, making money is the only goal a human being should have, and no sacrifice is too big to achieve it.

Cliff: Is that part of the Soviet mentality or the post-Soviet mentality (or a hybrid, part of what destroyed the Soviet Union and which guaranteed that the successor states would have lots of problems)?

The problem with communism is that it needs to put something in place of personal gain to motivate people. In the 1920s, the Soviet leadership used the enthusiasm of the people and their pride to be part of something they thought was good to motivate them to work. This kind of enthusiasm (that in our culture we call “naked enthusiasm”, as in the enthusiasm that is based on nothing real) can only be sustained for a short period of time.

In 1930s, the motivating factor was the terror. Again, this is not something you can sustain for a very long time unless the demographic conditions really permit that. The Soviet Republics were not China, so that motivation had to go quite soon. When both naked enthusiasm and intense fear disappear as motivating factors, profound cynicism sets in.

In the case of the USSR, the development of cynicism  as a world-view and a way of life was intensified by WWII. Soldiers who were in the war, as well as the many people who had been forcefully removed to Germany to work (especially from Ukraine and Belarus), finally had a chance to see how other European countries lived and the level of well-being they enjoyed. Even after Europe was destroyed by the war, it was still pretty obvious that the German, Belgian, French, etc. farmers had a much higher standard of living than Ukrainian peasants. This realization that the Soviet propaganda was lying about the misery of capitalist countries contributed to the growing cynicism.

As a result, the cynical mentality which lauded the accumulation of material goods as the only acceptable and respectable interest one could have came into existence in the USSR at the end of WWII. This is when deep class divisions began to set in. The party apparatchiks and the folks who served their needs enjoyed a degree of material well-being that regular people could not even begin to imagine. By the 1970s, when the generation that still remembered the enthusiasm and the faith of the 1920s started to die out, the cynicism became wide-spread and overwhelming.

When the USSR finally collapsed in 1991, people started getting access to such a wide variety of goods that were being imported from the West that the materialistic streak could only become more pronounced. In the 1990s, I saw people abandon all morality in a search for money and things to such a degree that it was painful to watch. Folks who used to be intellectuals would demand bribes, swindle their closest friends, and descend to such moral lows that it was scary to watch. A friend from college back in Ukraine stole an amount of money that was quite insignificant to her from me just because she could. When I confronted her, she felt extremely self-righteous and accused me of making it too easy for her to steal the money. This was the most religious and “spiritual” of all my friends.

As I shared before, I did not emigrate from my country in search of a better economic situation. I sacrificed a higher standard of living in return for a much lower one that I encountered in North America, and I did that consciously. It was the cynicism that I was escaping from. The sad life where people’s eyes glaze over when you try to talk about anything but things you have bought or want to buy, the impossibility of finding anybody who has any sort of political convictions, the incapacity to trust even the closest friends not to swindle you or steal from you.

P.S. I really like it when people ask questions. This is a hint. Wink, wink.

Want even more proof that the fetus-whisperers don’t really give a crap about “murdered babies” and that their anti-choice beliefs are about controlling women and nothing else whatsoever?

There is a community of actual baby-murderers who kill babies on a regular basis. This is not a community you would have ever heard about from the anti-choice fanatics. Getting justice for actual victims and preventing the deaths of real babies (as opposed to the removal of tiny clusters of cells) is of no interest to them whatsoever.

Just ask yourself why is it that, amongst all the hysteria produced by the anti-choice fetus-worshippers, this tragic issue is never addressed. Also ask yourself why it is that you never heard of this community or given it a second thought.

Now that you have pondered the issue, here is the baby-murdering community I’m talking about.

I saw the idea for this post at Feministe and I really like it.

Which is your all-time favorite post on Clarissa’s Blog? Or several all-time favorite posts?

You can mention the least favorite posts, too.

It’s OK if you don’t have time to search for a link. Just tell me what the post was about and I can find it myself.

College Misery published this hilarious and scary letter:

This parent is worried. The Student has one of those Unfortunate schedules and one of those Intractable (but hot, according to RMP) fascists, I mean teachers who is making that Thanksgiving getaway darned near impossible. The only way for the Student to get out of Uni town is Greyhound… the Student will arrive at the Crossroads of America (NY Port Authority) at Midnight, because hot teacher INSISTS ALL Students attend afternoon class or be penalized grade wise. The Student is worried…. The Parent ? The Parent is mighty pissed.

So, can you good folks send me to a place where I can vent ? Where what I have to say may actually make a difference? Because I know that the Student is going to be miserable for the short time the Student is home. And so, really, the Parent wonders if having a day of Thanks is really appropriate, when the Student will still be recovering from the trip home and will be resentful in that surly vacant way that students are these days… The Parent is even beginning to wonder about the wisdom of letting the Student attend an Out of State Instituion. Maybe the Parent should have said… “No Way..” Our State or No State… One would think State Schools would be Overjoyed to have Out of State Students and that they would care if these $$$$$ machines are happy…

Maybe the Professors would like to ponder this. Do you ever think about the folks who essentially pay your salaries? Do you have any feelings for your “employers” and their offspring (besides contempt ?) I mean, do you like being a College Professor ? (I admit it, I read just some of the blog…) Can you honestly tell me that we are getting our money’s worth, or do you teach to support your_______________ habit ?

Just curious…

Here’s hoping you get that well deserved rest you need over the Thanksgiving break…

The Not Happy Parent…

I’m too tired to respond to this unhinged rant from a person who believes that teachers who follow the terms of their contracts and teach when the university requires them to teach are fascists. There are really great responses to this weirdo on the College Misery site. All I can say is that it would be a lot easier for me to get the students to understand why a baseball game or nice weather don’t mean it’s OK to miss a class if the noise from helicopter blades were a little less deafening.

Dear Mommies and Daddies! If you think that the best way to instill the values of responsibility and maturity in your adult children is to tell them that a teacher who expects them to work on a work day is a fascist, I can only wish you the best of luck with trying to get your off-spring to move out of your house by the time your precious baby turns 45.

Anon left the link to an absolutely hilarious article on 50 Shades of Grey. Here is how it begins:

 I think the real force behind this “Fifty Shades” phenomenon is that our society is clamoring for closeness. However, in the absence of genuine sexual intimacy (best defined as “in-to-me-see”), we settle for sexual intensity: erotica, pornography, an office romance, an extramarital affair or whatever strokes the ego and provides the sexual high we crave.

Sexually miserable prudes always see sex as a consolation prize for losers who can’t get the real prize, which is intimacy. Sadly, instead of visiting a sexopathologist, people who suffer from this problem choose to make the outpourings of their unhealthiness embarrassingly public. The really funny thing is that such folks have absolutely no idea what intimacy actually is. For them, it’s getting somebody to service the exaggerated emotional needs they generate as a result of their sexual dissatisfaction in return for rare and miserable sex acts.

The article’s author proceeds to demonstrate what growing up in an extremely prudish environment does to one:

I suggest that sexual intensity (such as that experienced between the lead characters of the “Fifty Shades” trilogy) is simply not the same as intimacy. If it were, then prostitutes and porn stars would be the most emotionally and relationally fulfilled people on the planet. That doesn’t seem to be the case.

The elephant in the room that this sexually ignorant author is missing is an orgasm. Prostitutes and porn stars offer their bodies to let others achieve sexual pleasure. What prevents them from being the most sexually fulfilled people on the planet is the incapacity to privilege their own sexual fulfillment in sex.

As for emotional and relational fulfillment, anybody who seeks it through sex is a profoundly unhealthy, miserable individual who needs to get urgent psychological help. Just like it’s unhealthy to eat to fulfill your emotional needs, it is unhealthy to have sex to achieve non-sexual purposes. There is absolutely no difference between the author of this piece who uses sex to pursue emotional and relational goals and a prostitute who uses it to reach financial goals. Both people are selling their sexual health in return for something that their disastrous upbringing has convinced them matters more than their sexual realization. Shannon Ethridge, the author of this embarrassing article, likes to see herself as superior to prostitutes. She is vastly inferior in terms of self-awareness to any sex worker, however, since she is not even aware of being a sex-peddler.

Well, what can you expect form a person who is so sexually repressed that she has to explain the sexual needs of humans as a search for God:

Regardless of gender, age, race, political views, economic status, etc., all humans have two things in common: We are both spiritual and sexual beings. And behind every sexual longing, I believe there’s an even deeper spiritual longing.

One would hope that we would all be, first and foremost, thinking beings who don’t write such ridiculous things but, apparently, this is not to be.

Shannon Ethridge vaguely perceives that something is deeply wrong with her vision of sexuality which is why she creates throughout the article lists of people whose sex lives just have to be inferior to hers:

 But when we divorce physical pleasure from emotional connection, such as when we selfishly strive for orgasm through pornography, masturbation or illicit sexual encounters rather than cultivating sexual ecstasy with our marriage partner, sexual ecstasy is only “half-baked.” Love and relational intimacy are the “yeast” that allows our sexual ecstasy to rise to its highest level.

Of course, the only half-baked product I found in this piece is the author’s unconvincing justification of her weird approach to sex. After articles like this one, even 50 Shades of Grey becomes a huge breakthrough in terms of people’s sexual development.

I want to publish an exchange with reader Elizabeth as a separate post:

Elizabeth: Of all the children I know, exactly none of them would pass a grade in elementary school without their parents on their backs!

Clarissa: And now imagine living in a home where somebody, let’s say your husband, is constantly on your back about something he believes you need to do.

“Elizabeth, you need to be making more money. Why are you sitting there watching the TV? I said, you should be working extra. Hang up the phone now and go do some work. I will check to see how much you have done later.”

Or:

“Elizabeth, how many times did I tell you that you need to lose weight? Put down that sandwich now! Go do some exercise. Have you worked out today? How come I didn’t see it? Show me how you worked out. No, you need to work out some more.”

Imagine a year of this, day in and day out. How soon will your psyche – the psyche of a grown person – crack? Now imagine what this does to a child. Of course, you can always leave a husband who does this to you. A child has no place to go.

The saddest part of this is that these same parents get extremely incensed when I say that the reason why their kid is bullied at school is because s/he is so used to being bullied at home.

When people live under a colonial domination for centuries, they develop what is knows as “colonial mentality.”  Here is what it entails:

• —Success, power, intelligence, culture are associated with foreigners. Everything domestic is seen as inferior
• —Everything foreign (goods, products, education, culture, etc.) is more highly valued by default
• —Racist and xenophobic attitudes become interiorized
• The suffering of foreigners is experienced by the natives as more poignant and tragic than their own

Ukraine was a colony of Russia from 1665 to 1991. Since it achieved its de jure independence from the colonizer, Ukraine has been a de facto colony of Russia in terms of its economy and culture*. The colonizers engaged in a propaganda campaign that stretched across centuries and that aimed to convince Ukrainians that being Ukrainian made them inferior, low-cultured, stupid, and dirty by default.

This campaign continues today. It isn’t specifically organized by anybody, of course. It has simply become something that people do. Whenever a Ukrainian character appears on a Russian TV show or in a Russian movie, s/he is presented as a greedy, messy, coarse idiot. This is nothing new: colonizers have the habit of associating the colonized with dirt, disorder, inferior intelligence, and unbridled, almost animal-like sexuality. I hope I don’t need to explain  the reasons behind each of these tropes. Tragically, Ukrainians have absorbed this vision of themselves and it will now take forever to get rid of it.

In Ukraine, we have the grave misfortune of suffering not only of the colonial mentality but also of the Soviet mentality. The Soviet mentality is a worldview developed by the Soviet people in response to the social experiment that was conducted on them. This world-view is extremely cynical and posits that the acquisition of money and material goods is the only goal a human being should pursue. This goal is worth every sacrifice because the only thing that should cause you shame is not having money.

The Ukrainian pseudo-feminist group FEMEN is the perfect example of what happens when colonial and Soviet mentalities come together.

Continue reading “When Colonial and Soviet Mentalities Mesh: FEMEN in Paris” →