Clarissa's Blog

The Trump family is busily selling green cards and promoting immigration.  

Nyah-nyah-nyah-nyah, losers.  Will that teach you how to trust billionaires?

A professor at Duke spoke out against diversity trainings, and now he is being hounded by unhinged freaks. And the rest of the academic community is too mousy to stand up to the freaks. Everybody hates these trainings and finds them ridiculous and humiliating but you know academics. They are too chicken to speak up. All they can do is squeak vaingloriously about resistance and revolution while doing absolutely nothing to oppose actual, existing abuses.

Maybe all of these “Everybody stared at me and judged me for being in a public place with a toddler”, “At a restaurant everybody watches what I eat and judges me because I’m fat”, “Students treated me worse once I let my hair down”, “My evaluations depend on how nurturing I’m woth students” are a reaction against alienation. 

People are nostalgic for a world where somebody cares about their children, outfits, and food choices. 

The electoral choice almost everywhere in the Western civilization is between nasty cynical lackeys of liquid capital and neo-Nazis. 

The US has thrown a funny wrinkle into the whole deal by electing a nasty cynical lackey of liquid capital who poses as a neo-Nazi. 

McGuigan’s Neoliberal Culture was clearly composed out of a bunch of articles and conference talks, which is why it’s repetitive to the point of a few passages being repeated verbatim up to half a dozen times. This is not a bad thing because it will make for a fantastic textbook. There is no better way to make students learn than repetition. 

I love the way McGuigan writes. His writing is very light on the jargon, sarcastic, direct, and clear. He gives great examples from the truly insane world of British cultural production to illustrate his points. 

I also appreciate McGuigan’s truly unique capacity not to ignore the painfully obvious in service of ideological commitments. He is as Marxist as they get but he states very clearly that it’s no coincidence that the greatest advances for women coincided with the neoliberal epoch. There is a direct connection since the foundational ideas of neoliberalism are the ideas of feminism (importance of individual choice, primacy of individual desires over communal needs or mandates of tradition). 

McGuigan says that the neoliberal ideology has managed to make itself commonsense by integrating disaffection. I always wondered why people in opulent societies are so into complaining. And now I know: the apocalyptic mindset is neoliberalism’s safety valve. 

There are many ways in which neoliberal ideology conquers minds and none of us are immune. We can’t stand outside of ideology but we can catch glimpses of how it operates. And this is what McGuigan does brilliantly in his book. 

There are citizens of Russia at the heart of most acts of terror that occurred in France (use this blog’s search function if you don’t remember). LePen’ s campaign is openly funded by Russia. In the midst of the campaign, LePen goes to Russia to stand beaming next to Putin. Putin manufactured the huge immigration wave from Syria to Europe.

And the French support LePen because they don’t like terrorism and Muslim immigrants? So they vote for somebody who brought them terrorism and immigrants?

That’s fucking nuts. 

France used to be a great country but it’s become a total cesspit. My apologies to my French readers but I call it as I see it. French education is in the toilet. Air France is the worst airline on the planet. French scholarship is a joke. There hasn’t been an interesting high-quality product coming from France in forever. And now this shit? What the fuck? What have you all done with the real France?

Klara understands a lot more than I thought. I wondered aloud “Where is the stencil?” and she brought me the stencil. Then I asked where the robot was. She found it and gave it to me. I asked where the flowers were, and she brought me toy flowers and made sniffing noises at them. She also understands “Papa is sleeping, let’s be very quiet” and “It’s time to come out of the bathtub.”

It’s almost creepy.

This year I took a pay cut of $26,500. This is the amount of the yearly contribution my employer makes to my healthcare fund. Since the fund has been hijacked and used for corrupt purposes by Governor Rainer, I had to drop the university healthcare insurance. 

Our salaries are pathetically low (I’m a tenured Associate Professor and I make $56,000) but we are supposed to be getting a great benefits package to compensate for that. Now that’s shot to hell. 

All quality people are leaving the school in droves (the Department of Math and Stats lost 6 people last year), and the only ones who remain are those who are forced by family circumstances. And to think that at the height of the Recession we were the school with the smartest hiring policy that attracted a great number of talented young scholars. This has all been destroyed now when there is no recession. 

Bad students have this aggravating trick where they say something like, “Professor B is failing me because I don’t understand the difference between assonance and consonance!” And it sounds like Professor B is a monster, indeed. How can you fail a student for something like this in a survey of Spanish literature course?

And it’s true, the student in question doesn’t get assonance. Problem is, it’s the least of his troubles. Aside from assonance, he failed to understand all the rest of the material covered in the course because his Spanish is extremely poor. It’s so poor that he can’t say “His name is Cervantes.” 

The worst part is that the student fully believes his own story. He is absolutely convinced that his only problem is assonance, and he’s unfairly persecuted. Any attempt to make him recognize that it’s a fact of objective reality that he made 127 language mistakes in an 8-page essay elicits nothing but a string of sullen complaints about the blasted assonance. 

It’s the complete blindness to one’s own faults that bugs me. You make 127 mistakes in 8 pages. Seeing yourself as a victim in this situation takes the kind of obviousness that scares me. 

The cruel irony of fate! Who could have thought that, of all people in the world, I would be forced to become an (almost) vegan. I’m so befuddled that I feel the need to explain the reason why I’m buying a vegan cookbook to the cashier at the bookstore. 

“It’s for health reasons,” I say, terrified she’d think I’m an ideological vegan. 

My body is definitely grateful for the veganism but my mind rebels. 

Here is a dish I just came up with to utilize leftover produce. 

I sauteed baby carrots and baby potatoes in water, adding a lot of chopped fresh ginger, 6 cloves of crushed garlic, a cinnamon stick, a bay leaf, and a few allspice berries. 

No salt because I forgot. 

Then I added several large mushrooms that I broke in half and a lot of chopped kale. 

And that’s it. I’m at home with Klara and can’t explore complex recipes, so it’s pretty easy. It turned out shockingly not bland.