U. of Alabama-Birmingham Settles Dispute With Labor Scholar

Haha, what a beautiful and witty column. I agree with you. Sometimes it’s important just to live a moment without meta-narrating it the way we thinkers always want to do. 

About the “great disruption” theory, I think my view is similar to yours insofar as I cannot think of a time that did not involve disruption. I study the 18th and 19th century, and also have a degree in Classics. I look at every century of Athenian history, every century of Roman culture, all the most recent centuries — and they are all constantly in a state of disruption. Disruption is the normal state.  Call me a disciple of Foucault but I think we must experience the global movements today for what they are — fragments impossible to connect with what comes before and after.

But your thoughts on the cotton gin evoke many thoughts in me because I am working on my next book and it’s about the evolution of gay liberation rhetoric, from what I term “the gilded lily” stage to the “mean robot” stage (complicated multitiered cultural history involved.) Two landmark events in gay history stand out as “unintended consequences” moments: First, Stonewall, which led to the de-pathologizing of homosexuality and  ripped apart our sexual taboos against sodomy but unwittingly led to the AIDs crisis (I am appalled that gay activists still try to blame Reagan or homophobia for the AIDs crisis instead of taking responsibility for unintended consequences of massive rapid change.)

Second, there is the last ten years of gay history, in which obsession about the construct of the “gay soldier” brought about a convergence of three discourses: (1) a boom in pornography about gay soldiers and a boom in male fashion that fetishized military apparel, (2) the political crusade to repeal Don’t Ask Don’t Tell long after the law as it had changed was really kicking out gays against their will, and (3) a movement toward defining gay males mechanically and biologically with obsessive research about gaydar, biological causation, etc. 

In the case of Stonewall and AIDs, we can look back and see what the unintended consequences were. In the latter case, which I summarize as the rhetorical birth of “the gay robot” — the superhuman male who is the perfect soldier because he is so open to being mechanized and so devoid of compromising attachments to women — we do not know what lies ahead. I’ve worried and fretted because I am in the military and the massive shift toward glorification of gay soldiers has a cultural, spiritual, and direct material impact on my life. But I really don’t know what will happen. I have had to let the moment happen and stop trying to warn or predict; just be and let history carry me downstream.

I think that’s what we have to do with these global protests. I am reacting to them along the fault lines that make sense to me — as you say, along the lines of wealth inequality and basic human unfairness. I’m letting the Occupy USA movement gradually drag me kicking and screaming into their position, because I realized three days ago, as I strolled past the Occupy LA protests, that whatever differences of opinion I have with these malcontents, I do like them. I think that given the chance, they might like me. Maybe if we could let go of movements, party labels, and ideologies, we could savor such moments and get the most out of them.

Bravo on a great column today!

The movement has planners: ACORN, ANSWER, SEIU and a whole list of other progressive organizations. It’s clearly not some organic event representing a tipping point. It may not be Hill and Knowlton or Freedomworks at the controls, but someone is orchestrating it.

It’s an election year.

Just sayin.

And as Cohen also wrote:
“They sentenced me to twenty years of boredomFor trying to change the system from withinI’m coming now, I’m coming to reward themFirst we take Manhattan,…”

This is a bit OT even to your own post, but exactly why is it significant that total student loan debt exceeds total credit card debt? I hear this statistic mentioned a lot, but never without any discussion about what it actually means or why it is significant. 

Student loan debt is hugely significant.  It cannot be discharged in a bankruptcy;  if significant debts are incurred for ” fill-in-the-blank studies”, it may not be possible to earn enough to both repay the loan and have a life; there is no link between how much one may borrow for a course of study and the ability of that course of study to support earnings sufficient for repayment of the loan.

The current student loan environment is unsustainable.  Just as the real estate bubble relied on ever-increasing home prices, higher education relies on students assuming increasing debt to pay for degrees that will not yield incomes to support repayment of their loans.  Clearly, something has to give.

Constant bleating by professors that degrees are not training for jobs is not helpful in the search for a solution.

I think it is very much on topic. Higher education is the part of our economy for which middle-class purchasing power has eroded the most. Here is a chart showing the growth in tuition and fees compared with other important sectors of our economy:
http://m.static.newsvine.com/servista/imagesizer?file=allison-linnmsnbc6B6BD59F-9F84-0E5A-9652-32F626A03B51.jpg

Despite the rising cost, we continue to tell our young people that the key to their future is to buy a college education. Any degree will suffice, we say. So they borrow. Here is a chart showing the cumulative growth of student loan debt compared with all other household debt: http://cdn.theatlantic.com/static/mt/assets/business/crazy%20student%20loans%202011-q2.png

Here is a ‘student loan debt clock’: http://www.finaid.org/loans/studentloandebtclock.phtml

Many of the OWS ‘protestors’ are young and college educated. Many are upset about debt. Think about those things and ask yourself if this might be at least as relevant to the OWS movement as a song by Leonard Cohen.

I suppose the proverbial 1% are hoping OWS will run out of steam and go quietly into the night, and perhaps it will, but I’m quite sure the same was true of the French aristocracy leading up to the French revolution and similar points in history where a rather small percentage of the population lived arrogantly and ostentatiously while the vast majority faced nothing but deteriorating prospects.  Those involved in OWS may be better off than the hoi polloi of times past, but they are increasingly recognizing that the system is rigged to keep them in thrall to the operating norms of the big financial interests.  They see themselves as saddled with the costs of bailing out too big to fail and outlandish executive compensation practices, exemplified by the enormous and inescapable debt that will have them maintaining the fat cats in the style to which they have become accustomed for the indefinite future.  I don’t know who, or what, if any, are behind OWS (any more than the initial Tea Party rallies, which you might recall also were about big government bail outs for too big to fail), but it is quite clear to me that there’s a good chance the movement is taking on a life of its own.  Just as Republican politicians are trying to milk Tea Party fervor, I’m quite sure that we will see Democratic politicians seeking to do the same with OWS.  What will be interesting is to see what it morphs into, as professional manipulators seek to direct the evident discontent to their own agendas.  You can bet the monied interests are already hard at work to see who they can sacrifice to placate, and perhaps redirect, the attention they are currently receiving.

Look, I was asking a very specific question about a statistic that often gets thrown around. About your other rhetorical question, I would still say that I don’t know. I’m working off memory right now, but I believe that average student loan debt is about the same as the average car loan debt. Put in those terms, is student loan debt a problem? (and yes, loans probably cover a smaller proportion of overall costs of college than cars, so loans don’t tell the whole story).

I’m not saying that debt incurred from student loans isn’t a problem. And yes, someone who took out 100,000 in loans for a BA in Women Studies and religion at a pricy private university in NYC made a pretty bad decision. But the way numbers get cited in this discussion does not appear to me to be a useful way of figuring out what is good and bad debt.

Nobody got me to Zuccotti Park but myself, and I think that’s true for most of the people there, and in the Occupy Phoenix, Occupy Boston, Occupy Everywhere events.  I wasn’t really paying the demonstration any mind until the NYPD pepper-sprayed those women, and then the 700 arrests at the Brooklyn Bridge got me down there the next morning.

I can’t really speak to anyone’s motivation to join the movement except my own, but I believe my story is typical of most of the “second-generation” demonstrators.

For me, it was a “Finally! Someone is saying what’s needed be said!” experience — the same reason that in early 1968, at 16, I went down to the McCarthy for President HQ in my neighborhood.

Great column.  Leonard Cohen has had the right of it for some time.