Is it Irony?

It was the perfect way to end a quarter during which I was compelled to produce, for three separate classes, a full 47 pages of strained lines of reasoning, contrived nuances, and trite metaphors: “So far, you have written two essays for PolSci 273, and you are about to write another. Is the process of writing these essays a form of domination as Foucault understands it, or is it a path to freedom? Explain your answer.”

In the wee hours of the morning that this paper is due, when I’m on the last leg of a finals week of an unexpectedly taxing quarter, you better believe that it’s a form of domination.

I’m actually proud of a lot of the writing I’ve done this quarter. Not all of it is absolute drivel. I’ve had the opportunity to dress down many published writers who are smarter than me, without the attendant risk of these folks ever finding out and responding in kind. It’s like a scholarly guerrilla war. Christopher’s Id force pokes through in his treatment of Michael McFaul, the eminent Stanford political scientist and Russia specialist:

“McFaul’s rumination is mystifying, drenched as it is in the language of insinuation (everything ‘now seems inevitable,’ but ‘nothing seemed preordained,’ and ‘perhaps’ this is a great achievement?). Considering, moreover, that he precedes it with a list of all the things that might have gone wrong, we have no idea whether he regards the dissolution of the USSR as inevitable. But McFaul’s intellectual contortionism does provide us with…”

“Fully embracing, it seems, the obsequious connotation of the word ‘apologia’ as a label for his article, McFaul moves on to lament the personal demonization of Yeltsin. After all, he argues, ‘it is wrong to assume that one man could have the power or ideas to guide or crash Russia’s revolution...even a larger-than-life personality like Boris Yeltsin.’ This contention merits a response, if only because patronizing homilies like this are the kernels of irresponsible revisionism with a human face.”

That’s right. I went there. Did you catch the allusion to Gorbachev's political sloganeering in the last sentence? Gloves are off, bee-yatch!

In other news, thank God this quarter’s over.

Today’s Musical Insight (Don’t You Want Somebody to Love? Edition):

“If I don’t say this now, I will surely break…”