I've just read an op-ed piece published by an undergraduate named Irwin Kahn in the Daily Pennsylvanian (the student newspaper at Penn) dated October 6, 1952. We were losing the war in Korea, Kahn argued, because "we" (he seems to mean only anticommunists and pro-capitalists) were losing the rhetorical battle at home. Schools (he presumably meant Penn too) should be active in teaching the benefits of capitalism and the horrors of alternative economic theories. Any fair and free curriculum would teach "that the path of capitalism and free enterprise is the road for them [the 'masses']." But don't think too much: "Probably the individual's right to strive, the highlight of the American way, is lost amid our own introspection." Here's a link to the whole text.
Sunday, March 15, 2009
college is for winning the war of words
I've just read an op-ed piece published by an undergraduate named Irwin Kahn in the Daily Pennsylvanian (the student newspaper at Penn) dated October 6, 1952. We were losing the war in Korea, Kahn argued, because "we" (he seems to mean only anticommunists and pro-capitalists) were losing the rhetorical battle at home. Schools (he presumably meant Penn too) should be active in teaching the benefits of capitalism and the horrors of alternative economic theories. Any fair and free curriculum would teach "that the path of capitalism and free enterprise is the road for them [the 'masses']." But don't think too much: "Probably the individual's right to strive, the highlight of the American way, is lost amid our own introspection." Here's a link to the whole text.
"I teach horizontally, meaning that while I might begin with a fixed idea of what I'm going to teach that day, I let it drift rhizomatically way off topic, often pulling it back when it gets too far. I rely on non-fixed materials to teach this way; the whole world is at my fingertips. Should I go off on a tangent about John and Rauschenberg and their love relationship as expressed in Rauschenberg's bed, an image of that bed is always a click away. From there, we can head anywhere into the non-fixed universe, be it film, text or sound. And of course, that always takes us elsewhere. As Cage says, 'We are getting nowhere fast.'" 
that anyone has yet got the imaginative measure of that terrifying day six years ago. Certainly our Tolstoy has not crawled out of the rubble. The closest we have, Don DeLillo, succeeded as an essayist-journalist ("In the Ruins of the Future: Reflections on Terror and Loss in the Shadow of September,” Harper’s, December 2001) but, to my mind, failed as a novelist ("Falling Man"). One reason, perhaps, is that the remembered emotion was instantly buried under a pile of cultural junk.' - Tod Gitlin in his review of Susan Faludi's The Terror Dream (written for 
