an
international and interdisciplinary journal of postmodern cultural sound, text
and image
Volume 3, January 2006, ISSN
1552-5112
All
Capital’s Children: Thanking bruinalumi.com
Nicholas Ruiz III
“Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? - Who will watch the
watchers?” -Decimus Junius Juvenalis or Juvenal. Roman rhetorician and
satirical poet (1st to 2nd cent. A.D.)
The blood of our earth has
gone rancid. Thus the holy seek to
replenish it, in their pious good faith and all. The creation of lists has long been the first
step in such crepuscular campaigns.
Such a self-declared
'long-term project' as the listed "exposure of UCLA's most radical
professors," that of bruinalumni.com's the "UCLAProfs" website,
has at its core a desire to resume the list-making centuries of medieval
thinking. List-making has a long
history, no? Censoring, banning ,
burning, etc. It continues today.[1]
What is for sale in the
gimmick of bruinalumni.com is a point of view without dissent; paradoxically, such
right-leaning dissent is that which they accuse the 'rads’ of UCLA of
suppressing. I do not know any of these
professors--but I do know that academic freedom allows for the expression of
any point of view, anywhere, anytime, anyplace--politics notwithstanding. What bruinalumni.com really desires is the
death of academic freedom--and more dangerously--the freedom of expression,
that is, the right that allows the web-posting of their refuse. A rather dim strategy by any standard.
Without exception, today
we acknowledge that all are Capital's children, vying for preferred currencies
and denominations, accepting the rules of the metaphysical game. Do we despise bruinalumni.com for their
medieval preference? Or marvel at the
persistence of the vestigial trace they represent? Perhaps a bit of both. Perhaps this is all about God. As Milan Kundera reminded us twenty or so
years ago:
"The dispute between
those who believe that the world was created by God and those who think it came
into being of its own accord deals with phenomena that go beyond our reason and
experience. Much more real is the line
separating those who doubt being as it is granted to man (no matter how or by
whom) from those who accept it without reservation.[2]
Reality is in dispute on
bruinalumni.com. At any rate, we can
thank bruinalumni.com for doing all of the legwork in compiling such a nice
reading list of authors, no?
an
international and interdisciplinary journal of postmodern cultural sound, text
and image
Volume 3, January 2006, ISSN
1552-5112
notes