Newsgroups: bit.listserv.history
Date:         Thu, 27 Aug 1992 22:52:45 CDT
From:         U17801@UICVM.BITNET
Subject:      Re: Rantings of the 'new' religious right
              27 Aug 1992 22:01:48 EDT from <DFOSS@CCVM.SUNYSB.EDU>

On Thu, 27 Aug 1992 22:01:48 EDT Daniel A. Foss said:
>   We appreciate Renato Barrahona's advice down here underneath these
>floorboards, but the Exterminator came today, we survived him, we survived
>Hitler, we survived everything for 300 million years, but I don't think
>that is what Fyodor Dostoyevsky had in mind in calling his novel Cockroach
>Notes [Notes From Underground to you].
>
>   In an ill-planned, ill-advised adventure, actually, whose advise was there,
>I went off to annoy ANTHRO-L, at the time quiescent following a rather languid
>discussion of crosscultural patterns of flatulence. The pretext was, the
>superficial issues in this election - nobody has said a *thing* about the
>economy, inter alia, which would stand the slightest scrutiny - include sex,
>kinship, community, religion, the family, child-rearing practices, and
>cultural identity, all of which are within the province of the discipline of
>anthropology. Also mythology, in that Clinton was shamelessly emulating and
>appropriating the toga of JFK and the latter's mortuary cult, albeit *not
>even Clinton* has dared promise to "get this country moving again."
>
>   All went well so long as I appeared to mouth the pieties of the feminist-
>Liberal core orthodoxy. Then, I suggested an analysis whereby the feminist
>platitude, "The personal is political," had got appropriated by the Right
>albeit religiously transformed. This, I said, gives us a species of sexual
>Populism confronting a "Cultural Elite," as Mr. Quayle would have it, of
>ocuupational and sexual sucesses: In effect, "You can't call me ugly. You're
>Sinful!" Feminism, I said, needed rethinking.
>   I lost the feminists.
>   Then, I said, the JFK myth was no more than a crutch for intellectually
>bankrupt Liberals who had nothing else except a historically falsified figment
>to hold onto, and told them what I thought JFK really was and would have been
>had he not died when he did. That did it, and I got brickbats, dead cats, and
>a grass-roots movement to have my computer account shut down. Also a sick
>e-mail letter from a young woman in Arizona about JFK, "He was young,
>virile...."
>
>   As the HISTORY subscribers well know, a more tactless person than myself
>can hardly be found to issue the call to "Burn your past and start analyzing
>the society you are living in." Neither, however, is it possible to convince
>me, without irrefutable empirical evidence to the contrary, that social
>scientists in general, especially those not paid to live in the past (and
>I note in passing that, once again this year, Historical Sociology is the
>fastest-growing subfield of sociology), the capacity to critically analyze
>the society they inhabit as members or citizens has suffered from what i'd
>call "motivated atrophy."
>
>Daniel A. Foss

Daniel: You really must try the decaf; if that doesn't work, go for a decent an
d reliable mood stabilizer.  Come on, Daniel, do the right thing for all of us
on this list.

Renato
History
University of Illinois at Chicago
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