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Showing posts from July 22, 2018

visit to the Museum of the Wall - Berlin

The communist world is fallin' apart The capitalists are just breakin' hearts Money is the reason to be It makes me just want to sing Louie Louie And the state  Was on the other side Our Rough Guide to Berlin says this about the Wall Museum: “Overall, though, the huge collection is somewhat jumbled and rambling, and not quite the harrowing experience that some visitors expect.” About which, more must be said – at least by this visitor, who landed in Berlin on Tuesday. A little nostalgic hits of the 80s music please, Maestro. Let’s get into it. When the Berlin Wall fell, I was living in Austin. My source of income was precarious. A little of this, a little of that. Mostly working as a carpenter’s helper. But also teaching one class at ACC: a class in philosophy, about ethics. For which I had a text book that I threw out, and just photocopied a buncha the great texts and handed them out – The Gorgias, Nicodemean Ethics, Prolegomena to a future metaphysics of m

the end of dignity: Trump as a name

I have always associated dignity with the reactionary values, and so I am inclined to piss on it.   There is a longstanding strain of revolutionary thought that lies behind this idea. One of the great pamphleteers of the French Revolution, J-R. H è bert, published a newspaper of astonishing obscenity, Le Père Duchesne, which dedicated itself to stripping the dignity from the French aristocracy. The paper was subtitled, Je suis le veritable Pere Duschene, foutre – which can be roughly be translated as No shit, I’m the real Father Duchene. Hèbert was one of the great purveyors of an obscene distortion of Marie-Antoinette, making her a prostitute, an incestous mother, practically a cannibal. He also was one of her prosecutors at the Trial, which Marie Antoinette dominated. If you think HRC’s farcical persecution for Benghazi was a disgrace, read about Marie Antoinette’s trial, and weep. Chantal Thomas wrote a striking and important book about the “reine scelerat” in the 80s, which disma