The college boy who hated everyone

When I was a university student in the 1980s the system was being, particularly in the humanities, massively feminized. The administrative apparatus was even more so: if the professoriat in English and other departments was 50% female (philosophy was the exception to this; I would also its professional ethos in American universities extreme far right, though the content of what is studied may very towards the center at times) while the bureaucracy was 95% female except at the topmost levels.

As a young man, very poor though my family, which refused to support me in college since I did not follow my father's dictates, was middle class, I encountered massive intolerance.

"Feminism" made none of this in no way easier and every war far worse.

The common sense blamed me. Worse, I am white. Automatically placed in the oppressor class.

Yet I always thought of myself on the left, not the right (though certainly not a liberal). I still do. It is still something many people have doubted about me. For instance, black liberals, who define all politics in their terms, and may, like so many Americans interpret disagreements about ideas with failure to respect their persons as demonstrated by being 'nice', would assume my own radicalism is actually racism. That's their prior assumed major premise so any factual situation is useful as minor premise to draw the foregone conclusion. Imagine what would happen to me in my first effort to form a tenants association against a landlord who allowed the heat to be shut off in subzero weather and then lied about it, as landlords often do, but the black neighbors automatically read my contempt for this man as not respecting their one unbreakable rule that a white plebeian may not dislike a black master.

I'm anticapitalist, therefore on the left. My solidarity with any type of other persons is conditional based on the situation and what we really have in common. That woman chose to be a liberal and prefer black millionaires to equally poor white neighbors.

I was not successful at the university. I resentfully blame feminism for this in part. I blame liberalism in the main.

I am a radical who could be of the right or left. My analysis places me on the left. A different one could place me on the right.

Liberalism follows a different logic it shares with conservatism. It drives its politics by its moral commitments, and thus is conservative and tied to legalism. Thus in a way it is not political at all. But that is the mainstream culture.

The rise of feminism in corporate culture is not a simple matter, because there were great causes and interesting claims, and they are much further to the left and at least potentially closer to my own thinking, though on examination I find that an autonomous logic of opposing 'patriarchy' on the grounds of a theory of gender actually makes no sense.

I also think that men and women think differently, and the rise of female predominance and normative femininity meant that some of the powers of the mind are weakened in social life, and this affected the universities. The university I went to, the highest rated public university in the United States then as now, the University of California, had many brilliant professors and, in my encounter, few very interesting students, the mass of whom were only there hoping to get into a decent paying career and with little or no curiosity about much of anything. What they expected of each other was what everyone in California expects: smile like an idiot and keep on trucking as you mind your own business.

Many women are treated horribly in our society. So are many men. The liberal victimology ideology, which has nothing leftist about it, and was only a means for ambitious middle class people claiming minority status to further their own competitive bids for status by blaming social injustices easily theorized on whoever appeared to them to wear a face of that horrible evil thing known as privilege. The privilege I had was having been brought up by people who loved the arts and did not want only a bigger house and car, I grew up with notions of what is satisfying and pleasurable that involved doing things like reading books, which might or might not require being filthy rich enough that you could do so on estates and yachts where servants would do all your work, which sounds like the movie legend it is. I have always been aware that many people in our society are treated like shit, and I never saw it as obvious that this was the fault of those of them who might just be privileged enough to expect otherwise.

Therefore, I consider myself a man of the left who is not a feminist, a black nationalist, a gay liberationist, a cultivator of memorabilia of how 'our' people where specially targeted by this or that legendary massacre, which would surely be something to make a movie about and talk about with proud pleasure if you knew you could rightly identify with one of the heroes who seems just like your grandmother. And this may all sound nasty but what I mean is: if you really are sensitive or recognizant not just to the social injustices identifiable with darkest criminal sin but also those that are clearly effects of that great monster inequality, then the world we live in is awful and the word oppression may rightly be found near any decent person's speaking palette. To be against inequality and not just the sinfulness which might also be disobedience when found in the quarters not of the masterly but the servile, this I would call distaste for social injustice of left and not or not only right side of the political theater hall. And I think that matters.

Sure, I am contingently a feminist and all the rest. What I ask is is the one with the presumptively favored bottom status in fact victim of a wrong? Or just happy she sits comfortably atop a glass ceiling ledge? Yet I would not scorn her, if she might then topple, being made of glass, or rage in fury at the prospect, thinking she is. After all, Americans are touchy to provocation when it suits them. Their motto I hear, with tracks in mud that show it, is don't fuck with me. Yes ma'am he said and politely handed in his paper awaiting the mark or was it fine. Sure it is she said. And what's more I'll tell you what you impertinent writing boy.

By the way, do you know what the real difference between the Jews and the Irish? There are legends of mutual amity. The Jews, who make the best citizens of any monarchy provided they are given the chance for the same reason some of them also make its best critics (less often opponents) as long as they are tolerated, do not see oppression looming everywhere, but are only bothered by that injustice of authority that has become, exceptionally, immoral. Justice is happy for children of the divine. The Jews are the last remaining aristocracy because theirs is of the mind, and everyone knows the good has some relationship to our ability to understand matters by thinking about them, to say nothing of study, and for that alone. Most Europeans who don’t believe in God know that his idea was that of bosses, and they aren’t intimate with this deity, night or day, but have only been told about him, in the image of a tyrant, or ruler anyway, the question being that of right and left: whether tyranny is good or bad. But the Jews understand what the believers proclaim. They naturally don’t expect institutional authority to be against them, and so are quite determined it work as it should. Those Irish who are a bit inclined to be radicals think a bit more like the blacks, not because of how they plan to change the world but how they do or did know they are oppressed in it, an oppression that was known before moral reckonings and might well be opposed or hated without them, dangerous as that sounds, though unlike the blacks by appearance they may pass for members of the race of masters as long as they don’t say what they’re thinking. This is a fiction I use to define a funny way of being a radical, in a way that to most people just means disobedient and unruly brat, merely afflicted with immaturity (or sickness of mind) but to me was linked to the intuitive certainty that those bossing me were nasty bastards. I recall going to school at age 5 and thinking, maybe this boss is my oppressor, and similar expectations would later be often confirmed. Sure I overdid it, sure that is comic, but I always knew I was onto something, and it pleases me to know that very many people today agree. It may just be an American myth, but I was thinking of this in relation to some of my Jewish friends because the first ones I knew were radicals. What a shock when a few years later I found them at the core of the far right, a topic I have pondered much in print. Their official halls with their identity kits I found so fascinating if quaint. Most were fools, the others well read. It seems to me even now they divide interestingly being people who are merely rather more likely to take some ordinary matters quite seriously and those who just cherish their identity, so much that that they can do so by proclaiming it as the sole important thing they have in common while they all engage in some indifferent festive or sportive activity in a numerable congregation of persons who share an idea of who they are that means only enough to say that it must mean something, of great importance to be sure. They are less likely to be on the radical left I fetishistically cherished because they need their community with its ideas of the demanding happiness of an enchanted will to be just, but they don’t need to be oppressed. But Christ, isn’t that what ontological radicalism is?