As noted on the right, I am taking a class on globalization and labor, which I'm going to go ahead and call the most challenging class I've ever taken. Why the challenge? Because our brilliant professor (and I mean that with the deepest sincerity) believes that we enlightened and benevolent beings in our leftist ivory tower too quickly and easily dismiss our monstrous neo-liberal nemesis in the world. So the solution has been to read and discuss the likes of Joseph Stiglitz and Jagdesh Bhagwati. Two weeks ago, I thought I was going to lose some teeth to grinding while reading Stiglitz, it was the most insane and fanciful slop I'd ever had to slog through. That is until I got to Bhgwati and I thought I might lose some teeth when I blew my brains out. I'm not sure if it was the lying ("there is no scientific evidence that GMOs could be dangerous"), the faulty logic (yes, in the past corporations have been behind the murder of democratically elected leaders, but that is less likely to happen these days, now that those country have democratic leaders) or just the flat out dismissive tone (even the reasonable criticisms of globalization amount to a non sequitur) that made me want to run off and join some radical black block group. Fortunately our professor talked us down (I was not alone in this reaction) and this week we're reading some good ol' stuff of Adam Smith, Malthus and David Ricardo.... who in comparison seem like right nice chaps. We're all reading "The Global Class War" which looks to be more promising.
Significantly less frustrating, but equally head spinning, was "Traces on the Rhodian Shore," written by famous Berkeley Geographer Clarence Glacken. He began it as a dissertation and a decade and half later published an amazing volume tracing geographical thought in western great thinkers from the ancient greeks to 18th century. He died before completing the second half to bring up to the present (1960s). What life must have been like before wikipedia...it is boggling what ONE person can know (6 or 7 languages apparently- passage after passage in greek, french, latin, german, spanish without any translation). It was also written before the major explosion in nonsense words in social studies, so was a lot of fun to read. Which brings me to this weeks quiz:
Q: Governmentality?
- A. Government+ality.
- B. Govern + mentality.
- C. Poor phonetic translation of Gouvernementalité
- D. It's just as silly sounding when Foucault said it as some po-mo lecturer at Berkeley.
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