Word: gramsci
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...Fonte identifies the opposing armies in the war as Gramscians and Tocquevillians. The Gramscians take their name from the 20th-century Marxist intellectual and politician Antonio Gramsci (1891-1937). As Fonte remarks: "Despite [Gramsci's] enormous influence on today's politics, he remains far less well-known to most Americans than does Tocqueville," the prescient young French visitor who figured out America so brilliantly a hundred years before Gramsci's death...
...Left brain, right brain: Gramsci and Tocqueville represent radically different ways of thinking about America. "Like Marx," Fonte writes, "[Gramsci] argued that all societies in human history have been divided into two basic groups: the privileged and the marginalized, the oppressor and the oppressed, the dominant and the subordinate." Europe is that way - and America is no exception. Gramsci went beyond Marx to include "also women, racial minorities, and many 'criminals.'" Therefore: The personal - in fact, all life - is political. There are no absolute moral standards: morality is socially constructed. And so on. Gramsci's American descendants, as Fonte notes...
...book's namesake poem, "Midnight Salvage." The eight-section poems run through pieces of Rich's past, focusing particularly on a college life that, according to Rich, was as "a cemetery is controlled." The morbid metaphor originates in this piece, which makes backhanded allusions to John Keats and Antonio Gramsci, who are buried in the same cemetery in Rome. Through Rich's instinctive search for the figure of Orion, listeners and readers voyage with the poet through a life of activism, looking through "history's bloodshot eyes" across "the pathetic erections of soothsayers," before establishing Rich as a poet...
...devoted himself to keeping ghetto kids out of trouble. He also believes it's his Christian duty to verbally slap the black establishment upside the head when it's falling down on its job. In 1992, for example, he infuriated black intellectuals by accusing them of endlessly debating "Gramsci, Foucault, Derrida, Jameson, Bourdieu, Lukacs, Habermas, and Marx" instead of trying to find solutions to inner-city crime and drug abuse. Three years later, he excoriated them for romanticizing "cynically anti-Semitic, mean-spirited, and simply incompetent" demagogues such as Louis Farrakhan while the underclass plunged into misery...
Having no clue what Johnny said, we fall back on the old standard: "that's interesting, say more about that." Johnny replies, "which part, the part where I used Gramsci to explain the origins of the American Revolution, or the part where I employed a cliometric model of my own design to prove the Civil War had no impact on American society?" At this point, we usually show a movie...