Brian Leiter is the most powerful man in academic philosophy. His annual ranking of philosophy departments in the Anglosphere, and his blog of links and gossip for academics in the discipline—the highest-ranked philosophy blog on the web—have made him a familiar name to both those who do and those who only follow philosophy. And when I was an undergrad philosophy major in a backwater college with a total of two full-time tenured professors in the department, everyone in the department had heard of him, and most of them followed his output. It’s safe to say that his influence is substantial.
It’s also safe to say that he’s a Brahmin, and that he lacks the sense of decorum or restraint that prevents many Brahmins from clearly stating their opinions on the half of the population that falls on the other side of the American caste conflict. A few days ago, he linked and excerpted a ‘poem’ by Amiri Baraka, who is apparently “one of the most respected and widely published African-American writers” despite the fact that he can’t tell “its” from “it’s”. Let’s see what that poem says.
We get clear enough to elect Obama
the terrorists take off they Klan clothes
put on some suits , they the t party, now. TEA
The Evil Assholes, they terrorists & Nazi’s
like always. They do anything to stop America’s getting rid of it’s craziness.
They never let all of us
be Americans. They terrorists
And the Republicans they even got negroes
Real Public Coons, they terrorists too
like Tom Ass Clarence & his evil wife …We facing the sickness
of terrorists. Been terrorizing all of us
for hundreds of years. When we gonna catch em
and lock `em up! These terrorists. Catch em
and lock `em up! Then we can cure ourselves,
America, of what has always
Ailed us!
Even leaving aside the fact that this is what passes for “respected poetry” in certain circles today despite the fact that it shows not even the slightest semblance of poetic form, the problem is obvious: Baraka apparently believes that about half of America is made up of terrorists who should be caught and locked up to ‘cure’ America of… what, their existence?
And Leiter agrees. He says in a different post that “these sick, sick people need to be caged”, and peppers his blog with references to “the Right-Wing Blob” whose members are “literally devoid of independent thought, they are just bits of slime that ooze off the Blob when the Blob is poked”; “Nazism, American style”; “fascist thugs”; “little right-wing robots”; “religiously-inspired Nazis” and “disgusting moral miscreants”; the “brain-dead electorate”; “crytpo-fascist entertainers” (sic); and the “Texas Taliban”.
Meanwhile, he says that “the American right owns the rhetoric of violence”. Given that he has not only called for the imprisonment of half the population, but also strongly implied that a professor at Stanford ought to be put to death, one must wonder if he changes his party affiliation every time he makes a post to avoid falsifying his own statement.
The punchline to all this is that he appears to like democracy. Then again, history shows that democracy is technically compatible with wanting to lock up large swathes of the population for thoughtcrime.
-
curri
