In my grad school experience we are often assigned contemporary anthropological papers that are all very careful to describe the world/context of study as a sort of Rabinow-esque ‘overdetermined’ assemblage, something that is incredibly complex, processual, manifests the local and global and so on, but then inevitably goes onto make some sort of fairly standard point (couched in esoteric language for the most part) that capitalism hurts certain people, particular governments’ ‘turn’ to neoliberalism is screwing so and so or that women still have the short end of the stick etc. While I do not necessarily disagree with any of these example arguments, the fact is scholars tend to make them thousands of times over simply shuffling the (unnecessarily convoluted) terms around a bit to produce a new paper. We are then given them in class and then essentially everyone in the class agrees with their point and goes about discussing it, or at least trying to, in that same absurdly obtuse language. When there are students who may have a more ‘conservative’ viewpoint, they tend to be the most silenced members of the class. The first two or three papers you get from the professor you might feel that ‘these sorts’ of articles are just the first batch and then we are going to get some ‘middle of the road’ or ‘conservative’ anthropological articles, but in the end, you realize they are not coming at all. Maybe its just our discipline, I am not sure.

Anyways, perhaps this is just another grad-student existential crisis but it really makes me question the whole show sometimes. Apologies for this rant, I know it actually has little to do with what this certain, apparently ridiculous Mr. O’Keefe said, but for some reason it set me off.

A lot of movement conservatism seems to have fallen into this habit of “zombie rhetoric.” President proposes subsidizing people’s health insurance? Cry “socialized medicine!” President proposes some infrastructure improvements and money to help the states in the worst recession in 70 years? Cry “socialism!”

It’s rhetoric that’s completely out of balance with what’s actually happening, which is why I am amazed that *anyone* not a full-bore committed Republican votes for anyone in the party.