Author Archives: Michael Happy

“Class Warfare”

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8kFD_DjDkVI

One of the most jaw-droppingly deft rhetorical reversals conservatives have ever accomplished has been to appropriate the term “class warfare,” which is being rolled out again as the Occupy Wall Street protests have finally made the people who matter nervous/annoyed.

Whenever the privileges of the 1% of the population who possess 40% of the wealth are questioned, we begin to hear that the criticism constitutes class warfare. Class warfare no longer involves what the rich do to everyone else. It is now exclusively about the threat everyone else represents to the rich.

Mitt Romney, who recently declared that “corporations are people too,” uses the term in the clip above. He also repeats another Republican talking point currently being endlessly repeated: “Half the people in this country don’t pay income taxes.” The reason they don’t pay federal income taxes is that they don’t make enough income. It certainly does not mean, as the point intends to suggest, that they pay no taxes. They pay lots of taxes, all of them regressive, like sales and payroll taxes. These are the only taxes conservatives seem to think are acceptable because regressive taxes literally cost them nothing.

“Alice in Wonderland”

The first film adaptation of Alice in Wonderland, made in 1903, with the entire story rendered in just under nine minutes. For the time, the special effects are Spielbergian.

Here’s Frye in one of the late notebooks, cited by Bob Denham in his newly posted Essays on Northrop Frye: “I’ve often said that if I understood the two Alice books I’d have very little left to understand about literature.” (“Frye and Lewis Carroll,” 284)


					

Police Violence and Increased Interest in OWS

It’s become clear that the unprovoked police assault with pepper spray on some young women at Occupy Wall Street two weeks ago exploded attendance at the demonstration when it had already begun to wane. The result is that the Occupy movement has since spread to scores of cities, including a dozen in Canada, where demonstrations will commence this weekend. The graph above also shows that interest from the general public has massively increased as well, once police violence came into play.

Unfortunately, the Boston police have not learned the lesson, executing a middle-of-the-night raid upon the Occupy Boston demonstrators, leading to the arrest of at least a hundred, including a large number of veterans present to offer their support. It’s this last detail that is particularly distressing. American military personnel are invariably described as “heroes” when in combat, but are too often ignored and abused once that service is done: inadequate medical care, joblessness, homelessness, and a suicide rate that exceeds combat deaths.

(h/t Dish for the chart)

Frye on “the community of love”

Demonstrators at Occupy Wall Street, Saturday October 8, 2011. These are the kids Fox News and the Republicans are calling a “mob.”  

From Bob Denham’s Northrop Frye Unbuttoned:

“If we pursue either liberty or equality we lose both. The tertium quid of one thing needful is fraternity, or interpersonal relation, the kingdom of ends, the community of love, relaxing into tolerance and good will at a distance.” [Notes 58-8.71] (45)

Daily photos of the demonstrations here.

Must-see site: We are the 99%.

More photos after the jump.

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Robert D. Denham, “Essays on Northrop Frye”

We are delighted to be able to link you at last to Bob Denham’s new collection, Essays on Northrop Frye, the latest addition to our library. They are posted in PDF, making them paginated and searchable and more accessible to students, teachers, and scholars..

We will not be posting again till next week. With twenty-two essays from Bob available to you, you don’t need to hear from us for a while. Enjoy.

Update: The ebook is still a relatively new thing, but like the scholarly texts of old, it is still prone to errata. We’ve picked up a couple of typos, and they will be corrected shortly. We wanted to have this wonderful book up for the holiday long weekend, and, like anything squeezed in on a tight deadline, one or two slipped past the goalie.

Bob Denham’s New Book Coming Soon

We are just applying the final touches before posting Bob Denham’s latest collection of essays on Frye, including eight new titles: “Frye and Aristotle,” “Frye and Giordano Bruno,” “Frye and Henry Reynolds,” “Frye and Robert Burton,” “Frye and Soren Kierkegaard,” “Frye and Mallarmé,” “Frye and Joachim de Floris,” and “Frye and Lewis Carroll.”

I think we can safely say that this is an event. And it should (fingers crossed) occur by Friday.

Until then, be sure to check out Bob’s other work in our library. It’s a remarkable collection, including all ten volumes of his Northrop Frye Newsletter; his classic Northrop Frye and Critical Method (in its entirety, we are very pleased to say: that’s an earlier print edition pictured above); all nine introductions to the volumes of the Collected Works he edited; four previously unpublished lectures; a number of indispensable compilations of Frye on topics like chess, Islam and the Koran; some miscellaneous Frygiana, and a remarkable collection of all of the movies that Frye saw up until at least 1955.

Let’s put it this way: the library collection is comprised almost completely of bequests from Bob, which is only one reason that we call it the Robert D. Denham Library. The other is that he is and always will be one of the greatest Frye scholars we can ever hope to see. So go in and browse. There’s treasure in there. We promise that you will find something you’ve never seen before.

And, as long as you’re browsing, maybe peek in on our journal as well.

Photo of the Day: Jesus on Wall Street

A sign at the Occupy Wall Street protest today (h/t Dish).

Here’s Frye on Jesus, love, and the community in “Substance and Evidence”:

It’s very important to realize that when we profess or articulate a faith of any kind, what we’re really doing is attaching ourselves to a specific community. Christian beliefs attach us to a Christian community; democratic beliefs make us want to believe in a democracy, and so on. What faith should do is to help create a community in which every individual loves those who are closest to him, or what Jesus calls his neighbours. From there his love radiates into good will and tolerance, which might be called love at a distance, love for those we don’t know, or for those in other communities. (CW 4, 324)

And, right on schedule, the right mobilizes for an attack organized, promoted, and led by Fox News.

Update: More signs from Wall Street today here. What’s really striking is how very young most of these protesters are. Really young. It’s horrifying to think how much they’ve already been abused by police: threatened, kettled and kicked around, arrested, pepper-sprayed.

One of the signs is a quote from Kurt Cobain (who was dead before a lot of these kids were out of diapers), “It is the duty of youth to challenge corruption.” Duty.

(Photo: Daniel Shankbone)