turistas go home!

[intertribal]

The title is my reaction to Indiana Jones: The Kingdom of the Crystal Skull.  The above is also my reaction to every Indiana Jones movie, so I guess if you like Indiana Jones, you'll like it.

Let me just say though, that as someone who watched 9 FUCKING seasons of the X-Files, this sanitized, Americanized, and abridged version in 2 1/2 hours and M&Ms packaging just feels like a smack in the fucking face.

+ : every time Indiana Jones fails at something. 
- : every time Indiana Jones succeeds at something.
best character: crazy professor man + mutt
worst character: marion ravenwood + indiana jones
best impossibility: Indiana Jones gets pulled out of a sand trap by holding onto a snake that is somehow able to hold his entire weight!
worst impossibility: Indiana Jones survives a nuclear explosion by hiding in a refrigerator and doesn't die of cancer in three weeks!

Comments

[royinpink.livejournal.com]

With regard to my comments about Jason...I should add that he convinced me to see poverty as creating many racial stereotypes and identities a bit more than I had previously. I still don't think it can be reduced totally to that, as if the way people see 'race' does not matter at all in the creation of it, as I believe that such things are socially created, and Jason is more of a materialist. But the whole conversation did consist of a lot of yelling before we got to reach the agreements we did, although we were always both participants in the argument, not victims of attack. I see no problem with yelling or emotion (it's an emotional topic) so long as that holds true.

Anyway, your remarking on the academic tradition got me to thinking about the various backgrounds of the authors I'd had to read for Language & Politics, a lot of which, admittedly, I don't remember or know so well. I know there was a black lawyer who argued for the censorship of hate speech (Lawrence Summers III, I think), but I remember that because of the explicit "I am black and I'm going to talk about black people being oppressed" nature of the piece. But thinking further I remembered a book I'd started reading outside of class--The Evasion of American Philosophy by Cornell West, which I'm much more inclined to agree with politically, philosophically, etc. It's partly about American pragmatism, of which Peirce was the founder, though I also respect Dewey, who the book is much more about, but it's more than that:

"So just as my earlier texts emerged out of my own political praxis in and my identity with prophetic Christianity, this book consists of my attempt to come to terms with my philosophic allegiances in light of my participation in the U.S. democratic socialist movement (Democratic Socialists of America), my particular role in the American academy (Princeton University), and my existence on the margins of the black church (as a lay preacher).

"This book is principally motivated by my own disenchantment with intellectual life in America and my own demoralization regarding the political and cultural state of the country. For example, I am disturbed by the transformation of highly intelligent liberal intellectuals into tendentious neoconservatives owing to crude ethnic identity-based allegiances and vulgar neonationalist sentiments. I am disappointed with the professional incorporation of former New Left activists who now often thrive on a self-serving careerism while espousing rhetorics of oppositional politics of little seriousness and integrity. More important, I am depressed about the concrete nihilism in working-class and underclass American communities--the pervasive drug addiction, suicides, alcoholism, male violence against women, white violence against black, yellow, and brown people, and the black criminality against others, especially other black people. I have written this text convinced that a thorough reexamination of American pragmatism, stripping it of its myths, caricatures, and stereotypes and viewing it as a component of a new and novel form of indigenous America oppositional thought and action, may be a first step toward fundamental change and transformation in America and the world.

"I write as one who intends to deepen and enrich American pragmatism while bringing trenchant critique to bear on it. I consider myself deeply shaped by American civilization, but not fully a par of it. I am convinced that the best of the American pragmatist tradition is the best American has to offer itself and the world, yet I am willing to concede that this best may not be good enough given the depths of the international and domestic crises we now face. But though this slim and slight possibility may make my efforts no more than an impotent moral gesture, nonetheless, in the heat of battle, we have no other choice but to fight"

[(Anonymous)]

no, must've been Charles Lawrence III. which explains me remembering "Lawrence" better, as I had to cite him in a paper.