Wednesday 2 February 2011

Leon Trotsky ...

Yesterday I mentioned Leon Trotsky in a blog post.

Havn't mentioned or thought about Lev Davidovich for years, yet his photo was one of the background images of my student years. You could even buy notepads through the student co-op store with a cartoon of Lev and his famous quote "Revolutions are always verbose" on the cover.

Of course all that has gone away. In much the same way as professors have got respectable, all that leftist fervor and energy has gone away to be replaced with an anodyne sameness and complacency.

Now there was lot that was bad in the seventies, a lot of pseudo leftist posturing, the continual alphabet soup of the left and quite frankly a lot of crap being talked, not to mention economic chaos and hippy dippy utopianism. And I'll put my hand up and admit I was as prone to some of that as everyone else.

That said there was a challenging intellectual ferment, and I get the sense that there isn't that now, and it's not all being sublimated by other forms of creativity.

So where have all the crazy people gone?

2 comments:

dgm said...

by coincidence The Australian had an where have all the crazy profs gone? article yesterday ...

dgm said...

and of course there's the UNE ad spruiking distance ed ...