Ensler > Shakespeare

Friday, February 8, 2008

By Cate Lunt

Random progressive thoughts on a passing normative scene:

• I was pondering the other day, and suddenly it hit me all at once: Eve Ensler is the greatest playwright and artist who has ever lived. Period.

• We need justice on this campus now. Period.

• Activism tip: Lately I’ve been adding “Period.” to the end of otherwise vague statements to indicate how disgusted I am with all this caviling and incessant not-going-along. And, hell, it’s working pretty well.

• I’m beta-testing, as it were, the practice of speaking other forms of punctuation, particularly “question mark,” which seems like a good way to underscore especially subversive questions. Example: “Why do we still have war in the twenty-first century? Question mark.” I find that very stirring, though I’m still tweaking my technique. I’d like to hear from the activist community about how to best employ it.

• “Poetry, or activism”? Whenever I hear this, I want to shout “SAME THING!!!” Poetry is the purest form of activism, and activism the purest form of poetry. The best poem I ever wrote? “let’s change / the world / right now.”

• When I heard that the Elders of Beta Theta Phi “fraternity” wanted to “recolonize” (in their own rather revealing phrase) Dartmouth’s campus, I was overjoyed. Finally, everything I loved was pitted against everything I hated, which would result in the final activist Armageddon between the allies of social justice and the goons of conformity. We didn’t start this fight, but we’ll finish it all right.

• The varieties of my gangsta gesticulation experience: sort of without realizing it, I was flashing gang signs rather ironically in all my facebook pictures. Then I realized, why is a privileged white kid like yours truly co-opting these urban semiotic signifiers, as I like to call them? Then I thought maybe I should keep them up as it subverted the oppressive middle-class values so prevalent on facebook as to make it barely readable. Finally, I just gave it up because too many other people were doing it. Life’s a journey.

• My enemies are planning to reveal this anyways, so hear it goes: I’m getting an I-Banking job. Yah, I know, not what you’d expect. The idea is I’ll do this for only about two or six years, write poetry on the side, and then, you know, the future is wide open. Trouble: I wrote this totally kind of tongue-in-cheek, ironic article making fun of myself for doing it, but in a way I guess I wanted to sort of be absolved in a way maybe. But people haven’t really mentioned it. I’m nervous. I was thinking of writing another one, but that might be overkill. Anywho...

• All the interesting debates are on the left nowadays. The other day, I sent like two-hundred, no joke, blitzes arguing with my friend about whether homophobia is more imperialist than sexism is. Imperialism involves a whole slew of discourses vying for the construction of a simulacrum of “truth.” We knocked that one out pretty quickly. But if desire is a performance that can be culturally situated among various other racist discourses, then sexism’s conception of “the real” is closer to imperialism’s. But my friend said that racist discourses can’t be historicized by Western societies even as they disengage from post-colonial societies because they haven’t dealt with Lacan, not even a little bit. This was a witty point, so we reached a kind of impasse. Yet, it seems a lot of people don’t even care.

• I wore my awesome Stop Sexism t-shirt the other day, and this fool walked over next to me and said that my shirt wasn’t going to stop sexism—wow, like I didn’t know that. That’s not the point, as you all know. I told him that his objection was part of the problem, and that a phrase like “stop sexism” is never controversial except in a sexist society. So I thanked him with some totally over-the-top sarcasm for illuminating how sexist our culture really is. He looked like an ox that had just heard Beethoven.

• If we cannot laugh, then our cause is lost. Subversive joke: why did the chicken cross the picket line? Answer: Because he gets a bizarre sexual thrill out of corporate mass-slaughter in the developing world. Try this out at a party. You’ll make new friends while also challenging how people think.

• Do sexist, racist, and homophobic thoughts cause global warming? I feel that somehow they must, but I’m not sure how. Can we get a scientific consensus on this, please? Get those test tubes bubbling, white-coats.

• Who’s gonna be the next president of Dartmouth? I hope it’s like Dennis Kucinich or Moby but I have a feeling it’s gonna be some totally normative square who’ll refuse to dynamite the frats or put mind-control chips in people or anything like that. It’s like, chill out people, if you don’t think reprehensible thoughts, you’ve got nothing to fear. Some people are like, “Thought police!” but I have something to tell you that’ll rock your world: George Orwell once wrote something sort of racist in a letter. He did! Put that in your (tobacco) pipes and smoke it—normatively, I need hardly add. n

Ensler > Shakespeare

Article Tools

Related Articles