Mytheos: Your recent column (“Mytheology: Where is your Vanguard now?,” September 9, 2008, Volume CXLIV, Number 3) issues a warning to all egalitarian-minded budding political thinkers on campus, using Fountain Avenue as a model of what would result from the successful violent overthrow of our bourgeois parliamentarian government in a revolution spearheaded by Students for a Democratic Society and the Wesleyan chapter of the Communist Party USA. You predict, with the acuity of a young and very well groomed Nostradamus, that when the bleeding-heart egalitarian nutjobs win, we will see not a social democratic utopia but in fact the advent of a new People’s Republic of America, where the “blue collar solidarity” team of Stalins turn on the “utopian-minded egghead freak” Trotskys, chasing them to Mexico with their police dogs and pepper spray and finally beating them to death with ice picks. There probably won’t even be the consolation of having sex with Frida Kahlo before they die. Bummer.
In fact, your column was an eye-opening experience for me: someone who occasionally (though not often and for very short periods of time, I swear!) considered the possibility of attempting some slight and very meager work that might possibly one day result in our government adopting the socialistic policy of improving that meaningless and distracting statistic of income inequality. Equality of income means “the same” after all. Just look at how identical my parents (liberal graduate-degree wielding children of immigrants) are to Republican low-level financial analysts at Goldman Sachs, or unionized construction workers.
I’ve also flirted with supporting the heinous hypothetical proposal of injecting (dear God, don’t say it) public funds into the healthcare system to make it more affordable for working-class people. Worst of all, I might have advocated reforming the education system that wisely ensures that those with the most expensive houses get the best public schools and can then go on to get accepted at “highly selective, eccentric institutions” where their occasional interactions with “the proletariat” will be when they toss beer bottles at police cars.
I now see such thoughts of “agitation for social justice” for what they are: Marxist illusions of a classless society, dissipated no sooner had you reminded me that “vanguards” that lead the charge for equality from the front run the inevitable risk of getting screwed from behind. By “ferocious pets,” no less. I’ll incorporate your sagacity into my political thinking by inserting this truism into my “enlightened intellectual” manifesto: “Class division good, social justice bad.”
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