Shared an ultimately rather enjoyable bout of paranoia with some Marxist friends Wednesday evening. We were talking, of course, about "recent events at the New School." I told them that I suspected some revolutionaries might be asking themselves if I was to be trusted, since I had missed several important meetings (because of classes), had not spoken up at our college faculty meeting last week, and had now been seen shaking hands with the toxic president! There is definitely a spirit of suspicion setting in, and it's been getting to me.
Talking about it to uninvolved friends - who also happen to be Marxists who think academic politics is about as serious as a tea party, and see an insurrection of tenured faculty as like a landowners' rebellion - was a cool tonic. But first they let me squirm. We imagined the impossibility of convincing someone who thought you disloyal of your loyalty: making a public pledge of loyalty is just the sort of thing a disloyal person would do, especially someone not usually given to public pronouncements! But if you do nothing out of the ordinary, relying on your reputation for good judgment (such as it is), it seems like you're refusing to recognize the extraordinary circumstance, and so clearly counterrevolutionary... Suddenly we were back in the USSR!
"In circumstances such as these," said one friend, "no-one can be innocent." He seemed to enjoy my bourgeois unhappiness at this, and added, laconically: "Revolutionary times call for revolutionary fervor!" Thank goodness for his wife who interjected: "But non-revolutionary times don't call for revolutionary fervor." What we need to do is effect change in the way our school is run, not turn on each other.
