Q.E.D.

This speaks for itself. My Public Intellectual class has some amazing assignments.

me: so we had to do some "bad" writing for my public intellectual response today

here's mine

Phil: that sounds so fun

me: To say that the conversive and discursive habits of those garrisoned within the Ivory Tower are less than limpid (that is to say, in a word, equivocal) is a not manifold position which finds itself too often espoused by too large a segment of the populous at large. These so-called arbiters of some undefined "authority"(1) maintain that academes and intellectuals, particularly those in the American context, have become too subsumed (enslaved) in the culture that births academic writing that they have become overtly and unequivocally concerned with the form of the genre and have thus distanced themselves from any semblance of meaning.

What these pompous, self-appointed cultural critics (Warner and Wallace spring to mind) fail to understand in their supposed apotheosis of clarity is that the nature of intellectual discovery is an abstraction not always accessible to those who would care to fathom its depths. Rather, the complexity of the concepts and the fecundity of the discourse of those privileged enough to partake in the academy necessitate a certain level of abstruseness within the confines of the dialogue between academics.

(1) "Authority," as those primed in the basic levels of sociological academic discourse, is a problematic concept, which, in this author's opinion, should be stricken from both the academic lexicon as well as that of the vox populi. Its inclusion in this debate is reason enough to dismiss this argument, but I shall put aside this obvious weakness and amusement for the moment in service of my and my colleagues' amusement.

Phil: I want to shoot you

me: success!

And the wall came tumbling down

Today is the twentieth anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. It's also, as George Packer points out, the anniversary of the date of Kaiser Wilhelm's abdication, the Beer Hall Putsch, and Kristallnacht. "The German calendar is appropriately inconvenient: nothing good is conserved without the active remembrance of something bad," he writes.

How true. As a history major born on the 43rd anniversary of the use of the atomic bomb, a subject which I've thought about and written about to death, I've spent my entire life trying to learn that history doesn't discriminate. Certainly, people instigate events, and make decisions on specific dates for reasons, but ultimately, we have no control over what happens on the anniversary of any given day.

We like to tie historical events to memorable causes. But more often than not, the path of history is much more inglorious than we would like to admit, as Packer writes:

The wall came down not because Ronald Reagan stood up and demanded it but because on the evening of November 9th, at a televised press conference in East Berlin, a Party hack named Günter Schabowski flubbed a question about the regime’s new, liberalized travel regulations. Asked when they took effect, Schabowski shrugged, scratched his head, checked some papers, and said, “Immediately,” sending thousands of East Berliners to the wall in a human tide that the German Democratic Republic could not control. Soldiers and Stasi agents didn’t shoot into the crowd, but things could easily have gone otherwise.

What many like to see as an inevitable conclusion and what nearly everyone sees as an inspiring symbol of the end of an era only occured because of a strange set of coincidences and mistakes. And as epic and beautiful as that image is, we need to remember that there are many more forces at work than just fate and justice in the creation of history

And so then, how to treat the death of Vitaly Ginzburg, a fascinating man instrumental in the creation of the Soviet H-bomb? With him dies one more memory of a terrifying period in human history, one more account of Stalin's brutality.

That is perhaps the greatest loss. How will we remember the past when those who have experienced it are gone? At Brown University, my fair undergraduate institution, we celebrated the fall of the Berlin Wall with German spoken word, free sausages, and a reenactment of the day, complete with tearing down a mock wall on the Main Green. At the same time, on another quad, football players in pink shirts bench pressed weights to raise money for breast cancer as students cheered them on.

Coincidence? Certainly. What does it mean? You got me. At any rate, I'm glad it happened, just as people around the world, including myself, are happy for the coincidences of twenty years ago, as we all should be.