I sometimes wonder what would happen if I were to attempt to re-enter academia, and my potential colleagues were to come across this 'blog.  I suppose I might be criticized for a lack of rigor, for all the ranting and violent invective, for the abusive tone taken toward opposing viewpoints, and, especially, for all the cussing.  The latter is particularly pitiful, because it rests precisely on the notion of bad words.  This is a very odd notion, if you squint at it carefully under good light.  And by "odd" I mean completely batshit insane.  Roll the term over on your tongue a bit:  Bad.  Words.  Words that are bad.  What did they do?  Steal their grandparents' Social Security checks in order to buy crack, in order to force-feed it to puppies - perhaps puppies with fibromyalgia?

Fundamentally, the restraint of the academic style is admirable - one can't even begin to do philosophy, for example, unless one can dispassionately consider the possible grounds upon which opposing positions might be seen as legitimate.  One must perform the analysis of ideas with a surgeon's detachment.  However, once the papers have been written, there still lingers a certain excessive delicacy about academics.  At the very core of this tender sense of decorum is a patrician notion of civility.

And, yes, civility is nice, of course.  But "nice" is not synonymous with "good"!  Witness for example the hideous cowardice of British intellectuals in the face of the Rushdie affair - anxious not to slander any Muslim religious leader no matter how vile and inhumane, and totally unwilling to face the fact that militant fundamentalism is a large and in many places mainstream faction of that religion.  (Do you know what religion looks like if you don't believe in it?  Jonestown.)  Subtler than this is the handling of economics, say, or politics - particularly of the policies and activities of one's own government.  By its nature, a large government is inevitably involved in much larger-scale atrocities than any terrorist, by virtue of funding if nothing else!  And every bit as involved in money laundering, drug running, collusion with Nazis and death squads and gangsters... 

For myself, I would call this the Neville Chamberlain school of rhetoric.  "Perhaps if we speak softly to the monster, it will calm down and come to see how right we are, as evidenced by how friendly we are toward it."  Meanwhile, it's killing your students and large chunks of the Third World.  But, of course, academia has, perhaps, taken much of its tone - not to mention its leadership and its funding - from priests, artistocrats, robber barons, and suchlike, so let's not forget that the "monster" in question is, as often as not, the people at the foot of whose beds academics often find themselves kneeling.