so. my friend who's in the harvard english program just wrote me an email about an idea he's been kicking around with some friends/colleagues in the same, about starting a political action committee in academia focused on the idea of changing american foreign policy. he wanted me to see whether anybody in my program would be interested in being in on it.
his basic idea is to try to start a force in academia that's interested in changing american foreign policy - a group that would be unafraid of appearing lefty or crazy or whatever. he writes: "the model for this group is essentially the NRA. Forget about public opinion and focus your attention on campaigns and putting pressure on politicians directly -- if most of the country thinks you're nuts, who cares? If the general population thinks an academic political group is nuts, so what? They think we're nuts anyway. The advantage, though, is that academia is a sprawling social network that's already in place."
(he also points out that it's disgusting how the torture bill's outcome got shoved aside by all this foley stuff. which is true.)
it's all true enough. the question is, what would we do? i think it's even more interesting to think of how we, as AMS people, would understand our own responsibility to integrate our positions on foreign policy into our work. anybody interested in talking about this more?
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Funny, I was just thinking (again) about how academia is far removed from anything "meaningful" and that it's nice to theorize and write about X, Y and Z, but in the end it doesn't really matter.
That said, I'm not sure if I think that kind of top-down politics would work in academia. Either way it's an interesting proposition.
Yeah. I'm a little doubtful about the whole thing. I feel like numbers are against us. But then again, I am so pessimistic about political action in general. It's really bad.
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