(^{radically trivial}) FOOTNOTE: "Letter to the Editors"

While I agree with your editorial policy that what is needed now is serious analysis of “clown pedagogy” itself rather than a funny debunking of its products, I still think that from time to time it might be necessary to shift the focus and tone and actually look at the products. If you do that you will find some very “funny” things going on in the minds and in the practices of the students who are trained in clown pedagogy. I really think that the “humorous” and the “ironic” should not be abandoned to the reactionaries. As part of social discourses, they have to be mobilized against fascism in all its forms. So I have, in the text I am sending you, not hesitated to show the funny, the ridiculous and the infantile in the thinking and practices of the writers and readers of RADICAL TANGERINE which is, for all practical purposes, the official organ of clown pedagogy in this university now. But, there is a fundamental difference in the “funny” in my text and what you read in RADICAL TANGERINE. RADICAL TANGERINE, like AMERICAN SPECTATOR, for example, or NATIONAL REVIEW, uses the “funny” in order to cover up the serious: it basically amuses students and tells them that intellectual life is really silly, a bad joke, and this assures students that “real” life has nothing to do with thinking tough ideas and learning complicated languages...they can go on dreaming the American Dream as implied in THE RADICAL TANGERINE's fascist philosophy communicated through innuendoes, accusations, demeaning of intellectuals and progressive ideas. In the RADICAL TANGERINE's discourses the “funny” is used to cover up the emptiness of the American Dream for the majority of people and to absorb the crises and daily contradictions of students' lives into trivializing humorousness... I think the progressive use of humor is quite different: it not only does not cover up the crisis and does not reduce the serious into the silly, but, on the contrary, shows how what is represented as funny (in a society of divisions and class inequality) is always a cover up for fundamental problems in that society. In other words, the funny can be used as an archeological device: to unearth the crisis that underlies the surface of life under capitalism. I have tried to begin that process here: I have also woven here, in a fairly dense way, several voices and experimented with a lot of narrative de tours and ... you will see... I wanted to show the writers and readers of RADICAL TANGERINE how infantile is their idea of the funny and “wit”...At any rate, here is my text. I hope you find it helpful and publish it. I know you do not have a lot of room and I suggest you publish it in installments...bring in every now and then a part of it ..a sort of interposing of the humorous and the serious. In our fight against fascism that is sweeping America now we need to use all means necessary. Don't let the universities become breeding grounds for more Gingriches of this world. Help students to make the connections between the humor of RADICAL TANGERINE and fascism; help them to see that clown pedagogy is an ally of the oppressor and a friend of the exploiter. FIGHT FOR A SOCIETY WITHOUT EXPLOITATION OF THE WORKING PEOPLE.