you want to talk about repression?

jerry farber
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it's ironic. radicals dream midnight police raids, or sit around over coffee and talk with glittering eyes about 'repression' - about those internment camps that are waiting empty. and all the time mrs jones does her quiet thing with the kids inthe third grade. people like to chat about the fascist threat or the communist threat. but their visions of repression are for the most part romantic and self indulgent: massacres, machine guns drowning out la marseillaise. and in the meantime someone stops another tenth grader for a hall pass chack and notices that his t-shirt doesn't have a pocket on it. in the meantime the bank of america hands out another round of high school achievement awards. in the meantime i grade another set of quizzes. god knows the real massacres continue. but the machine gun isn't really what is to be feared most in our civilised western world. it just isn't needed all that much. the kids leave miss jone's class. and they go to junior high and high school and college. and most of them will never need to be put in an internment camp. because they are already there. do you think i am overstating it? that's what's so frightening: we have the illusion that we are free. in school we learn to be good little americans - or frenchmen - or russians. we learn how to take the crap that's going to be shovelled on us all our lives. in school the state wraps up people's minds so tight that it can afford to leave their bodies alone. repression? you want to see victims of repression? come look at most of the students of san diego state college, where i work. they want to be told what to do. they don't know how to be free. they've given their will to this institution just as they'll continue to give their will to the institutions that engulf them inthe future.
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