thread: 2006-05-09 : My OTHER body of work
On 2006-05-12, Vincent wrote:
I have this friend, Charlie Donahue. He used to be a big part of my life, now we aren't as close but we bump into each other once in a while in Northampton and it's always a real treat.
He was my boss in the dark times - oh hey, maybe you don't know this. You know "The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas" by Ursula LeGuin? U.S. liberalism is like Omelas. (Probably every legislative agenda everywhere is; U.S. liberalism is the one I know.) Every NARAL, every Amnesty International, every HRC balances on the backs of these 30 people toiling in hell. 30 people, they're a mix of students, unemployable, and plain hard up, and they're chained, doing the 3rd worst work I know so that the rest of us can feel good about supporting our causes.
Charlie was my boss in those hard times (then he was my colleague - and in fact, after that he got me this much better hospital gig, blessings be upon him). He was the perfect boss: get him telling stories and you'd buy sweet minutes away from the pit.
But - boss then colleague, whatever, he was my friend. We used to walk up the bike path to Whole Foods for lunch between shifts, and I heard stories that none of the rest of us got to hear. "The sixties," Charlie would say, "were very good to me." He was the anti-father I never had.
Now he's teaching modal logic at UMass Dartmouth. (I met Sean Stidd last year, we got talking, Sean's doing philosophy out in Chicago or wherever precisely. I told him my good friend Charlie teaches modal logic and Sean said, "I could be doing modal logic." I said, "Sean, that there's a joke with an extremely narrow target audience.")
Anyhow, the point is that Charlie Donahue had been friends with Andy Kaufman. Charlie had been the East Coast director of the Transcendental Meditation organization ("before the coup," he'd say - "before it all went wrong") and Andy Kaufman used to sweep their office at night.
So this image for you, Tris, is courtesy Charlie Donahue:
Picture a very young Andy Kaufman, pre-Taxi, pre-anything, solemn-faced, shaking his head and clucking his tongue. "Sad but false," he says. "Sad but false."
This makes BL go "Conversation bookmark"
Omelas and liberalism.
This makes lpl go "3rd worst work"
would consist of?
And what, if I dare ask, are the other two?
This makes VB go "the 3rd worst work is..."
Calling people on the telephone and asking them for money.
This makes MB go "First two"
would be 1)calling people about their urinary troubles and 2)packaging tacky Halloween costumes.
