Come to me, all you rabble-rousing academic plutocrats!

The best essay I've read about the Ward Churchill vs Bill O'Reilly kerfuffle appeared in this week's Village Voice. Illinois State University professor Curtis White argues that Churchill and O'Reilly are bound to one another, a blustering Judas Iscariot and Jesus of Nazareth, hostages of a socio-economic system without which they couldn't profit. This is not, needless to say, an observation of world-historic originality (paging Borges and Wilde), but sometimes the most obvious points need stressing:

This is not something Americans should fault him for. In all of these ways he is quite typically American. He's movin' on up, for God's sake. He is in the most unexceptional way a whore to the system he claims to hate. He, too, is a Good German. We all are. In the end, we go to work, do what's expected of us (even if that means just assigning grades), and accept our paycheck (and a nice six-figure thing that can be for a full professor at a flagship institution like Colorado, and you get to live in Boulder!). Worst of all, at the end of the year we pay our taxes, which we know are going toward things that would break our hearts to witness. And we have little choice but to continue to do these things

It's mildly gratifying to read an academic with a grain of modesty.