M’accuse! Marcuse.

An edgy essay by Robert Whyte

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I can’t claim not to know anything about Herbert Marcuse, for five good reasons.

1. People would say, oh no, not this old ploy; you’re not sucking me in this time.

2. My greenie, leftie, progressive, touchy-feely, warm-and-cuddly reputation would be shot to shit.

3. I would have to seriously have to consider, on reflection, that my so-called rounded liberal education was entirely in the hands of bankers, lawyers, conservative duffers, reactionary nitwits, anti-semites and morons, although I do have to admit I took Geology and Chemistry instead of History and I know something about terminal moraine, schist and the melting point of molybdenum — and look where that’s got me.

4. I would be too embarrassed.

5. It wouldn’t be true.

Except it is true. Oh, woe is me.

Someone did a number on me at high school and convinced me that any whiff of Marxism was death and girls would shun you like a plague of halitosis-afflicted scary clowns.

Even if you could play lead guitar and sing like a gravel truck. Yes, it was that bad.

Here’s the deets.

Herbert Marcuse, like Erich Fromm (who was the glaring absence revealed in my library last week) was a member of the Frankfurt school.

And what’s that you ask?

When I was at school I knew a Frankfurter was a hot dog, a Hamburger was a rissole in a bun, and a Berliner was a doughnut; but now I’m told this is all wrong.

The Frankfurt school was a bunch of commies, including Herbert Marcuse, Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Walter Benjamin, Erich Fromm, Friedrich Pollock, Leo Löwenthal, Jürgen Habermas, Alfred Schmidt, Axel Honneth, Siegfried Kracauer, Otto Kirchheimer and presumably some women, except women dissidents hadn’t been invented yet, apparently.

You can guess how many of those commies I’m on reading terms with.

Yep. All zip of them.

But why did no-one tell me these dudes were part of the “Cultural Marxism” conspiracy theory created to take over and destroy Western culture?

I’m totally one hundred per cent for that shit. Counterculture, multiculturalism, progressive politics, openly gay people on television, blacks, students and feminist women.

These are some of my favourite things.

I want to join you guys and uninvented women.

How hard could it be to see a periodontist and ditch the smiley face and the big red nose? You’re my gang!

So how come I’m not neck and crop with you ratbags?

Fuck it, it’s all too confusing.

If there is some lost spaceship B or jail cell where there is actually a whole bunch of people hopped out of their heads on home grown pooch, or hooch, or smooch or whatever that shit is called, trying to kind of snap their fingers with uncoordinated knuckles to the beat of some indifferent drum, chewing mentholated breath-ease and certainly not reading Stephen King; who actually have personally met or at least read Herbert Marcuse, Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Walter Benjamin, Erich Fromm, Friedrich Pollock, Leo Leventhal, Jürgen Habermas, Alfred Schmidt, Axel Honneth, Siegfried Kracauer, Otto Kirchheimer and all those uninvented dissident women — it can’t possibly exist, or I would have known about it.

I’m no denier, but I know my own blinkered ideology.

If you want to find out about Herbert Marcuse and his take on shit, look him up yourself.

What am I, your personal Googler?

Fuck the lot of you. I’m going to look up Chomsky.