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SCHECHTER | Trustees, Deliver Us a Courageous President
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Cornell has weathered the political storm before, and we must do it again.
The Cornell Daily Sun (https://cornellsun.com/tag/communism/)
Cornell has weathered the political storm before, and we must do it again.
Speaking to a sold-out audience at Bailey Hall on Monday, Professor Angela Davis reminded us of that Karl Marx aphorism, in so many words: We make our own history, but not as we choose. Rather, we are constantly haunted by those generations that came before us. History, materialized in the form of dead, calcified labor, weighs heavy upon our actions. Yet, Professor Davis, in speaking to a crowd of young and older activists alike, manifested an altogether different vision of history. Rather than the ghost of past labor, Davis arrived at Cornell representing the vivacity of deferred revolution — a figure of history who reminds us not of our constraints, but our infinite paths forward.
“The MacDonald’s Man” folds the highbrow seriousness of literature in on itself. People come out and denounce it not as a poem, but as “good poetry.” Well I do think it’s a good poem, but for different reasons.
Famous works were created — at the cost of a close friendship.
The 2015 biopic Trumbo depicts the struggle that many screenwriters faced during the Red Scare. Dalton Trumbo (played by Bryan Cranston), along with nine other screenwriters, was tried and charged for contempt of Congress under the accusation of writing films promoting anti-American ideals. As a consequence, he and many other writers faced blacklisting, forbidding them from writing and getting paid, wasting an enormous amount of talent. After his jail time, he decided to use the loopholes in his court orders to his advantage. Trumbo wrote films under the identity of Robert Rich (another screenwriter who was away on military leave) and even won an Academy Award for Best Original Story for The Brave One.