Ruth Frick O'Brien

Category: Harmony & Hegemony

  • protest politics

    protest politics

    Any one who knows me knows I’m rather persistent when it comes to physicał protests.

    Anyone who really knows me knows if and why i ‘show’-up, for a protest or stage one with my Fred or follow my fearless sons, can figure out these photos.The where and when.

    Too decide is an ordeal.

    It’s always an ordeal, or better yet a calculation to determine if my physical body can “take it.”

    When I arrived at CUNY I had a workplace injury as University of Denver (DU) –Repetitive Strain Injury (RSI), I taught and published only that. I was the “negative” example, if you will.

    No doubt about it!

    How (not why because too obvious) is the question.

    HOW is so much harder, though potentially counter-intuitive then way more interesting. Like ” “disinterest” not rational self-interest.

    Indeed, I get tired hearing either the why — the justification disguised or ʼframedʼ as I write in at least one book racialized – en-cultured or -en-appropriated (Penelope). And if you wanna play the game, select 2 ids please. It is only fair Rudi.

    What is my MO? Mother Courage or Reckless Ruthje? I love to name and to have acronyms like TAP (new-ish) and PRISM. I asked for over 23 years how a Germanic language like Dutch did not soften my name nor Ruudʼs. Happy to catch up with Gradi during the holidays. It is her cennential all year, after all.RPM taught me a lot about what radically changes meaning in transliteration. Being “lost in translation – is too obvious. Cultures are akin to climate(s). Get it?

    MuckrakerIdaTarbell
  • In a word, Gail, it’s Gramsci

    In a word, Gail, it’s Gramsci

    One of my cousins asked me a fun question. We were talking about Frick and Stout family artifacts from Iowa, Jacksonville Illinois, Des Moines, Grundy, and Polk Counties, all in Iowa, as well as Hopewell and Amwell, New Jersey, where Colonel Thomas Johnson Stout’s son left to head West.

    See David Forgacs, "Gramsci Undisabled" Modern Italy, 2016 doing:101017/mit.2016.33
    See Critical Studies of Education, Vol. 5 “Antonio Gramsci: A Pedagogy to Change the World” Nicola Pizzolato and John D. Holst, Editors (Cham, Switzerland, 2017)

    My baby sister Kathleen even has the china washbowl this single man brought with him all the way to Morgan County, IL The pitcher had long broken, our grandmother Ruth Finlayson Frick explained, along with the Dutch family tradition of giving the most prized artifacts to the last daughter married. On the back of that bowl in very discolored paper is an explanation of who Col. Stout was.

    Not only was he George’s (Washington) aide de camp, but he was a professor of religion and helped start Brown University too. But most of all, reading different newspaper accounts, the Colonel wanted nothing to do with receiving any Revolutionary War pension. Sure, he qualified, but he took it as an affront that anyone would think he would take money reserved for the poor.

    Antonio Gramsci didn’t think like Thomas Stout. And I am not even sure I would label his left-right politics partisan, yet. That said, he may have been honoring Revolutionary War widows and orphans. To me this means, like Gramsci 250 years later, Thomas Stout recognized the family and the hegemonic power within the family like Gramsci, who not only supported women’s rights but also those of children, unlike his Marxist and Communist and Anarchist or Syndicated Anarchist did with his particular preoccupation with culture and all the jarring juxtapositions that exist and do lead to change, like the changes we are seeing in the United States of America today.

    MuckrakerIdaTarbell
  • /Control?/Resist?!?/Bodies_in_Revolt*

    /Control?/Resist?!?/Bodies_in_Revolt*

    This was written before the ADAAA was passed in 2008 as President George W. Bush (43, not 41) with Routledge, 2005 and sold as chapters or I can send PDFs per requests (robrien@gc.cuny.edu within each semester (approximately September to December and February to May) each year. I only have select chapters.

    Finally, Voices from the Edge: Narratives about the Americans with Disabilities Act (USA: Oxford University Press, 2004)

    Crippled Justice: The History of Disability in the Workplace (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, October 2001).

    https://www.hulu.com/watch/88ceaa35-dea2-49de-9985-8993d49574a0

    https://press.princeton.edu/series/the-public-square

    Writing Politics inspired both Voices from the Edge and the Public Square (PS) by PUP in Princeton, New Jersey)

    MuckrakerIdaTarbell
  • 3-repubs

    3-repubs

    Representative Millicent Fenwick
    In 1977 and 1978, I got to walk with this brave Republican woman from New Jersey who knew Kevin McCarthy’s Dad — and/or The Grapes of Wrath managers who knew who Steinbeck named “the” book after

    These posts reflect my original interest in American politics, history and political theory broadly cast.

    What I call this is American Political Thought squared or (APT+APT).  You guessed it, I’m not interested in APD — with the D standing for “development.”

    I’m interested in exploring the nexus between American Political Development (APD) and American Political Thought (APT) as well as American Studies and Africana Studies or all regional “studies,” including working with Gajo Petrovic a leader in Praxis published in the former Yugoslavia. Now I found “Olde Good Things” where Fred and I can purchase “Americana” that is upcycled-not recycled nor antiqued. Check it out 🙂

    Indeed, APT squared or APT/APT explains my Master-Slave Hegelian re-interpretation discovered in CAPT (C stands for contemporary) where “A perfect Martini” and I and other students first discussed the too long APT reading list that includes/excludes not PwD but people who are not part of “All Other Persons” found in Federalist Paper #48.

    This was the reason I stayed in American practical or street level politics for my Ph.D. rather than leaving for law school, history, sociology or business school.  To be sure, UCLA doctoral faculty kept trying to convince me to leave and write (who has a career in writing in the 1980s? Wives to be sure but . . . )

    After working with Martin Heidegger’s Being and Time propagator — longstanding IAS member and philosophy professor Gajo Petrovic (Zagreb) after being working with the Fulbright scholar who wrote the only working Yugoslavian Constitution (i.e. the one that stuck — written in the 1970s). The constitutional scholar attended the Sorbonne in the 1930s and ended his career as the Dean of the best law school in Belgrade after Claremont Graduate School.

    In the 1980s the Fulbright funded his scholarship on Jefferson at Claremont Graduate School, which is similar to Jefferson’s table, I worked with him for my B.A. thesis — Beyond Reification — on Marx, existentialism, phenomenology and Yugoslavian self-management supervised by Claremont Men’s College’s public law professor Winston Fisk.  Fisk’s daughter is a well-known labor legal scholar, who last I saw or talked to was at Duke Law School in labor-capitalism theory.

    MuckrakerIdaTarbell