Having said that, I guess I would just like to suggest that ass-kicking is not necessarily opposed to patience. In fact, to turn a Yoderian phrase here (via Rom Coles), I think ass-kicking is perhaps a vital form of “wild patience.” After all, ass-kicking is not assault or murder, its a form of rebuke, of chastening, of discipline. Certainly ass-kicking can reach a point where it is excessive and sadistic. But, just from my own impressions of the phenomenon under discussion, I don’t think we’re there yet.

I also admit that my case is weakened by the fact that more remains in your interview. I look forward to reading it. I’m presently seeking to aquire more of your work.

My frustration, or visceral aversion as Halden wants to call it, is with your tendency to ultimately construe this generation as having no rigor nor intellectual curiosity due to your interaction with some jackass, and your continual reference to this generation as responsible for producing and being solely seduced by Barack Obama. As someone who reports the news better than most, does this really tell the whole story?

I grew up 5 minutes from Nova, I know that the type of people you and I run with are few and far between on the Main Line, I know what kind of students you interact with day to day, and I know imagining (let alone constituting) a different world is probably low on the to-do list. But, it isn’t everywhere. I’d suggest getting a bit more underground next time you give us a report.

I’m looking forward to your comments on McCabe. Would he prefer to kick this generations ass? Or would he have the prophetic capacity to see that patience is a far more revolutionary way to engage this generation, to stoke its creative impulses, and stir it from sleep? There is a time for both, and a way to merge both at the same time. I hope the rest of your interview does that work.

Doesn’t a visceral aversion to critique kind of, you know, confirm it?

As for hope and patience, I can assure JA that I’ve got plenty of it. But hope and patience don’t preclude calling things by their names. What my intervention “accomplishes,” I think, is to, as Dave puts it, kick the ass of the coming generation. (To every thing there is a season: a time to gently encourage, and a time to kick ass.) I should also remind JA that later in the first part of the interview I say exactly what he says in his first post: that the demise of the Empire and its mythologies is an extraordinarily hopeful moment. I’m perfectly willing to see what this generation can do. I just have to say that I’m not impressed — so far.

I certainly don’t claim any superior moral or intellectual valor for my own generation, many of whom, as JA points out, have been responsible for the mess his generation is inheriting. But while I take his point, I also think it’s limited and ultimately irrelevant. Some of us — yours truly included — aren’t “privileged global servants of liberal capitalism.” I’m a college professor, which has the one privilege of tenure — a very real and important one, to be sure, but one that I can assure JA isn’t making me rich. But I unashamedly use that privilege to undermine confidence in the system. I have no doubt that there are at least some in JA’s generation who are doing similar kinds of things — I just haven’t seen a critical mass. (To pile it on, I’m saddened and appalled by the professional obsessions of the rising academic cohort. Again, I understand it — the academic job market is awful and competitive — but the fact remains.) And besides, what previous generations did or didn’t do isn’t the issue. What is this generation going to do? One thing I can advise them — kick their asses — not to do is to think that voting for the likes of Barack Obama is going to constitute “change.”

In the third part of the interview, I talk a lot about Fr. Herbert McCabe, the wonderful Dominican and socialists whose work I often mention to students. If JA wants some encouragement rather than ass-kicking, I recommend that he stay tuned for further epidoses.

For balance, I think it’s worth noting that he handles the disappointment of some of his “brighter students” over the failed promises of president Obama with more care. With that in mind, I just don’t read him as dismissing the entire college generation out of hand. It’s something of an ass-kicking, but in my experience with several Christian college settings, I’d say it’s probably a voice that needs to be heard.

While I think this interview is spectacular and the criticism damning, to dismiss out-of-hand my generation is puzzling. I’m wondering where those ‘college generations’ who supposedly cared so much for ‘truth, falsehood, and evidence’ went?

So, now, not only will my generation have to be custodians for Professor McCarraher’s own apparently enlightened generations disaster, we’ve already been written off as failures. Here’s one reason to be more hopeful for the coming generation than any that we have seen in a long time: we’re coming of age at a time when the logic of capital, liberalism, and the American strands of Empire have been squarely revealed as mythology. And, maybe, when our most articulate are raking leaves to pay rent instead of reading Hegel and Aquinas, we’ll happen upon some fucking truth.