Digging Ditches in New Mexico

My guest on the show today is writer, activist and retired journalism professor Robert Jensen who has a new book out, This I Don’t Believe: A Fulfilling Life without Meaning.

In it, Bob uses his own encounters with different sources of meaning – God, nature, even the idea that we’re free to choose anything at all, rather than just being the mechanistic product of a bunch of subatomic particles interacting with each other in a sequence that gives rise to the illusion of human agency – to make the case for a more down-to-earth, small-m idea of meaning. He also talks, in ways I found quite moving, about his own struggles to patch together an adult life of purpose after a childhood so abusive and chaotic that he genuinely doesn’t remember a lot of it.

Bob spent most of his career as a journalism professor at UT Austin and as a writer of short, plainspoken books advocating for his brand of left-wing politics, including The Heart of Whiteness: Confronting Race, Racism and White Privilege; All My Bones Shake: Seeking a Progressive Path to the Prophetic Voice; and without question the best titled of his many books: Getting Off: Pornography and the End of Masculinity.

I first heard of Bob, I’m pretty sure, when a lot of people first heard of him, which was when he published an op-ed three days after 9/11 that drew a deliberate moral equivalence between the Al-Qaeda attacks on us and the history of U.S. aggression in places like Vietnam, Cambodia, East Timor, and Chile. He wasn’t defending Al Qaeda; his point was that we kind of sucked too, and, more importantly, we almost certainly were about to suck quite hard again.

Here he is, for instance, talking about the fear that took hold of him after the attacks, which wasn’t the fear that most people had, of more attacks on what we began to almost immediately call “the homeland,” but rather a fear of how we were going to respond militarily. He writes:

I almost immediately had to face the question: “When will the United States, without regard for civilian casualties, retaliate?” I wish the question were, “Will the United States retaliate?” But if history is a guide, it is a question only of when and where. So, the question is which civilians will be unlucky enough to be in the way of the U.S. bombs and missiles that might be unleashed.

Those are a few sentences that have worn quite well in the now 25 years since he first wrote them. There are others in the piece, as we discuss, that didn’t wear so well. But in both cases,