come back and say, like McLuhan, it’s important to 
be fresh, to be inventive, to be original, to come 
from the unseen angle of observation. And if that 
is his greatest contribution—like a Shaw or a 
Voltaire or someone who is constantly upsetting 
society, and causing us to rhetorically re-examine 
our stance—that is no less than causing people to 
think. And that is the essential commission of 
academia, or the scholar, or the intellectual or the 
social gadfly, or the poet in some ways, the artist 
in other ways. And so McLuhan found himself very 
much aligned with the artistic or the poetic or the 
consciousness-raising sector of society. And 
therefore, I think that is sort of an eternal