In “Lessons Learned: Red States May Be Outbreeding Blue States, but Blue Citiesâ€â€Particularly Blue College Townsâ€â€Can Help Turn the Tide,” Bill Savage, a lecturer in the Department of English and a college adviser at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, argues that indoctrination is not really indoctrination when it’s people like him doing the indoctrinating; instead, it’s remedying the horrific materialist upbringing foisted upon the rich womb droppings of wealthy Rethuglicans, and in so doing, helping to save a nation! Let us read together:
One of the best things about university life is the rhythm it gives to a year. For university professors like me, breaks for summer, which are just beginning, and breaks between terms allow for a bit of breathing room, time to reflect on the year past and plan for the year ahead. But not all such planning is about courses to teach and research to conduct. Nope, sometimes we have to think about the relationship between electoral politics and education.
Translation: “One of the best things about university life is that I get summers off—though it does get kinda hot. And when it does, I like to blame the heat on increased CO2 emissions caused by the global corporate monoliths who control the Rethuglican Party, a consideration that in turn reminds me how my ideological positions are routinely rejected by the voting public, which—I’ll admit it—really pisses me off, but which nevertheless serves to remind me that it’s my job, as an English lecturer, to change all that.
“Plus, I really like Sno-Cones!”
Beyond right-wingers clamoring for the hiring of more conservative faculty (affirmative action for conservatives? The world is turned upside down!), an issue of long-term political demographics makes the American university system a key front in the ongoing culture wars.
Translation: “Aha! So conservatives are against race-based affirmative action, but they seem to be for an affirmative action that would address the remarkable ideological hegemony in the academy. Taste the irony!”
In a New York Times Magazine article [“Fertile Red States,” Dec 12, 2004], published right around the last semester break, Noam Scheiber pointed out President Bush’s successes in the states with the highest fertility rates. As if Urban Archipelago dwellers don’t have enough to worry about. The message: Red states are outbreeding blue states, and the recent Great Leap Rightward is just the beginning.
Translation: “Why won’t the Red State Godbotherers just pull out like the rest of us?”
As an atypical Irish-Catholic American, this hits close to home. I’m a 43-year-old man without children (and none on the way, thanks to surgical intervention) and this news suggests I should feel complicit in my own political marginalization. If I had bred with the precocity and frequency of my parents, I’d have had three adult children voting in the last election, Chicago Democrats one and all.
Translation: “I’m much to into myself to ruin all this delicious introspection with diaper changes and Little League carpools—especially when I can turn my unwillingness to ejaculate without protection into a measure of my own intellectual martyrdom.”
That, of course, assumes that my putative children would vote like Dad. Scheiber quotes a demographer who claims that “it’s a truism of social science” that people vote like their parents.
Well, every “truism of social science” can also be described as a “false-ism” or “sheerest bullshit.” If people all voted like their parents, then we’d all be either Jeffersonians or Federalists. Every progressive political movement in American history has been fueled by people not voting like their parents.
Translation: “Marijuana, LSD, and CSN&Y rock!”
But even if this prediction comes to pass, one other fact remains which makes me sanguine that blue America’s Urban Archipelago can grow larger, more contiguous, and more politically powerful even without my offspring.
If we assume that red-state secondary education systems don’t utterly collapse due to underfunding caused by Republican anti-tax mania
(Editor’s note: and why on earth would we? public school test scores are on the rise, and per capital spending has never translated directly to academic success)
then colleges and universities will come into play. The children of red states will seek a higher education, and that education will very often happen in blue states or blue islands in red states. For the foreseeable future, loyal dittoheads will continue to drop off their children at the dorms. After a teary-eyed hug, Mom and Dad will drive their SUV off toward the nearest gas station, leaving their beloved progeny behind.
And then they are all mine.
Translation: “They WILL BE assimilated! That is, if I can get them to think of me as something more important than a childless English lecturer. Like, say, Deconstruction Man!”
I don’t need to have kids to create mini-me voters: I get classrooms full of other people’s kids, most already of voting age. And I’m not alone. As right-wing hysterics have recently noticed, universities in America are dominated by lefties like me. I suspect the main reason for this is that most academics I know are willing to forego making a big pile of money in order to, you know, think for a living.
Translation: “We’re simply smarter than right wingers. Just ask us!”
(Right-wingers prefer the professions where you make big piles of money by thinking about offshoring red-state manufacturing jobs to Red China.)
Translation: “I put that last bit of cliched Rethuglican bashing in a parenthetical to show that I’m not really all that committed to it; after all, the last thing I want to do is follow up a pronouncement on my intellectual superiority with such a lazy rehashing of anti-corporate talking points. Unless it’s in parentheticals, I mean. Because that shows that I know it’s an intellectually lazy rehashing, and self-conscious irony is, of course, the greatest measure of intelligence.”
So what happens to the children of the red states in my classroom that makes me confident that this demographic time bomb will fizzle?
It isn’t what right-wingers think: I don’t indoctrinate my students.
Translation: “Well, I try to indoctrinate them, don’t get me wrong. But the little rich fuckers keep resisting.”
My job, as an English professor, is to teach my students to read deeply, to think for themselves, and then to write their own arguments effectively.
Translation: “Like, for instance, I teach them how to obscure the fact that outsourcing yields a net positive in US jobs, or the fact that one tiny instance of globalization does more to combat third-world poverty and increase the standard of living than a thousand Marxist monographs—in favor of teaching them to fashion the kind of evasive rhetorical pieces that cynically suggest just the opposite, an exercise to which I affix the Orwellian label, ‘critical thinking.’”
I suspect that the Bill O’Reillys of the world believe that lefty academics engage in all-out Maoist Cultural Revolution- style indoctrination because that’s the only way they can picture a classroom, not having been in one for a while or ever. That, and the fact that some students have never heard anyone disagree with their parents’ parroting of Fox News and so they perceive the mere presentation of opposing points of view as attempted indoctrination.
Translation: “…Whereas, my begging of the question, evident in my taking as a given the premise that everything reported on FOXNews is wrong?—that’s not really a parroting of progressive talking points so much as it is, y’know, reality. Ditto those caricatures of rightwing talk show hosts, rightwing parents, and their doltish rightwing offspring. Just trying to keep it real, after all.”
As our politics show all too often, we lefties have hyper-developed consciences.
Translation: “Alas, we lefties care too damn much!”
To force students to agree with me would be unthinkable, not to mention boring. What really happens to students in my classroom is this: They get exposed to the world around them, especially the city of Chicago (located in Cook County, which provided Kerry’s largest vote margin even without my nonexistent offspring). One of the classes I most frequently teach is on Chicago writers, and it exposes children from red towns, counties, and cities to people unlike themselves and their parents. To give just one example, when they see racial conflict and the criminal justice system from the point of view of a black man in 1930s Chicago (Richard Wright), they have to ponder the worth of political screeds about the sources of, and solutions to, urban crime.
Translation: “The 1930s and today? Identical.”
The class also includes a tour of Chicago, conducted on foot and public transportation. In the many times I’ve done this tour, two things never fail to happen:
First, someone on the El always fucks with me while I lecture my students. One time, I was told in no uncertain terms by two elderly women that if my educational tour did not include the tourist trap Navy Pier, I was not fit to call myself a teacher. Another time, a drunk St. Louis Cardinals fan gave me a dollar tip as he reeled off the train at Wrigley Field and said “Thanksh fer th’ tour, maaaan, ver’ ‘formative.”
Translation: “None of this ever happened, but I’m really into this caricaturing thing. And once the creative juices get going… JUST TRY TO STOP THE POIGNANT, EARTHY IRONY!”
I always shrug off these incidents. Tolerating other people, in life in general and on public transportation in particular, is one aspect of urban living that translates directly into political values. The world is a crowded place and we all gotta get along. We’re all in the same train car together.
Translation: “Life is a train car. And sometimes, when their SUVs are in the shop, Red Staters will ride that train, too. When this happens, do not confront them directly. Instead, wait until you’re safely away from these filthy, warmongering fucks—military-loving Christian bluehairs and overgrown drunk jocks, the lot of ‘em—and write a nice little essay in which you use them as rigid, anti-intellectual stock characters, juxtaposed against your own beneficent open-mindedness and easy non-judgmentalism (though I grant you the sentiment would probably be more convincing if you haven’t previously dismissed all rightwingers as “loyal dittoheads” who “parrot Fox News” and brook no dissent. But let’s not nitpick. I’m rolling, baby!)”
Second, someone always interrupts me as I’m talking about a particular writer or public space and adds his or her own two cents. Mostly, it’s misinformed bullshit. But sometimes some passing stranger or street mope has an interesting insight, and I get out my notebook and write down what I’ve just learned. I’m not much on the theory of role models-if people just did what they saw people around them doing, the world would be in even worse shape. But when students see their middle-aged professor heeding a homeless guy who hangs out at a public fountain dedicated to a particular author, it stretches their brains, whether they’re from a red state or a blue one.
Translation: “Look at me! I won’t listen to a fucking thing dumb rightwingers have to say; hell, those people are barely even human. But should a piss-soaked homeless drunk stagger over and interrupt my lecture on Sandburg’s ‘Chicago’ to point out that he ‘once knew a hog butcher with one thumb who hated bacon’, I’ll dutifully pull out my little Serious Thinker’s Notebook™ and jot down this glorious burst of street frisson just to prove how deep is my consideration of the poem, which ceases to exist apart from the cultural dialogic in which it finds itself. Because I love the kind of authentic humanity this bum represents. Can’t help myself. I just love the Other.”
And so whatever the demographic models suggest, I’m not worried about the red staters outbreeding blue staters. As long as their kids need a college education, they’ll come to a blue town, county, or city, and there they will learn a thing or two about the world in which they live-and vote.
Translation: “And even if they don’t? I’m still getting paid for this shit.
“Which, how cool is that…?”
****
(h/t Sharp as a Marble)
****
update: I emailed the original Savage column along with my response to a number of bloggers listed in the TLB Academic “Community.” But, with the exception of Rusty at Jawa Report, it was roundly ignored.
So I guess it’s back to doing dick jokes.
Which reminds me: why did the English Lecturer from Northwestern cross the road?
A: COCK!
****
update: More, from Kate and Steven Taylor.
He’s kidding, right? Like the students want to be bothered by him all the time? Cripes when I was in college all I wanted was to get through the day, get to the weekend and drink beer. And perhaps put the moves (Ha! Irony!) on some girl. The last thing I wanted was my profs. philosophy of life.
Word: Work, as in I should get back to.
See, I would have just called him a motherfucker and poured myself a home-brew. You, sir, have panache.
And by panache I mean ‘verve’, not ‘A bunch of feathers or a plume, especially on a helmet.’
A tour de force, Jeff. Well said.
The sad thing is that this guy has no choice but to be doing what he’s doing. With that kind of condescending bullshit attitude there is no way he could successfully work around or with adults.
Damn, that made me want to procreate – 6 or 7 times even. More good Red Staters to vote like the old man. Where can I find a good looking young maiden? Aruba maybe?
I have news for this guy. My middle class Rethuglican college students spot the leftist cant pretty much immediately. They then think that the instructor is, politically at least, a loon.
Imagine the irony of students being asked to print and study material from an ecology class instead of having the instructors print it. Why? To save paper!!
Actually, it is to save the college’s paper, thus making the instructor types feel good. Dad’s paper? Oh, he’s a Rethuglican, it’s OK to waste his paper and money.
BECAUSE OF THE HYPOCRISY!!
TW: earth. Those trying to save the earth are often their own worst enemy.
Nicely done Mr. G! Savage is quite impressed with himself, isn’t he? Northwestern seems to have more than one of his type around as well. Fortunately he will probably live long enough to watch his thesis disproven – then he can pass from this world having accomplished naught, alone and unmourned.
Home run.
I wonder if this guy has any idea how many Republicans he’s actually created?
I’m not proud of it, but I got through college largely by parroting back whatever guys like this wanted to hear. Because I learned, first semester Freshman year, that if you challenge guys like this, you’ll work awfully hard for a C.
I harbor resentment towards academics to this day.
I fuckin’ hated the 1930s.
Another amazing post. Savage hypocrisy.
Maybe his lack of offspring is his love for science fiction:
“We will add your biological and technological distinctiveness to our own. Your culture will adapt to service us. Resistance is futile. We are the Borg.”
Arguing against leftist academics is like a hot woman trying to persuade heterosexual teenage boys not to masturbate; you can have the best arguments in the world, but all they’re thinking about is how your tits keep jiggling under the blouse.
But that said:
Jeff, you’re my hero.
I must have been drunk, because I can’t even remember the ‘30s.
Dusty and full of commies. The 30s that is.
Excellent. Sheer Excellence.
I’m going to direct my youngest, who we dropped off at SFSU a week ago, to read it.
The idjit prof almost made me WANT to buy a SUV just so I could slap some dittohead bumperstickers on it and drive right up to my daughter’s dorm.
She finds the campus “socialists” amusing and is looking forward in the next couple of weeks to attending a “peace” rally in Goldengate Park and another one with a friend that goes to Bezerkley. She’s going to do some firsthand info gathering for her brainwashed Rethuglican murder&mayhem mom with a hatemongering blog.
Touche. I theen the good professor, he has been skewered.
Numbskulls like Bill Savage are a godsend to conservative pundits. You couldn’t invent a more cogent example of the smug, self-centered paternalism of the modern Left if you tried.
Great piece, Jeff. I salute you, sir.
If people like this didn’t actually exist, we would have to make them up.
Unbelievable. Truly we are blessed by the quality of our political enemies.
The image of this black turtlenecked, beret-wearing, goatee-sporting goof, whipping out his notebook to jot down the mumblings of a local drunk while his students compare notes on the distance from the historically significant fountain to the bars on Elm or the shopping on the Miracle Mile is priceless.
That and the phrase “womb droppings”. Damn. Just damn.
First, someone on the El always fucks with me while I lecture my students.
Translation: I said a naughty word! I bet some reich-whinger rethug has a heart attack when he reads that! Tee hee! Plus, it shows the kids that I’m “down” with “keeping it real”, “dog”.
A. As one who once taught eager young minds at a major land grant university, here’s a question that bears on what Mr. Savage hopes to accomplish: Since when does three hours a week in a freshman comp or lit course make anyone “yours”? Vanity, thy name is the Northwestern English Department.
B. Educating people to think critically is vitally important. Educating people to think critically in one direction is indoctrination. I looked it up.
C. And, while some choose to view college-age folk (and even older) as “children” in the aggregated non-familial sense (see Sheehan, Cindy)–they are adults who can spot a phony and/or intellectual bully a mile away as others have noted.
D. I was once accosted by a drunk Cardinal fan as well. But she was also a good date.
The whole town of Evanston reeks with crap like that. When I was choosing a grad school my wife and I went for a visit. It took us about 3 minutes to tak a dislike to the place.
Jeez, Jeff, you just figuring out that college english profs are packed to the brim with grade-A bullshit?
Why’d you think their eyes were brown?
A double-barrelled Fisking if ever were one…
…unless we are paying ex-cons in crack cocaine to forge voter registrations in Ohio. In those cases, we are merely showing our hyper-developed balls.
Brilliant. I wonder if this idiot realizes that the red state students will just tell him what he wants to hear, so as to avoid hurting his tender feelings and their chances at a passing grade. What an ego on this one.
Perhaps the guy doesn’t understand that it the education is not the ends, but rather the means to it.
Cook County historically provides that kind of Dem turnout thanks to its nonexistent voters.
Creep.
Turing = matter, as in I bet, to a tenured radical like him, Dem vote fraud doesn’t even matter. Just another form of “direct action for social justice.”
Instant greatest hit Jeff, well done.
“To force students to agree with me would be unthinkable, not to mention boring.”
This like the one time I went to Monday Night football game AT Oakland. I wore black and I even cheered a little when it was prudent. I died a little inside but I knew what was good for me.
English teachers seem to have great discretion in college classes to subjectively grade submissions, it’s the nature of the subject. Sure, there are things like spelling and grammar but I never had a scantron test in my courses. You know what Mr. English teacher? You’re 100% right I don’t care what you say. Also, you don’t look fat in those jeans and this is my favorite subject this semester.
I fear your self-hatred in forcing yourself to read as much of that adolescent intellectual masturbation as you did is reaching critical levels, Jeff.
TW: next, as in “Next piece of self-serving, pat-on-the-back drivel?”
“Why won’t the Red State Godbotherers just pull out like the rest of us?”
I spit tea all over my monitor over that, Jeff–hope you’re happy, you God-bothering dittohead, you.
That was a work of art Jeff. Dare I call it an afternoon delight?
Dear God, how I would love to be in the same room when that academic mouthbreathing shit-for-brains read your utterly brilliant nullification of his very existence.
That alone would be worth the price of a Northwestern semester.
Why does conservative commentary usually include some level of name-calling? Oh yeah, because it’s about the best of which conservative commentary is capable …
Poopy-head!
There, I said it!…
So, Professor Savage, to introduce the bumpkins to Chicago, holds class, lectures on the El? What a pompous twit.
Why, how incisive you are, in your open-ended, intimated critiques, ulty.
Incidentally, what does one call it when a progressive drops in to generalize about how no conservative commentary is capable of rising above the level of ad homimem?
Would that be an ad hominem? Or just, y’know, irony?
I dub thee “The Offical Translator Of Liberalspeak”
No one does it better!
The trolls have arrived!
Harry Callahan: Do you have any kids, lieutenant?
Lt. Ackerman: No.
Harry Callahan: Lucky for them.
RE: Ulty’s comment
TASTE THE IRONY, MIND NUMBED KNUCKLE DRAGGERS!
TASTE IT!
Damn, a new troll tactic, just be so limp and vapid nobody wants to bother with it.
utly,
Howard Dean chairs which party?
Utly said…“Why does conservative commentary usually include some level of name-calling? Oh yeah, because it’s about the best of which conservative commentary is capable …”
As opposed to what…the always tolerant and intellectually diverse discussions hosted on the DailyKos?
Pot, kettle, black; you make the connection.
Another time, a drunk St. Louis Cardinals fan gave me a dollar tip as he reeled off the train at Wrigley Field and said “Thanksh fer th’ tour, maaaan, ver’ ‘formative.”
That was me and the Perfessor is a liar. I reeled off the train and said, “Ish tha’ enough to get you to a homeleshelter, Perfessor Crackhead?” And all my sycophantic Cardinal Nation rubes laughed and laughed as we stumbled on to El Jardin’s for grilled sea bass and tequila shots.
Abso-fucking-lutely piss poor. The 30s I mean. Worst decade in the history of decades. Hate it I tell you!
Excellent. That pathetic prof is, unfortunately, instantly recognizable. The preening self-delusion is astounding. Actually, what the kids are thinking, since the money-soaked public schools have failed to teach them adequate writing and comprehension skills, is “I wonder if this is this gonna be on the test.”
The 30s man. What a drag.
Well, who needs “nonexistent offspring” when you have shuffling hordes of zombies who always seem to vote Democrat? (I mean, in addition to folks like Doktor Professor Savage.)
I wouldn’t be at all surprised if my long-dead great grandparents are still voting in Cook County, just like they did in–gasp–the 1930’s!
I’m Red-state, so many of my colleagues see through crap like that, but we don’t have quite the level of pompous snothood that fellow brings to the table.
Oiii…
beck:
Definitely a low, dishonest decade.
Turing = gone, as in Thanks to the PC indoctrination of students by professors like this, I’ll bet the ability of youngsters to recognize poetic allusions like that is just about gone.
I fucking hate this.
Outside of freshman comp and a few other electives, all I took were science and math classes.
Nobody ever tried to indoctrinate me.
And I’m pissed. The best stories about college (other than the ones involving alcohol and, uh, exploration with/of the opposite sex) were clearly being played out in liberal arts courses.
Now I can’t get any ironic joy out of voting Republican. Damn.
Sanity Inspector: EXPLAIN THE POETIC ALLUSION!
Bah, I hate poetry.
Dave, not even in post-Civil War US History? My teacher spend 30 seconds on telling us that Nixon was a creep or what not. Then again, he also called Jimmy Carter ineffectual… I think.
Yeah, I haven’t been indoctrinated either.
Well, I have to admit that it’s touching that he would take these kids on a tour of the city. I hope he can also take them to a pet store, a post office, and if they’re really lucky, a farm.
I’m also worried about red-state schools going bankrupt. Why, did you know that federal education spending is now only twice as high as it was under Clinton?
Jesus, the wonderful education that man must have and it’s all for nothing. The guy’s got to have a doctorate or close to it and he can’t see that education spending has gone through the roof under Bush or grasp a simple concept like comparative advantage?
SeanH:
These are the same people that look at a $10billion Halliburton contract and declare $160million profit on it “obscene”.
There is a reason they chose academia over business.
Maybe someone did indoctrinate me in History class, but I was too busy doing my other homework or ogling women to notice.
I met a professor at a buddies wedding who said some shit once about Marx or something. When he said ‘deconstruction’, I figured he must be a civil engineering professor, but turns out he taught communications. I tried to figure out some Derrida stuff my room mates were reading once, and they got really pissed. I was imposing something hegemonic (logic, maybe) on them, and they weren’t having it. Frankly, it had me stumped. I got a PhD in chemistry, but I got no fuckin’ clue what the lit crit, post modern, yah yah brotherhood is talking about. I’m betting it’s either a)nothing or b)equivalent enough to nothing for me to ignore it.
You’d think a smart college professor would understand the difference between cause and effect. He says that “red states are outbreading blue states”… and never for once contemplates the idea that maybe states with a lot of families and children are red. You know… that whole family values thing… that whole concept of wanting lower taxes so you can spend your money on food, clothes, shelter… silly stuff like that.
Nah… couldn’t be that could it?
That has GOT to be the biggest load of self-aggrandizing claptrap I’ve read in a while. Of course he’s trying to indictrinate them! Does he really think we’re stupid enough to believe that simple exposure to the world will crank out one fledgling liberal after another? Idiot.
I’m envisioning Jerome Quat in I Am Charlotte Simmons.
(OK, not the greatest novel by Wolfe but his description of professor Quat is spot on parody of the pretentious cretin, Savage.)
Begging, of course, our guest host’s forebearance. Your takedown was masterful.
Was there anything more obnoxious in this vein than “Zen and the ART of Motorcycle Maintenance?” Another douchebag with MH issues and delusions of …..whatever.
OK, so I’m a die-hard Rethuglican.
But, I remember signing up for an “alternative” economics course about 30+ years ago when I was in the business program at Michigan. Hey, it fit into my schedule (my elective couse selections were pretty much dependant on how late I could sleep in). The professor was a founding member of URPE, the Union of Radical Polical Econonomists, basically a communist organization.
You know what? It was a great class. I still remember his rants about stuff like how IQ tests function as a class-sorting device to preserve the priviliges of the bourgeousie.
In retrospect, he was mostly full of shit, but had a few good ideas. As a kid, I benefitted from the challenge of his point of view, and I’m grateful to him. He truly did help to educate me.
I know that academia is full of liberal nonesense (I’ve got two kids in college now), but let’s give our kids some credit. They really need to hear this stuff, it’s actually good for them, and in the end, the common sense of Mom and Dad will prevail.
No one’s saying they shouldn’t hear this stuff, Michael. It’s that there should be a balance.
And of course, if you happen to be a white male conservative, good luck finding a job in academia.
I just have to wonder what the people who pony up big bucks to send their kids to Northwestern think when they read one of its English department lecturers drop trou like that.
Hopefully it will go along the lines of “I ain’t paying $10K a semester for you to go listen to that asshole!”
As to the Nutty Perfesser’s worry about “affirmative action for conservatives,” it’s called a real job – you know, one where you dont dress up in black turtleneck and a Che beret, smoke Gauloises and spend the day trying to nail the co-eds when not in your “Post-Deconstruction and Pre-Reconstruction Chicago Racial Literature from Approximately January 1931 Or So” seminar.
The average conservative would rather get a 9-to-5, then go out to the bars and try to nail the co-eds there.
TW= “girls”
On a hunch, I did a quick Google. Bill Savage is the brother of Dan Savage, the gay columnist who was so proud to report during the 2000 election season how he licked doorknobs at a GOP office in an attempt to pass on his nasty throat infection:
<a href=”http://www.villagevoice.com/people/0328,savage,45380,24.html” target=”_blank”>
Gosh, liberals are sooo peaceful and tolerant.
Dave, if you want to know what deconstructionism and postmodernism are all about, here are two good books:
“Higher Superstion: The Academic Left and Its Quarrels With Science” by Paul Gross and Norman Levitt
“Signs of the Times: Deconstruction and the Fall of Paul de Man” by David Lehman
Both are very readable and both are guaranteed to infuriate those postmodern frauds.
Wait, you can go to BARS and nail co-eds?
…
…
*Sigh*
Turing word “without” as in “I have gone without all these years because I don’t know these simple tricks!”
Good piece, Jeff. It would be much more enjoyable if I wasn’t presently spending $10k per year for my two kids’ tuition, so that these edumacated fucks can have their summers for reflection and inspiration, while the rest of us sweat. Academic freedom is a wonderful concept—for the acedemics. Those of us that actually produce something for a living tend to see these academic types differently—as a bunch of pussy leaches that contribute absolutely nothing to the public good, in spite of their superior intellects.
Superior, my ass.
One poetic allusion explanation, comin’ up!
Now, if I have to explain the significance of September 1, 1939 I’m gonna have to refer you to a specialist!
Turing = open, as in I’m glad you’ve got an open mind to ask, though.
Oh, and my kids have the same opinion of these assholes. They’re just working for a piece of paper.
“…we lefties have hyper-developed consciences.” I wonder what part of a “hyper-developed conscience” prods one to afflict bodily harm on one’s political opponents?
Oh, well, it didn’t work, anyway—Bush won. Obviously, we righties have hyper-developed immune systems.
Dave:
The lit crit deconstructionist postmodernism covers a fairly well demarked area of inquiry, ranging from “largely gibberish” to “completely gibberish”. It’s something of an accomplishment, to have come up with an academic fashion that would have been unthinkable forty years ago, and won’t be worth knowing forty years from now.
Well, I’m going to disagree with y’all re: the linguistic turn, which I think is philosophically important insofar as it deals with the nature of the verbal and (and, by extension, iconic and indexical) representation of reality.
The problem is, much of what is understood as postmodernism isn’t. Also, the jargon is overused and offputting.
I’ve written a bit about that here, for those interested.
Universities live in a different Universe. One in which the right thinking people can all get together pass an edict have it printed on paper and the world becomes suddenly a different place.
I just posted on the very thing, Iowa City home of U of I actually I think U of I is just about the whole city has an ordinance prohibiting the possession of Nuclear Weapons within the City Limits.
They even have signs posted, or they are supposed to they keep getting stolen
http://www.angelfire.com/ky/kentuckydan/CommitteesofCorrespondence/index.blog?entry_id=1074946
FWIW, Jeff, I wasn’t ignoring you. Just didn’t read the post until now.
“Well, I’m going to disagree with y’all re: the linguistic turn, which I think is philosophically important insofar as it deals with the nature of the verbal and (and, by extension, iconic and indexical) representation of reality.”
Wuh-de-fuh?
I’ve got a degree in Journalism and a minor in english lit, and I STILL have no clue what you just said.
But then again, I’m a conservative, so that may be self-evidentiary, but only in a pseudo-Nietsche, anti-dialectical sort of empiricism.
…ish.
Partisan Pundit:
It allows you to say whatever you want while sneering. Throw enough four syllable (or bigger) words together any old way and you got your thesis.
HOW DARE YOU STIFLE HIS FREE SPEECH!!!!!!!
Not to pile on (ok just this once) but for a guy being paid as a college english prof, he writes like crap.
That was boring, derivative and wandered more than the bums on the El.
I’ve read cleaner, more exciting CIA reports.
Magnificent!
The sad thing is that it isn’t just in colleges anymore. Or high schools.
Sunday, at my oh-so-very-red-statish church picnic, a third grader happened to overhear me and another fellow talking about hurricane Katrina. Lil’ Nick piped up, “You know the hurricane is so bad because of global warming, right? My teacher told me so.”
Third effing grade.
Which, y’know, means we parents had best start with the common sense injections earlier. Like in utero.
Common sense injections in utero?
Well, as a denizen of a very blue chunk of turf, let’s just say that I’ve been working on injecting common sense in to some folks quite a bit before the utero stage, so to speak.
“we lefties have hyper-developed consciences”…right. That’s why so many lefties want Israel to tear down its protective wall and leave its children exposed to homicide bombers. That’s why they want us to withdraw from Iraq with no concern about the gruesome retaliations that the fascists would visit on those who have been working and fighting for a free Iraq. That’s why they are eager to ban DDT and GM foods without concern about the consequences in malaria and starvation.
It’s often been said that “anyone who is a conservative before 30 has no heart, anyone who is a liberal after 40 has no head.” But today’s lefties seem to have neither heart *nor* head.
Savage: “What really happens to students in my classroom is this: They get exposed to the world around them…”
And ironically, the more they are exposed to the world, the more conservative they become. Whatever its temporary success, Savage’s indoctrination simply doesn’t take.
For my recent XYZ* reunion the alumni survey showed that the same class of people who were fairly liberal as undergrads had become on average much more conservative as alumni. Once out of the academy, contact with reality turns liberals into conservatives.
* Ivy League school, name deleted, much more prestigious than Northwestern
The liberal indoctrination is usually complete by the time the kids enter high school, let alone college. Opening up their minds to critical thinking would thus involve a completely different curriculum than the one our dear professor is espousing.
Outstanding. A delightful and balanced meal. But it is complemented well when served with a side order of the Bob Hope movie clip re: zombies…
The 30’s? I don’t know, at least the cars had real running boards. You could get three tommy-gun-toting gangsters per side on one of those things. Try doing that with a Ford Freestar.
“Licking doorknobs”??? Was this a log cabin GOP office?
A little late I know, but your link on how outsourcing “yields a net positive” in jobs is broken–it just goes to the Sandberg poem about Chicago.
Thanks. Fixed.