Past the end of the quad
Where the co-eds do go
To tan themselves brown when the summertime shows
And the young men observe them twixt Ultimate throws
Is the office of Dr. Ric Caric.

And there from the art building, some people say,
If you look rather hard you can still see, today,
Where the Caric does grade
In a purple-y shade
The papers of undergrad students.

What is the Caric?
And why is it there?
And why should we think that we really should care
What it types in the night on its ‘puter?

Well, a student remembers.
Go ask him, he knows
What happens to grades when you step on Ric’s toes.
The course was required to get his degree,
He could not avoid it–compulsory, see?
And he still lives on campus
In poverty there, and works on his grade point
And tears out his hair,
And on special dank midnights in August,
He peeks out of the shutters
And murmurs how screwed he has been by this nutter.

He’ll tell you, perhaps,
If you’re willing to pay.
On the end of his rope
He lets down a tin pail
And you have to toss in some Bugler,
A Newcastle Ale
And the scrofulous tuft of a cheerleader’s tail.

Then he hauls up the pail
And turns down JJ Cale
And carefully puts back his
Two-handed flail.
Then he hides his new goodies
Away in the fridge
Beneath the potato chips
(Bar-b-cue Ridged)

Then he snorts, “I will call you by Whisper-ma-phone,
For the free-speech pavilion is three miles from home.”
SLUPP!
Down slupps the Whisper-ma-Phone to your ear,
And the poor sullen student is quite hard to hear,
Since the sound’s almost drowned
By the outraged rasp,
As if he had 4 or 5 bugs up his ass.

“Now I’ll tell you,” he says, with his voice far away
“How the Caric demolished my grade point that day . . .
It all started back . . .
Such a long, long time back . . .
Back in the days when my youth was still green,
And behind my ears wet,
And my hope was pristine,
And my heart all enchanted in love with this campus,
Was singing a song like an undersea grampus.

And I first met ideas!
Such wondrous ideas!
The prismatic hues of the wondrous ideas!
Rows of them housed in the library shelves!
Like piles of cookies all new-baked by elves!
And co-eds with breasts that were firmer than firm,
Who wore not-too-much at the start of the term.
And Plato and Burke and Darwin and Boyle,
And Hamlet regarding the sloughing of coil!

Those ideas! Great ideas!
Those brilliant ideas!
All my life I’d been searching,
As lost in Ikea!
The flash of their lightning
Was brighter than sun,
The one was made manifold,
Manifold one!

I felt a great leaping
Of joy in my heart.
I knew just what I’d do!
I’d study the art
Of good government: Socrates, Moore, Dante
Just for a start. So I signed up for
Government roundtable 1,
And jumped to the texts
Like a sprinter to gun.
And with great concentration and consummate speed
I picked up a book and I started to read.
And the instant I put down Machiavelli’s The Prince
I heard a loud noise that caused me to wince.

The teacher arrived with a gigantic whump,
A kind of a man intermixed with a stump.
Describe him? That’s hard. I don’t know if I can.
He was shortish. And oldish.
And sort of a man.
His eyes were bespectacled, recessed and glossy.
He spoke with a voice that was sharpish and bossy.
“Sonny!” he said with a few dusty hacks,
“I am the Caric. I speak for the blacks.
I speak for the blacks, for the blacks have no tongues,
And I’m telling you, sir, at the top of my lungs”—
He was very upset as he shouted and puffed—
“That that TEXT you’ve read there is a pile of dung!”

“Look, Caric,” I said. “There’s no cause for alarm.
I’ve just read one book, and it did me no harm.
It’s really quite interesting, see this Italian,
Is mocking the Prince, and he’s really quite valiant.
He claims it’s how-to, but it actually serving
To indict the powerful who aren’t deserving.
He melds the old classics with examples current,
And says things most true though he wishes they weren’t.”

The Caric said,
“Sir! You are maddened by hate.
That Renaissance Dago has dented your pate!
But the very next moment I proved he was wrong,
For just at that moment the Dean came along,
And patted my head and said, “Wonderful stuff.
Not the usual PC political fluff.”

I laughed at the Caric, “You poor goofy guy!
You really should pry out the beam from your eye.”
“I repeat,” cried the Caric,
“I speak for the blacks!”
I said, “Life’s a banquet;
I’ve no time for snacks.”

I rushed to my room, and in no time at all,
I went to my email and put out call.
I sent to my friends and my mom and my dad
And I said, “Check this guy out, he really is rad!
Go check out The Prince and the guy’s Art of War!
He’s not like that Lewis H. Laphamous bore!”
And in no time at all
I read all of his stuff
And liked it so well
That my brain got quite buff.

I read Aristotle, and Thomas Hobbes, too,
And Mo Maimonides, the medieval Jew,
And others too numerous here to assemble,
Charged with such brilliance they caused me to tremble.
And Caric, I found, didn’t call anymore,
Till the day that I had to go pound on his door.
He snapped, “I’m the Caric who speaks for the blacks,
Who are suffering under the yoke of you quacks!
But I’m also protecting the Brown Bar-ba-loots
Who played in the shade in their Bar-ba-loot suits
And peacefully lived, eating exotic fruits!”

“NOW. . . thanks for the cover you give to the racists
The Bar-ba-loot people are losing their places.
There’s not enough exotic fruit to go round
With the prospectors digging through Bar-ba-loot ground.
You mustn’t use DDT there in the wild,
They have DNA that makes infection mild!
They loved living there in the swamps with the bugs,
Tattooing themselves and taking their drugs,
And warring with tribes who lived just round the bend.
Why ever would anyone want that to end?”

I felt then perplexed
For I really had passed
Just to knock on his door
And sign up for his class.
For the class was compulsory, as you should know,
And I trusted eventually he’d let it go.
So I went to the class and he kept haranguing,
About Western oppression and white-on-black hanging,
Till even the two black guys who first dug his tack
Got really embarrassed and sat in the back.
I felt really sorry for stuff done by guys
Who had the same color of skin and blue eyes,
Who lived in the South and oppressed darker people,
And kept them from polls and burned down their steeples,
But as he kept at it I got round to thinking
Of wine and cheese parties where I saw him drinking
A snifter of port that was brought from Madeira
From vines that were tended by slaves in the era . . .

“I am the Caric,” he coughed and he whiffled.
He sneezed and he snuffled. He snarggled. He sniffled.
“Student!” he cried with a cruffulous croak.
“Student! You’re making such smogulous smoke!
My poor lungy-lungs cannot take such a toke!
No one can lecture with smog in his throat!
And so,” said the Caric, “I ask you to leave
So air-loving folk can continue to breathe!
I feel from the tickle I’m getting a cough!
It cannot be so, so I’m sending you off!
Where will you go? I do not care to know!
Away from the campus where windy winds blow,
And rainy rains rain, and the snowy snows snow!
I hope that you choke and you croak like a crow!”

“What’s more,” snapped the Caric (his dander was up),
“Let me accuse you of Hippety-Hup.
To the other young snappers, you’ll come on real cool
When you quote gangsta rappers, and they will be fooled.
You’ll put bigotty thoughts in their brains, and you’ll fleece ‘em
By pretending to couch all your poison in reason,
When the stuff that you say is the worst kind of treason!”

And then I got mad.
I got terribly mad.
I yelled at the Caric, “Now listen here, dad,
All you do is yap-yap and say, ‘Bad! Bad! Bad! Bad!
Well, I have my reasons, sir, and I’m telling you
That I intend to go on thinking just as I do,
Until I get some real logic from you.
And for your information, you Caric, I’m figgering
On pounding you flatter and sniggering and sniggering,
Until you consider just what you are saying,
Not holding my breath that you will stop braying!”

At that very moment he opened a book, and gave me an F,
And gave me a look. He said that my attitude clearly was hateful
And thus when he failed me the failing was fateful,
And he mumbled something right then about karma,
And scurried away for to catch Greg and Dharma.

And then I said nothing. Just gave him a glance,
A very sad backwards type sad kind of glance,
As he furtively pulled from his ass crack his pants,
And hoisted himself up and took leave of the place,
With a calm indignation etched into his face,
And padded away with a strange oafish grace
And suddenly started to quicken his pace
And felt at his belt for his sprayer of mace
A pale pasty person obsessed by race
Who hobbled as though on his leg was a brace.

“And so I am here,” said the poor fellow fettered.
“Consigned to my fate till my attitude’s bettered.
And if you would do me a favor, please send
A carton of cigarettes, and be a friend.
I feel I’m oppressed, though I know I am white,
I haven’t the heart to say more for the night.”
And up when the Whisper-ma-Phone in the dark,
And so I walked home through the darkling park.