Prophets and Madness

In my state, we have gay marriage, or at least, we have it for the moment. Various groups are attempting to make it unconstitutional. Indeed, in the paper the other day there was the photo of a religious leader present in town to lead the fight the threat posed to heterosexual weddings by the other sort. The man had a striking face -- the features sharp yet solid, the eyes clear and piercing.

It was, in short, the face of a prophet. A specific sort of prophet. A fanatic. The sort who stumbles out of the desert, bearing with him sunstroke and spleen, declaring his the voice of God, and thus to trouble all humanity with his mighty, gnawing hatred of life.

Notes from the Academy:

It can be difficult for newcomers to understand the language of professors and scholars in the modern academy, particularly when they are progressive, advanced, and insightful. Therefore, I have decided to provide some degree of translation service. Below is a short list of terms and expression as they’re said in academy followed by what they really mean. This will, I know, prove invaluable to all incoming students.

When they say: They mean:

*Genocide : White Male
*Holocaust : White Male
*Racism: White Male
*Murder: White Male
*Rape: White Male
*Plague: White Male
*Famine: White Male
*Tooth Decay: White Male
* Integrity, Honesty, and Righteousness : White Female with an advanced degree from a prestigious women’s college and a small family fortune in the low, but respectable millions. Trust funds preferred.

Oh, and way at the bottom:

Child Care: non-white Female with a brown face and a funny accent who is paid under the table and doesn’t have a green card and whose opinions, of course, do not matter.

Bittermuch on The Professortariat

The late J.J. Bittermuch writes me from the fifth circle (the Wraithful) of Hell:

“The important thing to remember about the professortariat is that academics are strongly rewarded for saying whatever it is that the cultural elite wants to hear. That’s how you get grants and tenure.

“The problem is that there is sometimes a lag between the speaker and the message. That is, when the elite wants a new message, it has to somehow deal with the professors who are already in position, repeating the dogmas that had before been the keys to the kingdom.

“Thus, in much of the 19th century (and again, in the 1950s), it was the academic’s job to say that everything in Western culture was just ducky, thanks, and that the rest of the world should line up and fight Communism and/or learn how to use soap. Which we’d sell them. At inflated prices. Of course.

“Then, in parts of the 20th century, and particularly in the 1960s, when the children of the elite decided they didn’t want to head off to ‘Nam or where-ever, academics got their brownies by being the severest critics of America and the West.

“Now, in the 21st century, the cultural elite has new goals – specifically, to gain control of oil reserves and, if possible, prevent China from doing so. Ergo, we have a new message from the top, and it involves young men marching off to die in gawdawful deserts and maybe, given time, on Pacific beaches.

“The problem is that many of the academics at the Universities still haven’t gotten the word, and they’re out there preaching reform and revolt. So, we have the myth of the “tenured radical” as a result.

“But, of course, there’s no such thing. The ‘tenured radical’ is just trying to do what he’s always done . . . only, he finds himself with his lips puckered in the air, the derriere in question having mysteriously moved to some new location.”

d*amning Detroit

In the paper today I read that the Detroit car makers are concerned that with gas prices just a tad below $4 a gallon and climbing that people might, just maybe, stop buying their SUV, Hummers, and BIG trucks for guys with small wee-wees.

In a word, f*cking duh.

Look, guys, we’ve all known since the 1970s that eventually we were going to run out of oil, or that the Arab countries would get miffed at us and shut off the taps, or that some disaster (like Katrina) was going to take most or all of our production off line.

And what did you do in those thirty years?

Nothing. Absolutely nothing.

You have refused to develop more efficient cars. You have declined to give any but the most token effort to hybrids. You have staged PR campaigns about hydrogen vehicles, but — let’s be honest — you never had any real intention of putting them on the market or investing in the infrastructure necessary to make them possible. You’ve just gone and on, doing what you had always done, and getting us all deeper and deeper into a hole.

In short, you got yourselves into this mess, and if yours were really profit-making entities in a competitive free enterprise system, then we ought to just let you go chapter 12 the way you damn well deserve.

But there’s the rub. In spite of all your claims to the contrary, you’re not profit-making entities in a competitive free enterprise system. You’re members of a thinly disguised cartel which has managed to dictate how we use energy and how the economy functions. Thus, when you go down, you take us with you.

So . . . I got a modest proposal. Forget chapter 12. That’s for businesses. For you . . . we reserve the consequences of incompetence in government and state-craft.

You’ll love the prison at Guantanamo. It’s so tropical.