Under Grievous Provocation

Last Friday, the manager of Vintage Apartments called the College Station police to report that “a couple” was “squatting in an otherwise unoccupied apartment.” If the couple had been squatting in an occupied apartment, we must suppose that ejecting them would have been the tenant’s problem; but as this unit was for rent, the manager did the manly thing and picked up the telephone.

Prospective renters are notoriously narrow-minded when it comes to squatters in the second bedroom.

Fake News and the End of the World as We Know It

Thanks to the forethought of my wife, my family and I were lucky to have been able to travel to Madras, Oregon for the recent solar eclipse. Madras was one of the best places to see it, because of the low likelihood of overcast in the high desert of central Oregon during the summer months. As it happened, there was dense wood smoke instead, from the wildfires that have been burning all over the west in recent weeks. But on the day of the eclipse, we were fortunate that, thanks to a shift in the prevailing winds, the smoke had temporarily abated somewhat, and our view of the sky was quite good.

The eclipse was beautiful and spooky, unlike any other thing; happy intellectual fascination atop wild visceral dread.

But the most striking thing about the whole event was how the press disseminated totally false information about it.

How to Tell a Weenie

Reading a book of evangelical theology this afternoon, I realized that there are a few reliable ways we can be sure that an author is a liberal weenie, and that the text he has written is therefore ideologically driven, ergo tendentious (whether witly or not), and probably wrong in its arguments. It is very simple, at least in books of theology. We can be sure that an author is a weenie if:

• He uses “impact” as a verb.
• He uses “image” as a verb.
• He avoids using masculine pronouns in referring to God.
• He uses “gender” to indicate sex.
• He uses “gender” as a verb.

If furthermore there is ever in a writer about ancient texts anything like environmentalism or feminism, egalitarianism or communism, relativism or nominalism, we can be sure that he has read them anachronistically, and therefore wrongly. We can, in short, be pretty sure that he is a hopeless idiot, and what is worse, not even therefore much useful to his sinister god.

What can we take from this? That we should never, ever, ever in a million years commit any such howlers.

Probably I have missed a few. I welcome correction of any such omissions.

Punch Drunk at the Edge of Existence

One could be forgive for believing that the expression “punch drunk” has something to do with alcoholic punch, and that to be “punch drunk” is therefore to be, or to resemble, a man filled to the gills with that sticky and treacherous concoction.

An Altogether Different Burden

Imagine yourself on vacation. Imagine yourself, say, reclined in a hammock beside a blue mountain lake, a satisfying book resting face down on your chest, your mind sinking gratefully into the twilight of a nap. Under these circumstances, would you think, “How irrelevant all of this is?” Would you scorn the irrelevance of the hammock and the lake to next week’s meeting of the Assessment Evaluation Committee? Would your somnolent mind protest that it does not see the relevance of the book and the nap to the urgent and annoying problem of that leaking drain-hose behind the dishwasher?

Woke Wet Dreams

The course in Hip Hop Philosophy is fully enrolled this semester, and who knows how many disappointed Aggies were left enviously eyeing the thirty-two lucky scholars who will convene in the YMCA building (that is to say the building built by the Young Men’s Christian Association, now home to the Department of Philosophy), to sit at the feet (although frequently only the “virtual” feet) of our semi-notorious Professor Woke (some background here and here).

Upstate Consolation University Addresses Statue Crisis

 

The Mehar Shandruff-Danpoo Multicultural Center and Cafetorium (UCU Main Campus)

As the fall semester began in the first week of August at Upstate Consolation University, student radicals and their faculty sponsors, seeking solidarity with their fellow Social Justice Warriors elsewhere in the country, rallied in the Mehar Shandruff-Danpoo Multicultural Center and Cafetorium, formerly the Andrea Dworkin Memorial Housing and Parking Office, to announce their determination to overturn and smash all statues of Confederate Civil-War heroes currently standing on the teaching-college’s architecturally bland lakeside campus.  On leaving the rally, however, to go in search of offensive icons to topple and desecrate, the emotionally overheated crowd could find none.  There were various commemorative statues scattered about the grounds of UCU, but not only did none of these represent or honor any Confederate Civil-War hero, none represented or honored any Civil-War hero, or, with one exception, any participant in any war. This fact is perhaps unsurprising given that UCU was only founded in 1958, nearly a century after the Southern surrender at Appomattox Courthouse. The absence of targets nevertheless provoked the protesters maddeningly, causing them to retreat to designated “safe places,” where volunteers supplied them with pearl necklaces to clutch and offered smelling-salts to redeem the marginalized and oppressed from their debilitating white-privilege-induced vapor-attacks.

Warts and Carbuncles

Yesterday’s homily may have been written with me in mind. Of course I may be paranoid, or vain, or beset by a guilty conscience. Maybe all of these things are true. Maybe none. But it gave me something to think about.

Divide and Conquer

You’re walking down a corridor at work. Maybe you’re on your way to a critical meeting of the Annual Picnic Planning Committee, but you nevertheless notice a new poster on the wall. Or at least you think it’s new. Maybe it has always been there.

Diversity is Our Strength!

The words appear under a group shot of people who don’t look at all alike, except for the smiles. In fact, they look a lot like the Annual Picnic Planning Committee, except for the smiles.

To Seek for Rule, Supremacy, and Sway*

We are hearing a lot about “White Supremacy” these days, mostly from shills who are ignorant, or mendacious, or who combine both qualities with a cunning eye on the main chance.  My local newspaper, for instance, recently saw fit to mention that a couple of lowlifes on their way to prison are members of a “white supremacist gang,” while omitting to mention that it had itself been, for most of its long history, a White Supremacist newspaper.

This is not to say that it expressed hatred for Blacks; but a hundred years of back issues evidence the implicit doctrine that Whites should rule.