Right Wing Nation

Let’s start with this Einstein, a University of Wisconsin law professor who made what can euphemistically be called inflammatory comments — yes, in class — about the Hmong:

According to an e-mail sent to several law and Hmong students obtained by The Badger Herald, professor Leonard Kaplan spoke for 10 minutes using “racist and inappropriate” comments.

The e-mail quoted Kaplan allegedly saying, “Hmong men have no talent other than to kill” and “All second-generation Hmong end up in gangs and other criminal activity.”

Kaplan also allegedly said, “All Hmong men purchase their wives, so if he wants to have sex with his wife and she doesn’t consent, you and I call it rape, but the Hmong guy is thinking ‘man, I paid too much for her.’”

As Bugs Bunny would say, whatta maroon. Then we have the the president of the Committee for Academic Freedom and Rights at UW, who spews this tripe:

“We have to be very careful. We want professors to speak with what they see as their truths,” Downs said. “We’re here to push the envelope. … Academic freedom has to be very strong and vibrant.”

Before you say that at least he’s not screaming “Academic freedom!” for the PC only, he also said this:

“I would be shocked if he meant these words in a [derogatory] way — he’s not that kind of guy,” said Downs, the president of the Committee for Academic Freedom and Rights at UW. “Students are free to criticize and challenge, but let the marketplace of ideas handle it.”

Downs added Kaplan is a “decent and fair man” and said he is known for his work with social-justice issues on campus.

He’s a leftist, you see. He couldn’t have been racist. But let’s go back to that last quotation, or this part of it:

We want professors to speak with what they see as their truths

Note that we have further relativized the relative here. It was stupid enough when we had “All truths are equally valid!” but now, we have, in addition to “their truths,” “what they see as their truths,” which one assumes might be different from “their truths,” which of course can always differ from truth, which doesn’t exist.

You folks who wonder where “truthiness” came from, it came from the humanities. There is no reality or truth. There is what you see as your truth, now. Send out the memo.

Not to be outdone, another academic flushes the taxes he’s paid down the toilet — and gets published:

Images of Bliss
Ejaculation, Masculinity, Meaning
by Murat Aydemir

Yes, you read that right. And if you think that’s ludicrous nonsense, read on:

Aristotle believed semen to be the purest of all bodily secretions, a vehicle for the spirit or psyche that gives form to substance. For Proust’s narrator in Swann’s Way, waking to find he has experienced a nocturnal emission, it is the product of “some misplacing of my thigh.” The heavy metal band Metallica used it to adorn an album cover. Beyond its biological function, semen has been applied with surprising frequency to metaphorical and narratological purposes.

In Images of Bliss, Murat Aydemir undertakes an original and extensive analysis of images of male orgasm and semen. In a series of detailed case studies—Aristotle’s On the Generation of Animals; Andres Serrano’s use of bodily fluids in his art; paintings by Holbein and Leonardo; Proust’s In Search of Lost Time; hard-core pornography (both straight and gay); and key texts from the poststructuralist canon, including Lacan on the phallus, Bataille on expenditure, Barthes on bliss, and Derrida on dissemination—Aydemir traces the complex and often contradictory possibilities for imagination, description, and cognition that both the idea and the reality of semen make available. In particular, he foregrounds the significance of male ejaculation for masculine subjectivity. More often than not, Aydemir argues, the event or object of ejaculation emerges as the instance through which identity, meaning, and gender are not so much affirmed as they are relentlessly and productively questioned, complicated, and displaced.

Combining close readings of diverse works with subtle theoretical elaboration and a keen eye for the cultural ideals and anxieties attached to sexuality, Images of Bliss offers a convincing and long overdue critical exploration of ejaculation in Western culture.

Murat Aydemir is assistant professor of comparative literature at the University of Amsterdam.

Gives a whole new meaning to “mental masturbation,” doesn’t it? And perhaps you don’t realize this, but this academic idiot is going to put this on his list of publications on his vita — and distribute it. Think about that. “Oh yes, I have contributed a great deal to Western Civilization and intellectualism! I wrote Images of Bliss: Ejaculation, Masculinity, Meaning, you know!”

No doubt it will be a seminal work.

Then, thanks to Ann Althouse, we have this professor of literature (from France, by the way), who is hawking his latest book (are you ready for this one?), How to Talk About Books You Haven’t Read. According to the fawning and bowing and scraping in the NYT:

Mr. Bayard’s most daring suggestion is that nonreaders should talk about themselves, using the pretext of the book without dwelling on its contents. In this way, he said, they are forced to tap their imagination and, in effect, invent their own book.

I suppose it has become cultural imperialism or something equally awful for a literature professor to suggest that people read.

The good news is that some academics are waking from a long coma. Don’t misunderstand me. I have a great deal of respect for Democrat K. C. Johnson, the history professor from Brooklyn College who has singlehandedly produced by far the most complete and detailed history and review of the Duke “rape” scandal, and until very recently, stood almost alone in pointing out the judicial and academic abuses at Duke. But in an interview with the Chicago Sports Review, he says:

Looking at that, you know there’s a tendency among activist-left in the academy to just brand anyone who disagrees with them as a right wing-nut. It works, and it’s hard for them to give up that stance. … Put it this way: before this case started I had never seen defending civil liberties as a right wing position.

I can’t help but wonder why it took this case. This nonsense has reigned at universities for a long time, since the 80s (though it did snowball in the 90s). How is it that Johnson is just now becoming aware of it?