Pegging The Grabarimeter

I’ve just returned from an idyllic Sunday afternoon at the Mark Taper Imaging Center, where I was inserted head-first into a long, dark, narrow sheath, and treated to a series of vibrations and sounds of varying, but uniformly disquieting, frequencies. And from this experience I learned two things. 1) Thinking about baseball doesn’t help, and 2) It’s a good thing my penis isn’t as claustrophobic as the rest of me.

Anyway, the MRI is probably the worst carnival attraction I’ve ever been on — even worse than the thrill rides at Iron Lung Fantasy Camp — but after 20 minutes of being flayed with electromagnetism while listening to a concerto for Inuit throat singer and diesel jake brake, I may have actually extruded sufficient spleen to power a brief blog post. So, before the narcotics return me to my now customary semi-comatose state, let’s see what we can pluck from Townhall’s Low Hanging Fruit Salad…

Ah! Perfect! It’s been awhile since we checked in on Temporary Assistant Professor of English and Slovenian folk dancing enthusiast Mary Grabar. When last seen, she was explaining how stupid atheists were to construe her previous column, “Letter to a Stupid Atheist,” as some sort of accusation that atheists were stupid. This time, the professor explains that when she wrote about her Yugoslavian relatives being raped by Russian soldiers during World War II, then followed that with a column claiming that Obama’s followers — his goosestepping shock troops of the Culture War — had “ravished our virgins,” she was merely going metaphorical on your ass:

It appears that my use of war metaphors in the opening paragraph of my last column confused a number of people

For the record, here’s that opening paragraph:

An Obama presidency would signal the final salvo by the Left in the culture wars. Obama’s advance troops have already taken over our college campuses, have bound and gagged our conservative professors, have ravished our virgins, have pillaged our stores of wisdom, and have ensconced themselves in the thrones of power in deans’, presidents’ and department heads’ offices.

However deeply swaddled in metaphor it may be, the point Professor Grabar’s trying to make here will be instantly recognizable to anyone acquainted with wingnut tropes, since she’s not actually writing so much as reciting from a text as venerable and unchanging as the Obergammerau passion play. Anyway, those few readers who might have been confused by her poetic use of language don’t seem to bother Mary nearly as much as those who were clearly amused:

[the column was] was circulated around the blogosphere and set off a chorus of chortling. The left-wing bloggers, especially, had a field day with my reference to “ravished our virgins.” They pointed out, in quite crude terms, that one must go to middle schools these days to find virgins.

When confronted with mockery, the best way to turn the tables on one’s irreverent detractors is to make a stiff and dignified appeal to the authority of Webster’s, or the Oxford English Dictionary. This proves you are not to be trifled with.

I will begin with a reminder from English 102 that a metaphor is “A figure of speech that describes something as though it actually is something else, thereby enhancing understanding and insight” (“Literature: An Introduction to Reading and Writing” Fourth Compact Ed., Edgar V. Roberts).

Ah, she threw us a curve and quoted a textbook instead. Damn her high-falutin’, cognitive linguistics. If only she’d get down off her semiotic pedestal and unpack her densely figurative language for us monosyllabic proles.

So let me, as my more fashionable colleagues in English departments say, “unpack” this:

Oh goody.

“Obama’s advance troops” are the tenured radicals who have left their legacy on college campuses. Their takeover began in the 1960s, but their protégés now control hiring, tenure, and curriculum choice. They have dispensed with the study of dead white men unless it is in innovative ways, like a conference on “Faulkner’s Sexualities,” for which they pin up posters on their office doors.

Thus creating a hostile work environment for those colleagues who believe that Temple Drake had it coming.

William Faulkner, as you may recall, was the Nobel-prize-winning Southern novelist. Old-fashioned scholars used to study him for his innovative writing style, his mark on the modernist movement, as well as for the ideas he presented in his work.

But style and ideas are passé. Sexuality, or better yet, sexualities, is where it’s at if you are a scholar doing “cutting edge” research.

Well, if I were a Southern Literature scholar, and it was a choice between assigning “Intruder in the Dust” for the 23rd year in a row, or taking a sabbatical to study why Faulkner and New Orleans boho William Spratling painted Sherwood Anderson’s son’s penis green, I’d be filling out that grant application as we speak.

Were I able to make the case that the focus of my dissertation, the Southern Catholic novelist Walker Percy, had multiple sexualities, I would not have had my paper proposal turned down at that great fair of English professors, the Modern Language Association convention, where the hippest scholars are interviewed and hired to tenure-track positions.

Indeed. So-called scholars who are happy wallowing in the swine bog of godless deconstructionism make temp work uncomfortable for those aspiring academics who don’t want to know about Faulkner’s penchant for verdant phalli! This is clearly unfair, since Dr. Grabar has obligingly played the Publish or Perish game that all would-be professors must engage in, as a visit to her website will attest. Amongst her published works:

My Townhall Columns
Feminism’s Legacy: YouTube Catfights
The Cultural Illiteracy of Easy Atheists
Bush haters rain on our local parade (Atlanta Journal-Constitution)
Little Girls in Head Scarves (The American Spectator)
Are Terrorists Courageous?
Burquas give Muslims too much cover

Suck on that, Noam Chomsky!

Tenured conservative professors, as old as most of them are, of course are not literally “bound and gagged.” Most of them probably served in the military, and so tenured radicals would not be able to take them down in a physical way.

(TYING ON RAMBO-STYLE HEADBAND AND HEFTING .30 MACHINEGUN) What you call Hell, Professor E. C. Buehler, Director of Forensics at the University of Kansas, calls Home.

The actual violence on campuses is directed more at invited speakers like David Horowitz, Patrick Buchanan, and the Minutemen, by brave undergraduates who bear weapons of cream pies and bottles of salad dressing.

I guess since neither Horowitz or Buchanan served in the military, the hippies consider them soft targets.

Those who are bound and gagged (metaphorically) are afraid to differ in opinion for fear of losing our temporary jobs when the talk in the faculty break room or part-timers’ office turns to political elections. There is always danger, for your lack of assent may make you conspicuous and thereby invite an ambush of questioning.

Because the last thing someone who aspires to teach for a living wants to do is answer a bunch of questions, or try to defend her opinions. Besides, it’s a lot spicier to imagine the faculty lounge as a BDSM dungeon instead of a small, shabby room with two Naugahyde sofas and a Mr. Coffee.

Self-censorship also occurs at faculty meetings, and the sight of a middle-aged Shakespeare scholar (in tweed), a citizen in good standing, quaking at the directives of the feminist department head is deserving of Sophocles. A chorus should come on the stage to weep for such a man reduced to nodding in agreement to a unanimous decision to approve a new assistant professor’s proposal for a course, “Popular Literature,” that would include rapper Tupac Shakur’s lyrics as “poetry.”

Hey, she’s right! This is exactly like the central conflict in Antigone, with its tragic struggle between civic duties and private loyalties, except this version is spiced up with a bulldyke!

“Ensconced themselves in the thrones of power in deans’, presidents’ and department heads’ offices” is a reference to the fact that humanities departments veer left, as evidenced by records of voter registration and surveys. One study by Christopher R. Cardiff and Daniel B. Klein, as reported in 2005 in “Critical Review,” found that for every one Republican in the Humanities in California colleges there were ten Democrats.

Heavens! Well, it’s never too early to start wetting your pants in total panic. Unless the humanities represent some sort of outlier…

Abstract of Cardiff and Klein: The party registration of tenure-track faculty at 11 California universities, ranging from small, private, religious-affiliated institutions to large, public, elite schools, shows that the “one-party campus” conjecture does not extend to all institutions or all departments. At one end of the scale, U.C. Berkeley has an adjusted Democrat:Republican ratio of almost 9.1, while Pepperdine University has a ratio of nearly 1:1. Academic discipline also makes a tremendous difference, with the humanities averaging a 10:1 D:R ratio and business schools averaging 1.3:1, and with departments ranging from sociology (44:1) to management (1.5:1). Across all departments and institutions, the D:R ratio is 5:1, while, in the “soft” liberal-arts fields, the ratio is higher than 8:1. These results are generally in line with previous studies.

Okay, so when you look at the whole picture, the situation’s not quiteso dire.

The situation is dire.

Most of the conservatives writing about this issue have either abandoned the academy or have never taught.

…making them your best choice for informed commentary on modern academia.

One 24-year-old editor of a blog on higher education described the situation as being that academia only “occasionally represses conservative thought.” I can tell you that conservative thought in most humanities departments has just about been banished. And I could count in numerous ways how this has been done. Many studies, statistics, papers, and surveys supporting my first-hand observations are presented in articles; but these are read mostly by academics.

There’s gobs and gobs of empirical evidence, computer modeling, and exhaustive statistical analysis proving my gut feeling that the best shoes are made by dwarves living secretly in the Black Forest, but those peer reviewed studies were published in journals that are read mostly by cobblers, so you’ll have to take my word for it.

Those who are still in the academy are too afraid to write about what they see and experience.

You never hear the cream pie that has your name on it.

The strategy of the leftists is to cast their critics as alarmist exaggerators.

Thank goodness that’s not working…

Soon, everyone will forget that there even was such a thing as a conservative intellectual tradition. Referring to conservative and intellectual in the same breath is likely to bring derisive laughter from humanities professors.

Let’s see if the bastard is still laughing after you box his ears with a copy of Liberal Fascism!

The radicals are winning this war. We need the help of the public and our political leaders to break through the barricade.

Yes! Heed the clarion call, people! This is exactly like the big, rousing Act II number “Upon These Stones” from Les Miserables, except in this case the barricade is manned by bitter temps who got dissed at an English Teacher Job Fair.

So…When we last spent some quality time with Mary, commenter R. V. Dump proposed a new standard for “measuring batshit crazy: The Graybar ( Usage: That essay was estimated to reach a force of 6.5 GrB (Graybars).” Personally, I’d give this one a 7.4.

Posted by scott on June 16th, 2008