Dear Michael,
“White male privilege” (the term is a neo-Marxist Hail Mary, a strong-armed play to get back in the game) is being gossiped about and romantically linked with the term “fraternity.” Cute linkage, you reckon?
Not half as cute as yours. To whom? To the very incarnation of “white male privilege,” the Crown Prince of Camelot. As the Crown Prince’s wannabe thane on this, your High-land patch of heather, bedazzled by Camelot glam, you invited the heir-apparent and Grand Old Man of the Party of Caring and Compassion to speak at your fiefdom’s gala, Commencement ’08.
That was a bridge too far. I penned a Wespeak decrying your invitation to a man who, years before, had driven a woman off a bridge and sealed her fate by failing to run for help after extricating himself from his flipped-over vehicle as it settled on the bottom in the dead of night. Authors Richard and Thomas Tedrow examine every scrap of evidence available (much of it was unavailable: an autopsy of the body to determine the cause of death) and conclude that the victim had lived for at least four hours in the air pocket ere succumbing to bad breath: her own CO2 had killed her, the water not running in, the oxygen running out.
How did the defendant acquit himself? Was he charged with vehicular homicide? Reckless driving? DUI? All of the above? The one-party state’s liberal senator’s fate was decided, as luck would have it, by the “liberal” role of Justice’s wheels, as honest as Rick’s one wheel in “Casablanca”: charged with leaving the scene of an accident, the driver paid the two dollars and walked. Thus was Justice served by the Bay State’s criminal liberal justice system.
“What difference does it make?” – the plea of another standard bearer of the Party of Caring and Compassion, responding to a question about Benghazi. Not that you, dear Michael would not have gone her one better: “Benghazi? Never heard of it.” Just as you never heard of 9/11. Both of which may be found among your unmentionables.
And this. Within a year of your installation, you brandished a glimpse of your tenure’s personal code of non-academic conduct: then-President Bush, you said, was “undermining the Constitution.” Repercussions? Nil. Not one of your team’s receivers got even close to hauling in your holler-borne heave of a Hail Mary and run with it: not the bumper-sticker composers, who might have gone lyrical, stuck on “Impeach the Texas trawler!” or “Flying Bush, flock off!”; not your rabble-rousing and Rabellaisian (pardon my French) fraternity’s moribund organ, the Lazarus Press; and lastly, not liberal law professors like Jonathan Turley, midnight-riding, alarming: “The Rednecks are coming!”
Turley HAS been alarming of late, reacting (hidebound reactionary!) to Bush’s successor’s extra-Constitutional exploits. And how would the latter-day Paul Revere’s reverberant hue and cry be greeted on High? If not with buckshot (the campus being a gun-free field of battle), most likely with a yard sign (BEWARE THE DOG!) and the shire’s lung-some crier, decrying, “This talk about undermining the Constitution is a tempest in a tea party pot!” Would that be the bark of Wes’s top dog, the Constitution’s formerly bulldog defender and latterly the fan of the Document-shredding fundamental transformer?
What a difference a Messiah’s election makes! The morning after, his Holy Spirit descended upon you, and in a twinkling “undermining the Constitution” became (mirabile dictu!) a dead letter. As dead as a lovely woman (the grieving parents’ only child) driven off a bridge and left to die. As dead as the polished longhand scrivened upon a piece of parchment by a crowd of powdered wigs, a white male privileged fraternity best forgotten: “You must NOT remember this.”
And off with the heads of all alarmists who DO remember that piece. And should an alarming ricochet manage to get through a chink in the boilerplate surrounding your schoolyard’s really cool curriculum, diversions of an activist and carnal kind and approved by you (or would you be giving mere TACIT consent?) will wholly obliterate it.
In addition the students have your course book’s work horse, “Rewriting History: Monopolizing the Narrative.” You have an objection? The course book doesn’t list such creature? Not now, mon vieux, but surely you haven’t forgotten your critter’s old brand name before it was run through We Correct U’s costly (but worth it) state-of-the-art, plutonium-fueled euphemizer (I wish I were making this up), and thanks to which, your hobby horse is now tricked out in a dozen word-robe changes.
A fitting selection (I thought you’d never ask) would be “The Past on Film.” This course on the past is taught, I believe, by a self-confessed and unrepentant postmodernist; a fellow who, touching all the bases, dubs himself a progressive (that is, he’s forward-looking); a humanist (backward-looking); and, romping home, our man for all seasons dubs himself a liberal. And here we must hearken, for the seasoned lib’s astride a strident lyric: “You MUST remember THIS…”
Martin Benjamin is a member of the class of 1957.