Dear Michael,
Your Jan. 29 Wesleyan blog, alluding to Wes’s “distinctiveness,” spoke of the “…culture of openness and experimentation, exuberance and achievement, creativity and focus…” So THAT’S what Pornocopia, the Bubble’s latest curricular bauble, is all about!
God may be dead on High, but pornography lives—indeed, it’s been resurrected: As far back as Year One of this brave new millennium, Wesleyan reached the pinnacle of renown as “the pornographic ivy.” (A goodly chunk of the student body was outraged over the label: the students had no problem with the adjective; it was the NOUN they couldn’t abide.)
Poor American Studies Professor Hope Weisman. It wasn’t HER fault her course on porn was outed and splashed in tabloid-sized headlines across the land. President Bennet, found hiding under his desk in South College, was dragged out, kicking and screaming, “Who knew? I’m shocked, shocked!” or some such. He forthwith appointed a faculty member with time on his hands to “study” the matter; whereupon, in interview after interview, Weisman’s colleagues loudly decried the “McCarthyite witchhunt’s chilling effect” on their freedom to speak their mind.
Nor was the school’s First Lady of Pornography taking it lying down. In self-defense the anorexic academic stoutly wrapped herself in gauzy layers of Jargonese which has stood the test of time, for even today it wonderfully passeth understanding. President Bennet, wonderfully impressed, declared the lady’s tart confection as wholesome as Mom and apple pie, and quietly had it airbrushed out of the course book. It was soon forgotten, as Wes’s encyclopedic curriculum, which runs the gamut from A (Alinsky) to Z (Howard Zinn), was able to fill the slot in no time flat with a course comprising another novel exercise in slamming Hegemon Sam. (Wes can be soooooooo creative.)
Well, goodbye to all that, I say, for here and now, after spending a long lost decade tramping through Yukon mining camps and other low-end venues, the pig, tricked out in Pornocopia, her naughty new shade of lipstick, is back to living high on the hog on High. I understand her feted return was engineered by a member of the Department of Sociology, and rightly so: If I were a Marxist (excuse me: Progressive) professor in a department fighting and losing the battle for relevance in a world where every party except Obama’s has found that Marx and the wealth of nations have nothing to do with each other, I too would be climbing into bed with a sure-fire bet to pass the rigorous “relevance” test installed by the student body, at least the lower half of same.
Michael, I’m dying to know which one of new-and-improved Wes’s wonderfully creative writers came up with the lipstick’s name. Was it a professor of creative writing? A writer in residence, perhaps? A creative student writer? Whoever it is, let’s give the diffident devil his due and say that, as lipstick labels go, the porny old porker’s would sell like hotcakes, if not for the far-from-furtive, unkosher smell.
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