Radical Notions About Radical Nuts
December 17, 2003
I think we conservatives sometimes go slightly overboard when we attack liberals. That's not to say they don't deserve attacking. But your run-of-the-mill lib is usually just a well-meaning dunderhead, but not actually evil. We can certainly agree that they're wrong about nearly everything, from bilingual education and capital punishment to affirmative action and the United Nations. The poor saps can't even decide how many people it takes to raise a child; except when they're trying to make a case for unmarried women and gay couples, they're insisting it takes an entire village!
But, having known a large number of liberals, I feel I can vouch -- at least in most cases -- for their good intentions. They really do believe that there isn't a problem in America, ranging from illiteracy to illegal aliens, that can't be solved by throwing tax dollars at it.
The reason that we on the right tend to despise, rather than pity, liberals is because they don't see the need to separate themselves from the truly demented members of the radical left.
You know who they are. They're the unbathed goonies you see marching in the streets carrying signs equating George Bush or Tony Blair or Bill Gates or Uncle Sam with Hitler. Oddly enough, they never seem to equate actual living dictators with der fuhrer.
They are the same mob that takes to the street every time the industrialized nations have an economic conference. God only knows what it is that sets them off. Possibly it's the sight of so many people who are neat, clean and well-groomed. For all I know, or am able to make out from their bizarre array of picket signs, they just might take clean fingernails as a personal affront.
TV enjoys covering their demonstrations for the same reason TV loves major fires, earthquakes, tidal waves and lurid murder trials. It's because TV is all eyes and stomach and has no soul.
By covering the demonstrations, TV over-emphasizes their importance and, naturally, the rest of the media falls into line. For instance, TV reported that 100,000 people were in the streets protesting President Bush's state visit to England recently. Depending upon how you feel about Bush and his foreign policy, you will either be reassured by one estimate that put the number at 50,000, or be heartened by the figure of 150,000 that I also heard bandied about. What nobody seems to bother remarking on is the irrefutable fact that roughly 7,000,000 Londoners weren't carrying picket signs; they were at work or they were home having dinner and watching the riff-raff on their telly.
The bottom line is that radicals everywhere are always far more likely to march in the streets than conservatives because they are far more likely to play hooky and far less likely to have jobs.
There is, however, one group of radicals who are gainfully employed. Far too gainfully, in my opinion. I refer to college professors; specifically those in the humanities.
Their radicalism is fired by their arrogance. They really do believe they're the smartest people around. They probably believe this because they are paid a ton of money to do a job that doesn't require any heavy lifting.
They remind me of an old radio show called "Duffy's Tavern." Each time the phone rang, Archie the bartender would answer it with, "Duffy's Tavern, where the elite meet to eat." The audience at home, knowing what a collection of lowlifes constituted the tavern's clientele, would chuckle knowingly. That is exactly how many of us feel about academics.
The Wizard of Oz made the brainless Scarecrow think he was brilliant by presenting him with a diploma. The same trick works on our professors. If they know anything at all, which in some cases is highly debatable, it's their one small special area. So, yes, they may know more than the ordinary bear when it comes to French poetry of the 19th century or the events leading up to the signing of the Magna Carta or every practical joke ever played on Arthur Schopenhauer, but so what? Who would you rather have living next door -- a nice guy who can fix your plumbing or some boring pedant who can explain why a haiku contains 17 syllables, and not 16.
It figures that the human brain will begin to mutate in mysterious and dangerous ways after years and years of delivering the same dreary lectures to the same apathetic students. I contend that something is bound to snap in the human mind when a person has barely strayed off a school campus since the age of six!
The only professors who actually get out in the world are archaeologists. But, of course, they're scientists. Unlike their colleagues, when they have a hunch about something, they go off and dig a hole in the ground. After they've dug around for a year or two, they either uncover the lost city they expected to find or they wrap up their shovels, admit they were mistaken, and call it a day.
But in the humanities, professors are never required to admit they're wrong. At worst, it becomes a matter of two scholars squaring off over whether, say, Shakespeare or Bacon wrote "Hamlet." They will then spend the rest of their well-paid lives trying to make their case.
Students in the humanities are not only captive, but they can be punished with bad grades if they voice a heretical thought. So, hearing nary a discouraging word, the profs wind up spending their entire careers spouting claptrap to a bunch of highly impressionable 18-year-olds.
But even professors are human. And when the choice is between either boring their students to death rambling on endlessly about pre-Colombian musical instruments or mouthing off about the evils of America, capitalism, and the kids' stupid, materialistic parents, it's really no contest.
Let's face it, if you were trying to impress the cute blonde coed in the second row, who would you choose to be -- Mister Chips or Che Guevara?
What you have are tenured rams propagandizing undergrad sheep. Which is why when they answer the phone, they should be required to say, "Harvard (or Princeton or Columbia or Cal Berkeley), where the elite meet to bleat."
©2003 Burt Prelutsky
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