A British children’s book author decides to change the name of an animated character from Mohammed. And Western civilization continues to crumble.
It appears that the university did not cancel Ahmadinejad’s speech.
You have to wonder how this nation - and the broader Western civilization of which it is a part - is going to survive. Our educational establishment seems to want its destruction. Same goes for our major news-dispensing institutions. Also most of the arts-and-entertainment industry. Also one of our two major political parties. Other industries are mainly preoccupied with what they primarily do: make and distribute things.
I hope there’s a huge crowd on hand to raise hell when this vile creature steps on campus.
A Western Civilization Studies department struggles to be born at - ready for this? - the University of Colorado at Boulder, but is likely stillborn due to - are you ready for this - the obstruction of a couple of Republicans. What’s up with this disingenuous questioning: “Just what is Western civilization?”
This tidbit comes from Britain, which is looking more and more European - that is to say, less and less like part of Western civilization. How’s that for rigorous historical scholarship? Tippy-toeing around the sensitivities of Holocaust deniers.
A big-time Muslim group in Britain insists on certain “reforms,” shall we say, of the educational system. And a government official says, “Gee, how can I facilitate the implementation of your nice little requests?”
UPDATE: Diana West’s Townhall column today points out something very Mark Steyn-esque about all this. The document enumerating the “reforms” starts out by saying that implementing them would be a good idea because nowadays British students of white or mixed heritage (i.e., post-Christian students) don’t place as much importance on religion as Muslim students.
From Britain - a revamping of their entire public-school curriculum. This is so pathetic and disturbing I could spit nails.
The university has me teaching rock history again next semester. I’m in the process of getting my syllabus together.
We all know that this subject is generally “taught” from the angle that it’s yet another excellent opportunity to propagandize to the kiddies. Most of the overall-rock history books that are used as textbooks out there come at it from a “the-music-reflected-the-social-attitudes-of-the-times” slant. And we all know what that’s about: opening the door to the whole peace-activism-feminism-environmentalism-tossing-age-old-social-customs-out-the-window-was-a-good-thing way of seeing the last half of the twentieth century.
Now, my view is that any kind of history begins with an aquaintance with the names, dates and events that comprise the development of the human endeavor being examined. Only after you have a firm grasp on that can you start to draw inferences about how it “reflected social attitudes” or whatever.
Let’s take a concrete example that usually comes up for me when I teach this course. Invariable, either on the first night when I go around the room and ask, as an ice-breaker, what the students’ choice for all-time greatest rock recordings would be, or a few weeks later, when they’re submitting their paper topics, some bright-eyed young scholar-in-the-making will gush about how John Lennon was a man of peace and “Imagine” was such a great song. The way I’ve generally handled that is to just let the student reconsider that as he or she absorbs the material as the course unfolds. He or she (usually a she) generally has no idea that Lennon had such an explosive temper, had such infantile expectations of the women in his life, flitted so fitfully from one spiritual approach, therapy technique and political philosophy to another, and had such addictive tendencies. (I generally try to just leave “Imagine” alone. For me to point out that it’s a nihilistic and anarchistic - not to mention musically plodding - pie-in-the-sky exercise would be to engage in opinion-dispensing beyond what I feel my academic code of ethics would allow.)
You can imagine (excuse the pun) that I am tempted to just spew out all the above on that first night, but of course I don’t want to encourage attrition by stirring up talk along the lines of “Man, I don’t think this guy really likes rock and roll. What is the university doing having him teach this course?”
I do what I can to make this a serious course that can enhance a student’s understanding of Western civilization. For instance, when it comes time to discuss Vietnam, I go all the way back to the French missionaries arriving in the early 19th century, up through Napoleon III, and on into how Ho Chi Minh studied at the feet of Josef Stalin in Moscow in the 1930s, and how the North was directly aiding the National Liberation Front (Vietcong) by 1960, in violation of what was agreed upon at the post-Dienbienphu conference in 1954.
What I’m thinking about doing at the outset this time is inviting the students to consider that those elements in our society that have had concerns about rock’s impact may have been on to something. I think this is important because the general trend, in those books and in places like the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland, is to make light of any anti-rock sentiments as square and fuddy-duddy and reactionary.
But, jeez, has there ever been a field, even within the arts-and-entertainment realm, so peopled with cartoonish, sociopathic, perpetually adolescent characters? It’s important for someone to say, “There are other ways to regard these people than veneration.”
Anyway, it’s a weird little way that I’ve been handed to take my stand in postmodern America.
Those who have been to my main site know that I am adjunct faculty at the Columbus, Indiana campus of Indiana University - Purdue University - Indianapolis.
I let slide a lot of irritating things I encounter doing that gig, but this situation has me really hot. This slimy race-baiter and her bunch probably won’t get very far with this, but that’s because the dhimmis in the administration will probably give them a lot of what they want without the thing coming to a lawsuit.
The diversity office of IUPUI, both up in Indy and locally, burns through our tax dollars putting out puke-inducing stuff with great regularity. Still, this Whitney lady feels the need to say her silly-ass little citadel of social engineering still needs to be more “harsh on [itself].”
Trying to decide whether to proceed gingerly, given that my bread is partially buttered by this institution, or take my stand here.
Blackmailing a state-funded school to be more “welcoming” to minorities as a “Eurocentric” institution. Grrrr.
I’m so f—in’ furious I can barely see straight.
