Posted on 05/08/2003 10:26:34 AM PDT by Behind Liberal Lines
The only obvious difference between Ithaca and a bucket of scum is that a bucket of scum does not siphon off millions of dollars in taxpayers’ money every year.
Finding this entire area completely devoid of virtue, your writer feels the need to highlight the reasons for his glee at soon gettin’ outta Dodge:
Ithaca, hidden in its secluded (and deluded) little corner of New York, is a world of idealism run amuck. This is a town in which a million dollars were spent to make up “Ithaca Hours”—a communist’s dream—a currency in which one hour of one’s labour (no matter what the labour was) is equal to one Ithaca Buck. This funny money is actually being used in legal transactions. The people of this town are stuck in the sixties, with regards to both their radical leftist and peacenik utopian thought patterns and their rusted-out Volvos and Volkswagen vans. Theirs is the biggest congregation of overweight and under-worked fluffmuffins seen since Jerry Garcia died.
The entire place reeks. The cat-urine smell of organic food markets is narrowly overcome by the Pepe Le Pew green vapors floating from marijuana-drenched bandannas and sweat-stained tie-dyed shirts most Americans wouldn’t wear to work on their Harleys. The Ithaca Commons (pedestrian shopping district) is rather like an unwashed Chimpanzee cage at the zoo, except it has half the intelligence level, and no bars to restrain its vagrants.
The people of Ithaca are scroungy, lazy, and completely set apart from mainstream America. Driving down the street, one is met with the blatant, blank stares of Ithacites (the Review term for Ithacans, akin to “parasites”). This probably comes from an extreme liberal desire to look into the lives of others, like a grandmother with too much time on her hands (and too much communally-grown coffee in her system).
Everything in Ithaca is overpriced. Service is poor. Sales tax is 8 percent. There are very few chain stores because the “Common Council” refuses to let them get zoning permits. They believe this ban on franchises will help privately-owned stores, but it really just makes sure everyone has to leave the county in order to buy anything. Wal-Mart was prevented from building a store because it is “environmentally unsound.” Despite the money and education, this is a city of know-nothings and have-nots.
The Catholics in Ithaca are socialistic monsters, and much more worried about pushing their fringe beliefs than doing spiritual works of mercy. The Ithaca Catholic Worker (a Marxist labour group) took the Iraqi conflict not as a time to pray for the safety and well-being of our soldiers, but rather to break into a local Army recruitment office and splatter human blood on recruitment posters and the Stars and Bars. Rather than denounce this, local congressman Maurice Hinchey (D-NY) released a statement calling the war in Iraq a “massacre.”
It is little surprise to learn that, until 1995, the mayor of Ithaca was a card-carrying member of the Socialist Party. The insular location of this hamlet in the hills of the Finger Lakes is a perfect scenario for such out-dated and overwhelmingly-rejected backwash ideology to linger many years beyond its shelf life.
The Ithaca school system hired a convicted cocaine dealer practically just out of the slammer, because he happened to be black and liberal. First and second grade students in Ithaca also receive a grade on how well they “respect others of varying cultures, genders, experiences, and abilities.”
The situation at Cornell, overlooking this sea of filth and absurdity, is little better. Cornell students are a hard-working, boring bunch. If ever there was an example of the negative by-products of capitalism, it is seen here above Cayuga’s waters: one often goes an entire day on Cornell’s Ivy League campus without saying Hello or as much as making eye-contact with a fellow student. The vast majority of students are way too bound up in themselves, their “careers,” square-toed shoes, and just plain dog-eat-dog trying-to-get-ahead competition to act like human beings (let alone be of interest). The majority of these students, as bright as they are, are little more than robots (especially in the science departments), completely bound up in their inane physical world of consumerism and sensual appetites—and thoroughly miserable to be around. An entirely dreary lot, all around.
The Parking Pirates of both Cornell and Ithaca are vile and relentless. The streets are patrolled like Captain Kidd on the seven seas, and violating vehicles are swooped on like a Spanish gold galleon with broken guns. They descend with $25 tickets like Captain Hook on a can of beans, and purchasing a parking pass adds little protection: for prices beyond $500 a year, a student will get a space he has to ride a bus to get to, and, even if the lot closest to his dorm is full, he will still have to pay the premium price for this close lot, despite his space being in some tundraesque (A-lot) corner of the campus—or on the dangerous Reservation (CC-lot, by Akwe:kon) lands.
A large-part of Cornell’s minority students (sans Asians) are partitioned off (both physically and intellectually) into barrios and ghettoes, from whence the demagogues (whose occupation relies on creating future throngs of malcontents) can teach them to see racial tension and discrimination where none exists. This they call, “Unpacking the Invisible Bookbag of Privilege.” Invisible, just like their evidence. The director of the black program house has a standing rule against exchanging salutations with white students.
Cornell’s campus dining is sharply over-priced. This is because the unionized food workers have the administration paying outrageously high prices (starting wage for burger flipper is $10/hour) for labour. The food is not bad, but $2 for a slice of pizza isn’t exactly economical for students living on loans. Meal equivalencies barely cover the cost of fries and a drink.
Besides a few gothic buildings and scenic gorges, Cornell’s campus is almost completely devoid of beauty. Once warm weather finally arrives (sometime around late April), Cornellians slough off their sundry layers of wool and fleece in favour of obscenely tiny shorts and tank-tops. It is especially endearing when this outfit is worn to play Frisbee across the main thoroughfares.
For girls, attire rotates between indecent cosmo-trash club-wear on “party nights”, to sloppy “just woke up with a hangover” sweat-suits, sun glasses and flip-flops for the rest of the week. Oftentimes even sweats are too much effort, and pajamas are just worn instead. When extreme lack of class is coupled with arrogance and a caffeine-high, few can ward off nausea. Maybe it is being picky, but do you want a girlfriend who looks like a whore one day and a homeless person the next?
Despite being girls who would not even be considered better looking than average on most college campuses, the majority of Cornell’s lady-folk strut around as if they are God’s gift to God: supercilious, standoffish and just plain boring to all but a few rich boys and gangster types who BET (Black Entertainment Television) tells them will bring fulfillment.
Staying as far behind the times as possible, Cornell now has Jeffrey Lehman as president, who some may know as affirmative action’s poster-boy. Lehman, former dean of U. of Michigan’s law school, will soon be arguing for affirmative action in the Supreme Court. Once this practice of institutionalized racial preference is abolished, Lehman, and Cornell, will be the national laughingstock.
Many of Cornell’s professors are good in their subject matter, but there are many more who think their narrow scope of expertise gives them license to preach like prophets about every third-world liberal cause under the sun—as if molecular biology and the Intifada rest on the same premises.
Ithaca also has some of the worst potholes known to man. While traversing these chasms, anything less than an SUV has a good chance of blowing a tire. (However, SUVs often end up spray-painted “Gas Guzzler”, or keyed.) Meanwhile, as Ithaca’s denizens are having their fillings rattled out, the town officials can think of nothing better to do than pass anti-war resolutions and hold a “Franco-Ithacan Friendship Day.” Perhaps we shouldn’t blame every Frenchman for Chirac’s prissy psuedo-pacificism, but this sort of Anti-Americanism needs Macho Man’s “elbow drop”, pronto.
This town is home to every half-witted liberal cause devised by lack of human thought, only a few of which we have covered here. We can only hope the students put through this little make-believe world of feel-good, government-to-the-rescue, liberal tripe will somehow, someway, survive with their sanity (and souls) intact. We have all seen the slogan, “Ithaca is Gorges.” Sure, Ithaca is “Gorges”, in one’s rear-view mirror.
This criticism of the Ithaca Hours system is entirely unfounded, and is based on ignorance. If you pay a dentist for a half hour of work, you might give him three or four "hour" certificates.
It's a way to keep money circulating in the local community among local businesses, instead of being siphoned out by the truckload through Big Box stores.
You just wait 'til Ulysses returns, he straightened Ithica once, he can do it again!
ROTFLMELAO!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
That’s amazing.
I’d like to get my hands on an Ithaca Buck just for fun. If I lived there I’d be thinking about getting Ithaca Bucks (I wonder if they have higher denominations) and using a scanner and printer to make myself an Ithaca Millionaire.
Certainly the feds won’t care if you’re forging Ithaca Bucks.
Gorges? This sounds SERIES. It could be HUGH. As in, there was a series man, who was very gorges, and boy was he hugh!!!
But this one is starting to see some support too:
;-)
Hmmmmmm....you bring up a good point. Liberals in general always assume that human beings are good natured and honest, and Ithicans in specific assume that nobody would ever dare cheat a monetary system with holes big enough to drive a Peterbuilt through. I say we put this theory to the test: print up a few hundred thousand Ithica bucks and just dump them around town (the university would be a good place). Let's see how honest the Ithicans really are--would they turn them in or.........???
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