Among the Intellectualoids: Liberal Obsolescence

All these words are used to describe putatively oppressive relationships which it then becomes the job of the literary critic to tease out of, say, Jane Austen for no better purpose than exposing the fact -- which the critic obviously knew before he ever read Jane Austen -- that they are there.

Do you suppose that just maybe, one of the great authors just wanted to tell a good story and didn't give a rats patootie about commenting on social conditions?

Keep in mind there are conservatives in higher education; most are in the hard sciences, math and engineering. Liberals dominate liberal arts and journalism, the lower paying jobs in the private and academic settings. As a conservative in the hard sciences I make a comfortable 6-figured salary supported mostly by grants received for valued work.

The fact is, most liberals fall into one of these Demo-constituency groups, and they are motivated by a hatred for one or more of the following: patriotism, the military, American autonomy, free enterprise, the Constitution, God, Christians, the Pledge of Allegiance, gun-owners, school-voucher advocates, home-schoolers, rural folks, the South, independent thinkers (especially conservative blacks), SUV-drivers, heterosexual males, anyone who threatens Leftist eco-theological idolatry, traditional marriage and families, abstinence, unborn children, entrepreneurs, small business owners, large business owners (stockholders), nuclear energy, oil exploration, global warmers, anyone who listens to talk radio, anyone with authority, anyone advocating individual responsibility, et cetera ....

Most of all, though, they hate haters -- a "hater" being defined as anyone who dares challenge their Demo-constituency agenda. They are united in their hate for George W. Bush.

I received this little tidbit, among others, in an email from a friend this morning, and it came to mind again as I read this article:

In the 60's, people took acid to make the world weird. Now the world is weird and people take Prozac to make it normal.

The 60's were the breeding ground that replaced a common sense culture with the "enlightened", "mind-expanding", "nuanced", nonsense of the Left's counterculture. The people who were children during the "Reagan Era" have experienced now the epitome of the differences during the "Clinton Era". It doesn't take a rocket scientist to recognize that the "intellectuals" who ridiculed Reagan are full of......themselves, and hot air.

A topic near and dear to my heart - thanks for posting this one.

Even if you believed that every narrative is resolvable into the schematic of the power relationships of its characters, you'd have to have either a pretty high boredom threshold or an enormously high opinion of yourself, or both, if you were to devote your life to the "decoding" in this way of the world's great literature.

Well, it's nice work if you can get it. The rigidity and brittleness of the entire deconstructionist approach to literary criticism provides an insulated little enclave from which its occupants may snipe endlessly at what they perceive to be the inadequacies of modern society. It's a sweet gig; they aren't about to give that up. But it is truly "thinking inside the box," a box that is impossibly confining to anyone with a real love for the subject matter. It is that last that I see among the postmodernists - they do not do what they do out of a love for literature, but out of hatred for it and the societies which produced it. Deconstruction isn't to build it up again, it's to destroy it. Such hatred is always sterile and self-defeating.

Part of this is due to the second-rate nature of most of these intellects which is a result of a dilution of talent produced by the tremendous expansion of higher education in an affluent and decadent West. Anyone reduced to explaining the prevalence of one political point of view in faculty by the fiction that only that one is smart enough to be there is a second-rate thinker at best. In fact, there is still a core of those on both sides of the political spectrum that truly does love its subject matter and is not afraid of diversity of opinion. Sadly, as a result of political orthodoxy and the influx of a cadre of the politically indoctrinated and intellectually insecure, these are a minority and apt to be shouted down or simply ignored in hiring and tenure committees. Scholarship has gone underground on the very campuses that are charged with its proliferation. But it's still out there, a seed that will not be stamped out by the "Studies" curricula and the enemies of true diversity that populate the diversity movements. The phonies know who the real scholars are, and oh, how they hate them.

Must be something in the old water pipes at many universities. Like, say, lead perhaps. The tendencies toward fallacious reasoning, false dichotomy, false generalization, Straw Man, pseudo-scientific jargon, smarmy liberal sophistry, and general disengagement from reality are either common attributes of the liberal brain or something in the water or food must be causing it.

If you know anyone who actually enjoys spending time around a lot of irrational, smelly, arrogant, condescending, left-brained liberal secular humanists with annoying-sounding squeaky voices, do let us know.

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