Kevin D. Williamson writing in NRO
* * *
Really, Yale — you shouldn’t have! All this for little
ol’ me?
On Friday, I was honored to be a guest of the William F.
Buckley Jr. Program at Yale, where I participated in a panel on freedom of speech
with the wonderful writer Harry Stein and Professor Bradley A. Smith, a noted
law scholar. The Yale kids did their screaming best to prevent us from having a
conversation about free speech — the Yale kids are utterly immune to irony —
but the event went much as planned.
Coming and going, we were chanted at by idiot children
screaming, “Genocide is not a joke!”
* HOLY GOD! SO I'M NOT THE ONLY ONE WHO CALLS IDIOTS...
er... IDIOTS!
* THANK YOU, KEVIN D. WILLIAMSON!
Of course genocide isn’t a joke. Yale kids, on the other
hand...
(*APPRECIATIVE GRIN*)
For the first several years of my life, I thought that
“Yale man” was a synonym for “caveman,” because the only references to Yale I’d
ever heard were from Thurston Howell III, who greeted displays of barbarism
with “Heavens! A Yale man!”
I thought of that when the police officer was obliged to
carry the shrieking protester out of the venue where he’d come to put a stop to
our free-speech discussion.
(*SIGH*)
If you’re wondering about the "genocide" thing,
so were we. Turns out it’s a fairly typical college story — which is to say, a fairly
stupid story — the short version of which is that Yale’s sensitivity babysitter
sent out a pre-Halloween e-mail reminding all the smart Ivy League kids not to
dress up like Al Jolson in The Jazz Singer.
(*CHUCKLING SNORT*)
Professor Erika Christakis offered a reply bemoaning that
college campuses have become “places of censure and prohibition”; a few
students consequently went bonkers because their safe spaces were being
invaded; and — here’s where we come in — Greg Lukianoff of the Foundation for
Individual Rights in Education, one of our panelists, remarked that these
hysterical ninnies were acting like Professor Christakis had burned down an
Indian village. Which is to say: The idiot children were screaming about
Lukianoff because he said they were over-reacting to Christakis’s criticism
that they tend to scream and overreact.
Well played, idiot children!
(*VIRTUAL BACK-SLAP FOR WILLIAMSON*)
(*VIRTUAL FACE SLAPS FOR THE IDIOT CHILDREN*)
Of course, these idiot children aren’t children. These
are young adults who can serve in the military, get married, buy firearms,
drink alcohol, etc. They are at the beginning years of adult life, but they are
entirely unprepared for adult life.
* THEIR PARENTS MUST BE IDIOTS...
(*SHRUG*)
It’s fashionable to blame Yale and other elite
institutions for this sorry state of affairs, but, while the colleges certainly
do their share of damage, the truth is that these children are maladjusted
buffoons when they show up in New Haven. Yale doesn’t make them into hysterical
ninnies — their families do.
* GREAT MINDS THINK ALIKE!
* WHY DOESN'T ANYONE PAY ME FOR ALL MY WRITINGS...?!?!
There is a certain strain of upper-middle-class American
culture that cultivates an excess of self-importance that grows cancerous when
it isn’t counteracted by a deep understanding that the world is full of things
that are much more important than you are: God, country, the rest of the human
race.
That American striver culture has many invaluable aspects
— it is the culture that produces the high-achieving students who go to Yale
and other elite institutions — but in the absence of transcendent values it
turns everybody into a miniature Donald Trump. If your concerns in life are limited
to personal economic advancement and status whoring, then everything —
literally — is about you. That’s when you see things like Lena Dunham’s dopey
political advertisements, which reduce citizenship to another shallow channel
of self-satisfaction: Never mind patriotism, never mind history, never mind
anything else — what does your vote say about you? How do it make you feel?
* YEP... WILLIAMSON HITS THE NAIL ON THE HEAD!
I understand why the idiot children at Yale are so
sensitive. Really, I do. I sometimes list in my mind all of the poor, suffering
people who get a raw deal in this life, and Yale students are always right at
the top, with the Bangladeshi orphans and women traded by sex traffickers in
Vietnam.
(*LAUGHING HYSTERICALLY*)
Yale isn’t a safe space, Congo isn’t a safe space — it
all makes sense, as long as you don’t expect it to make sense.
No, genocide isn’t a joke. I’m sure that the women and
children being raped to death by Boko Haram appreciate that the idiot children
at Yale are making stern faces and pumping their fists.
* YEP...
(*SIGH*)
As for me, I think that they’re clowns, and worse than
that, really: They’re bad citizens, and defective people from defective
families.
* KEVIN... COME! VISIT ME! DRINK MY SCOTCH! EAT MY BILL
CONCOCTIONS! GOD BLESS YOU, MY FRIEND!
They aren’t motivated by good will, but by fear: of the
dawning realization that they, as people, aren’t really all that important,
despite having been told all their lives how important they are.
We’re all real sorry about your "safe spaces"
and your pacifier and your stuffed puppy, Caitlyn. Really we are. Yet the
perpetual revolution of configured stars continues in its indifference, and the
lot of man is ceaseless labor, and though you may find the thought terrifying —
and thinking itself terrifying — it may turn out to be the case that the
screaming in the dark you do on campus is more or less the same screaming in
the dark you did in the crib... the same howl for the same reason.
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