Tuesday, August 30, 2016

WHINING ISN'T EVERYTHING, IT'S THE ONLY THING.

It's a small thing really, but writing professors are always talking about the Telling Detail, so: wingnut Cornell Professor William Jacobson of Legal Insurrection has acquired a new second home -- not bad, the life of a tenured radical! -- and talks about it thus:
For the past six weeks I’ve been back and forth several times, and expect to split the year between Ithaca and Rhode Island again like I did for five years prior to selling our prior RI home in June 2013. During these breaks from Ithaca I’ve come to understand how living full time in Ithaca is a political pressure cooker.
Really? I know the place as the rich, cultivated home of two colleges, hard by Lake Cayuga and dotted with parks and awash in natural beauty. Plus you have two houses at least, and your adjuncts probably do all your work. What pressure?
In Ithaca, everything is political. You can’t escape it. You will not be left alone.
You will be made to care.
Oh yeah? Can you give us an example?
Even about your coffee, as I joked when we left RI for Ithaca full time:
Please excuse me while I go cry into my organic fair-trade soy latte served in a compostable eco-friendly sustainable cup, a portion of the proceeds of which will go to help indigenous mountain farmers in Central America.
So... you will be made to care by something written on your paper coffee cup? This is the outrage? Couldn't you just bring a mug to Starbucks that says I HATE HOMOS WHATSAMATTER YOU AGAINST FREE SPEECH and make them pour it into that?
There is no non-political life in Ithaca. It’s Obama’s America, compounded by geographical isolation and liberal homogeneity:
And the Professor links to Michelle Obama's "Barack Obama will require you to work" speech from 2008, which just seems eerily prescient today, since we're all slaving in work camps and some of us only have one home.
The personal life is dead, history has killed it.
With this he links to, I swear to God, a clip from Doctor Zhivago.

All these ominous cliches, and nothing, not one blessed thing of substance, to back them up. And the punchline is, he's spewing this self-pitying, Obama's-America, all-is-lost guff even as he informs us of a spectacular manifestation of the fact that he is the polar opposite of persecuted.  You can just imagine -- actually, you can only imagine him doing this while inwardly laughing at the dopes who take him seriously.

The massive grifts pertaining to the Trump campaign have been instructive, but let's not forget it didn't start with Trump; not by long shot.

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