Like shooting fish in a barrel, like stealing candy from babies
...like a battle of wits with the unarmed...
Oh wait, that last one isn't a metaphor.
Via World-O-Crap, I see that Dr. Grabar's piqued defense of her "ravished virgins" rhetoric is to claim that we who are in stitches over this Just Don't Get It - we are too stupid to grasp that she was only using a Literary Device, and thought she was really talking about Liberals Gone Wild, literal Barbarians At The Gates of the Ivory Tower, instead of just using wildly over-the-top figures of speech that happen to embody all the stock tropes of sexualized phobia that fill the nightmares and daymares of right-wing academia (of which, for new readers, I am an escapee myself, so I speak whereof I know) as well as being completely inappropriate for the subject matter, or at least would be if the subject of the essay weren't "My Paranoid Stoner Ramblings At Midnight" to be followed by "Oops, Bong Water Is Bad For Keyboards, Who Knew?"
--That, for Dr. Grabar, is likewise figurative, though not as OTT as describing the set of all liberal college professors as 1) "shock troops" in the Rebel Army of Gen. Obama, 2) virgin-raping, building-pillaging, furniture-stealing, Conan-copycatting neo-Visigoths (The Silver Horde In Mortarboards--? The college-ravishing thing is a subject you'd think Dr. Grabar would stay away from, given the Deal Hudson Affair.)
So, too, is Stephen Frug's flight of fancy, even though he hasn't as yet posted a disclaimer explaining that he doesn't really believe in a soopersekrit government draconic battle corps.
No, we understand very well, Dr. Gradgrind, and what we were laughing at was the sheer ridiculousness of the hyperbole - and the naked, purple, polka-dotted, polka-dancing monsters from the collective conservative Id on display, starting with the ever-present fear that somebody, somewhere, is having more/better/any sex at all, to the raging persecution complex, to the touching faith that they, and they alone, are the Onlie True Defenders of Real, ie Western, Culture from a coordinated attack by Satan's Willing Minions, to Virginity Fetishism, and back to the nagging, burning, itching resentment that Other People are having more/better/any sex at all...
It's like the result of, oh, I dunno - maybe too much exposure at too young an age to comprehend them, to propaganda posters from the first half of the 20th century? - with a little acid-dropping to send their imaginations right over the edge from which there is no returning.
I see also that an attempt to defend Dr. Grabar's Hyperbole (sounds like a brand of 19th-century tonic!) by (some, not all by any means, even American Spectator & NRO embarrassed) her ideological confreres, claiming that apart from the hyperbole she's right - or "right", as this air-quotes challenged commenter might say - who, of course, would probably be aghast at a class talking about all the weird sexuality and giddy pop-culture references in O'Connor ("converge", heh, heh-!) while another here tries to argue that aside from the first paragraph, there are good points being made even if Grabar doesn't make them very well (lukewarm praise, that) and these are not being addressed by us mockers in all the pointing and laughing at the first paragraph.
Actually, this isn't true. Hunter went through the entire essay, addressing all the different layers of fatuousness sequentially, and many commenters about the net, not I alone, took the trouble to point out with examples how beyond-satirizing absurd it is to 1) complain about college courses addressing either pop culture inclusive-or sex in the Western Literary Canon, given that a) once upon a time all that is in that list of Great Books was itself pop culture, and b) it's all full of talk about sex, much of it really really dirty, silly, subversive, or all of the above.
I suppose we could have talked more about the Entitlement Mentality inherent in saying that liberal "shock troops" have "have ensconced themselves in the thrones of power in deans’, presidents’ and department heads’ offices" rather than saying that the Dean of X College is a liberal, and has presumably been made dean by the normal inertial processes of academic politics, search committees and board meetings and all that boring stuff, rather than violently usurping something that by nature belongs to a conservative with some sort of figurative two-handed sword. (We could contrast this with the frequent noting of her introduction of personal religious views into the classroom by former students, and their fears that disagreeing with her affects grades, along with the common complaint of a dull literalism in her teaching, for added hypocrisy/empahy blindness.)
We could talk, too, about the inappropriateness of this endless invocation of the 1960s student protests by someone who isn't old enough to remember them (and inaccuarate: no student sit-ins resulted in protestors becoming president or dean!) and how it's so utterly typical of the threadbare rhetoric of the conservative movement, too. That would be more fair to Dr. Grabar than focusing on her sexual obsessions and valorization of "manly" violence ("...Tenured conservative professors, as old as most of them are, of course are not literally 'bound and gagged.' Most of them probably served in the military, and so tenured radicals would not be able to take them down in a physical way...") as well as how inappropriate it is to claim the mantle of victims of violent persecution and attack and how insulting it is to real resistors of tyranny and targets of purging, academic or not.
We could also discuss how it's soooo much easier to claim that you're not getting the praise and positions you feel you deserve because you're being persecuted for your beliefs, instead of because of the fact that a) you're just one more Little Turtle out of how many thousands of other English Majors out there, and/or b) you're a derivative, talentless hack, which explains a lot about Dr. Grabar's published corpus of texts, and why this is such a common shtik for conservative academics and wannabes, and how it's no different from the people who argue conspiracy to suppress their fic and/or claim that any crit is a flame and flamers are just H8TERS (but alas the Grabars of the world never take down their writing in dudgeon...
--Not nice, but fairer.
(OTOH, the discussion of this goofiness got an actual Kenyan commenter to show up in the thread at ObWi explaining and debunking some of the ZOMG!Evil/Hypocritical Liberal smears being circulated, which is the kind of thing that never could have happened back in the days of print media, so silver linings of substance as well as solace.)
And the thing that all the ZOMG!shutup-you're-embarrassing-the-movement conservatives are leaving out is that Dr. Grabar's histrionic equation of There are people out there who disagree with me and nobody is making them stop!!! with actual violence and violations of bodily integrity and freedom is not only more disproportionate than the overuse of "vitriol" in political discourse, it's just as common in discussions and internal movement writings, and always has been. This is just one of the first times that it's gotten out of the hothouse and into the wild, to be pointed at as the grotesque monstrosity it is by the general public.
But we talked like this all the time at schools like Thomas Aquinas College, University of Dallas, Thomas More College, University of Steubenville and in the conservative cliques at secular schools - it was as absurd as claiming that everyone was out to Get Us for being SF fans, when the real problem was that most people didn't know or care about our existence. And I don't expect the rhetoric has toned down any, or is/was any less at the conservative schools I didn't personally know people from.
I think it's time to have a Blog Award for the Stupidest Wingnut With An Advanced Degree, perhaps with professional and amateur classes so that the Dumb Doctors with Townhall gigs aren't unfairly contending with the self-published Paranoic PhD's. (Possibly also separate divisions for professors who are presently teaching, and those who are only writing these days.) We've got Mike Adams, Ann Althouse, Insta-must-not-be-named-pundit, his wife, and who else to start with?
Oh wait, that last one isn't a metaphor.
Via World-O-Crap, I see that Dr. Grabar's piqued defense of her "ravished virgins" rhetoric is to claim that we who are in stitches over this Just Don't Get It - we are too stupid to grasp that she was only using a Literary Device, and thought she was really talking about Liberals Gone Wild, literal Barbarians At The Gates of the Ivory Tower, instead of just using wildly over-the-top figures of speech that happen to embody all the stock tropes of sexualized phobia that fill the nightmares and daymares of right-wing academia (of which, for new readers, I am an escapee myself, so I speak whereof I know) as well as being completely inappropriate for the subject matter, or at least would be if the subject of the essay weren't "My Paranoid Stoner Ramblings At Midnight" to be followed by "Oops, Bong Water Is Bad For Keyboards, Who Knew?"
--That, for Dr. Grabar, is likewise figurative, though not as OTT as describing the set of all liberal college professors as 1) "shock troops" in the Rebel Army of Gen. Obama, 2) virgin-raping, building-pillaging, furniture-stealing, Conan-copycatting neo-Visigoths (The Silver Horde In Mortarboards--? The college-ravishing thing is a subject you'd think Dr. Grabar would stay away from, given the Deal Hudson Affair.)
So, too, is Stephen Frug's flight of fancy, even though he hasn't as yet posted a disclaimer explaining that he doesn't really believe in a soopersekrit government draconic battle corps.
No, we understand very well, Dr. Gradgrind, and what we were laughing at was the sheer ridiculousness of the hyperbole - and the naked, purple, polka-dotted, polka-dancing monsters from the collective conservative Id on display, starting with the ever-present fear that somebody, somewhere, is having more/better/any sex at all, to the raging persecution complex, to the touching faith that they, and they alone, are the Onlie True Defenders of Real, ie Western, Culture from a coordinated attack by Satan's Willing Minions, to Virginity Fetishism, and back to the nagging, burning, itching resentment that Other People are having more/better/any sex at all...
It's like the result of, oh, I dunno - maybe too much exposure at too young an age to comprehend them, to propaganda posters from the first half of the 20th century? - with a little acid-dropping to send their imaginations right over the edge from which there is no returning.
I see also that an attempt to defend Dr. Grabar's Hyperbole (sounds like a brand of 19th-century tonic!) by (some, not all by any means, even American Spectator & NRO embarrassed) her ideological confreres, claiming that apart from the hyperbole she's right - or "right", as this air-quotes challenged commenter might say - who, of course, would probably be aghast at a class talking about all the weird sexuality and giddy pop-culture references in O'Connor ("converge", heh, heh-!) while another here tries to argue that aside from the first paragraph, there are good points being made even if Grabar doesn't make them very well (lukewarm praise, that) and these are not being addressed by us mockers in all the pointing and laughing at the first paragraph.
Actually, this isn't true. Hunter went through the entire essay, addressing all the different layers of fatuousness sequentially, and many commenters about the net, not I alone, took the trouble to point out with examples how beyond-satirizing absurd it is to 1) complain about college courses addressing either pop culture inclusive-or sex in the Western Literary Canon, given that a) once upon a time all that is in that list of Great Books was itself pop culture, and b) it's all full of talk about sex, much of it really really dirty, silly, subversive, or all of the above.
I suppose we could have talked more about the Entitlement Mentality inherent in saying that liberal "shock troops" have "have ensconced themselves in the thrones of power in deans’, presidents’ and department heads’ offices" rather than saying that the Dean of X College is a liberal, and has presumably been made dean by the normal inertial processes of academic politics, search committees and board meetings and all that boring stuff, rather than violently usurping something that by nature belongs to a conservative with some sort of figurative two-handed sword. (We could contrast this with the frequent noting of her introduction of personal religious views into the classroom by former students, and their fears that disagreeing with her affects grades, along with the common complaint of a dull literalism in her teaching, for added hypocrisy/empahy blindness.)
We could talk, too, about the inappropriateness of this endless invocation of the 1960s student protests by someone who isn't old enough to remember them (and inaccuarate: no student sit-ins resulted in protestors becoming president or dean!) and how it's so utterly typical of the threadbare rhetoric of the conservative movement, too. That would be more fair to Dr. Grabar than focusing on her sexual obsessions and valorization of "manly" violence ("...Tenured conservative professors, as old as most of them are, of course are not literally 'bound and gagged.' Most of them probably served in the military, and so tenured radicals would not be able to take them down in a physical way...") as well as how inappropriate it is to claim the mantle of victims of violent persecution and attack and how insulting it is to real resistors of tyranny and targets of purging, academic or not.
We could also discuss how it's soooo much easier to claim that you're not getting the praise and positions you feel you deserve because you're being persecuted for your beliefs, instead of because of the fact that a) you're just one more Little Turtle out of how many thousands of other English Majors out there, and/or b) you're a derivative, talentless hack, which explains a lot about Dr. Grabar's published corpus of texts, and why this is such a common shtik for conservative academics and wannabes, and how it's no different from the people who argue conspiracy to suppress their fic and/or claim that any crit is a flame and flamers are just H8TERS (but alas the Grabars of the world never take down their writing in dudgeon...
--Not nice, but fairer.
(OTOH, the discussion of this goofiness got an actual Kenyan commenter to show up in the thread at ObWi explaining and debunking some of the ZOMG!Evil/Hypocritical Liberal smears being circulated, which is the kind of thing that never could have happened back in the days of print media, so silver linings of substance as well as solace.)
And the thing that all the ZOMG!shutup-you're-embarrassing-the-movement conservatives are leaving out is that Dr. Grabar's histrionic equation of There are people out there who disagree with me and nobody is making them stop!!! with actual violence and violations of bodily integrity and freedom is not only more disproportionate than the overuse of "vitriol" in political discourse, it's just as common in discussions and internal movement writings, and always has been. This is just one of the first times that it's gotten out of the hothouse and into the wild, to be pointed at as the grotesque monstrosity it is by the general public.
But we talked like this all the time at schools like Thomas Aquinas College, University of Dallas, Thomas More College, University of Steubenville and in the conservative cliques at secular schools - it was as absurd as claiming that everyone was out to Get Us for being SF fans, when the real problem was that most people didn't know or care about our existence. And I don't expect the rhetoric has toned down any, or is/was any less at the conservative schools I didn't personally know people from.
I think it's time to have a Blog Award for the Stupidest Wingnut With An Advanced Degree, perhaps with professional and amateur classes so that the Dumb Doctors with Townhall gigs aren't unfairly contending with the self-published Paranoic PhD's. (Possibly also separate divisions for professors who are presently teaching, and those who are only writing these days.) We've got Mike Adams, Ann Althouse, Insta-must-not-be-named-pundit, his wife, and who else to start with?