ACADEMIA’S SAUL BELLOW MOMENT: One of Rod Dreher’s readers is reminded of Bellow’s first novel:
Watching the video you embedded of [Yale’s] Christakis surrounded by SJWs, pleading along the lines of, “But we’ve eaten together for years, you’ve taken classes with me, how could you think I’m the kind of person you’re now accusing me of being? Doesn’t our having known each other count for anything, at all?” my mind went immediately to a scene from Saul Bellow’s first novel, Dangling Man, when Joseph, the narrator, encounters a former Party comrade in a restaurant.
Plus this:
One day, hopefully soon, we’re going to reach a point where those of us who dissent from the antiliberalism of the campus Left will simply announce, with e.e. cummings, that “There is some sh*t I will not eat.” I think in the refusal to apologize on that campus lawn, there’s a step toward it. (My breaking point came when I refused to write an e-mail apologizing to several colleagues for my insufficient expression of outrage at the “racist condiments” in the department break room. No one had asked me to; I just knew I needed to. And then I realized what I was doing and closed my computer. That was a thing that really happened in my life.)
I’d love to know the insane troll logic* behind which condiment was racist and why! But then, as Kurt Schlichter tweets, “I used to advocate destroying liberal academia, but now I say let’s laugh and watch it destroy itself.”