BlogWonks

I believe President Bush has had good intentions as he has led this nation for 2 terms. I believe along the way, though, he has lost his way as he is listening to advice that is not necessarily in the best interest of this country. Political correctness has also infiltrated the Bush administration.

Should Conservadom, in the spirit of positive reinforcement, ever decide to create awards for its most valuable commentators, it is quite likely that David Horowitz will be summoned to the podium each and every year until the time of his death. Few other figures have so resolutely, and creatively, battled the left over the course of the past two decades. His ingenuity, zeal and sense of humor are apparent in the titles of his works, such as How to Beat the Democrats and Other Subversive Ideas, The Art of Political War and Other Radical Pursuits, and Hating Whitey and Other Progressive Causes. His careful and inflammatory choice of wording is again discernible in his latest release, Indoctrination U: The Left’s War Against Academic Freedom. The book is essentially a postscript to last year’s The Professors: The 101 Most Dangerous Academics in America as it provides an antidote to the toxins disseminated by the 101 pseudo-scholars detailed within.

The cure Horowitz offers to the propagandizing of the bottom10 percent of the professorate is called The Academic Bill of Rights. The context and story behind Indoctrination U is the author’s attempt to gain publicity for the proposition. Having it enacted by state legislatures was never his primary goal. What he sincerely desired was for universities to preemptively adopt its essence into their own bylaws.

The Bill itself is reproduced in an appendix. Its language is well-crafted and rather innocuous, yet one would never know this from the reaction it received from its critics. They dubbed it “crazy, Orwellian, a witch hunt,” and totalitarian in nature. Their disparagement is perhaps a ruse to better enable them to protect their own privilege as tenets like, “No faculty shall be hired or fired or denied promotion or tenure on the basis of their political or religious beliefs” is not the stuff of McCarthyism. Although, should it be rigidly interpreted, a clause like, “Faculty will not use their courses for the purpose of political, ideological, religious or anti-religious indoctrination” would completely threaten the activists’ way of life. Commandments like that are far more threatening than having their beloved Fairness Doctrine applied to network news broadcasts or NPR.

The story within this story is the way in which his enemies eschew discussion of the document in favor of excoriating Horowitz. They had several opportunities to do so as he posed for them repeatedly atop a podium during his college speaking tour. Wherever he went, he was alchemized into a resolution for debate. A trip to one California state school saw him become the first conservative invited there in its 11 year history while at Butler he got hit in the face with a pie [stunning argumentation]. Even more absurd was the warning an administrator gave just before he commenced his speech at the University of Chicago. She noted that a safe room was available should the speaker’s words prove too harrowing for youthful ears to tolerate. His presentation at Reed College was unexpectedly rebutted by the Dean who had little to say about the Academic Bill of Rights but denounced Horowitz as a “political pornographer.” The dean’s spiel was actually encouraging because pressure from his superior brought about an apology. Horowitz was met by protestors at Penn State even though the university’s Policy Manual contains the same type of restrictions on instructor behavior which are outlined in the Bill.

Those who actually discussed the initiative were generally dismissive. One proclaimed it a “solution in search of a problem.” How much better off the country would be if such a view was correct. The liberal arts programs within our universities have become leftist bastions whose purpose is no longer to pursue truth. Unlike with the sciences, whose colleges are the finest in the world, numerous liberal arts departments have become completely politicized and are little more than ad hoc centers of agitprop.

Many of our tenured luminaries even question whether there is such a thing as truth or objectivity at all. Their skepticism makes for all kinds of classroom mischief as they idolatrously worship the troika of race, class, and gender. What “social justice” should mean is that the citizenry has the right to keep what they’ve earned, but, in the mouths of radicals, it is morphed into a description of government’s attempt to pit one social group against another via an arbitrary, and authoritarian, redistribution of wealth scheme. Political correctness functions as the academy’s Cerberus. It tyrannizes the marketplace of ideas and uses wonderland logic to turn its critics into peddlers of hate speech.

Some have argued that the professorate’s overwhelmingly leftist slant fails to prove that any discrimination in hiring transpired—even though they would never repeat these same words regarding the proportion of minorities within a particular business or profession. Theoretically, this is true but there is no shortage of evidence documenting the penchant anti-liberal utopians have for barring the impure from their ranks. None of this really matters though as the Bill has no provision for the hiring of conservatives. What’s done is done. The hope for people like Horowitz is that public awareness of past wrongs will allow for the future to be salvaged.

Given his adroitness and experience, the author could not have been too surprised by the reaction he received from those in the bunkers of the Ivory Tower because his appearances were intentionally provocative. The speech he gave at Duke is transcribed in these pages. It turned out to be quite inspiring which meant that half of the audience either fainted or walked out. The Director of the Anthropology Studies program recommended that her students strip to the waist as a form of protest but the wards failed to follow her order; although, Horowitz was met with the bizarre tactic of synchronized giggling. Irrational backlash like that is to be expected as emotionality and obstruction have been the left’s weapons of choice since humans first found a way to end words with “ist” and “ism.”

In the final analysis, what good has come from the imbroglio over The Academic Bill of Rights? Well, there have been some mild successes. Princeton University passed a “Student Bill of Rights” while Temple University enacted a policy to prevent students from being politically bullied in the classroom. According to Horowitz, over 20 projects similar to Penn State’s Center for the Study of Free Institutions and Civic Education have been created as a means to instill intellectual diversity into our universities. Of course, for the foreseeable future, the only accolades academe will win for tolerance are ones it bestows upon itself.

Length, or a lack thereof, is the lone reservation this reviewer has about Indoctrination U. Another four or five chapters would have been mightily appreciated. Horowitz admits that there were many attacks and accusations that he chose not to document, but we would be better off if he had. Not only do these “teachable moments” provide proof of perpetual injustice, they also make for serious entertainment. Seinfeld would have difficulty dreaming up material as goofy as the “safe room” comment in Chicago.

Bernard Chapin is a writer living in Chicago who is the author of Escape from Gangsta Island, and is currently at work on a book concerning women. He can be contacted at veritaseducation@gmail.com.

The lamestream media told you:

Sub-zero cold blanketed the northeast, following severe snowstorms in the nation’s midsection, plus eight feet of snow in New York, and is blamed for numerous deaths.

The Uninvited Ombudsman notes however that:

The timing of the freezing weather is very bad, coming as it does on the heels of the Paris “science” conference held to add legitimacy to global warming theories that are in vogue. No explanation for the discrepancy has been issued, but cynics expect at least some “authorities” to blame the cold on heat-trapping “greenhouse” gases.

The warming effect of running six billion heaters, at 98.6 degrees, 24 hours a day for an average of 70 years each, has not been factored into the equations. A Page Nine Special Report on Global Whining will be released shortly.

The lamestream media told you:

President Bush remains firm on his commitment to not increase taxes, but plans to raise $81 billion by adjusting fees for a variety of services, according to the McClatchy chain of papers and wire services.

The Uninvited Ombudsman notes however that:

If your government gets money and it comes from you, it’s taxation. Watchdog groups like newspaper chains have lately preferred to disguise this for the public for an unknown reason. Critics charge it is propaganda designed to mislead sheeple and the ignorant. Reporters could not be reached for comment.

To hide taxes, they are now referred to as fees, user fees, tariffs, subsidies, subsidy reductions, benefit reductions, allocations, allotments, allowances, decreased allowances, rate surcharges, funding, stipends, costs, cost of living increases, adjustments for inflation, ramp ups, planned expansions, withholdings, FICA payments, add-ons, hikes, charges on taxpayers, regulations, licenses, wage and labor rules, and revenue generators.

“Technically, these aren’t taxes,” McClatchy reports. Right.

“Technically, this is not reporting,” says The Uninvited Ombudsman. No ethics-violation charges are expected.

Illegals’ Crimes Recognized

“Many White supremacists blame immigrants, particularly Hispanics, for crime, struggling schools or unemployment,” reports Erin Texeira for the Associated Press on 2/6/07.

The Uninvited Ombudsman notes however that:

Are people, including stereotyped racists, blaming illegals for problems, or just recognizing obvious problems?

Law enforcement officials, politicians, government bureaucrats, the “news” media, school administrators and the public at large have long been keenly aware that crime, struggling schools and unemployment problems are fueled in large measure by illegal Hispanic immigrants who have snuck into the country and are siphoning off resources, creating problems, committing crimes and protesting.

The AP reporter must have singled out White supremacist groups to suggest they are about as bright as everyone else.

Prison populations, English-language learner programs and day laborers clogging parking lots and street corners stand as hard evidence of the problem White supremacists are now credited with recognizing, according to geniuses at the Associated Press.

In other news, illegal Hispanics in the U.S., estimated to number at least 30 million, are largely Christian, and will turn out to be valuable allies against Muslim islamofascists, who are stepping up efforts to trash American culture and institute a global jihadi caliphate here, as they are succeeding in doing in Europe.

The lamestream media told you:

“Even as teen pregnancy rates have declined across the country over the past decade, the teen pregnancy rates among Latinos remains high,” reports Gannett’s number two paper (after USA Today), The Arizona Republic.

The Uninvited Ombudsman notes however that:

Teen pregnancy rates among Latinos are not remaining high, they are increasing dramatically, according to the chart printed with the story. Why reporters would whitewash the text when the actual numbers are provided is not known. The suggestion that Americans can’t understand numbers cannot possibly be correct.

Race-based reporting is now an accepted cultural norm and form of diversity for multiculti lamestream reporters.

The lamestream media told you:

Under pressure from Washington, Mexican authorities are cracking down on South Americans who sneak up through Mexico to sneak into the United States. Civil rights groups fear the immigrants are being treated poorly by Mexicans, and crammed into overcrowded cells.

The Uninvited Ombudsman notes however that:

A rumor that Mexico is running out of lower-class people it can export to the United States, after exporting millions a year for decades by sneaking them across the border illegally, could not be confirmed. The Mexican elite class is doing quite well, according to most economic indicators.

The 30 million illegal immigrants estimated to have already been snuck into this country amounts to approximately one third of the entire Mexican population.

The lamestream media told you:

President Bush’s proposed $2.9 trillion federal budget is (pick one, based on what you typically read:) a disaster, ingenious, will work, will fail, depends on luck, is too high, too low, spends money in the wrong place) and likely to meet stiff resistance in the Democrat Congress.

The Uninvited Ombudsman notes however that:

Most state’s reporters included a column about how much money their own state would “get” from the federal budget, and generally complained it was too little, even if it was an increase from last year.

No reporters mentioned that if the federal government hadn’t taken all that money from the public in the first place, states wouldn’t have to “get” it back for social services, roads, schools and all the other expenses government has adopted.

Reporters failed to mention that it costs a fortune for the central federal authorities to take all that money from the people as taxes and withholdings. They then spend and lose a fortune while “managing” it all year long. They also use up and spend a fortune giving the money back to the states they took it from.

It’s hard for the average person to imagine how wealthy we’d all be if the government didn’t take so much in the first place. Reporters refused repeated requests to report on it.

None of the interest the feds make on all that money they take (and bank) goes back to the people they took it from.

It is highly questionable whether most of the expenditures of those billions of dollars are authorized by the Constitution, a point overlooked by lamestream reporters in their rush to complain that they are not getting enough back.

According to economics expert and frequent Page Nine guest columnist Craig Cantoni, nearly 60% of the federal budget now is redistributions — taken from the public and given away to people and uses deemed worthy by the bureaucrats in charge. No arrests have been made.

“Pikes,” says Cantoni, “we need heads on pikes to slow down the theft and redistribution the government is calling a budget.”

The leader of the black congressional caucus, a race-based group within Congress, that calls itself non-partisan, publicly announced its intention to get on the right committees and get that money for their constituents, a completely unAmerican position, challenged by no reporters. Rumored charges of ethics violations have not materialized.

The lamestream media told you:

Nancy Pelosi has made the nation safer by quickly enacting recommendations made by the unbiased non-partisan Iraq study group.

The Uninvited Ombudsman notes however that:

Shipments of bomb-grade uranium and plutonium are tracked by U.S. agents from the CIA, according to Congressman Rick Renzi (R-Ariz.). Under the Pelosi bill, Renzi notes that this authority is transferred away from us and to the United Nations. A quick review of the bill confirms the shift to the U.N. is buried in a mass of new WMD procedural changes.

The lamestream media told you:

In order to reduce violence, protect the innocent, and fight rampant corruption in Mexico, Mexican federales confiscated all firearms from the police in Tijuana.

The Uninvited Ombudsman notes however that:

The National Shooting Sports Foundation has circulated news that the Tijuana, Mexico, police department has issued about 60 slingshots to officers whose guns were confiscated. I am not making this up.

The city’s 2,000 police officers have been without guns since Jan. 5, when their firearms were confiscated amid allegations that corrupt officers were supporting drug traffickers. How the 1,940 officers without slingshots will cope was not covered.

No news was issued on whether U.S. police would have their guns changed to slingshots to address allegations that some corrupt officers here support the drug trade.

Critics note that the entire U.S. war on some drugs supports the drug trade, with price supports and a system that makes every drug available in every city in America. “In the war on drugs, the problem isn’t the drugs, it’s the war,” says one critic on condition of anonymity.

To get on the excellent NSSF news list, visit http://www.nssf.org. NSSF sponsors “First Shots,” a program that introduces newcomers to the joys, excitement and wholesome fun of the shooting sports.

The lamestream media told you:

Islam is the religion of peace.

The Uninvited Ombudsman notes however that:

Even the dimmest news consumers can see from the bombings, rants from mullahs, silence of the lambs, and of course the Internet where real news and photos are easily found, Islam has little to do with peace, unless it’s the peace where all non-Muslims are converted or put to death. Islam’s stated main concern is eventual total domination of the planet.

Koran, loosely translated by lamestream outlets as “Peace,” but which most people now realize actually means, “Submission,” calls for martyrdom in the pursuit of a global caliphate — a worldwide religious dictatorship based on the Koran’s sharia-style law.

Now, apparently, even the Washington Post gets it, as its long compassionate and sensitive silence on the truth about Muslims is cracking around the edges. In a widely circulated wire story, its reporters Joshua Partlow and Saad Sarhan reveal that insurgents in Iraq calling themselves, “Soldiers of Heaven,” are, “driven by an apocalyptic vision of clearing the Earth of the depraved in preparation for the second coming,” of a mystical cleric from the 9th century. “Fight until martyrdom,” is their cry, heard by one of the reporters near the fighting.

With enough reporting like this, Americans might wake up. They might see the catastrophe Europe is battling from Muslim immigrants preparing for battle, which has been effectively suppressed by lamestream outlets. Nah.

Many websites have the images the U.S. media refuses to show. Just use Google images for “Muslim protests in London.”

Anna Nicole, Milton Friedman and Joan Collins who?

By Craig J. Cantoni

When the media announced the death of Anna Nicole Smith, I had to ask my wife who she was. In retrospect, it would have been better not to know. And when I learned the same week that hundreds of Scottsdale women had lined up at the Barnes & Noble near my house for a book signing by Joan Collins, I had to ask who she was, and again regretted asking.

Nobel Prize winner Milton Friedman died recently. There were tributes to him in the media, but nothing like the incessant coverage of Anna Nicole Smith, whose claim to fame was posing naked, mooching off an old guy, taking drugs, gaining weight, losing weight, wearing so much mascara that she looked like a raccoon, and having the intelligence of a — well, never mind.

By contrast, Friedman’s claim to fame was developing an economics theory and a libertarian political philosophy that lifted countless millions of people out of poverty.

I wonder how many Scottsdale women would have shown up if Friedman had held a book signing for his masterpiece, Monetary History of the United States, 1867-1960, which he co-authored with Anna Jacobsen Schwartz, whose first name and gender were the only things the brilliant woman had in common with the other Anna. The book showed that government monetary policy is what actually triggered the Great Depression.

I also wonder how many Scottsdale women would have shown up if Friedman and his equally brilliant wife Rose had held a book signing for the insightful book they co-authored, Free to Choose: A Personal Statement. For sure, few public school teachers would have shown up — given their animus towards Friedman, who was the father of school vouchers.

His book gives example after example of how free markets and free choice help mankind, and how government control and restricted choice hurt mankind, a lesson that city councils and most of Congress haven’t learned — to the detriment of us all.

Yes, free markets and free choice allow people to spend their time and money watching inane coverage of Anna Nicole Smith and buying a fluff book by Joan Collins. But they also allow smart, industrious, creative and entrepreneurial people to be successful and thus raise the standard of living for everyone else.

Thank goodness we live in a country where there are enough of the second kind of people to compensate for the first kind of people.

An author and consultant, Mr. Cantoni can be reached at ccan2@aol.com.

The lamestream media told you:

More bombs went off in Iraq, killing many more people in crowded areas, as sectarian violence continues to escalate, and hopelessness expands.

The Uninvited Ombudsman notes however that:

Somewhere in military command there must be a huge battle map, and teams working on it, to identify every explosion that goes off in Iraq. It must identify the bomb type, explosive used, detonator, size, casualties, and of course time and place.

This allows commanders to recognize the high-risk zones, bomb makers’ patterns and deployment, identify newcomers, and help root out those responsible. With so much explosives floating around, identifying the sources is a primary goal. They link each maker, supplies used and MO so our forces can spot patterns.

That much bomb making takes supply lines, expertise, command and control, and these patterns are readily noticeable.

News reports give a sense however that completely indiscriminate bombs from unrelated sources are just madness produced by mindless madmen, rebels aimlessly killing people. That ain’t so.

Think back to any domestic bomb incident (say, the Atlanta Olympics), and you’ll recall how much detail the FBI went into day after day to identify what occurred. Bomb experts are having a field day with all the research opportunities they have overseas. None of it is leaking into the boring repetitive drone the media provides, numbing you down.

Iran has recently been singled out as a suspected bomb maker, as a prelude to an expected incursion.

The lamestream media told you:

Capital punishment is a barbaric leftover from olden days and should be abolished because it is unfair, isn’t used elsewhere, doesn’t even work and is no deterrent.

The Uninvited Ombudsman notes however that:

News reports about Saddam Hussein appear to have decreased dramatically since he was put to death at the end of a rope several weeks ago. Threats and problems caused by the vicious dictator while he was alive seem to have ended, and news outlets are spending valuable time on everything but the bearded tyrant. No complaints about the lack of Saddam stories have been filed by opponents of the death penalty.

For whatever reason, Woody Allen was a great hero of my youth. I saw every film of his that I could, and eagerly anticipated his seemingly non-stop new releases. Maybe it was due to my being enthralled by New York City or maybe I was addicted to his comedy or maybe I just loved the fact that a fellow juvenile had found a way to become rich and famous. Regardless, I have always been interested in him which caused to purchase a biography called The Unruly Life of Woody Allen. It was my hope that Marion Meade’s book would provide a critical and unvarnished examination of this controversial figure. Initially, I was quite sure that it had due its fact-filled, brisk, and concise narrative. Ms. Meade is a talented biographer and writer. She cites a plethora of primary sources who offer up unique and important observations about this cinematographic legend. Allen’s enigmatic personality is dissected in full, and, after finishing it, his oeuvre makes considerably more sense as there seems to be little truly fictional about his storylines.

Ms. Meade never seems to be very sympathetic towards her subject which, given Allen’s history, really isn’t remarkable; however, her subtle bias against the auteur becomes flagrant in those chapters concerning his rupture with Mia Farrow. Ms. Meade interprets their fantastically acrimonious parting as if it were a morality play wherein Woody is cast as the dark lord and Mia as a maiden of virtue. As the facts of the case reveal, this could not be farther from the truth. A better description of their relationship is to picture two twisted trees growing to maturity alongside one another with each mirroring the other’s juts and jags precisely.

Quite clearly, Allen is a man whose pathology cannot be denied. He is full of obsessions, compulsions, and neuroses in general. As if those demerits weren’t enough, he also appears to be a snob and an elitist. Yet it is hard to fathom how one could find Farrow much healthier. At best, hers is a manipulative, passive-aggressive, and violent personality. Ms. Meade must see Farrow as being a Grade A societal victim which then cleanses her of guilt for every horrific behavior she commits.

The biographer is incredulous that anyone could find anything wrong with Farrow’s single parent martyr act—which necessitated her adopting 11 children (to make for a total brood of 15). Well, let’s consider the possible motivation for these habitual adoptions. We can rule out that she was a saint as nothing in her life seems to suggest that this is a possibility. A desire to spend every waking moment with children is not likely because she maintained a busy professional and social life the entire in which she cruised the international orphanage circuit. That her infant acquisition often corresponded with her entering some kind of personal crisis should give us pause. Could she have been using these children, and the enticing emotional bonds they offered, as a form of self-medication? The explanation is quite feasible. During her crackup with Allen, she readily turned the two children he loved against him, and alienated them from the person they once saw as their father. She also made a point of sharing details with them to ease her own pain while exponentially increasing theirs, such as when she told her twin sons after discovering evidence of Allen’s treachery: “Woody’s been f*cking Soon-Yi.”

In a country where corrupt feminist statistics concerning domestic violence are actually believed by law enforcement officials, Meade makes no point of mentioning of the way in which Farrow happened to be the (only) physical aggressor in this case as she battered Allen repeatedly. During one of their arguments, she “punched him in the face” and “thwacked him hard across the back.” These acts continued months after she first heard of his infidelity so no crime of passion defense is possible. Perhaps Meade regards violence as being a sign of health when it is directed towards men. Farrow harassed Allen on the phone and threatened to kill him along with herself. She gave him a 1992 Valentine’s Day card with a picture of her family inside. It was adorned with “steel turkey-roasting skewers” that pierced the hearts of her children. It’s hard to imagine a person alive who wouldn’t find such evidence damning. If a man comported himself in the same fashion he would quickly be placed into a jail cell. Only a writer with a serious agenda could overlook the pathology of Mia Farrow.

Finally, the notion that Allen is a misogynist is entirely incorrect. He is far more of a misanthrope than anything else. He loathes himself and practically everyone else with whom he shares this earth, but, beyond that, he clearly favors women over men. Nothing in his oeuvre reveals any sympathy for his male peers whatsoever. His characters are never masculine in the traditional sense; they are aged yuppies at best or slight variations of a female personality at worst. Should men not be New York, neurotic pseudo-intellectuals then they are deemed worthless. That he hates his species is a foregone conclusion, but that he prefers women to men cannot be doubted.

Bernard Chapin is a writer living in Chicago. He is the author of Escape from Gangsta Island, and is currently at work on a book concerning women. He can be contacted at veritaseducation@gmail.com.

Hey Everybody,

I was lucky enough to have an interview with the great and heroic Christina Hoff Sommers, but I can only post the link here as it is the property of the American Spectator. As you probably know, they have a ton of quality writers with a set amount of space so two of the questions got edited out and I will post them here, and only here, because all of us LaSalleites are big fans of hers:

BC: One Nation Under Therapy is an amazing book and one which deserves the accolades it has received. Is your next project going to be along these same lines? Also, can you tell us a bit about it?

Christina Hoff Sommers: I am becoming involved in the struggle of Islamic women to secure their basic rights. The United States of America is not a patriarchy—but places like Yemen, Iran, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia certainly are. There are broadly two sorts of women’s rights movements in the Muslim world. One is led by observant religious women who are trying to find sources of liberation inside their own religion. The other, much smaller, is led by women who are non-religious and who want to bring the Enlightenment to their societies. I sympathize with both groups and I believe that American equity feminism has a lot to offer both. 

But remember, the American feminist establishment is currently dominated by gender feminist radicals. They believe that America is, in its way, as oppressive as any Muslim country. So most of their effort is taken up with “liberating” American women (especially college women) from the ravages of patriarchy. That leaves them almost no time to help oppressed women in other countries.  

Even if they want to help Islamic women—their antipathy to traditional religion makes them useless to religious Muslim women. Their animus towards men, feminine beauty, and romance will alienate vast numbers of liberated, Enlightenment feminists in the Muslim world. (Their rejection of the free market capitalism helps no one.) Conservative, moderate and libertarian American women are going to have to find an appropriate and sympathetic way to make common cause with Muslim women—but we will have to work around the feminist establishment to help them—not with it. Anyway, I am planning to write a long essay or a short book to sort this out.

BC: I still consult both of those books along with your articles on the subject quite regularly. Have times changed over the course of the last decade? Do you think that the radical feminist (or gender feminist) viewpoint is no longer as dominant among our elites and the media as it once was?

Christina Hoff Sommers: As I said, journalists are no longer under the spell of orthodox feminists.  In fact, no one seems to find what they have to say all that relevant or appealing. But hapless college students can’t escape them. Ardent, fire-breathing true believers are ubiquitous on the modern campus. They describe American society as a “patriarchy,” and they inveigh against capitalism. They see President George W. Bush as more of a threat than Osama Bin Laden.  That worldview is not dominant in the media –nor almost anywhere else that you can name. The one exception is the feminist classroom.

No responsibility, no accountability for one’s actions. That’s the society we now live in, as people engage in careless behavior.

I discovered yesterday that Bonnie Erbe at U.S. News and World Report wrote a column in response to my “Women Are Not Oppressed” piece. She then penned a follow up as well. Ostensibly, the reason for her devoting so much time to this issue is twofold. First, she wants to show people what uneducated bumpkins we Internet writers are, and second, she wants to put a stop to any notion that women are not disadvantaged in America. As the reader may surmise, she fails in meeting either objective.Before addressing the specifics of her complaint let me first point out that Ms. Erbe is a woman so persecuted that she is published by a major media outlet while also covering “Congress, the Supreme Court, the Justice Department, and occasionally the White House for radio and television networks. She also hosts PBS’s weekly news analysis program, To the Contrary with Bonnie Erbe, and writes a weekly syndicated newspaper column for Scripps Howard News Service.” Not to mention that the piece I’ll shortly be dissecting was picked up by CBS News who reproduced it on their own pages. Yes, one must pity poor Ms. Erbe; harassment like the kind she’s been through would produce tears of empathy from the survivors of the Bataan Death March.

From Erbe we can see just how little being a man is of benefit to the writer. My requests for equal time were ignored by U.S. News and CBS while my original piece was formally rejected by the Baltimore Sun. It seems that I, as opposed to Ms. Erbe, am the person disfranchised by the supposedly patriarchal media. Clearly, women are about as downtrodden in America as the Greek gods were upon Olympus. Although, perhaps the radical feminists might contend that explicitly favoring females is all part of the patriarchy’s sinister master plan. By not providing men with equality of opportunity it is actually a way of advancing our own needs to be vanquished which then promotes a more ominous patriarchy [with a bit more mumbo-jumbo like that I just might find a spot on a university faculty yet].

I will now refute Ms. Erbe’s positions although there really is not much that needs to be said. Let’s observe first that she made a colossal blunder by linking to my article in the body of her piece. Interestingly, the folks at CBS News were smart enough to avoid doing so. The foolishness of her tactic will be immediately apparent to any reader who follows the link and discovers the kind of politically incorrect argumentation that they’ll never hear on a college campus or in the pages of a mainstream media publication. For this mistake, I thank her wholeheartedly.

Getting to her first post, it is called “The End of Punditry.” She states:

“But one of high tech’s less ambrosial characteristics is the Internet’s plethora of self-appointed pundits. Anyone with a computer and broadband may now make his or her thoughts available to a global audience. Some of those folks, let’s be honest, have very little new, interesting, or enlightening to say. On the downside, they ratchet up anger levels in our already divided culture.”

Were we to be so lucky! Anyway, now that she’s come down from her place next to the burning bush we should brace ourselves for the demolishing of my positions, but the siege engines fail to roll forth. She mentions my column and that it was a response to a piece by Jenny Dombrowski. She then compliments Dombrowski and says “[m]ore in my next blog.” We are told that it is the end of punditry, but there is no punditry with which to justify this claim.

The action we await comes in her second piece, titled “Internet Unleashes Unguided Punditry.” She highlights a paragraph by Dombrowski and then modifies it, thus showing us low functioning types how real press work is done. The only problem here is that Dombrowsi’s piece was reproduced on the internet after it originally appeared in the print version of the Baltimore Sun. Oh well, she gets an A for self-righteousness at least.

Then we come to the money sequence:

“Still, her column ends up making us think about the fact that many gen-Y women fail to experience the need for a women’s movement the way their gen-X or boomer foremothers did: again, a point worth considering. Would that were true of the work of Bernard Chapin, who responded to Dombrowski’s column. Instead, he weaves together a pugilistic response to each of Dombrowski’s claims that doesn’t teach or move the reader much at all.”

Was my account pugilistic? Possibly, it’s certainly not complimentary to Ms. Dombrowski or radical feminism. In my opinion, I would say that “logical” and “thorough” would be better words to describe my work, but pugilistic is not an entirely unfair representation. Unlike Ms. Erbe and Ms. Dombrowski, I definitely put effort into my claims by making use of citations which they are apparently above needing. Her statement about my not teaching or moving the reader is deeply rooted in bias, however. How could I ever persuade Ms. Erbe of anything when her mind is already made up? I have no hope of persuading radicals of my views—a belief I illuminated last week:

“For this reason, we can never hope to convince them of anything at all. Our battles are chiefly of indirect benefit alone. They are a way in which to persuade intentional or unintentional observers as to the rightness of our cause. Hearing us or seeing our words may be the only intellectual diversity to which some students every encounter.”

From onset, convincing the likes of Ms. Erbe or Ms. Dombrowski is not possible and not one of my substantive arguments was mentioned or alluded to here.

Ms. Erbe continues:

“He writes, ‘Although her accusations are quite preposterous, I will live up to my burden of rejoinder by analyzing them because crazed feminists multiply and become more powerful when good men think theyre (sic) above responding to them.’ His ‘burden of rejoinder’? Puh-leeze!!!

Burden of rejoinder is a term that remains embedded in my mind from my years in college debate. It can be defined as “The affirmative team assumes the burden of proof, i.e., to prove that the proposition is probably true. The negative team assumes the burden of rejoinder, i.e., to attack the affirmative team’s arguments.” I assumed this burden by refuting Ms. Dombrowski screed assertion by assertion. I took it up again when I answered my critics with a follow-up article and another that appeared shortly after the second. The burden of rejoinder is never met by saying, “Puh-leeze!!!” Valley Girl lingo is not the stuff of high debate. Think about this in relation to the title which includes “unguided.” Who should be guiding internet writers? Think of how condescending that word is along with its reek of totalitarianism. Should we be guided by people who don’t know what the ‘burden of rejoinder’ means? Why shouldn’t we be allowed to think for ourselves?

Ms. Erbe identifies my spelling error which then becomes her entire rationale for dismissing my positions [she can’t very well address any of the issues I raised]. She concludes, “I chose his work merely as an example of what passes for punditry, thanks to the Internet. No apparent editing, no correction, no questioning of his claims. Just write it, hit the “send” button, and you’re global.”

And that’s that. I forgot an apostrophe so I’m an idiot who must be shunned. There are many things I can say here but the first is that substance should be reflexively favored over style. When arguing you should refute your opponent’s ideas, and once you have done so you are then free to make whatever stylistic objections you wish. That there are few Nabokovs on the internet is a given, but the same can be said about the mainstream media.

Of course, I concede that I do make spelling errors on a regular basis. Those times in which I have had exposure to a top-notch blue pencil[i] were most rewarding. That is the reason that “Editor” is a job title so well known to the general public. They are useful, but, in their absence, a writer making grammatical errors is quite common. I have interviewed persons so intellectually powerful that I am not fit to touch their keyboards,[ii] but their correspondence was often filled with the same type of errors that I commit. The reason for this is that our minds process information at a rate far faster than that of our fingers. Speed of processing errors mean very little on their own.

Yet, what is so priceless about this is that Ms. Erbe makes a clerical error of her own. Here our guide—our mighty mainstream media Sherpa—provides a link for “Bernard Chapin” which turns out to be a link for the article by Ms. Dombrowski. Now ordinarily, due to my own highly evident fallibility, I would never make mention of this, but Ms. Erbe’s self-righteous argument—what there is of it—entirely hinges on amateurs like your narrator being clueless rubes in comparison to the overpaid mandarins of the press.

As to her remark about the no questioning of claims, I had them questioned quite vigorously after the publication of the first piece which is why I responded with two more pieces of my own. I’ll send this article to Ms. Erbe and we’ll see if she does the same thing. Does anyone have any predictions?

Bernard Chapin is a writer living in Chicago. He is the author of Escape from Gangsta Island, and is currently at work on a book concerning women. He can be contacted at veritaseducation@gmail.com.