{"id":33751,"date":"2015-11-12T19:30:57","date_gmt":"2015-11-13T00:30:57","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thedailygouge.com\/?p=33751"},"modified":"2015-11-12T19:31:04","modified_gmt":"2015-11-13T00:31:04","slug":"the-daily-gouge-archive-wednesday-november-11th-veterans-day-2015","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.thedailygouge.com\/?p=33751","title":{"rendered":"The Daily Gouge Archive, Wednesday, November 11th, Veteran’s Day 2015"},"content":{"rendered":"

It’s Wednesday, November 11th, Veteran’s Day 2015…but before we begin, three photos which epitomize the misinformation, hypocrisy and deceipt…<\/strong><\/p>\n

\"obama_release\"<\/a><\/p>\n

\"Slings<\/a><\/p>\n

\"ObamaHomelessVeteran-1024x1024\"<\/a><\/p>\n

…which characterize the Obama Administration as surely as Watergate did Nixon.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Now, here’s The Gouge!<\/strong><\/p>\n

First up, since we’re on the subject of events epitomizing the content and character of an entire movement, two offerings from\u00a0NRO<\/em>\u00a0which prove the decomposition of the Progressive fish has finally reached the tail. \u00a0First, Rich Lowry catalogues…<\/strong><\/p>\n

The Mizzou Meltdown<\/a><\/span><\/h1>\n

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\"Hands<\/a><\/p>\n

“…To read the association\u2019s indictment, you\u2019d think that the University of Missouri exists in a small enclave of Klan-dominated, Reconstruction-era Mississippi<\/em><\/span>: \u201cThe academic careers of our students are suffering.<\/span> The mental health of our campus is under constant attack. Our students are being ignored.<\/span> We have asked the University to create spaces of healing and it failed to do so.\u201d<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

This is the insatiable voice of children who object at the insufficiency of their coddling<\/em><\/span>.<\/strong><\/span> In another outrage, no one powders the bottoms of Mizzou students after they go potty…”<\/p>\n

Next, David French details…<\/strong><\/p>\n

Missouri\u2019s Lesson: the Campus Wars Are about Power, Not Justice<\/a><\/span><\/h1>\n

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“No, I’m serious; someone just dropped a house on my sister!”<\/strong><\/em><\/span><\/p>\n

“Earlier this morning, Tim Wolfe, the president of the University of Missouri system, abruptly resigned. Why?<\/strong><\/span> The popular narrative is that his \u201cinadequate\u201d response to a series of racist incidents on campus triggered a massive student backlash, including an unprecedented \u201cstrike\u201d by the university\u2019s football team, and he finally caved to the pressure.<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

Yet this explanation collapses under the slightest scrutiny. The idea that Wolfe presided over a racially insensitive educational empire is a sad joke. A timeline of racial outrages in Columbia is sparse indeed<\/em><\/span>, showing two<\/em><\/span> allegations of racial name-calling<\/em><\/span> (on a campus with 35,000<\/span> students<\/em>) and one disturbing incident in which a swastika was drawn on a dorm wall with human waste<\/em><\/span>.\u00a0(With no proof whatsoever as to the race of either the finger or sphincter<\/em><\/span> responsible!)<\/span><\/span><\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

No rational, sentient human being believes system presidents can be responsible for what lunatics do with their own feces, or that they can prevent any given student from shouting racial slurs.<\/strong><\/span> Not even the worst communist dictatorships could control the speech of all their subjects. Wolfe couldn\u2019t stop drunk undergraduates from hurling insensitive insults even if he established his own gulag and deployed commissars across campus.<\/p>\n

The campus culture wars aren\u2019t about \u201cvictims\u201d or \u201cracial injustice\u201d or \u201csafe spaces.\u201d People who shriek in the quad, launch hunger strikes in a blaze of publicity, or stand outside free-speech events and chant for censorship aren\u2019t anyone\u2019s victims. They\u2019re not weak.<\/span> They don\u2019t need \u201cprotection.\u201d They\u2019re revolutionaries<\/em><\/span>, and the revolution they seek is nothing less than the overthrow of our constitutional republic<\/span><\/em>, beginning with our universities<\/em><\/span><\/span><\/strong><\/span>…”<\/p>\n

As for the football players who expressed solidarity with their Black brothers, Rich Lowry said it best:<\/strong><\/p>\n

…If anyone running the university had any guts, the school would have told the team, \u201cCome back and talk to us when you can beat sad-sack Vanderbilt, or at least score more than three points against them<\/span><\/em>.\u201d<\/span> Given the team\u2019s performance, the proper rejoinder to its threatened boycott should have been, \u201cHow would anyone notice<\/em><\/span>?\u201d<\/span><\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

In a related item of politically-correct coddling run utterly amok, the concurrent flap in New Haven was\u00a0<\/strong>prompted by this<\/em><\/span>\u00a0rather even-keeled email:<\/b><\/p>\n

Dear Sillimanders:<\/span><\/p>\n

Nicholas and I have heard from a number of students who were frustrated by the mass email sent to the student body about appropriate Halloween\u00adwear. I\u2019ve always found Halloween an interesting embodiment of more general adult worries about young people. As some of you may be aware, I teach a class on \u201cThe Concept of the Problem Child,\u201d and I was speaking with some of my students yesterday about the ways in which Halloween \u2013 traditionally a day of subversion for children and young people \u2013 is also an occasion for adults to exert their control.<\/span><\/p>\n

When I was young, adults were freaked out by the specter of Halloween candy poisoned by lunatics, or spiked with razor blades (despite the absence of a single recorded case of such an event). Now, we\u2019ve grown to fear the sugary candy itself. And this year, we seem afraid that college students are unable to decide how to dress themselves on Halloween. I don\u2019t wish to trivialize genuine concerns about cultural and personal representation, and other challenges to our lived experience in a plural community. I know that many decent people have proposed guidelines on Halloween costumes from a spirit of avoiding hurt and offense. I laud those goals, in theory, as most of us do. But in practice, I wonder if we should reflect more transparently, as a community, on the consequences of an institutional (which is to say: bureaucratic and administrative) exercise of implied control over college students.<\/span><\/p>\n

It seems to me that we can have this discussion of costumes on many levels: we can talk about complex issues of identify, free speech, cultural appropriation, and virtue \u201csignalling.\u201d But I wanted to share my thoughts with you from a totally different angle, as an educator concerned with the developmental stages of childhood and young adulthood.<\/span><\/p>\n

As a former preschool teacher, for example, it is hard for me to give credence to a claim that there is something objectionably \u201cappropriative\u201d about a blonde\u00adhaired child\u2019s wanting to be Mulan for a day. Pretend play is the foundation of most cognitive tasks, and it seems to me that we want to be in the business of encouraging the exercise of imagination, not constraining it. I suppose we could agree that there is a difference between fantasizing about an individual character vs. appropriating a culture, wholesale, the latter of which could be seen as (tacky)(offensive)(jejeune)(hurtful), take your pick. But, then, I wonder what is the statute of limitations on dreaming of dressing as Tiana the Frog Princess if you aren\u2019t a black girl from New Orleans? Is it okay if you are eight, but not 18? I don\u2019t know the answer to these questions\u037e they seem unanswerable. Or at the least, they put us on slippery terrain that I, for one, prefer not to cross.<\/span><\/p>\n

Which is my point. I don\u2019t, actually, trust myself to foist my Halloweenish standards and motives on others. I can\u2019t defend them anymore than you could defend yours. Why do we dress up on Halloween, anyway? Should we start explaining that too? I\u2019ve always been a good mimic and I enjoy accents. I love to travel, too, and have been to every continent but Antarctica. When I lived in Bangladesh, I bought a sari because it was beautiful, even though I looked stupid in it and never wore it once. Am I fetishizing and appropriating others\u2019 cultural experiences? Probably. But I really, really like them too. Even if we could agree on how to avoid offense \u2013 and I\u2019ll note that no one around campus seems overly concerned about the offense taken by religiously conservative folks to skin\u00adrevealing costumes \u2013 I wonder, and I am not trying to be provocative: Is there no room anymore for a child or young person to be a little bit obnoxious\u2026 a little bit inappropriate or provocative or, yes, offensive? American universities were once a safe space not only for maturation but also for a certain regressive, or even transgressive, experience\u037eincreasingly, it seems, they have become places of censure and prohibition. And the censure and prohibition come from above, not from yourselves! Are we all okay with this transfer of power? Have we lost faith in young people’s capacity \u2013 in your capacity \u00ad to exercise self\u00adcensure, through social norming, and also in your capacity to ignore or reject things that trouble you? We tend to view this shift from individual to institutional agency as a tradeoff between libertarian vs. liberal values (\u201cliberal\u201d in the American, not European sense of the word).<\/span><\/p>\n

Nicholas says, if you don\u2019t like a costume someone is wearing, look away, or tell them you are offended. Talk to each other. Free speech and the ability to tolerate offence are the hallmarks of a free and open society.<\/span><\/p>\n

But \u2013 again, speaking as a child development specialist \u2013 I think there might be something missing in our discourse about the exercise of free speech (including how we dress ourselves) on campus, and it is this: What does this debate about Halloween costumes say about our view of young adults, of their strength and judgment?<\/span><\/p>\n

In other words: Whose business is it to control the forms of costumes of young people<\/em><\/span>? It’s not mine, I know that.<\/span><\/span><\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

Happy Halloween.<\/span><\/p>\n

Imagine his surprise when the author’s husband found himself defending not only his wife’s innocuous epistle, but the 1st Amendment itself:<\/strong><\/p>\n