The Rachel Dolezal story has provided me some innocent merriment for the last few days. For those pillar saints who haven’t yet heard, Rachel has been making a living for some years by impersonating a black woman. Recently her parents went public, swearing up and down that she’s ‘Caucasian’ — an Azerbaijani, perhaps? — with the usual American fictive admixture of an odd Cherokee somewhere in the more tenuous boughs of the family tree.

One does wonder why the parents decided to out her now. We’ll never know, probably. Families!

A great deal of metaphysical energy has been spent on the ontological conundra hereby posed. It seems that race needs to be simultaneously a bogus category (so racism has no basis) and a real one (so we can recognize the indisputable fact that there are racist people, racist practices, racist institutions, and that these harm some people more than others — people whom it’s mostly not very difficult to identify).

Speaking of identification, there’s also the highly charged question of ‘identity’ — what it consists of, what it’s good for, who’s allowed to claim it, and who’s entitled to say who’s allowed to claim it. The default position is that those who already have it are the ones allowed to rule on who can claim it. A bit like a country club. Though this standard has not gone undisputed.

Perhaps some, at least, of the animus against Rachel arises from the fact that her imposture has given her a not-bad career, a career which was, in effect, stolen from some real black person who would otherwise have had it. The Lump Of Opportunity Theory. She’s been a cuckoo’s egg in the nest, you might say. She forged a diversity card!

Perhaps one might suggest that there are some implications here about the value of ‘diversity’ as a response to racism.

Perhaps there are further implications. Transgender is a thing now, right? It’s universally acknowledged that there are people who are really women born into men’s bodies, and vice-versa. Soooo… why shouldn’t transracial be a thing, too? Maybe Rachel really is a black person, who had the misfortune to be born with ‘Caucasian’ ancestors and pale skin. I gather there’s been some disagreement among feminists about whether trans women are ‘really’ women, and no doubt similar perplexities will arise in connection with trans black people. Will the foundations of essentialism begin to crumble at every corner of the citadel? Probably not; but a guy can dream.

[Update: I thought this was an original idea, when I had it an hour ago, but I now discover that as usual, Twitter is way ahead of me, and the tweets are flying fast and furious from both sides, with the usual fervent dogmatism. Transrace is a thing! No, transrace is NOT a thing, you racist boob!

Just as a matter of logic, it seems to me that anybody who accepts transgender and rejects transrace has to carry the burden of proof. It shouldn’t be too difficult; when an analogy is bad, it’s usually easy to see why it’s bad.]

At the very least, one certainly senses a great opportunity here for medical entrepreneurs. And it’s very exciting to have been present at the birth of a whole new identity.

Northwestern University, situated in a bosky North Shore suburb of Chicago, has, or used to have, anyway, a particularly pampered, spoiled customer base — sometimes referred to as the ‘student body’ — mostly drawn from other similar suburbs. I would have said it was the Nordstrom’s of higher education; but this may be a poorly calibrated comparison. I invite better-informed suggestions.

Laura Kipnis, a very engaging writer, has the mixed good and bad fortune of being a tenured professor there. She has recently found herself in hot water because she has written a couple of sprightly and entertaining articles in the Chronicle Of Higher Education — now, unfortunately, paywalled — about the demented excesses of thought- and speech-policing on American college campuses these days. Summing it up, she has found herself the subject of Title IX sex-discrimination complaints because she wrote an essay in the aforementioned Chronicle; and she subsequently wrote an account, alternately horrifying and hilarious, about the hugger-mugger Star Chamber proceedings to which she was subsequently subjected by her employers.

This shitstorm of campus imbecility around trigger warnings, harassment, discrimination, comfort, safety and what not, like all social phenomena, is overdetermined. Partly the Unis have brought it on themselves with their ambition to be totalizing environments, where every aspect of the customer’s experience is carefully controlled, and nothing unpleasant is permitted to intrude. Disney World is the obvious prototype.

Then too there’s just good old-fashioned entrepreneurship, in this case grievance entrepreneurship. The kids who are making all this noise are, I suspect, a not very numerous part of the customer base, but they seek opportunities for self-aggrandizement and an influence on events. Of course in the contemporary US there is no better lever for such self-promotion than a grievance. The ‘Nineleven Families’ might be cited as the locus classicus here, though at the same time it must be admitted that they suffered an actual harm, unlike these twaddling embryo Inquisitors at Northwestern.

The noisy minority, however, does have a way of bringing a larger penumbra of camp-followers with it. At the last college graduation I attended, about half the credentialees had taped the numerals ‘IX’ on top of their mortarboards. I gather this was meant to communicate that rape was a Bad Thing.

The cost-free advantages of a gesture like this are fairly obvious. It feels ever so mildly, though safely, always safely, transgressive, and yet it’s in aid of an eminently uncontroversial proposition. Win/win!

I like to think the kids are alright, as I may have said before, so I don’t want to make sweeping generalizations about how coddled they are or how aggressive and entitled they are, as some other old-fart observers of this collective mania have done. I think the institutions are mostly to blame.

At any rate, that’s my story, and I’m stickin’ with it. As the man said.

I recently had an interesting conversation with a young friend of mine — ‘young’, in this case, meaning less than half my age. My friend and I started off by agreeing that the recent referendum in Ireland, endorsing same-sex marriage by a rather amazing 60% majority, was excellent and gratifying news. But then my young friend gobsmacked me by saying that he wished this result had been achieved by some other means than a popular vote. Unless I misunderstood him, which is possible, he seemed to believe that a court decision, based ostensibly on some text like the US constitution, would have been preferable, as offering a more secure foundation for the right so obtained than the fickle whimsies of… 60% of the people. In Ireland!

I don’t think my friend is a particularly political guy — at least, the topic has never come up before — but I would be amazed if he were a right-winger. In fact, I would bet he isn’t.

I think what he may have been exhibiting is something very American, namely a dislike and distrust of the rabble, cherished even by many of the rabble themselves (a category to which I certainly belong; perhaps my friend has a trust fund I don’t know about, but I suspect he’s rabble too).

This is a pretty extraordinary phenomenon, when you think about it. Of course it’s not surprising that the ‘founding fathers’ hated and distrusted the people; they were a thoroughly elite body. But it’s pretty remarkable that this mentality has been able to reproduce itself so well for so long, among people who are anything but elite, and have had plenty of opportunities to figure out what the elites are really up to. My friend, for example, has certainly lived long enough to see the Supreme Court in action for a while now, and might have drawn some conclusions about what that sorry row of scarecrows is all about. But unless I misunderstood him, he would be happier with his rights in their custody than in the custody of his fellow-citizens.

Is this just the tyranny of received opinion? Or does it reflect a certain factitious sense of elite status among relatively educated liberal folks?

Or am I just over-interpreting? A very insightful former girlfriend of mine once said that I was the sort of guy who would show up for a friendly backyard game of touch football, all kitted out in cleats, shoulder pads, and a regulation helmet.

The unspeakable Jeffrey Goldberg, cruelly but accurately caricatured above, was recently granted an audience with the God-Emperor Obie, and made such hay of it as he could in a lengthy but rather predictable piece in the Atlantic magazine. Obsequious, of course, as befits a kicker of heels in the corridors of power, but also tendentious — the piece is mostly devoted to keeping us all very worried about Iran, a thankless and probably fruitless undertaking. Nobody much, or nobody without a vested interest, is buying that bill of goods any more, so one has to admire Jeffrey’s determination to keep the vaudeville going even as the audience is bolting for the exits.

Now Obie, of course, has presided, willingly or not, over two rather sharp kicks in the teeth to the Israel lobby. First there was the refusal to attack Syria back in 2013, though the lobby had dialed the noise machine up to 11 on this topic; and more recently, the tentative nuke deal with Iran, against much the same kind of alarums and excursions upstage.

Since I don’t like Obie, personally, I would prefer to believe that he was dragged kicking and screaming to these decisions; that the consensus of the foreign policy elites has begun to shift against Israel — not a minute too soon — and that Obie, good organization man that he is, had to go along. But who knows? They don’t invite me to these meetings. Maybe he’s more of a leader than he appears to be. If so, good on him, up to a point.

Of course, he felt obliged to give voice to the usual nonsensical incoherencies:

There’s a direct line between supporting the right of the Jewish people to have a homeland and to feel safe and free of discrimination and persecution, and the right of African Americans to vote and have equal protection under the law….

It is true to Israel’s traditions and its values—its founding principles—that it has to care about those Palestinian kids….

The bedrock security relationships between our two countries—these are sacrosanct….

The core strategic relationship that exists between the United States and Israel… will continue until the end of time….

A Jewish-majority democracy. And I care deeply about preserving that Jewish democracy….

Kibbutzim, and Moshe Dayan, and Golda Meir….

I think a good baseline is: Do you think that Israel has a right to exist as a homeland for the Jewish people, and are you aware of the particular circumstances of Jewish history that might prompt that need and desire? And if your answer is no, if your notion is somehow that that history doesn’t matter, then that’s a problem, in my mind.

Sacrosanct? Until the end of time? Jewish democracy? This is all word salad, of course, and the idea that the Zionist cause and the American civil rights movement have anything in common is simply an obscenity. Not to mention that caring about Palestinian kids is a founding principle of Israel. Well, in a sense it is, no doubt. Getting rid of them is certainly a founding principle of Israel.

Much has been made, in the pro-Israel blogotweetosphere, about that last bit — the connection between anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism. The God-Emperor has been cited as endorsing an equivalence between the two, and this has been much hailed here and there among the Zionist arriere-garde. In fact Obie’s language, on close inspection, offers a bit less comfort to the Thought Police than they would like to have.

I daresay Obie will leave us all guessing. Does he really believe this nonsense, insofar as anyone can be said to believe anything that makes no sense? Or is he just saying it, to protect his flank, and not embarrass Bloody Hillary too much in her own progress to the Iron Throne?

Wouldn’t it be nice if he actually wrote a truthful memoir, once he’s out of office? Not that I expect it. He’s too well-trained, I think. But I continue to believe that he’s not actually a fool, and hey, a guy can dream.

The gent above is Sigmar Gabriel, vice-Chancellor of Germany and — wait for it — head of the Socialist party. The scowl is because somebody mentioned Greece.

Parse the title as you will — analogous to ‘string cheese’ or ‘got milk?’

Our neighbors in the Great White North lately seem determined to beat us USniks at our own crazy game:

The Harper government is signaling its intention to use hate crime laws against Canadian advocacy groups that encourage boycotts of Israel.

Such a move could target a range of civil society organizations, from the United Church of Canada and the Canadian Quakers to campus protest groups and labour unions.

If they really mean it this would imply that advocating BDS constitutes ‘hate speech’.

Now there are two ways we could go with this. One would be to comment on the absurdity of considering BDS advocacy as ‘hate speech’, a preposterous notion on its face, even if you think that the notion of ‘hate speech’ is a useful construct.

But the other, more sweeping and naturally therefore more appealing to me, is to suggest that this ‘abuse’ of hate-speech legislation was certain to happen, as certain as God made little green apples, and for this reason among others, the idea of outlawing hate speech — indeed, the concept of hate crimes in general — is a disastrously bad one.

Going further still, there is, of course, an even more principled basis for resisting the notion of hate crimes: namely, that they are essentially thought crimes. If you beat somebody up because he’s gay, this is worse than beating him up because he’s a Red Sox fan. Why? Nobody deserves to get beaten up because of his tastes. Even Red Sox fans.

The underlying intent, I suppose, is to discourage people from beating up gay guys, which is certainly a desirable outcome. But assault and battery is already a crime, and has been for a long time. To the extent that law can assist in protecting gay guys from beatings, the law is already there, and it has the additional effect, also desirable, of protecting everybody else from beatings too — again, to the extent that a law can. (Enforcement and prosecution are another matter, of course, since they occur or don’t at the whim of the cops and the DA. But that remains the case with or without specific legislation about hate crimes.)

The larger purpose, perhaps, is to persuade haters to hate a little less. Also a desirable outcome. But might one suggest that creating new categories of crime, hinging on subjective feelings and attitudes, is an ill-advised way to go about that admirable project?

I am afraid we are dealing here with a déformation professionnelle of liberalism: namely that the proper response to any problem is to outlaw something not previously outlawed, and dial up the penalties for it. So the only way a liberal has to signal his solidarity with gay guys is to offer them an expansion of the criminal code, and a shiny new pair of pincers in the prosecutor’s arbitrary toolkit.

This reflects, at the very least, an impoverished repertoire of self-expression. It’s like being the driver of a car: all you can do to make your feelings known is to honk the horn.

“Campus Debates on Israel Drive a Wedge Between Jews and Minorities“, the New York Times notes with alarm.

Starting with the headline, this is a very odd piece. Not least because, last I heard, Jews were a minority, in every sense of the term I understand. Either Jewish moms have recently been very busy in the maternity wards of the great Republic, or some rather special, non-obvious sense of ‘minority’ is intended here.

But why waste time on these ponderous drolleries? Of course we all know what this means. ‘Minority’ is decent Times-speak for what Jackie Mason once referred to as the ‘schvartzers’.

Even with this scilicet understood, the headline is a lie. There’s a wedge, certainly, but it’s not between Jews and ‘minorities’. It’s between defenders of Israel and ‘minorities’. As is well known — though the Times piece barely adverts to the fact — an increasing number of Jews, particularly young Jews, have little or no use for Israel.

It’s a fine old Times hatchet job, in the grand tradition, softly phrased, magisterial and objective in tone, a virtuoso exercise in suggestio falsi and suppressio veri. Well worth reading on that basis alone, as an object lesson in how the Times recycles ideology and manufactures news out of it.

But what particularly tickled me about it was its account of the way this polemic was being conducted on campus — namely, in the plushy Care Bear terms discussed here just a few days ago. Discomfort. Check your privilege. Empowered. Aggressive. Hostility. Sensitivity. Feeling threatened. Divisive. Identity (a word which would make me reach for my revolver, if I owned a revolver. Fortunately, I do not).

Some of the kiddywinks ‘felt uncomfortable expressing their support for Israel.’ Well, no bloody wonder. I’d feel uncomfortable too, in their place. It’s a bit like expressing support for the Confederate States of America. I mean, family connections and all, one can understand, but still… This is a kind of discomfort we need more of.

(Of course, I think we need more discomfort on campus generally, and certainly a lot less fear of discomfort, but that’s a different topic.)

Before declaring her candidacy, Ms. Horwitz felt compelled to remove pro-Israel references from her Facebook page before she ran for the student senate.

So Ms Horwitz is a Zionist, but thank God she’s also an opportunist. She will do well in life, one way or the other. I don’t see that anyone’s heart need break over this sad story, or any like it.

Above, a notorious child molester. That dirty old bird would be on a police registry these days.

Ovid tells his story, and a number of other equally appalling ones, in the Metamorphoses, a text continually read and immensely loved since Ovid’s own day. Ovid is omnipresent in Dante, and Shakespeare, and… everywhere, really; or at least was, until the the fashion came in for illiterate writers.

Mean old Ovid, however, is too strong for the stomachs of certain sensitive souls at Columbia University:

During the week spent on Ovid’s “Metamorphoses,” the class was instructed to read the myths of Persephone and Daphne, both of which include vivid depictions of rape and sexual assault. As a survivor of sexual assault, [a] student described being triggered while reading such detailed accounts of rape … [T]he student said her professor focused on the beauty of the language and the splendor of the imagery when lecturing on the text… [T]he student completely disengaged from the class discussion as a means of self-preservation. She did not feel safe in the class.

I feel very grateful to have bailed out of Academe when I did. My idea of a classroom is one in which nobody ever feels safe — least of all, the teacher.

The piece linked above deploys just about every buzzword associated with the current cult of hysterical hypersensitivity: safe, self-preservation, triggered, survivor, share, concerns, offensive, marginalize, identity, intervention, transgression (this one not at all in a good sense, but an unambiguously bad one); insensitive, traumatize, silence, facilitate, support, training, best practice, framing, engage, effective, feedback, addressing (‘issues’, not letters). The only one missing is ‘inappropriate’.

In general, the impression one receives is that Columbia undergraduates are hagridden, traumatized, oppressed, disadvantaged, suffering souls, shying from a trigger a minute like a skittish pony in rattlesnake country; easily intimidated and silenced, and so distressed by the coarseness of their teachers that they can barely force themselves through the classroom door.

I must say they do not make this impression in the places, numerous in my neighborhood, where they customarily resort. There, they comport themselves with an assurance bordering on insolence, and a very conspicuous air of self-satisfaction and entitlement.

Perhaps initiatives like the one quoted above are best regarded as a kind of consumer advocacy. The kids are shopping in the Columbia mall, and somebody is going to foot a pretty hefty bill for it. There is therefore every reason why they shouldn’t be inconvenienced or aggrieved by the clerks behind the counter. The customer is always right. If they find Ovid yucky and out of date, they shouldn’t have to read him.

Of course it’s overdetermined. There’s also the elite-as-victim angle. Columbia and all the Ivies are very much in the business of credentialling the future management cadre of the empire; these are people many or most of whom will be dishing out a lot more shit in their future managerial or professional lives than they will ever have to eat. No doubt there’s an element of self-absolution for them in seeing themselves as suffering, ill-used victims.

Great White Hope Bill de Blasio, like all his predecessors in recent years, has become a mere tool of the Police Department:

Mayor Bill de Blasio, facing an uproar over arrests at a Manhattan rally to protest strong-armed policing, offered a spirited defense of law enforcement on Thursday, brushing off concerns that demonstrators had been mistreated even as he insisted on his own commitment to reform.

The whole piece is well worth reading, if you have a strong stomach.

It’s a classic case of liberal evolution: the insurgent outsider, after a year or two in office, cements his relationship with the Old Oligarchs, embraces the nightstick, and scolds his former comrades.

Of course they’re human, these people — in a sense; and so they have to justify themselves to themselves. King Billy exhibits the classic approach:

“I’ve participated in plenty of protests, on plenty of issues,” the mayor said…. But, he added: “When the police give you instruction, you follow the instruction. It’s not debatable.”

…. The result was a strained, and at times testy display by a mayor trying to balance liberal sympathies with the burdens of overseeing a police force whose tactics he once criticized….

Mr. de Blasio grew visibly frustrated at the notion that the police in Union Square had been too aggressive with protesters, telling reporters, “If you guys want to sensationalize, if you think that’s your contribution to society, feel free.”

Citing the former activist resume in support of the cops — that’s a Democrat for ya.

In connection with recent events in Baltimore, a number of my friends, both real 3-D friends and the facebunk variety, have observed, in more or less this form of words, “Of course I don’t condone riots, but…”

Since most of my friends are sensible and fair-minded people, what follows the ‘but’ is usually some fairly intelligent observation on the order of ‘Whaddya expect, you treat people like this? Of course they’re gonna riot.’

I began to wonder why we feel obliged to issue this pre-emptive caveat about not ‘condoning’ something. What danger are we guarding against by saying that? The observation is nonsensical on its face, of course; what we ‘condone’ or don’t condone has absolutely no effect in the world. It’s like saying ‘I don’t condone hurricanes.’ To say that you don’t ‘condone’ something that’s inevitable and under no one’s control is just incoherent.

Does the language of ‘condoning’ suggest some sort of unitary agency, some single collective will we can blame for bad decisions? (Zionists, by the way, love this line of argument: The Palestinians collectively fucked up back in 1933, or whenever, so therefore….) Or are we preserving our liberal bona fides by suggesting, implicitly, that some kind of Gandhi schtick or (worse yet) electoral activity would be better?

Let the record show that for what it’s worth, I do condone riots. They’re not my first choice, of course. What I would prefer is a well-armed and well-organized insurrection, led by relentless, bloody-minded Bolsheviks. But until that comes along, riots are a great deal better than acquiescence.