Glenn Cummings

..............................................................

The following email correspondence regarding the "hate crime" illustrates the horrendous scorn for vigorous debate, cornerstone of democracy, by USM students, as well as the editors of The Press Herald, which refused to respond...

  

From: Krysteana Scribner

Sent: Saturday, January 14, 2017 3:14 PM

To: George Slone

Subject: Re: A free speech poem and... The In-Lock-Step Press

Hello,

We will no longer be responding to your commentary. Do not reach out to us again, we only publish student work.

Thanks,

Krysteana

On Sat, Jan 14, 2017 at 9:39 AM, George Slone <todslone@hotmail.com> wrote:

To Humza,
Several points are made in that poem, which does not constitute a hate crime… not yet.  I suspect you might have missed all of them.  So, I delineate them here, and again it is sad that these things will not be debated at your public university because of its ban on outside criticism.  The Free Press?  What an odd misnomer for University of Southern Maine’s student newspaper!  If it were honest, it would be called The In-Lockstep Press.      

1.  Free speech is fundamental to democracy.

2.  In its current form, Islam and free speech are NOT compatible.  Why not?  Because, as you surely must know, Islam prohibits free speech that criticizes Islam.  

3.  In order for democracy and free speech to survive, citizens must build spine and not  be easily offended by opinions they do not like.  

4.  In essence, Deus Vult is an expression of free speech and should be treated that way.  In essence, it should not be viewed as a vandalism crime because of that.  Yet it will likely be treated as a crime.

5.  Hate speech is NOT illegal in America, though it is in Europe.  Why not?  Well, HATE for you might be REASON AND FACT for me, and vice versa.  Sadly, many American universities attempt to treat it as a crime and have been taken to court by, for example, the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, AND have lost!  

6.  Many universities, like yours, for example, seem to be heading in the direction of totalitarian entities and thus increasingly stand in contradiction to democracy and its prime cornerstone, free speech.  Thus, in essence, holding a placard might actually be treated as a hate crime at such institutions, even though legally it is not.  

G. Tod

From: USM Student Body President <muhammad.khan@maine.edu>

Sent: Friday, January 13, 2017 4:21 PM

To: George Slone

Subject: Re: An Islamophobiamania Cartoon and an Open Poem to the University of Southern Maine

Thank you for the poem. 

On Thu, Jan 12, 2017 at 2:18 PM, George Slone <todslone@hotmail.com> wrote:

Yes, you might wish to pass this poem around at your next student senate meeting:

Devious Islamophobiamaniacs

And here I thought graffiti was a mere misdemeanor!  

Well, apparently it is, but misdemeanors are crimes.

Graffiti is vandalism, which constitutes criminal mischief.

So, the college student who wrote DEUS VULT on a desk 

at the University of Southern Maine, a public institution,

might be charged of committing not only a crime, 

but because the term was the rallying cry 

used by medieval Christian crusaders against Muslim invaders,

student Muslims might be offended and/or intimidated,

so the graffiti guy might be arrested and cuffed, 

and otherwise shamed and branded as a criminal hate writer.

Now, if that student had written DEUS VULT on a placard

and brandished the placard during a student senate meeting,

whose very senate president was an easily offended Muslim,

likely causing even greater offense and greater intimidation;

in theory, he could not be charged as a criminal hate writer

because brandishing a placard is not a crime in America, not yet…

G. Tod

From: USM Student Body President <muhammad.khan@maine.edu>

Sent: Wednesday, January 4, 2017 10:49 PM

To: George Slone

Subject: Re: An Islamophobiamania Cartoon and an Open Poem to the University of Southern Maine

Dear George, 

I sincerely apologize for not responding. We are certainly on vacation from the University and I have not been able to make it to the office lately mainly focusing on my job. :) Trying to work as many hours as possible. I will respond shortly. I apologize once again for not responding. 

On Sun, Dec 18, 2016 at 11:35 AM, George Slone <todslone@hotmail.com> wrote:

To Humza,

So, after giving me a mini-lecture on dialogue (i.e., debate), you decide to kill the dialogue?  Perhaps the reality is that you really prefer monologue.  Hopefully, you are not as easily offended as I suspect. 
Sincerely,

G. Tod

From: George Slone

Sent: Monday, February 20, 2017 8:49 AM

To: USM Student Body President

Subject: ISLAM HATES THE FIRST AMENDMENT!!!

Salut Humza,

So, that was quite a dialogue you and I had, after your mini-lecture on dialogue.  Are you, by chance, a fake?  In any event, to keep you updated, my voice was not permitted into the debate on Islam at USM.  So, you can be happy about that!  The Portland Press Herald (at least it’s not called Portland Free Press) would not permit my commentary in its pro-Islam pages.  And so Islam continues its ALLAHU VULT.  But I and others shall continue fighting against its forward push and its hatred for FREEDOM OF EXPRESSION.  

Au plaisir,

G. Tod

From: George Slone

Sent: Monday, February 6, 2017 7:44 AM

To: ngallagher@pressherald.com

Subject: USM Hate Crime Incident

To Noel K. Gallagher, Portland Press Herald:

No new news on the USM hate-crime incident?  If no news occurs, then one has to suspect it might have been overinflated.  I tried to penetrate into the student newspaper bec. of the incident's educational potential regarding the First Amendment.  Sadly, the paper would not permit my comments.  The cartoon I sketched, which I assume you ignored because of lack of courage, highlighted the educational aspect and the need for vigorous debate, as opposed to cries of shut-the-conversation-down islamophobia, especially at a public university.  Alas...

G. Tod Slone, Ed.

The American Dissident

[No response from Gallagher.]

George Yancy

...................................................................................

Read below the essay I wrote, "Blancophobia: A Case Study," with regards Yancy.   Unsurprisingly, neither he nor the student editors at Emory University deigned to respond. 
Ideologues detest vigorous debate, cornerstone of a thriving democracy... 

From: George Slone

Sent: Monday, December 5, 2016 12:11 PM

To: george.d.yancy@emory.edu

Cc: zachary.j.hudak@emory.edu; julia.munslow@emory.edu; critchls@newschool.edu

Subject: A rebuttal of your op-ed

To Prof. George Yancy, Philosophy Dept., Emory University:

The following rebuttal to your most recent New York Times op-ed is also, as you can see, being forwarded to the Emory University student newspaper editors, Zachary Hudak and Julia Munslow, as well as to The Stone (New York Times).  Of course, I expect no response from them... or you.  But miracles do happen, n'est-ce pas?  Might the student editors actually publish it?  Might Simon Critchley publish it?  Pipe dream?  You bet!  After all, only the privileged in America, black or white, have voice...

Blancophobia:  A Case Study

George Yancy is a black privileged Emory University philosophy professor.  Unsurprisingly, his latest New York Times op-ed, “I Am a Dangerous Professor.” constitutes an exercise in blancophobia.  The Times had been publishing many such anti-white op-eds.  In fact, that was all its journalist Charles Blow ever seemed to write… and on a weekly basis.  

The op-ed title immediately grabbed my attention because I’d never encountered a “dangerous” professor.  After all, the “dangerous” ones tended to be weeded out early on, leaving the obedient and unquestioning ones to fill the well-remunerated tenure sinecures.  Sure, now and then, a few professors likely succeeded in duping the tenure system.  But still, I’d never encountered such exceptions.  Might Professor Yancy be one of them?  Instinctively, I knew that would be highly unlikely.  The term “dangerous professor” was an oxymoron.  Did the professor fight against the intrinsic intellectual corruption likely festering at his university?  If so, how to explain his entrenchment in its philosophy department?  Instead, it was likely that he followed, mirrored, and spewed the same anti-white bigotry firmly in place at so many of the nation’s universities today.  Thus, at Emory Professor Yancy was probably not at all “dangerous,” but rather quite common. 

Always on the lookout for satirical cartoon ideas, I thought perhaps the op-ed might prove fruitful, then reading through it I realized I’d already done one on the professor and the blancophobic New York Times op-ed he’d written a year ago, “Dear White America.”  Apparently, I’d forgotten to send it to him.  I’d always made it a point to inform my targets, in a usually in vain effort to incite a little much needed debate in academe.  When dealing with academics, I also liked to inform the particular student newspaper editor, most of whom, however (that’s been my sad experience), would not respond and otherwise buck the system, despite hollow pronouncements of independence.  

Thus, I posted last-year’s forgotten cartoon (https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=239569862679528067#editor/target=post;postID=1609290798865680431) and sent notice of it with this rebuttal to both Professor Yancy and The Emory Wheel student newspaper editors Zak Hudak and Julia Munslow. 

Perhaps the idea for the right-wing Professor Watchlist that Professor Yancy decried in his latest op-ed was actually incited by the Hatewatch list kept by left-wing Southern Poverty Law Center to monitor the “American radical right.”  Had the professor also decried SPLC’s targeting?  Likely not, for that list aided and abetted his ideological victimization narrative.  In any case, a watchlist per se is certainly not unAmerican, nor is flagging someone to be “unAmerican” unAmerican, contrary to the professor’s statement.  Both are clear manifestations of America’s freedom of speech.  

Contrary to Professor Yancy’s assertion, the Professor Watchlist was probably not a threat to academic freedom at all.  According to one of its organizers, Matt Lamb, “We aim to post professors who have records of targeting students for their viewpoints, forcing students to adopt a certain perspective, and/or abuse or harm students in any way for standing up for their beliefs.”  In essence, the site might also be compared with RateMyProfessors.com.  

The real deep-seated threat to academic freedom was certainly not Professor Watchlist, but rather professor cowardice, as well as self-censorship… regarding the university administration and “dangerous” anti-PC thoughts.  Challenging political correctness did take courage in academe, especially in humanities departments like Professor Yancy’s.  To be part of the PC-mindset took no courage at all, though the professor seemed to believe he had lots of courage because he not only decried the Watchlist… but also he pushed the black victimization narrative in his classes.   

The basic question that needed to be posed was how intelligent people like Professor Yancy failed so egregiously at the gates of reason.  How did such people so easily fall to the spell of indoctrination?  Deep anger could perhaps block out reason.  Also, deep-seated psychological need to be part of a group, to belong, could probably do that also?  How to explain intelligent people who espoused double-standards, White Privilege racial stereotyping, two wrongs make a right Affirmative Action (now, what would MLK have said about judging people by their skin color?), and anything else but reason. 

Oddly, if not absolutely aberrantly, the professor began his op-ed with a quote from Orwell, who of course wrote extensively against PC-speech before it even really existed: “Newspeak was designed not to extend but to diminish the range of thought.”  And indeed that was precisely what Professor Yancy and his academic colleagues had been successfully doing on the nation’s campuses with their safe spaces, people of color-only spaces, trigger warnings, disinvitations, microaggressions, and of course speech codes.  Emory University still possesses the poor red-light rating accorded by the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (https://www.thefire.org/schools/emory-university/). 

Professor Yancy states that he was accused by the Professor Watchlist of advancing “leftist propaganda in the classroom.”  Yet was that a false accusation?  Then he transformed the Watchlist into a criticism of Trump, as if the latter had incited its creation, yet conservative campus watchdog groups (e.g., Campus Reform and The College Fix) existed long before Trump’s advent.  He noted, “The Watchlist appears to be consistent with a nostalgic desire ‘to make America great again’ and to expose and oppose those voices in academia that are anti-Republican or express anti-Republican values.”  But are freedom of speech and vigorous debate only Republican values?  If so, what might be Democrat values?  Suppression of freedom of speech and vigorous debate?  

Professor Yancy argues:  “For many black people, making America ‘great again’ is especially threatening, as it signals a return to a more explicit and unapologetic racial dystopia.  For us, dreaming of yesterday is not a privilege, not a desire, but a nightmare.”  And yet haven’t we seen under Obama, not Trump, a definite increase in that racial dystopia?  The separation of whites and blacks had increased on college campuses like Emory over the past decade, where anti-white racism had been accorded the seal of academic approval with the widespread campus “White Privilege” and only Black Lives Matter PC-mantras, “designed to mark, shame and silence,” to use the professor’s words.  The Double-standards mindset blocks the ability to reason with objectivity.  Moreover, clearly Trump’s mantra, contrary to the professor’s clear implication, never meant let’s go back to the Antebellum South!  

For Professor Yancy, spokesperson of black people, the Professor Watchlist would rather that “we run in shame after having been called out.”  And yet the professor sure didn’t give a damn that he and his PC-comrades have made whites run in shame after having been called out via the White Privilege denunciation.  And the professor waxed poetical, though always unreasonable, “Its devotees would rather I become numb, afraid and silent.  However, it is the anger that I feel that functions as a saving grace, a place of being.”  

And it was that anger that prevented him from perceiving that he was guilty of precisely what he decried, though with regards whites.  In reality, his entire op-ed constituted a confusion—a mea culpa written as a j’accuse.  He argued in full hyperbolic mode, “The list is not simply designed to get others to spy on us, to out us, but to install forms of psychological self-policing to eliminate thoughts, pedagogical approaches and theoretical orientations that it defines as subversive.”  Yet he failed to note that was precisely what the anti-white racist “white privilege” and only Black Lives Matter movements and, more generally, campus political correctness ended up doing. 

It was possible that racial harmony will never exist to the point where the only solution might be racially separate nations.  The left’s intentional social engineering, racial mixage, might never succeed.  Certainly, the ingrained hatred and victimization and paranoia of Professor Yancy and so many others trumpeting racism ad infinitum would seem to point to that failure.  The professor  summarizes it nicely:  “Honestly, being a black man, I had thought that I had been marked enough — as bestial, as criminal, as inferior. I have always known of the existence of that racialized scarlet letter. It marks me as I enter stores; the white security guard never fails to see it. It follows me around at predominantly white philosophy conferences; I am marked as “different” within that space not because I am different, but because the conference space is filled with whiteness. It follows me as white police officers pull me over for no other reason than because I’m black.”

What of course the professor could not envision was his own privilege.  And he could not see it because seeing it would break the victimization narrative that fed him, that gave him privilege.  One would think that Yancy in his self-professed racism hopelessness and racism despair that he might consider moving to an all black nation like Liberia, where he could attend all black elitist philosophy conferences filled with blackness and all black police officers would pull him over not because he was black and all black security guards would not see the racialized scarlet n-word burned into his forehead because there he wouldn’t have one.       

Professor Yancy then declared, self-congratulating as so many academics love to do, standing up on his hind legs like a hero in cap, gown, and chevrons:  “Yet I reject this marking. I refuse to be philosophically and pedagogically adjusted. To be ‘philosophically adjusted’ is to belie what I see as one major aim of philosophy — to speak to the multiple ways in which we suffer, to be a voice through which suffering might speak and be heard, and to offer a gift to my students that will leave them maladjusted and profoundly unhappy with the world as it is. Bringing them to that state is what I call doing ‘high stakes philosophy.’”

And yet clearly Professor Yancy did not reject that victimization marking because it was precisely what provided him with a life of remunerated elitism.  How interesting to suffer so deeply, while simultaneously living a life of Riley!  His “high stakes philosophy” was nothing but another term for political correctness.  Hopefully, while making his students feel profoundly unhappy, he would also warn them that they might not be fortunate to live his life of privilege because to be profoundly unhappy and truly unprivileged could be a deadly combination.  

Throughout his op-ed, the professor patted himself on the back:  “I refuse to entertain my students with mummified ideas and abstract forms of philosophical self-stimulation. What leaves their hands is always philosophically alive, vibrant and filled with urgency. I want them to engage in the process of freeing ideas, freeing their philosophical imaginations. I want them to lose sleep over the pain and suffering of so many lives that many of us deem disposable. I want them to become conceptually unhinged, to leave my classes discontented and maladjusted.”  

And yet those “mummified ideas” were precisely what political correctness and the professor had been espousing.  Political correctness incarnated double speak, as in the freeing of ideas by limiting ideas. Did Professor Yancy want his students to question the claims of Black Lives Matter and deny the rise of black privilege, including black multimillionaires, or simply swallow those claims and ignore the latter?   Would his students leave his classes “discontented and maladjusted” because if they dared question the claims and the black privilege of their professor, their grades would suffer?  

“So, in my classrooms,” declares the professor, “I refuse to remain silent in the face of racism, its subtle and systemic structure.”  And yet did he raise his voice against the growing not-so-subtle anti-white racism spreading across the nation’s campuses?  Did he teach his students that two wrongs somehow make a right?  “I refuse to remain silent in the face of patriarchal and sexist hegemony and the denigration of women’s bodies, or about the ways in which women have internalized male assumptions of how they should look and what they should feel and desire,” he states.  And yet did the professor raise his voice against Islam and Sharia Law and Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and Palestine with that regard?  

“I refuse to be silent about forms of militarism in which innocent civilians are murdered in the name of “democracy,” he proclaims.  And yet did he raise his voice when murder was committed in the name of Islamic theocracy?  “I refuse to remain silent when it comes to acknowledging the existential and psychic dread and chaos experienced by those who are targets of xenophobia and homophobia,” notes the professor.  But what about blancophobia?   And what about fraudulent claims of xenophobic and homophobic hate crimes?  

“I refuse to remain silent in a world where children become targets of sexual violence, and where unarmed black bodies are shot dead by the state and its proxies, where those with disabilities are mocked and still rendered ‘monstrous,’ and where the earth suffers because some of us refuse to hear its suffering, where my ideas are marked as ‘un-American,’ and apparently ‘dangerous,’” he argues.  And what about Islamic child marriages and Islamic genital mutilation?  And what about unarmed black bodies being shot dead right and left by black thugs in Chicago?  And what about the San Bernardino and Orlando massacres?  Were they committed by evil whites?  

Professor Yancy concludes, “Well, if it is dangerous to teach my students to love their neighbors, to think and rethink constructively and ethically about who their neighbors are, and how they have been taught to see themselves as disconnected and neoliberal subjects, then, yes, I am dangerous, and what I teach is dangerous.”  And yet how did teaching divisiveness and white privilege and black victimization help students learn to love their neighbors, including the white ones?  The professor was dangerous, but not in the way he assumed.  He was dangerous only if he succeeded in indoctrinating his students to stand like him at antipodes to reason and fact.   Would he teach his students when lecturing on racism and slavery that the very first legal slave owner in America was a black man, Anthony Johnson; that thousands of black slaveowners existed during the Antebellum period, including over 3000 in New Orleans alone; that some of those black slaveholders used their slaves as human sacrifices in religious rituals; that Muslim (i.e., blackness, not whiteness) slaveholders “marched vast numbers of human beings from their homes where they had been captured to the places where they would be sold, hundreds of miles away, often spending months crossing the burning sands of the Sahara; that the death toll on these marches exceeded even the horrific toll on packed slave ships crossing the Atlantic” (Thomas Sowell); that blackness Muslims enslaved millions of whiteness Europeans; that the word “slave” derived not from blacks, but from Slavs, who were white Europeans, many of whom were enslaved; and that today, blackness Muslims still own slaves?  

Toni Morrison

...................

Morrison is as racist as it gets and of course gets a pass because she's not only privileged but is black.  That is the sad sign of our modern times.  Two wrongs make a right... somehow.  I was planning on doing a cartoon on her thanks to her latest white-hate racist essay in the New Yorker, "Mourning Whiteness," but then realized I'd already done two on her and that was enough.  So, I post the two old cartoons now.  The only thing that's changed since them is her girth, which gets larger and larger... along with her privilege.  We have white-privileged racist pigs and we also have black-privileged racist pigs, including Obama, Holder, Lynch, Oprah, and Morrison...

...................

Mourning for Reason

A Dialogue de Sourds between a Black One-Percenter and a White Male without Voice

Reason is the arch-enemy of ideology.  

—P. Maudit

The New Yorker certainly does not mourn for the death of reason and will certainly not publish this pro-reason rebuttal.  Indeed, it is quite content for the death of reason in the darkness of the left-wing ideology it espouses.  If it did mourn for reason, it would not have published Toni Morrison’s “Mourning for Whiteness,” a despicable anti-white racist diatribe, of the kind so popular on far too many of the nation’s ideologically-controlled college campuses today, where anti-white racism has all but replaced reason.    

Morrison is a multimillionaire one-percenter, immensely privileged black woman, far more privileged than most white males.  Simply mentioning that reality inevitably upsets her white-privilege narrative.  Besides her wealth and hoarding of over $25 million, she has voice, whereas most white males do not have voice.  The elitist New Yorker will publish anything she has to say, including racist rant.  That’s called privilege.  In fact, one must have privilege connections to be published in such a highbrow magazine.  For Morrison and likely the editors at the New Yorker, racism is good, as long as anti-white.  Double standards, stereotyping, and grotesque generalizations are part of Morrison’s game, while logic and reason are not.  For Morrison, two wrongs make a right. 

TM:  “All immigrants to the United States know (and knew) that if they want to become real, authentic Americans they must reduce their fealty to their native country and regard it as secondary, subordinate, in order to emphasize their whiteness.”  

PM:  So, white immigrants from England or Norway, for example, have (and had) to reduce their fealty to those countries, or they’d be emphasizing their blackness and thus anti-whiteness?  And all those immigrants brandishing the Mexican flag or setting up mosques are also rejecting whiteness in favor of blackness?   Hmm.  And how can a black immigrant from Haiti emphasize his or her “whiteness”?  And how about Somalis in Minnesota?  If assimilating into American values such as freedom of speech, vigorous debate, due process, and equality of treatment constitutes whiteness, then what values might constitute blackness?  Evidently, values you prefer.  Perhaps then you ought to consider moving to a whiteness-devoid black dictatorship in Africa.  It might make you a lot happier!  

TM:  “White people’s conviction of their natural superiority is being lost. Rapidly lost.”  

PM:  Yet I am white and do not walk around with a sense of superiority, natural or unnatural, for the mere color of my white skin.  But you walk around with a definite sense of superiority for the mere color of your black skin.  Go figure!  Logic is certainly not the forte of racists and ideologues. 

TM:  “There are ‘people of color’ everywhere, threatening to erase this long-understood definition of America.  And what then?  Another black President?  A predominantly black Senate? Three black Supreme Court Justices?  The threat is frightening.”  

PM:  Well, that “threat” is only frightening if it means the same blackness rule we’ve seen in African countries like Liberia, Ruanda, and Nigeria, where “whiteness” principles of freedom of speech, vigorous debate, due process, and equality are inexistent.  

TM:  “In order to limit the possibility of this untenable change [i.e., the “threat”], and restore whiteness to its former status as a marker of national identity, a number of white Americans are sacrificing themselves.  They are willing to kill small children attending Sunday school and slaughter churchgoers who invite a white boy to pray.”

PM:  That number is a minute minority!  You make it sound like a majority of white males shoot blacks!  How absurd!  One deranged man in South Carolina shamefully massacred those black churchgoers.  Why do you not mention the shameful massacres at Orlando and San Bernadino perpetrated by blackness?  And what about the near massacre at Ohio State perpetuated by blackness?  Ah, they do not fit your racist anti-white narrative, that’s why!  The racist KKK, which for some reason you do not name, is hardly representative of white people in America today.  Is Farrakhan’s racist Nation of Islam representative of black people in America?  Let’s hope not!  And what about the black males shooting black children in the streets of Chicago?  Ah, again, that doesn’t fit the narrative, nor do the black on white crime statistics that indicate blacks attack whites 25 times more frequently than vice versa (National Crime Victimization Survey).  

TM:  “To keep alive the perception of white superiority, these white Americans tuck their heads under cone-shaped hats and American flags and deny themselves the dignity of face-to-face confrontation, training their guns on the unarmed, the innocent, the scared, on subjects who are running away, exposing their unthreatening backs to bullets.”

PM:  Yes, there is or was a KKK violence problem in the deep south, though I haven’t heard much at all about it in several decades or more. However, I have heard of racist anti-white Black Lives Matter mobs  beating up whites.  

TM:  “Surely, shooting a fleeing man in the back hurts the presumption of white strength?”

PM:  And of course the same could be said of blacks who shoot whites in the back!  

TM:  The sad plight of grown white men, crouching beneath their (better) selves, to slaughter the innocent during traffic stops, to push black women’s faces into the dirt, to handcuff black children. Only the frightened would do that. Right?

PM:  And what about the sad plight of grown black men, crouching beneath their (better) selves, to slaughter the innocent during traffic stops and rape white women? Only the frightened would do that.  RIght?  Well, maybe only the mentally deficient, violent macho cruel-streaked. 

TM:  “Personal debasement is not easy for white people (especially for white men), but to retain the conviction of their superiority to others—especially to black people—they are willing to risk contempt, and to be reviled by the mature, the sophisticated, and the strong.  If it weren’t so ignorant and pitiful, one could mourn this collapse of dignity in service to an evil cause.”  

PM:  How can you really incarnate “the mature, the sophisticated, and the strong”?  On the contrary, you incarnate a conviction of black superiority just like the white superiority you denounce!  When have you manifested an iota of “personal debasement,” whatever the hell that means?  What a flaming hypocrite!  

TM:  “The comfort of being “naturally better than,” of not having to struggle or demand civil treatment, is hard to give up.  The confidence that you will not be watched in a department store, that you are the preferred customer in high-end restaurants—these social inflections, belonging to whiteness, are greedily relished.”

PM:  Now, who but privileged multi-millionaires like you even go to “high-end restaurants” and lament about the possibility of not being treated like some queen Pulitzer bee?  As for civil treatment, I’m white and have had to demand it and still have not received it.  My civil rights are being denied in my town because I have been prohibited from attending any cultural or political events held at my neighborhood library because I stood up for freedom of speech.  What library prohibits you from attending cultural and political events?  Not one!  So don’t tell me high-and-mighty queen Pulitzer bee that because of my skin color I have rights you do not have.  Wake up!  This is the 21st century, not the Antebellum South!  

TM: “So scary are the consequences of a collapse of white privilege that many Americans have flocked to a political platform that supports and translates violence against the defenseless as strength. These people are not so much angry as terrified, with the kind of terror that makes knees tremble.”  

PM:  Affirmative Action ended the notion of white privilege and began the notion of black privilege… quite a while ago and now it’s two wrongs make a right.  Some progress, eh!  If the “collapse of white privilege” is synonymous with the collapse of reason, free speech, vigorous debate, due process, and equality, then indeed perhaps we should flock to a new platform.  It is your visceral hatred for white people that makes your knees tremble!  

TM:  “On Election Day, how eagerly so many white voters—both the poorly educated and the well educated—embraced the shame and fear sowed by Donald Trump,” 

PM:  And yet why did so many white voters vote for Obama with almost no experience, who didn’t give a damn about New Black Panther scare-tactics at the voting polls and supported Black Lives Matter rioting and looting?   And why should so many black voters have voted for a congenital liar and perjurer like Hillary?  Do they represent a basket of deplorable blackness?   

TM:  “The candidate whose company has been sued by the Justice Department for not renting apartments to black people.”

PM: And what about the candidate whose foundation cheated poor black Haitians in need out of millions of dollars? 

TM:  “The candidate who questioned whether Barack Obama was born in the United States, and who seemed to condone the beating of a Black Lives Matter protester at a campaign rally.” 

PM:  Yet Obama himself wrote that he was born in Kenya!  And what about the candidate who supported Black Lives Matter—the riots, looting, killing of cops, and beating up whites?

TM:  “The candidate who kept black workers off the floors of his casinos. The candidate who is beloved by David Duke and endorsed by the Ku Klux Klan.”

PM:  And what about the candidate who is beloved by the father of Orlando terrorist Omar Mateen and crooked Muslim pay-to-play lawyer Khzir Khan and who takes millions of dollars from Islamic dictatorships that treat women as sub-humans?  

TM:  “William Faulkner understood this better than almost any other American writer. In Absalom, Absalom, incest is less of a taboo for an upper-class Southern family than acknowledging the one drop of black blood that would clearly soil the family line. Rather than lose its “whiteness” (once again), the family chooses murder.

PM:  This is the 21st century.  Educate yourself queen Pulitzer bee!  Now, here’s a few facts you willfully ignore about wonderful blackness.  The very first legal slave owner in America was a black man, Anthony Johnson.  Thousands of black slaveowners existed during the Antebellum period, including over 3000 in New Orleans alone.  Some of those black slaveholders used their slaves as human sacrifices in religious rituals.  Black author Thomas Sowell notes that Muslim (i.e., blackness, not whiteness) slaveholders “marched vast numbers of human beings from their homes where they had been captured to the places where they would be sold, hundreds of miles away, often spending months crossing the burning sands of the Sahara. The death toll on these marches exceeded even the horrific toll on packed slave ships crossing the Atlantic.”  Blackness Muslims enslaved millions of whiteness Europeans.  After all, the word “slave” derives not from blacks, but from Slavs, who were white Europeans, many of whom were enslaved. Today, blackness Muslims still own slaves!  

 

In retrospect, whiteness must be pretty damn good if it allows people like Morrison to freely express their white-hatred viewpoints.  In fact, do blackness regimes allow for black-hatred viewpoints to be expressed in Africa and elsewhere?  Apparently not, which explains why so many choose to immigrate to whiteness America.  In any case, real progress does not mean giving a pass to black racists.  It means rejecting racism, black or white.  Period.  Morrison has a long way to go with that regard… and evidently at her age, she ain’t gonna have the time to get there.  The New Yorker has yet to respond to this rebuttal.  

Toni Morrison

Elizabeth Lund

.........................

Poetry-as-Usual:  A Brief Review of a Brief Review

“The key reason for the smallness of the audience for poetry is that people associate poetry with school…”

—Billy Collins

What to scribble when famous poets and their hagiographers have nothing to say and never dare transgress the space space of literary careerism?  Well, Elizabeth Lund, publishing house pusher, uh, literary critic at Washington Post, illustrates the problem in her brief essay, “Best poetry of the month: New collections by Billy Collins and Robert Pinsky,” where not an iota of criticism… just the kind of praise one might expect from a court jester introducing a poet laureate to a Hillarius, the First.  In this case, it’s two poet laureates.  

Well, at least Lund didn’t take the leap to best poetry of the century.  However, she still piles it on.  For Collins’ The Rain in Portugal, it’s “dry wit,” “subtle twists,” “fanciful landscape,” “richness,” “biting moments,” and “evocative and lovely.”  The subjects Collins writes about, anything but critical of the academic/literary hand that feeds him so royally, include conversations with an imaginary sister, thoughts of Shakespeare on an airplane, Keith Richards holding up the world, a weathervane, a “veggie platter that suggests the impermanence of life,” and “an encounter with a brown rabbit that could be the late Seamus Heaney.”  Yes, I couldn’t help but laugh out loud!  No, I am not making these things up, nor apparently is Lund, who argues:  “The constant shifting in these pieces provides both pleasure and a vivid example of how one’s thoughts, when unrestrained, can lead to unexpected destinations.”  Allow me to paraphrase with a touch of hard-core critique: “how one’s thoughts, when restrained, can lead to expected destinations… of utter fluff.”  

As for the other academic careerist and distinguished fellow, Pinsky—you know, that working-class guy from New Jersey—, it’s always quite safe to write about subjects distant from his little cocoon in the intellectually corrupt academy, in this case, Boston University, which was accorded the worst rating for freedom of speech by the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (see 

https://www.thefire.org/schools/boston-university/ and https://www.thefire.org/speech-code-of-the-month-boston-university/).  Does Pinsky care about that rating?  Not in the least!  Yet how can a poet survive chained down by speech codes (i.e., without freedom of speech)?  Well, Pinsky apparently has no problem at all with that!  

His latest book, At the Foundling Hospital,” concerns “infants, slaves and immigrants.”  Perhaps a plea for open borders or support for Black Lives Matter?  Again, Lund lauds with unoriginal high-brow laudanum:   “tremendous range of thought,” “ability to weave together complex ideas into resonant poems,” “sophisticated,” “refined music,” “gives voice to various gods,” and forces “readers to rethink the wisdom they know.”  Man, Pinsky must be a god himself to be able to do all of that!  Lord, I better get down on my prayer rug.  Hmm.  And brilliantly Lund decides the poems themselves are foundlings.  Oh, she’ll surely bring a smile to Pinsky!  

Yes, poet laureates Billy Collins and Robert Pinsky not only have the stamp of Congressional approval, but, according to Lund, provide fascinating, if not brilliant, examples of… absolute fluff.  

Collins is wrong regarding the key reason for small poetry audiences.  The real reason is gutless, boring poets, not to mention gutless, boring poetry reviews, and poetry devoid of purpose.  Well, he gets it right with that regard: “Poetry is aimless, not purposeful. The poem is dancing with itself.”

The Fall of Hillarius, the First ! 

I think she’s a total goddess and I just love her.

—Miley Cyrus aka the Tongue

the lies, the denial, the perjury, the lying about the lies,

the lousy memory, the short-circuiting mind,

the rampant cronyism, the deflecting, the hypocrisy, 

the flip flopping, the ethics vacuum, the quid pro quo,

the Wikileaks bombshells, the Project Veritas revelations, 

the spinning surrogates, the entitlement, the elitism, 

the social engineering, the ultra-efficient smear machine,

the most transparent opacity in history, the epic greed, 

the conflicts of interest, the demonization tactics, 

the ruthful vindictiveness, the fawning Pravda press,

the four FBI investigations, the Homey in the back pocket,

the stronger-together platitude spewing, the reset button,

the safe spaces, the speech codes, and the trigger warnings,

the diversity groupthink exclusion mind-forged manacles,

the White Privilege bullshit, the rejection of All Lives Matter, 

the deafening silence in the face of Black Lives Matter racism, 

the deranged smile and cackle, the mess in the Middle East,

the Goldman Sachs speeches, the BleachBit, 

the town hall questions from Donna Brazil,

the rigged Democrat Party primary, the selling out of Bernie,

the basket of “I’m for her” deplorables, 

the fraudulent foundation, the election tampering,

the Muslim Brotherhood, the Benghazi nightmare,

the $5.4 million “crystal stemware” for the State Department,

the death of Vince Foster, the selling of the Lincoln bedroom,

the vast right-wing-conspiracy left-wing conspiracy theories, 

the defamation of Bubba-accusing women, 

the carbon footprint for thee, but not for my family,

the decades of self-service public service, 

the Istanbul Process and its Resolution 16/18,

the contempt for the Freedom of Information Act,

the revulsion for the Freedom of Information Act,

  the hatred for the Freedom of Information Act, 

and, more than anything else, the thousand-dollar Mao Pantsuits…

—G. Tod Slone (todslone@hotmail.com, Ed, The American Dissident