The Guillotine - Affirmative Action Turned On Its Head And Harvard President Gay Gets Hers Lopped Off

It was too long in coming and about time.  Harvard President Gay resigned her post in disgrace only six months after appointment - she had been removed for academic insufficiency, deception, and plagiarism and for tone deaf, unconscionable defense of anti-Semitism on campus. 

She had been an affirmative action baby, chosen by Harvard's board of directors not because of any academic excellence or leadership, but because she was both black and a woman - two birds with one stone - a selection which, the board thought, would solidify Harvard's reputation as an inclusive, diverse, equitable place. 

 

Gay's impossibly ignorant testimony before a House committee and continued defense of her self-serving stance, and later revelations about her intellectual dishonesty and ridiculously pimped out academic career did her and the university in. Not only was she summarily cashiered, but Harvard itself was outed for its bald-faced kowtowing to the radical Left.  

No one was supposed to notice that Gay was fished out of a stagnant pool and set up as a puppet administrator.  She was black, after all, and that according to the progressive lexicon was ipso facto sainthood.  Being a woman added cachet and cover.

Howls of 'racism' were heard up and down both coasts.  Gay had been tarred, feathered, and run out of town by a bunch of MAGA thugs.  She was lucky not to have been spayed and mutilated like her enslaved forbears. 'Race is everything' is the meme, and admitting that the woman had been vaulted to a position of prominence for no reason other than her sex and color would have been capitulation, a retreat from principle.

The Harvard debacle is important not only because its credentials as America's premier institution of higher learning have been tarnished - in fact the ivory tower has been toppled - but because it demonstrates the progressive rot within all of academia.  

The presidents and boards of major universities have reflexively sided with radical identity politics where victimhood is the be-all and end-all.  Black people are ipso facto heirs to the kingdom, at the top of the human pyramid, icons of innate naturalism and beauty. Palestinians - murderous and unprincipled - are righteous defenders of sovereignty. 

Gay men and women, especially those on unique places on the gender spectrum, are knighted exemplars of the new sexuality.  Transgenders who have physically altered themselves to match their gender choice are the nation's new heroes.  Immigrants coming across the southern border in waves are expressing their indignation at poverty, political oppression, and autocracy. 

Nothing on these campuses, clotured and immured even hints at the truth. Black people must take responsibility for decades of dysfunction, crime, drug addiction, and fatherlessness. There are, always have been, and always will be two sexes and no amount of intellectual chicanery will change the facts. Tolerance of illegal immigration is an exercise of futility, designed to accelerate black and brown demographic share, and disruptive of the normal curve.

 

Americans are supposed to accept without question the appointment of a failed academic to a storied post at the nation's top university simply because she is black and a woman, just as they are supposed to overlook reality and accept blackness and femaleness as superior human traits.

There are those who refuse to face facts and prefer to subscribe to 'innate absolutism', the theory that some ideas, concepts, and principles cannot be contested.  Received wisdom with a divine imprimatur. There is no way that the sorry state of the inner city can possibly be the result of endogenous dereliction. It has to be the result of white supremacy, the systemic racism which it has spawned, and the manipulative, corrosive capitalism which underlies all.

Bob Muzelle, an Ivy League graduate and a legatee of America's colonial past (his ancestors had not joined the Mayflower, but instead were investors in the rich lands of the New World they had discovered), had turned coat and became a progressive's progressive, a man with a passion for social justice and reform; a man who would never, ever, tire of the struggle to right the American ship, to create a truly compassionate, respectful, diverse, and inclusive nation.  

Not even when hammered and bludgeoned with the truth, would Bob give up his ideals.  The black man, the transgender, the Latino, and all people of color in the world were the rightful heirs of God's bounty. 

Bob was a signatory, among five-hundred other well-known members of the Left who had pleaded with the Harvard board to keep Dr. Gay as President.  Keep her, they wrote, as a right and in defiance of those who seek to disparage, dismiss, and defame her as a poseur and imposter. Do the right thing.  Keep MAGA at bay. Give in not one inch.

And now she was gone as President but not completely exiled, only reduced to the level of a mere professor of freshmen who still want a darshan of the lady.

Who was next? Any reasonable person would appoint a straight, white man with impeccable academic and leadership credentials; but the progressive mind being what it is, Harvard might still go woke and recruit someone from the big tent. A gay man might be accepted like Pete Buttigieg was in Biden's cabinet.  He and his partner have children, but since he looks like America and is not a swishy, South Beach outré, people forget his sexuality; but what's the point of appointing a gay man unless he is unmistakably gay and South Beach?

The great inclusive juggernaut has been slowed. It was good that it happened at such a visible place - Harvard, an icon for all that is superior.  Now that the flimsy excuse for leadership has been debunked and dismissed, maybe the whole racial preference thing can be laid to rest.

The Folly Of Overeducated Old Men - On Death's Doorstep And Still Worried About The Planet

It was Howard's 60th Reunion and no time to waste, the presentation calendar was filling up, and the problems faced were more troubling and the country was as unappeased as ever.  Not only that, the most destructive, evil-minded, careless and insurrectionist-supporting devil was in the wings.  'We still can make a difference', Howard wrote to reunion organizers.  We, the former best and brightest, can alert the nation through our voices, our presence, and our will, to the dangers afoot. 

Of course nothing could be farther from the truth.  Old men, most of whom were as dodgy as the President, as stale as old loaves of bread forgotten long ago in the pantry, had only caresses in familiar courtyards to make sense of the end of days. 

Howard remembered the resonance of the college anthem sung by hundreds in the vast, neo-Gothic hall of his university, all male, all proud, all well-to-do, and said, 'We are indeed the chosen'; but again he was far off the mark, because for all the whingeing, whining, hectoring, and commandeering, the world was still the same old place it had been since the Pleistocene, as violent, unsatisfied, territorial, and uncivil as ever.  The idealistic reformism of the day hadn't been worth a spit in the ocean, and here were hundreds of old men convinced that it was. 

 

Bobby Marker, a classmate from the good old days had made his bones on the freedom rides, cheek by jowl with black men marching across the Pettis Bridge; but when he brings up the subject, the young people in the audience smile indulgently.  What bridge exactly and what buses? All these ingenues could think of when it came to black people was the nasty and persistent dysfunction of the inner city, the crime, the surging violence, the gang thefts of Vuitton and Dior, and the ceaseless bang-bang of Uzis and Glocks.  It wasn't exactly that Bob was supernumerary - he still meant something to those who had ridden with him, and of course his children - but he was an old plug put out to pasture. 

To say nothing of Arnold Platte,  Harvard lawyer who had turned down Wall Street for Chicago community organizing, heady days withSaul Alinsky and the young Barack Obama; but whose pleas for more compassionate policing, more inclusive government, and a more tolerant, respectful distance for those accused of crime fell on deaf years.  Chicago was a mess, an unruly, ungovernable place of indifference. 

Or Peter Kentner, the climate change guru of the class who had waited for, prayed for a quicker melting of the Ross Ice Shelf just to show the deniers how ignorant they were.  He had become a man obsessed, checking weather reports from Patagonia to Irkutsk, fluctuations in the Humboldt current, variations in the Southwest monsoon.  It had to happen, he said to anyone within earshot, it was happening, and prepare!  He had become a parody of the crazed streetcorner preacher waving a The End Is Nigh placard on Times Square.  Yet he was Ivy League pedigreed, double Harvard-Yale, the very summit of academics and political passion. 

So why was it that the student body of both universities became Jew-haters or rather finally had the chutzpah to shout out their anti-Semitism with pro-Palestinian slogans? Their concern about warming waters, hotter deserts, rising tides, and the changing ecosystem was absent.  Palestinian victimhood at the hands of the Jewish oppressor was far more satisfying that the incremental changes in the Southern Ocean.  He spoke to empty auditoriums, and ate alone at the Sheraton.  

And so it was that these old men, hooked off the stage by their vaudevillian handlers, shuffled with trousers rolled to empty quarters. 

Until the reunion! A chance to once again for Howard to show the colors to an appreciative, applauding audience.  

Getting there was another thing altogether.  Each and every one of his classmates pushed for first shot at the lectern, and the line was long - climate change, misogyny, racism, capitalist oppression, international adventurism, pharmaceutical autocracy, environmental rape, transgender reassignment, and much, much more.  And that was only the old chestnuts.  The line extended to genetic research, AI, virtual reality, stem cells, hypothalamus replacement, and so on.

It was a bit ironic to see these codgers elbowing for a place in line to discuss topics only understood by younger men; but they wanted to give it a go - one last go, if fact, for this would undoubtedly be their last reunion and chance to show what they were worth. 

Only one classmate held up the line, and asked what on earth were these men at death's doorstep, ready to meet their Maker or face the vast unknown doing elbowing their way like Jews to the corned beef at a bar mitzvah? Wasn't it time, he said, to put secular concerns aside and face the one, only, absolutely meaningful moment of their lives? 

 

He was met with disdain. His request was too Biblical, and they had no time for fundamentalism, the root cause of American ignorance.  And, they went on, who said it was our last decade, we're good for another two or three.  And the world needs us. 

The reunion organizer had been an enforcer of sorts.  A former judge who brooked no nonsense in his courtroom, a Biblical figure of imposing rectitude and legal reasoning, he was the right man for the job of taming the unruly lot of classmates pandering for access.  So the docket got filled with applicants getting at least a clip - a darshan the Hindus call it, a glimpse of a holy man bestowing grace; or a sighting of the Pope at St. Peter's square - so like all compromises no one leaves the room happy. 

The reunion was a success, so everyone said.  The old men had their say, schmoozed and drank, reminisced about the good old days and went home satisfied but with lighter pockets.  The real purpose of reunions is to engender a warm sense of camaraderie and belonging and to give generously thanks to it. 

Most importantly, someone finally had listened to Howard, and he was very, very happy. 

Filling Diversity Gaps - Joe Biden's Search For The Virgin Mary

Bill Clinton started this whole diversity thing when he said that his Cabinet 'would look like America', and in so doing ignored talent and welcomed members selected for the most inconsequential reasons. Recruiting women for their sex meant that their history of Kinder, Küche, Kirche, a life of pots and pans, diapers, ladies teas, and charitable causes had something to bear on the affairs of state; and that because women see the world through a different lens, a more compassionate, caring, and nurturing view, they will bring people together. 

Feminists were nonplussed.  It was a good thing that the President was making a bold effort to change the calculus of power; but his championing the very hackneyed, patriarchal, discredited notions of femaleness ignored feminists' contention that there is no difference between men and women.  Women can be riveters and garbage collectors or solve Fermat's Theorem.  Choosing women just because they are women was satisfying - it was about time that women got their due - but such a policy stated an inconvenient truth - women cry a lot, are less aggressive, and more sensitive and empathetic.

If women are no different than  men, then open the lottery to all.  If they are different, say it. Say we need women around the table who will challenge men's boisterous aggression and rein in their desire to bomb, shoot, and maim.  Clinton did neither.  He rounded up and corralled good women and picked the friskiest mares. 

The same was true of his recruitment of black people. They are either no different from any other American, as capable as any; or their legacy of servitude - broken families, single fatherhood, Nat Turner rebelliousness, insolence and hatred of the white man - would stand them in good stead  for righting the racial ship, restoring racial balance through a Huey Newton confrontation. 

Clinton did neither and opted not quite for Uncle Toms nor Stokely Carmichaels, but some bland place in between. 

Clinton, for all his righteous posturing was recruiting people only for their race, gender, or ethnicity - to create a nice Benneton poster of happy inclusivity; and in so doing he set the Left off on its current mission of radical social reform. No longer satisfied with a simple palette, progressives had insisted on a Jackson Pollock tableau.  Just a woman would not suffice.  She had to be black and transgender, an inclusivity trifecta.  Gay men had less value because, despite their coming out of the closet, were still men after all; and Latinos of either sex hadn't enough radical cachet - Cesar Chavez was a bit old hat.

The entire Biden White House is now a potpourri of this strange assembly of former fringe members; but Cabinet meetings are not the inclusive, respectful, collaborative affairs the President had hoped for. Diversity was based on identity, and identity was based on solidarity. Color meant everything in the racial struggle for equality.  Sexual choice was equally political, for the fight against sexual orthodoxy was as challenging as that against racism; and the few Latinos squeezed into the room felt bound and determined to expunge the faded notion of farm working, illegal immigrants. 

So the internecine squabbles were something to see.  Although all Cabinet members and White House staff were under gag orders to keep their differences 'within these walls', they leaked their complaints to the press in the hopes of generating public sympathy for their causes.  A straight, blond, white, former Marine was brought in to restore order. 

'What don't we have?', asked the President of his DEI (Diversity, Equity, Inclusion) Advisor.  The Advisor wanted to expand the big tent to include all oppressed minorities and had been approached by both the Barnum & Bailey crowd and the few well known dwarves in Hollywood for positions in the Administration. 'Little people must have their say", said a former side show manager who had risen through the ranks. 

The Advisor was under pressure by the LGBTQ+ community to move past the obvious transsexuals to include demiflux, muxe, and neutrois people among other choices on the fluid gender spectrum, but had ruffled feathers when she said, "If I choose one, then I have to choose all", a not unreasonable conclusion given the fact that sexual addenda were daily occurrences.  'Then pick a doozy", said a tumtum. "Let's make 'em squirm". 

"What about a nun?", asked the President, thinking of Sister Marie Joseph who had taken a shine to him in his catechism class.  There was something special about Sister that reminded him of the Virgin Mary, not the least of which were the habits chosen by the Vatican eons ago to recall the robes and finery of the Blessed Virgin.  Something, well, was virginal about this young woman who despite her vows was as attractive a woman as he could imagine.  Her devotion to God and her marriage to Christ were only challenges to what the young Joe thought would be an unbelievable sexual experience.  Of course he was too young to know what was what, but still.

 

A nun was truly a distinct, remarkable character now oppressed by the Church.  Vatican II in so many words dismissed them.  Minor characters though they were in the Catholic hierarchy and beholden to priests, they were still in Jesus' favor and now they were no more than ordinary women.  A good, virginal, obedient, and prayerful nun would be a good addition to the tent.  'The only virgins in Washington are in the womb' was the meme on the Potomac, and nothing could be truer; so the recruitment of a nun would be its own, particular trifecta - a real woman, a virgin, and a believer - none of which were even remotely seen at 1700 Pennsylvania Avenue. 

The President had a statue of the Virgin Mary in the Oval Office to which he prayed often.  Kept under wraps because of Church and State clauses in the Presidential contract, she was always within reach, and saying a Hail, Mary to her when times got tough was a source of infinite solace and strength; so having a real acolyte of Jesus' mother in the White House would be a way of outing his love and respect for the Church and the Blessed Virgin without causing waves. 

"But then you would have to have a rabbi', said the DEI Advisor, shaking her head in distaste as she thought of a yarmulke-wearing, humorless Jew at the table; but once the President got an idea in his head, there was no dislodging it. And so it was that a Sister of Charity joined the staff, and offered her pretty little homilies at meetings.  She was ignored by most - in progressives' reformist secularism there is  room for religion - and given only a nod as she took her seat; but the President smiled at her often, and invited her to tea.  

The diversity agenda has been completed, and the President was happy.  As much as Sister rankled and upset the rest of the staff - particularly lapsed Catholics who were forced to give a second thought to their leaving the Church -  she made the President, now well in his dotage and spending more and more of his day in memories of a simple, innocent Catholic childhood, happy.