For the first time in 30 years, Cook County, IL had over 1,000 homicides in a year. And 2021 isn’t over yet. It was 600+ in 2018 and 2019, as far as I can remember. A thousand nine people. I can’t even imagine.

80% of the victims were black. 15% Hispanic. Call me extremely stupid but when BLM started and I was an early supporter, I swear I thought it was going to be about this slow-motion genocide. Then I realized nobody gives a fuck. I’m still not over that monumental, ocean-wide disappointment.

This is just one county. There’s also East St Louis, Baltimore, Philadelphia, New York. When I think about all those needlessly dead people, I feel so much anger towards every stupid, smug idiot nattering about structural racisms and putting BLM in their email signatures. They are self-promoting and advancing their stupid little brands off real tragedy.

We had 4 candidates for Chancellor. Three black men and a white woman. The search committee was the diversity office. Here is the breakdown of the candidates:

1. One was brilliant, charming, an alumnus with a great knowledge of our campus, our programs, and our issues. He was the only candidate to talk about the physical buildings on campus. His understanding of diversity is heavily oriented towards helping the disabled students. Also, he’s the only candidate to use the words “research” and “productivity.”

2. The second one was. . . OK. Not a superstar like the first but a perfectly reasonable, decent candidate.

3. The woman was. . . not a star. A typical plodding bureaucrat with no original ideas.

4. The fourth candidate was so neoliberal he looked like a parody. We need data! And dashboards! We need software that shows us data on dashboards! And an app! How great would it be to have an app? Once we get the dashboard data on an app, we can start “taking difficult decisions about the workforce.” We need to work harder, deliver fewer services, and move much of our operations online. Because online education is anti-racist! And so are data dashboards in apps!

The neoliberal guy evinced zero knowledge of our campus. He was the youngest, the least experienced, and the most robotic in his delivery. The spoke in a bureaucratic jargon and not a single glimpse of anything human shone through the wall of meaningless neologisms. Every colleague I spoke to was dismayed by this guy. Obviously, the diversity office voted for him and he was hired.

Delivered at my doorstep at 6 am today! Just when I have a review to write and a stack of papers to grade. Duty or desire? What will win?

We all know the answer.

A Freudian would notice in this imagery a huge sexual frustration that screams to the skies. Big! Red! Boxes! are a woman’s equivalent of gigantic penis-shaped objects displayed by a man.

Leaving Freud aside, this is so ugly. Why can’t these people hire somebody with a modicum of artistic sensibility?