This is a poem that is assigned to my 16-year-old niece in Canada:
Ugly, outdated, and plain weird is what it is.
The Barbie drama of women over the age of eighty is incomprehensible to today’s teenagers. Why the neuroses of great- grandmas are being inflicted on the young is never explained.
This is one of those things that make me shake my head and wonder what planet folks live on, I played with Barbie as a fat, plain, dark-haired, glasses-wearing kid and I turned out fine. I didn’t grow up thinking dolls should look like me or that I had to identify with fictional characters, I read and loved the Sweet Valley High books about gorgeous blond, blue-eyed twin sisters from Southern California and actually identified with Elizabeth, the smart twin.
By that standard, my currently writing a story set in Anglo Saxon England about a Viking turned Christian lord where Christians and Christianity is positive would make their heads explode with cognitive dissonance. Supposedly since I am from a “Hispanic” background, I ought not to be interested in Dark Ages history since that is not my culture
I put Hispanic in quotes because while my parents were born in Cuba, my grandparents were all born in Spain so we’re not Hispanic in a way people would think since we are white and basically Spaniards who made a pit stop in Cuba. Many Americans don’t understand that having a Spanish surname doesn’t equal nonwhite, which is why people are shocked in my interest in Dark Ages history and taste in indie rock, they can’t understand that someone with my background more or less acts like an Anglo white woman
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LOL, the reason it makes no sense is because the “poet” is nearly 90. She was one of the rat bastards 10-15 years older than the boomers, one of the neurotic critters that misled young gullible girls in the Second Wave with horseshit² about an oppressive patriarchy. The problem was not her appearance, it was her nasty attitude ;-D
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In many schools – and some universities – across Britain, Keats’s Ode on a Grecian Urn is proscribed because it’s considered to be “problematic” (is “still unravish’d bride” incitement to rape?). I apologise for the quotation marks, but it’s Newspeak and I have to signal it in some way.
Lecturers at Cambridge University are “invited” to give “trigger warnings” before lectures on Greek tragedies and any other works of literature fraught with issues considered too challenging for the sensibilities of modern snowflakes.
This is the state of academia at one of the world’s leading universities, and there are countless other examples: institutional capture at its finest. There’s a long way ahead to return to a situation where the intellectual pursuit of knowledge and truth is unencumbered by the pieties and strictures of the modern-day Postmodernist, Neo-Marxist, Intersectional Cerberus guarding the gates of academe.
I am personally rather pessimistic, as I consider it on a par with the Islamic conquest of Constantinople: there will never be a Christian Near East again. It’s also one of the reasons why 25 years ago I decide to give up almost a decade of university teaching for high school, but the rot has now started to destroy secondary education too. A few more years and I’ll be out of here soon.
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A conservative literary critic and college professor
Clarissa's Blog 
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