If you think that conservatives are the only ones who are throwing hissy fits over tenure, think again. Here is somebody from the opposite end of the political spectrum trying to pleasure Scott Walker orally in a very dedicated manner:

Why not strip away protections professors have in their jobs, if I don’t have the same ones in mine?

If I can get fired for mouthing off to my boss why shouldn’t P. Louis Scholarly? If I can get fired for looking at my boss funny, for coming in five minutes late, for telling a customer to get bent, for being nearby while my boss has a bad day, why shouldn’t the very fine taxpayers of the state of Wisconsin and every other state be able to fire educators who are tasked with teaching the public? Why shouldn’t they be able to shitcan F. Poncey Publishable, if they don’t like the way he talks back?

It is useless to explain to somebody who is frothing at the mouth like this that tenure doesn’t protect people but the product they create.

Of course, people who have failed at life so massively and have not managed to make themselves valued as professionals at such an advanced age cannot be expected to have the intellectual wherewithal to get the difference. They want to be protected from life by mysterious external forces and fail to understand that the only real protection we can count on comes from the store of intellectual, professional, and psychological capital we have accumulated in the course of our lives. 

OK, people, as the election cycle is starting off, let get one thing clear once and for all.

I support Hillary Clinton in this election. Well, actually, I support Bernie Sanders but he has no chance in hell, so I support Hillary. Putin wants Bush to win and is terrified of Hillary winning. And you all know how much I want to see Putin thwarted. So because of this – and every other – reason I support Hillary.

Having said that, I have to issue a fair warning that I will be as critical as I feel like of Hillary and of her campaign. If that will be too traumatizing for you to face, please go away now. Before you do leave, let me tell you that getting emotionally attached to public figures to the extent where it hurts your feelings to see them criticized is a result of childhood traumas that your therapist can help you address. And until you address them, good luck kicking that smoking habit, losing weight, vanquishing the fear of public speaking, getting your finances in order, or figuring out your personal life.

So remember the manipulative fellow with kids and his girlfriend from our “Relationships” series? The jerk dumped her, and in a very nasty way, too. The little weasel did all he could to keep sucking out as much feeling of self-importance from the situation:

We had brunch Thurs morning, drove in a leisurely fashion to a nearby city, had a pleasant afternoon indoors before a delicious dinner and a fantastic outdoor concert.  Yesterday, we made our way back here, with a stop at a picturesque location and, serendipitously, lunch with one of my friends; we had dinner last night with my sister, brother-in-law and niece.  Then, since we were borrowing a friend’s convertible for the evening, we drove around afterward in a sweet ride, enjoying the evening.

And then he apologized to me for not being able to be the person I wanted him to be. The end.

Of course, after this sort of “apology” begins, one should just get up and leave immediately and never have any contact with the person again for the simple reason that the tit of human kindness should at least be contingent on the person actually wanting to be with you. That’s not what happened, though:

Doesn’t matter what I want, of course.  It’s never a negotiation.  We talked and he listened, but it wasn’t as if he was going to change his mind. I could feel him pulling away these last few weeks in subtle little ways and, once again, I was right.

Friends.  We’re good friends.  That’s what he wants.  Of course.  Because I’m a fucking good friend. He wants to talk to me every now and then, get together for dinner when I’m in town to visit Cool Friend, because we’re friends.  And I should call him later, he says – probably because he does care that he’s hurt me and he somehow thinks that will make things better.

The guy is just a total gift of God to humanity (I say sarcastically, for those who are not taking too well to the current heat wave.) He must have been stomped on many times by women in order to get so nasty and needy.

I’m very very sorry that this blogger is suffering because I’ve been reading her a lot and have grown somewhat emotionally attached. She is obviously a fantastic person and does not deserve all this suffering. I know exactly what it feels like to find yourself in the same damn romantic situation for the bizillionth time and not to have any clue as to why your relationships always end in the exact same pathetic way.

Tragically, this woman’s situation will not improve until she realizes that Mr. Jerkwad is not asking her to call “because he does care that he’s hurt me.” All he wants is to keep feeding off her attachment and her pain. But she, of course, will call and feed the loser some more and then there will be another jerk to nourish, and so on.

This is very frustrating.

Knowing how to be loved is just as much of a skill as loving.Some people just never get an opportunity to acquire that skill or to realize that this is what they are missing:

And I try to understand and I do.  But I still hurt.  And I wonder why I can’t have what I want, why it seems that I am always aching for something I can’t have, why I’m never enough for any man.

This is all very sad.

I’m hearing that Hillary Clinton will be mentioning the poverty experienced by her mother when the mother was a child in her speech today. She’ll do it to let the voters know she understands what economic hardship is like.

Soon, we’ll have politicians breathlessly inform us that they know all about poverty because they once talked to somebody who once stood next to somebody who had heard of somebody who might have been poor.

I don’t blame Hillary for this pathetic effort to pretend she’s not who she actually is. If people voted on issues and not on soppy “human interest” stories, nobody would have to contort themselves into weird shapes and fake non-existent suffering.

Literary criticism was far from being the only field of study that was created to promote the goals of nationalism. There was also archeology, created to “prove” that nations were eternal in origin. And anthropology was given the task of “demonstrating” that the people of a nation were biologically related to each other and superior to those of other nations.

So Putin went to see the Pope, right? And of course he was an hour late because meeting a human being without humiliating said being is just no fun for Putin.

The Pope gave Putin a medallion with an angel engraved on it. I have no idea what the poor angel ever did to the Pope to make the fellow want to punish him like that, but here you have it, the angel went straight to Putin.

Of course, the Russian propaganda has modified this piece of news ever so slightly. Instead of “the Pope gave Putin a medallion”, the Russian media are saying “the Pope awarded Putin a medal.” I  mean, medal, medallion, it’s almost the same thing, and it’s not like the Pope will mind. If he did mind, he could have evaluated what the consequences might be before having Putin over.

So have you heard about this Nobel – prize winning scientist who said a bunch of stupid things about falling in love with weepy female lab workers?

Obviously, in everything that doesn’t concern his field of knowledge the guy is kind of dumb. But I’m hearing he’s had to resign from his university. And that’s a very bizarre and disturbing development. If we don’t like his gender discourse (and obviously we don’t), let’s not have him over to dinner. Let’s not follow his Twitter and let’s respond with, “Hey that’s really stupid” whenever he opines on gender. There’s no need to get him to terminate his work at his university over this, though.

Let’s also observe that we never hear any stories about doctors, lawyers, or statisticians being policed as a group as much as professors are all the time.

One day after a Pew poll showed only 38 percent of Germans

view Russia as a threat to its neighbors (other than Ukraine), news has broken that Russia hacked the Bundestag.

Objective reality doesn’t go away even if we close our eyes and hide under the sofa.

Writers are, first and foremost, readers. They read a lot and as a result know what has been done so many times that doing it once again would be a horrible cliché.

To give just an example, a contemporary writer starts a famous novel as follows. The main character’s mother died when he was an infant. So there was nobody to “raise him in tenderness” and he grew up wild. Because all women are tender, obviously. And without their civilizing presence men remain wild. But that’s OK because the character had a special talent he discovered at the age of 7. And now let me cover thousands of pages with words to tell you all the details of that special talent.

Without even starting on the artistic qualities, just the plot premise itself is excruciatingly boring. “Orphaned and wild” has been done so many times that one begins to wish for an orphaned and domesticated character just to relieve the tedium. The special gift one discovers all of a sudden serves as a foundation for every TV show featuring children or adolescents.

Everything turns to a parody of itself with repeated use. Wild motherless orphans made sense in the early 19th century. The need for women to civilize men by applying their “softer” influence to them was all the rage in the 1500s. Golden locks and rosebud mouths sounded just fine in the 17th century. Eos of the rosy fingers worked out fantastic for Homer but you just can’t do this shit without a trace of irony in the postmodern era and still be a writer.

This is not to say that the cheap pop psych of dead mothers, softening women, and sudden talents can’t be entertaining as hell. Just like an occasional meal at Wendy’s might be fun and delicious. Yet a person who sees no difference between a dish prepared by a Michelin-star chef and an outing at Applebee’s is missing many exciting experiences that constitute culinary education. And in the same way, the person who believes that literature is Hunger Games and 50 Shades has had an impoverished range of intellectual and artistic experiences.

What I’m expressing here is a point of view that is hugely unpopular in North American academia. We are all so terrified of rating or ranking and so into the idea of total equality that we spent months last year at my department  interviewing people for a job they were not even remotely qualified to do just because it would be unfair not to interview everybody who NEEDED a job.

But hey, when did I care what anybody else thought? The literary canon was created to prop up the nation-state. And now that the nation-state is tottering, preserving the idea of Great Books might offer some support to the nation-state.