Guest Post by Fred Reed
Getting what we seem to want.
July 11, 2014
rrasssemnt that last week I wrote “discrete” when I meant “discreet.” Write long enough and you do something stupid. Two often, one falls intoo one or to errors. Apologies.
Here is a news item that I once might have made up as parody. It is hard, though, to imagine anything too absurd not to exist in a university.
“Female Arizona State University students can receive extra credit for defying social norms and refusing to shave for 10 weeks during the semester.”
Accompanying the news of this enlightened policy was a photograph of the beneficiaries triumphantly exhibiting their armpits. The children were of course trying to shock, which is normal among adolescents. What once would actually have shocked is that the alleged adults in the alleged university encourage their alleged scholars in extended juvenility. (Stray thought: Why are so many feminists ugly enough to make a freight train take a dirt road?)
Said one of the participating students (I use the word so loosely that it might well cast off and set out into life on its own):
“The experience helped me better understand how pervasive gendered socialization is in our culture. Furthermore, by doing this kind of activist project I was no longer an armchair activist theorizing in the classroom. So much is learned by actually taking part in the theory or idea we learn in the classroom, and we could benefit from this type of pedagogy being taken up by similar classes.”
This solemn gibberish begs for parody, but on contemplation I am more sad than amused. These pitiable girls go through the forms of schooling, but learn nothing beyond a pseudo-intellectual drivel of pubertal rebellion. The story is not an anecdote but a condition, repeated at hundreds of pretend-universities across the land.
And this in institutions that once existed to pass along civilization.
The bleakness of American culture leads one to despair. Subtract technology and nothing is left. Music? Classical composition is dead. The symphony orchestras hold on by their teeth. Opera is unheard and almost unheard of. Book sales drop, and those that sell are mostly trash. Poetry is dead, Shakespeare a comic shorthand for ridiculous irrelevant pedantry.
Talented painters abound, but the nation has no interest in them. Sculpture means curious blobs and shapes said to be art and chosen by suburban arts committees. Theater? How many people have seen a play recently other than a high-school production?
In all the things that once marked civilization, the United States has become a desert, a waste of self-satisfied, pampered, arrogantly ignorant sidewalk peasants. This is curious, since anything the cultivated might want awaits on the web. One may think of Amazon as an automated fifth-century monastery, saving things of worth for an awakening centuries hence.
The female of the race being more susceptible to hysterias than the male, it is not surprising to see theatric idiocy of lofted armpits in departments of Women’s, Transsexual etc Studies. Males seldom show such symptoms of psychiatric stress as bulimia and anorexia. Yet a similar infantilism seems to affect the boys. Girls exhibit a desperate feminism while boys retreat into video games. In their mid-twenties both seem farther from adulthood than my generation was at sixteen. Why?
When I was a stripling in rural Virginia a dispiriting number of years ago, we rebelled with expected hormonal punctuality, knew more than our parents about everything, and behaved with the proper amount of reckless stupidity. Yet we did not cling to our pubescence. The reason, I think, was that we were trying to be adults before we were ready, rather than avoiding adulthood after it was proper. These are very different things.
It is traditional for the old to view their youth in roseate hues it never had and speak of walking barefoot twelve miles daily to high school through eighteen inches of shark-infested snow. We didn’t. Nobody in King George Country was hungry or close to it. I certainly was not.
Yet I remember getting up before first light in January (in, yes, sometimes a foot of snow) to run my paper route, which I did partly because it made me feel semi-grown up (and partly because I had my eye on a thirteen-foot Grumman canoe). It was no big deal. Kids did these things. We were, as they say, transitioning out of kid-hood.
To be sixteen, working the graveyard shift alone at Kriegstedt’s Esso on Route 301, fueling the big eighteen-wheelers that came howling in for diesel at three a.m., talking to the drivers as almost an equal—it was close to manhood. I liked it. We liked it. It was preparation for the big world. Marching for transgendered rights or getting our navels pierced would have seemed lunatic.
It still does. Different world.
Out of the Sixties came the cult of Relevance, meaning a fascination with things of no relevance, and a distaste for learning anything requiring either effort or maturity. Once the chain of cultivation breaks, how do you weld it together? That generation—I was once of them—swept into faculty lounges as a sort of jejune intellectual anthrax and turned the universities into political sand boxes. Soon we had departments of the utterly trivial, and courses like “Lesbian Chicana Theory in the Brazilian Favela.”
Before long there were few, and soon there will be fewer, who knew of the things lost, or why they mattered. Declining societies drink from the sumps below, so the values and dress of the black ghetto became the standard. There came rap music, which isn’t, and the dumbing down of everything to hide the deficiencies of the deficient. Now what?
The rot goes beyond the academic. The whole epicene circus smells of weakness of character. Watching our prancing half-men and furry co-eds, I wonder what would happen to them if it rained hard. America today lives in an unconsciously precarious equilibrium. Some two or three percent of the population grow food for an urbanized country that has never shot a rabbit, baited a hook, or existed other than in the world of McDonald’s, dope, and latchkey afternoons. They seem never to have been in a schoolyard fight, never had to take care of themselves, defend themselves, or to understand that one day they might have to do it.
What if one day Mommy, or Mommy Washington, isn’t around to take care of them? Any disruption—riots, for example, that stopped the flow of food trucks into the cities—would cause devastation.
We have become soft, mentally vacuous, helpless, a civilization on the brink. As the US subsides into–what?—I am gratified that, though feckless, unlettered, and helpless, our university girls will have hairy armpits.
When I lived in Cali we used to call the gals who didn’t shave their pits “Beaver Women ” .
“The female of the race being more susceptible to hysterias than the male,”
HUH?
I can’t believe this sexist drivel. Anyone who thinks that women are “more susceptible to hysteria” than men, has never been to a sporting event, or witnessed a riot break out over a car accident or some other minor event, or had to deal with a man after his favorite team loses.
Otherwise, Rockwell’s rant is dead on.
Good old Fred Reed, of “Fred On Everything” fame. 🙂 He’s today’s version of Florence King, another observer who takes no prisoners.
@Chicago,
..or witnessed a man jarred from his slumber by the security alarm going off at 3:00 a.m.
lmao!!!
Had it been unshaved vajayjays..
I could deal wit
Remember way, way back, there was a time when schools provided classical education and taught outlandish things such as “Cause & Effect”?
Greetings,
I do not understand why anyone cares. The university system as we know it is dead. Anyone that thinks that college has any value other than a 4 – 6 year party vacation is living under a rock. I know it, you know it and corporate america certainly knows it which is why it is becoming next to impossible for college grads to find work. After all, why hire someone that has just thrown away the best years of their lives on something as worthless as a degree from an american university – especially one as silly as the university of Arizona.
The future belongs to the self motivated. It doesn’t belong to those silly women in the image above.
Post collapse everyone will be hairy as a bear wherever they are prone to grow it. This picture is just grade c humanity saying ‘aren’t we clever for not participating in industrialized civilization in this completely irrelevant way?’ They won’t even be creative or motivated enough for cannibalism when the real shit goes down.
Had it been unshaved vajayjays..
I could deal wit
Laghed out loud at that!
Hyster(o)=uterus/womb. The word implies that men are incapable of being hysterical. Androgenic megalomania is a more fitting description of men gone wild.
That being said, the histrionic, nut-job feminists embracing this under-arm hair nonsense are cowardly nut-jobs.
What happened to the good ol’ days when women didn’t file law-suits if men got out of hand, but merely slapped the s#!t out of them, and all was over and done with? Or better yet, women told men who got out of hand that their daddy, brother, uncle, etc, would be around to kick ass if a man harassed a woman. No copfuks, no government intervention needed.
Insanity is what passes for feminism today, and eunuchs now refer to themselves as being men.
Meanwhile, Rudyard Kipling got it right; Don’t mess with good, sane females who shave their legs and under their arms.
Rudyard Kipling (1865-1936)
The Female of the Species
WHEN the Himalayan peasant meets the he-bear in his pride,
He shouts to scare the monster, who will often turn aside.
But the she-bear thus accosted rends the peasant tooth and nail.
For the female of the species is more deadly than the male.
When Nag the basking cobra hears the careless foot of man,
He will sometimes wriggle sideways and avoid it if he can.
But his mate makes no such motion where she camps beside the trail.
For the female of the species is more deadly than the male.
When the early Jesuit fathers preached to Hurons and Choctaws,
They prayed to be delivered from the vengeance of the squaws.
‘Twas the women, not the warriors, turned those stark enthusiasts pale.
For the female of the species is more deadly than the male.
Man’s timid heart is bursting with the things he must not say,
For the Woman that God gave him isn’t his to give away;
But when hunter meets with husbands, each confirms the other’s tale—
The female of the species is more deadly than the male.
Man, a bear in most relations—worm and savage otherwise,—
Man propounds negotiations, Man accepts the compromise.
Very rarely will he squarely push the logic of a fact
To its ultimate conclusion in unmitigated act.
Fear, or foolishness, impels him, ere he lay the wicked low,
To concede some form of trial even to his fiercest foe.
Mirth obscene diverts his anger—Doubt and Pity oft perplex
Him in dealing with an issue—to the scandal of The Sex!
But the Woman that God gave him, every fibre of her frame
Proves her launched for one sole issue, armed and engined for the same;
And to serve that single issue, lest the generations fail,
The female of the species must be deadlier than the male.
She who faces Death by torture for each life beneath her breast
May not deal in doubt or pity—must not swerve for fact or jest.
These be purely male diversions—not in these her honour dwells—
She the Other Law we live by, is that Law and nothing else.
She can bring no more to living than the powers that make her great
As the Mother of the Infant and the Mistress of the Mate.
And when Babe and Man are lacking and she strides unclaimed to claim
Her right as femme (and baron), her equipment is the same.
She is wedded to convictions—in default of grosser ties;
Her contentions are her children, Heaven help him who denies!—
He will meet no suave discussion, but the instant, white-hot, wild,
Wakened female of the species warring as for spouse and child.
Unprovoked and awful charges—even so the she-bear fights,
Speech that drips, corrodes, and poisons—even so the cobra bites,
Scientific vivisection of one nerve till it is raw
And the victim writhes in anguish—like the Jesuit with the squaw!
So it comes that Man, the coward, when he gathers to confer
With his fellow-braves in council, dare not leave a place for her
Where, at war with Life and Conscience, he uplifts his erring hands
To some God of Abstract Justice—which no woman understands.
And Man knows it! Knows, moreover, that the Woman that God gave him
Must command but may not govern—shall enthral but not enslave him.
And She knows, because She warns him, and Her instincts never fail,
That the Female of Her Species is more deadly than the Male.
Look, if you want to shave your ass, pubes or pits is not my business.
Jenny Brooks, a true feminist;
In 1863, eight duly sworn and appointed law officers of the state government, acting with the authority of their nation’s congress, executed a search of the homestead of one Henry Brooks. They were there searching for Brooks’ son who was evading the draft and to execute the tax-in-kind law, which stated that everyone, no matter how poor, had to support the national government, even if that meant having half their crop and farm animals stolen for government purposes. At the homestead were Brooks, his wife Jenny and their eight children. The oldest son was just 17 and was hiding in the barn. The youngest was suckling at his mother’s breast. The men disarmed the Brooks at gunpoint and commenced their work. In order to find out where the eldest son was, the Confederate Home Guard posse put a rope around Henry’s neck, threw it over a limb of the tree in their front yard and slowly raised and lowered him, torturing him for the whereabouts of his son as the entire family was forced to watch.
Shortly, the oldest boy could take no more and charged the men in a hopeless sally from the barn. He was shot to death. Henry Brooks, still hanging from the rope and strangling to death, was shot as well. The lawful and duly sworn search party then rode away. They were laughing as they left.
Had they understood who they were messing with, they wouldn’t have been laughing. Jenny lowered her husband’s body from the tree, laid it out beside that of her oldest son, and had all of her sons place their hands in the blood on their daddy’s chest (or, in the case of the baby, she placed it there herself). She then had them swear a blood oath that they would not rest until all eight men were dead. This began a feud that lasted forty years, the last shots of which were fired in McCurtain County, Oklahoma in 1904. By that time seven of the eight “law officers” were dead, as well as no less than twenty-four others who got in the way of the Brooks’ and their quarry. (The eighth disappeared, leaving his family and all his property behind, apparently changed his name and was never seen in these parts again.)
Jenny, a full-blooded Cherokee girl whose family had avoided the Trail of Tears by hiding up in the mountains, loved her dead husband. She demonstrated the depth of that love by ambushing the leader of the lawful posse a couple months later, shooting him off his horse as he rode out alone from his own home. She then dragged his body into the woods, cut the “lawman’s” head clean off, put it in a tote sack, took it home and put it in the lye boiling pot, cooking it until all that was left was the man’s skull, minus the jawbone. She then turned it upside down, put it on the sideboard and used it as a soap dish the rest of her life, right up until the day she died many, many years later.
The eight duly sworn and appointed law officers didn’t understand, nor did they care to understand, just exactly who it was that they were messing with.
Jenny sounds like MY kind of feminist.
Too bad there weren’t more women like her when our government started stripping away the rights of its citizens.