Ivory Towers and the Volume of Women
Some years back as closing time crept up about half-a-dozen of us were still hanging out at the local dive. An unyielding feminist bartender ruled the roost. She had a notoriously low tolerance for shots at her “ism” whether cheap or dead accurate. Only one other woman, just as wary of patriarchal domination, was on hand. A lone man unknown to us sat at the end. Brazenly hazarding strange waters, he told this joke: “A couple of cave men were sitting around drinking cactus juice after dinner. One says to the other: “My wife’s back there doing the dishes, I’m thinking of teaching her to talk; how much harm could it do?” Our eyes darted back and forth. Mr. T would have pitied the fool who laughed right away. When the victims of male oppression busted loose first, yuks aloud were granted the full nod.
Screwing around idly on YouTube I came across an exchange between Louisiana Senator John Kennedy (R) and George Washington University Professor of Law Mary Ann Franks. As lawyers before a Senate panel go, not to mention lots of others, she was different. When the senator read from the lady’s published history of hostile invective the jurist neither hemmed nor hawed. The author owned the words without hesitation or qualification. You’ve got to give it to her, she doesn’t back down. That’s as rare inside the beltway as a well-heeled left-wanker’s kid in a public school. So, just what was said that interested the senator?
“When the Supreme Court says that there is a constitutional right to armed self-defense in public, it openly embraces a culture that privileges white men’s ability to terrorize and kill those that they perceive as threats,” certainly got my attention.
Then there’s: “By simultaneously expanding white men’s right to kill and constricting women’s right not to die this Supreme Court has turned the constitution into a homicide pact.”
Kennedy rounded citations off nicely with: “The majority of Americans hate women more than they love anything, including democracy.”
Aren’t “the majority of Americans” women?
Somebody should have asked the professor why, with this expanded “right to kill,” other demographics outpace white men so widely doing the killing? Is she telling us the patriarchy has grown timid exercising its rights? Is it possible that an academic with Frank’s substantial credentials — degrees from Loyola, Harvard, Oxford — is unacquainted with the demography of homicide stats? Or, is it that actual homicide isn’t what really bothers the good prof? Isn’t the elephant in the ideological room an elitist establishment that gushingly memorializes victims checking the right boxes — whatever behaviors impinged their demise — while turning its back on those — less proactive in self destruction — checking the wrong ones?
Are any of the people seething to “bring it all down” even coarsely familiar with the statist crimes of the 20th century?
We are confronted here with the use of the word “homicide” in a polemical and abstract sense. Is it crude to ask that if Emmett Till gets a movie, should Joseph Fournier — who was “William” Horton’s victim — or Irina Zarutska get one? What about an accounting of victims, across racial lines that post-date, by better than a half century, the era of lynching? The numbers would not bring comfort to those making a living off white supremacist narratives. Is asking that question controversial? Is it characterizable as “supremacist”? When confronted with statements like Franks’ above, and others like it by highly credentialed people, is it rationally avoidable?
A sizable ideological faction, controlling much of the academic landscape, clings to ideas that ignore reality in pursuit of their goals. In doing so, they often harm the very cause they claim to defend. Those they call the “proletariat” were never the naïve masses they imagine—far from it. Around the same time that the communication revolution revealed the vast capabilities and insights of ordinary people, the gilded professoriate turned against them with surprising ferocity. Meanwhile, we are left uncertain whether YouTubers on college campuses are pranking viewers or not. How can students enter college ignorant of the sides in the world wars, the locations of oceans, or even the capital of the United States?
Using what remains of conventional media propaganda prowess to maintain a misleading account of goings on is a desperate ploy. It’s one thing to be naturally dull and sub-competent. Letting ideology overwhelm perception is less forgivable. The guiltiest parties are in the informing and pedagogical classes.
A more elaborate description of what Franks’ means is in her article “Speaking of Women: Feminism and Free Speech“:
If protecting radical, dissenting, provocative, unpopular speech truly were at the heart of the First Amendment, then it would be women’s speech, especially women’s speech that displeases or defies men, that would preoccupy free speech doctrine and practice. Throughout history, women’s speech challenging the power and authority of men has been prohibited, regulated, and punished, from a four-thousand-year-old Sumerian law declaring that “a woman who speaks out of turn to a man will have her teeth smashed by a burnt brick” to the burning of women at the stake for “spells” and blasphemy to the vicious backlash against women who speak out against sexual abuse. In 2017, Desiree Fairooz, a member of the women’s activist group Code Pink, was arrested and convicted for disorderly conduct for laughing during the confirmation hearing of Attorney General Jeff Sessions; in 2020, art teacher Sheila Buck was arrested and physically dragged away from a public street by Tulsa police for wearing a t-shirt that read “I Can’t Breathe” before a Trump rally; multiple women who have made or publicized high-profile #MeToo allegations have been sued for defamation.
King Ur-Nammu, going by the thrust of Franksian diatribe, might have qualified as a white Anglo-Saxon protestant. In groping for examples 40 centuries after his reign, this lady of the law comes off mighty weak. Arresting anyone for wearing an “I can’t breathe” T-shirt is impossible to justify under the first amendment. The $700,000 Sheila Buck was later awarded for this injustice is a bit more palatable, however, than having her teeth smashed in. Few readers would wonder why Franks omits the reversal of Desiree Fairooz’s conviction. In any event, comparing these two cases to the horrors of ancient Sumerian penalties and burning people at the stake — (weren’t they mostly men?) — ought to bring some second thoughts to the administration at George Washington University.
Franks has a valid point about politicizing school curricula. So do people that don’t think math is racist, classical history and literature are irrelevant, science is a species of patriarchal strongarming, and other kooky contempt for all that maintains and advances Western Civilization. Education is inevitably political. It’s usually a top priority after every coup d’etat or revolution. Anyone who pushes too hard on a historic-cultural pendulum had better watch out for the back swing. That does not preclude the present administration.
Did Franks notice what happened to Scott Adams when he suggested race separation? Did she not notice what didn’t happen to Brittney Cooper suggesting white people should be “taken out”? Nearly anytime anything is said that sounds untoward about Franks’ “oppressed,” by a person of prominence, uproar and consequences follow. Anything the other way around, no matter how extreme, is likely to be overlooked.
Any worthwhile treatment of how the “sides” might maul the first amendment should recognize the fragile sensitivities of “both.” The fact is, there are more than two sides. When neither of the ones considered legit can take as well they give, irresponsible fakes are doing the legitimizing.
It is certainly problematic when an administration uses its powers to censor and control academic curricula. It is also a worthwhile question whether or not what preceded this interference was adequate, biased or even altogether misleading. The number of students and alums today ignorant of the horrors brought on by the Bolshevik Revolution, Mao’s People’s Republic and Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge amounts to a perilous scandal. Reading the annals batters the senses of any sensate observer. After you’re done subtracting mass murder on epic scales from necessary context … well … American slavery no longer stands alone in the annals of moral depravity.
Are any of the people seething to “bring it all down” even coarsely familiar with the statist crimes of the 20th century? Whether they are women, men, or new and improved categories, none seem capable of recognizing what always follows radical transformation by enlightened actors with the clutches of state power. Only the deaf, blind, or comatose can’t hear or read women in 21st century America. Shutting up men, whatever their status, to turn up female volume is a path back to the Stone Age.
READ MORE from Tim Hartnett:
Why Western Accomplishment Provokes Outrage