Tags
'Safe Spaces for Students, Al Qaeda, Bambi, ISIS, Peter Pan, The Borgias, The Female Eunoch, The Glass Menagerie, The Great Gatsby, The Muppets, The reformatiion, The Yellow Room
Never Never Land
“Sorry. You can’t watch it.”
“But it’s a classic!”
“Too violent. The hero’s mother gets wasted in the opening frame.”
“Whaaaaat?”
“Hmmm. And I’m not too sure about ‘Thumper’ either.”
“How about this one?”
“Good heavens, no!”
“They’re all children!”
“Who live in a jungle; never wash; never seem to have any homework; and are chased by horrible nasty men; paedophiles I shouldn’t wonder. And I don’t like the relationship between the hero and the heroine; a lot of sexual tension there if you ask me.”
“They’re kids!”
“All in their bed-clothes! Very suggestive. And as for the pirate; Captain Hook! Too muck Freudian undertones there.”
“All right. You win. I’ll do some of my Bible Studies…”
“Over my dead body! Murder! Wars, pillaging,… and other things!”
“The readings are about Christ and his miracles!”
“Oh, I know all about them! Changing water into wine; bloody alchy! Feeding five thousand with bread and fish – uncooked no doubt; very unhygienic! Raising the dead? That’s how you spread disease! And don’t talk to me about Mary Magdalene!”
“Well can I watch some old Muppet shows?”
“Certainly not! Bloody Communists! Here. Read this. ..”
“What? ‘Introducing Feminism’? What’s that all about?”
“It has lots of nice pictures in it, to make it easy to understand.”
“Is that ’cause women are thick? Ouch! You hit me!”
“Regard it as part of your ‘learning curve’. Now come on, it’s time for your breast-feeding.”
“But I’m twenty-three years old!”
HERE ENDETH THE LESSON
Is Nappy Rash Infectious?
I kid you not. The above scenario is being acted out both in out former colonies, presently known as the United States of America, and here in Blighty. I never knew that students could be so sensitive. We weren’t. You couldn’t get awarded for your degree until you’d paid at least five visits to the Skin Clinic and were not immune to penicillin. How the hell anyone can lecture in History now is beyond me. The Greek and Roman Empires? Too violent. And slaves as well. Good grief; they even shagged the pretty ones! The Dark Ages? Too much blood and thunder from the barbarians. And they had slaves. They even shagged the ugly ones! The Renaissance? The Borgias? Say no more. The Reformation? Eeek! Catholics and Protestants wiping each other out in the millions. The Spanish Inquisition? Auto-da-Fees? Oliver Cromwell? Regicide? Louis XIV? The French Revolution? The British Empire? World Wars One and Two? The Atomic Bomb? The Cold War? Feminism? At least the Fascists and Communists didn’t read “The Female Eunoch’ to you before killing you.
Apparently a ‘Traffic Violation’ means a shag in a car nowadays. And it’s all too traumatic for words! But here’s a thought for how to deal with the wave of WIMPs and WIFPs. Why not get them to go the Bronx and /or Leith to complain about the inherent sexism in some of the Rappers songs? “Slap ma Bitch” would not necessarily mean cruelty to dumb animals – unless they were blondes, of course. Or why don’t the wee, precious darlings try and teach some Anger Management classes to some Hell’s Angels? Or the benefits of aromatherapy to ISIS? Or the culinary delights of pork scratchings to Al Qaeda? The possibilities are endless.
Cogito ergo dumb
Naturlich the sensitive nancy boys and girls who are too delicate for the real world can at least now be spared the anally-retentive drivel spouted by their profs about such literary pygmies as ‘The Great Gatsby’, ‘The Yellow Room’, “The Glass Menagerie’ and other similar offal. They may have been daring for middle class America in the twenties and fifties; but we have all moved on since then. They’re now called ‘Soaps’ – a form of sadistic brain-washing. But perhaps what is really nice for all the rest of the normal students, it makes the job market a great deal more attractive. What employer in his or her right mind in going to employ any loser whose CV boasts of how they read nothing but ‘Noddy’ books for their degree, and banned any intellectual thought from staining their pre-pubescent fantasy world? Yeehah!
John J McCabe.
Copyright, 2015.