Dog Food for Everyone!

When I was around ten years old I used to play a game with my cousin Jim (who was just a couple of years younger)—a game we called "Guess the Taste" which required a blindfold and a can opener. Occasionally my sister would also join us. The person wearing the blindfold would have to eat whatever combination of "goodies" the director provided, and as you can imagine this meant that one or the other of us would wind up eating canned dog food with spicy mustard or peanut butter with garden slugs. It was a dreadful game but what made it endurable was that it was democratic. If I gave Jim a pickle dipped in kitty litter he would get revenge by handing me an Oreo cookie with a housefly inside. You couldn’t refuse to eat "the thing" as we called it. In for a penny, in for a pound.

I was reminded of "Guess the Taste" last evening while channel surfing. Suddenly, there appeared on my screen two overgrown ten year olds and wouldn’t you know it—they were playing with a can opener and a blindfold though of course they didn’t know .

The gassy, superannuated, and undifferentiated ten year olds were none other than right wing commentator Glen Beck and Harvard professor of law, Alan Dershowitz.

Glen Beck was saying that he counts as one of his friends a university president who reports that college professors are terrible people. Dershowitz jumped right in by saying that there is no more cowardly class of people than tenured college faculty and then he went on to say that most of them are aging liberals who harangue today’s students with political demagoguery left over from the sixties and these people will defend the rights of the very people who want to destroy our nation, etc. etc.. I think he also said something about how scandalous it is that the salaries of these professors are paid for by the taxpayers. (You’ve always got to make a bad taste even worse so the one with the blindfold won’t know what the original thing might be. But I digress.)

Heck. I’m not prey to the pretense that my views about the world are legion. My sense of humor alone assures that I’m mostly a lonely man. (For instance I think it’s funny that "Episcopal" and "Pepsi-cola" are composed from the same letters.)

I’ve been teaching in higher education for close to thirty years. My father was a highly successful college president. I think I can say with assurance that I’ve lived most of my life in the vicinity of American colleges and universities.

I have absolutely no idea what Glen Beck and Dershowitz are carrying on about. Professors are in my experience as uncategorizable as New York City cab drivers. Some are right wingers. Some are lefties. Some are drunks. Some are not. Some (like myself) love John Wayne movies. Some think "the Duke" was a fascist.

Beating up on "the professoriate" is as stupid and pointless as playing "Guess the Taste" except it’s even stupider since real ten year olds don’t pretend to moral or political superiority.

Colleges remain this nation’s leading forum for the free expression of ideas. Some ideas are better than others. Today, for instance, they don’t burn women at the stake in Salem, Massachusetts. Alright, I’m spray painting the lily.

Glen Beck is a smart fella. But really, c’mon. There are right wing professors who helped George W. Bush prattle on and on about the idea that global warming is a fiction.

As for Dershowitz: we know he will put anything on a fork if he thinks you can’t see.

S.K.

Author: stevekuusisto

Poet, Essayist, Blogger, Journalist, Memoirist, Disability Rights Advocate, Public Speaker, Professor, Syracuse University View all posts by stevekuusisto