How to be an Asshole Without Even Really Trying

On March 16, 2016 By Luther M. SilerIn idiocy5 Comments

…okay, I know I said I wouldn’t be around much today, but I want to write this down before I forget about it and it won’t take long.

On my list of things to do today was an eye doctor appointment to get fitted with contact lenses so that I can see while I’m swimming. I’ve worn contacts before; I tend to flip back and forth between contacts and glasses every couple of years or so. I left with a pair of sample contacts in my prescription and, after thinking about it for a bit, decided to go for a swim.

Why did I think about it? Because the thought you don’t have a replacement pair, so if you lose a lens in the damn pool you’re going to feel pretty stupid rolled through my head, and I almost decided to give my eyes a couple of days to get re-used to the lenses before swimming.

But I didn’t!

As I was swimming, getting reasonably close to my number of goal laps for the day, I noticed a youngish black kid standing rather nervously at the shallow end of the pool. There was one open lane and one person in each of the other three, and he was being kind of weirdly fidgety about getting in. I stood down at the shallow end and gasped for air for a minute or two, waiting to see if he wanted to share my lane, and then swam down to the far end.

As I got down to the far end and turned around, he climbed into the pool, using the ladder, in my lane.

And right about there, at that exact second, I adjusted my goggles and knocked a lens out of place. It wasn’t out of my eye, but it was seriously not in position any longer, and it wasn’t comfortable at all. I fiddled with it for a second, realized my chlorine-soaked hands weren’t doing me any good, and bailed. From the deep end.

Leaving my towel and flip-flops at the other end.

And, as it was starting to hurt, didn’t quite run– the floor’s too slippery for that– but made for the men’s locker room at as high a rate of speed as being half-blind and in bare feet could allow.

It took two or three minutes in the bathroom, maybe, to get the lens back in place, at which point I thought fuck it, I was pretty close to the number of laps I was going to do anyway, and I think I’ve pushed my luck enough. I went back into the pool area, grabbed my flip-flops and my towel, and went off to the hot tub. Meanwhile, this kid’s swimming– not in my lane, notably, but sharing the one next to where I was.

It wasn’t until I was in the shower a few minutes after that that I realized that, as far as he could tell, the fat white guy had practically jumped out of the pool and fled as soon as the black teenager had gotten in. Fled so quickly, in fact, that I’d forgotten to take my shit with me and had had to go back and get it.

So, yeah, that could have gone better.

(Note that I’m fully aware that I am not the center of this kid’s universe and that he probably barely even noticed I was there. But if he did? Shit. It ain’t like I can track him down and apologize. “Hey, that thing I did, that you might not have even noticed and looked really racist if you did? Contact lens. I swear. Wanna go share the pool so I can prove it?”)

It’s time for a plague.

On February 7, 2015February 7, 2015 By Luther M. SilerIn idiocy8 Comments

So, Knighthawk Armory, an organization I’d never heard of prior to today, just posted some fucking amazing pictures to their Facebook page. I’ll show you two of them; click through for the others. They made a Hulk out of scrap metal:

(CORRECTION: They didn’t do it, they just reposted the pictures. Actual artists are Old Steel Art out of Thailand, whose page is mostly not in English but whose pictures are amazing anyway.)

Here’s the fifth comment on the post:

There are some dumb, dumb, dumb motherfuckers in this country, people. Christ.

In which I gently suggest something to white people

On January 21, 2015January 18, 2016 By Luther M. SilerIn Politics14 Comments

Take a look at these two pictures.

What do you think of these two guys? Go ahead, jot down a few thoughts.

Okay.

I hate to break it to you, but you just told yourself more or less exactly what you’d think of Martin Luther King Jr. if he were still alive, or (having just had his 86th birthday, after all) if he’d been allowed to live a normal human lifespan and was no longer with us.

Yes. Really.

No, he wasn’t different. Look at the things white people were saying about Martin Luther King Jr. when he was alive. People say the exact same things about Jackson and Sharpton. Word for goddamn word.

Publicity hound? Outside agitator? Stuck his nose in where it didn’t belong? Communist? White people said all that shit about King, and white people say all that shit about Jackson and Sharpton now. (Okay, Al Sharpton to my knowledge has never been accused of Communism. But Jackson has.) Do you happen to know what King was doing in Memphis when he was killed? Supporting a sanitation workers’ strike. Hardly a national issue, right? He’s just preening for the cameras. Just likes the attention.

Same. Exact. Shit.

Oh, but <insert ethics thing here>?

King was a notorious womanizer who plagiarized much of his doctoral dissertation. These assertions are facts; they aren’t even controversial. Had he not been assassinated, there’s every chance that Coretta would have divorced him eventually. And he’d have had an extra forty-some-odd years for either the press to dig up more dirt or to make more mistakes in his life, depending on how charitable you feel like being about it.

This is not to denigrate King’s legacy. That is unassailable– and, in fact, part of the reason King’s legacy is unassailable is precisely because he was killed. I am trying to point something out that should be obvious: Martin Luther King, Jr. was. a. PERSON.

He was not Jesus.

Hell, Jesus wasn’t even Jesus, but that’s a whole ‘nother post.

He was a man, and white people hated him. Murdered him, in fact.

You are not different by virtue of the fact that you’re alive nearly fifty years after he was shot. If anything, King was more of a leftist than Jackson and Sharpton are now, and given where his rhetoric and politics were going at the time he was killed, maybe I should have included a third picture up there:

(Went ahead and gave y’all a caption, because I know you don’t know what Jeremiah Wright looks like.)

I’m not sure what in particular got on my last nerve about this year’s MLK Day, but… damn. Learn something, y’all. Read some of what this dude had to say– and not just the I Have a Dream speech. Look at what he had to say about Vietnam; muse on the fact that he was calling America “a sick society” as early as 1963 if not before that. King was alive in the sixties, and most white people hated him. If King was still alive in the 2010s, most white people would still hate him. I hate to break it to y’all, but it’s true.

This is Martin Luther King Jr, white people:

An extended quote:

The only change came from America as we increased our troop commitments in support of governments which were singularly corrupt, inept, and without popular support and all the while the people read our leaflets and received regular promises of peace and democracy and land reform. Now they languish under our bombs and consider us, not their fellow Vietnamese, the real enemy. They move sadly and apathetically as we herd them off the land of their fathers into concentration camps, where minimal social needs are rarely met. They know they must move or be destroyed by our bombs. So they go, primarily women, and children and the aged. They watch as we poison their water, as we kill a million acres of their crops. They must weep as the bulldozers roar through their areas preparing to destroy the precious trees. They wander into the towns and see thousands of thousands of the children, homeless, without clothes, running in packs on the streets like animals. They see the children degraded by our soldiers as they beg for food. They see the children selling their sisters to our soldiers, soliciting for their mothers. We have destroyed their two most cherished institutions: the family and the village. We have destroyed their land and their crops. We have cooperated in the crushing of the nation’s only noncommunist revolutionary political force, the United Buddhist Church. This is a role our nation has taken, the role of those who make peaceful revolutions impossible but refusing to give up the privileges and the pleasures that comes from the immense profits of overseas investments. I’m convinced that if we are to get on the right side of the world revolution, we as a nation must undergo a radical revolution of values. We must rapidly begin the shift from a thing-oriented society to a person-oriented society. When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, militarism and economic exploitation are incapable of being conquered.

What do you think this guy would have had to say about the Middle East? About, really, any aspect of current American foreign policy? In a country where people think Barack Obama is a socialist?

There’s something strangely inconsistent about a nation and a press that will praise you when you say, Be non-violent toward Jim Clark, but will curse and damn you when you say, “Be non-violent toward little brown Vietnamese children.”

Go ahead. Replace “Vietnamese” with “Muslim.” And think about how white America would be treating this man if he were still alive.

Ten minutes on Christmas Eve

On December 24, 2014December 24, 2014 By Luther M. SilerIn Stories4 Comments

I am out running errands. I am doing this despite being horribly sick because I am a misanthrope and believe society deserves plague, and also because I need the shit I’m doing done and not all hanging over my head going ha ha ha, you haven’t done us yet and I know ferdamnsure I’m not getting anything done tomorrow. None of the errands I’m doing are remotely Christmas Eve-related; I could have needed to do them any day of the year, but it just happens that I’ve chosen to get them done now.

One of the tasks is to get a bunch of dead CFL bulbs to Lowe’s, which has a recycling station for said bulbs in its entryway. (Sidenote: Do I just not remember how often the old bulbs burned out? Because these things really don’t seem to last any longer than the old ones did. Screw ten years; I know I’ve replaced every bulb in the house at least once or twice since we moved in here.) (Second sidenote: WordPress does not think “sidenote” is a word, and insists on replacing it with “sidetone,” which is definitely not a word.)

Anyway. I’m dressed neutrally; I can tend towards the shabby on weekends, but I’m wearing my nice leather coat and a leather hat, so I figure I don’t immediately scan as broke-assed as I usually do on the weekends, but I’m also not exactly in fashion plate mode; it’s not like I’ve come from work and I’m wearing business clothes or anything. As I’m walking toward the entryway to Lowe’s I see a person who initially scans as either crazy or homeless or both standing in the entryway. She’s asking everyone who comes in if they have a cigarette that she can borrow and everyone’s saying no and avoiding her in the way one typically does when approached by the crazy and/or homeless in public.

(Another sidenote: I got used to this when I lived in Chicago, but it’s extremely rare in South Bend. I know that there are homeless people in this town, but panhandlers, especially in retail spaces, are vanishingly uncommon. So the reaction she’s getting isn’t entirely surprising.)

Anyway. I prepare myself to tell her I don’t smoke (true) and realize that I have a couple of loose dollar bills in my pocket and am in the process of deciding whether I’ll give them to her when she… ignores me. She’s asked every person who walks in. She says nothing to me.

Huh.

Well, okay; I put my CFLs in the recycling bin (they have to be individually bagged and put in one at a time so this takes a while) and then cut through the store to exit through the proper exit rather than exiting through the entrance, which I suppose would have been perfectly fine.

I enter the store behind two grandmotherly-looking black women who, importantly, are pushing an empty cart, generally a signal that you intend to buy something. I am trying to accelerate to cruising speed and have nothing in my hands. There is precisely one greeter standing in the doorway, a white woman of perhaps thirty years of age, who walks right past the two black women to make eye contact with me and ask me if I need help.

The two women stop dead in their tracks. I say no and then look over at them with what I sincerely hope is a did that shit just happen? look on my face. I mean, shit, you couldn’t just do some sort of generic “Welcome to Lowe’s, does anyone need assistance?” and direct that shit to everybody? And not to be stereotypical while I’m accusing somebody else of racism but I suspect the two elderly women pushing a cart just might be slightly more in need of assistance in the home improvement store than the middle-aged dude. Maybe.

The situation ends without anyone raising a ruckus; I nod apologetically to the two women, not sure what the hell else I might do short of causing a scene, and they continue on their way and I head for the exit. You have to cut through the checkout lanes to get out of the store. There are two people sitting on chairs just past the registers, and I cannot explain this any further other than to say I notice them in a way that I didn’t notice many other people as I walked through the store. They… maybe look familiar? I guess? A bit? Or maybe not.

And then the gentleman of the couple looks right at me and says “Hi, Steve.”

Now, in this scenario, let’s pretend that “Steve” is my real first name, which it isn’t, and let’s also pretend (this part is true) that I go by my middle name, and not my first, and that no one anywhere actually calls me Steve. And I swear to you that this guy says Steve in the exact same tone that a girl who had a one-night stand with someone who later found out that he’d been lying about his name might say Steve if she ran into him at the bar again later and wanted to embarrass him. Like, “I know this isn’t really your name, you asshole, and I’m calling you that to draw attention to this fact.”

It… uh… takes me a bit by surprise, especially since these people are vaguely familiar but not enough that I have any idea who they are, and double-especially because of the weirdness of addressing me by a name that no one calls me. I stop. I stare at them, a no-doubt extremely quizzical look on my face.

And then Steve, who was directly behind me, and not expecting me to suddenly stop in my tracks, runs into me, and he apologizes at the very second that the man’s wife figures out what has just happens and breaks into laughter.

“You must be Steve too,” she says.

“Yeah,” I say. “Sorry.”

“Merry Christmas,” she says.

I consider replying Happy Holidays, and then it hits me that given the last ten minutes that might lead to some additional nonsense, and say Merry Christmas to her too and leave the store.

I’m, uh, not gonna go back to Lowe’s for a while.

And none could say they were surprised: on #Ferguson

On November 25, 2014November 25, 2014 By Luther M. SilerIn Politics15 Comments

I keep needing to remind myself of something: I have liked every cop I’ve ever known. The number’s not large, mind you; four, perhaps five people, one of whom’s faces I can remember clearly but whose name has escaped me. At least one is a Facebook friend who may read this. Alternate universe me actually is a police officer; if you Google search my real name most of the results you’ll get are for the other guy since I’m as diligent as I can be about keeping my name off the Web.

But as much as I want to generalize, I keep having to remind myself: I know cops. I am friends, or at least cordial acquaintances, with two of them. They aren’t all bad people, as much as it frequently seems like they are. They’re just embedded in a system that encourages them to be bad people, and if that’s not the most understated use of the word “just” that I see today something has gone terribly wrong. Cops aren’t all bad people. Cop culture fucking sucks. You could say the same thing about gamers, by the way, a group I consider myself a part of. The big difference, of course, is that gamers aren’t shooting young black men down in the street and getting away with it.

I’ve read through some of the grand jury testimony that was released today, and all of Darren Wilson’s testimony in particular. I’m not a news organization and I don’t have to pretend to be objective: Darren Wilson is a liar. He is a liar and a murderer and he is lying in his grand jury testimony and there is nothing that can convince me otherwise. Consider this:

“The third one could be fatal if he hit me right.”

This is Darren Wilson at the hospital, no more than a few hours after he murdered Mike Brown:

From head-on you have to look carefully to notice that his lower lip looks a little bit scraped. The redness on his face only vaguely resembles a bruise; it looks more like a sunburn or a bad day with his razor to me.

This man wants us to believe that he thought he was being beaten to death. Wants us to believe that Michael Brown was so mighty, so powerful and enraged, that he could have beaten a grown man to death with three punches.

No.

He literally calls Michael Brown a “demon” on page 225 of the testimony, the same page where he slips and calls Brown “it” instead of “he.” He says that holding onto Brown’s arm was “like a five-year-old hanging onto Hulk Hogan.”

Darren Wilson, according to his own testimony, is six feet four inches tall and 210 pounds. He is not a small man by any means. What he is is a liar. Michael Brown was murdered a hundred and fifty feet away from Darren Wilson’s car. There are no official police photographs of the body because supposedly the photographer forgot to charge his batteries. And Wilson’s story hinges on a call in to dispatch that, somehow, dispatch just magically never got.

This man is a liar and a murderer. His description of the events not only fail to line up with direct evidence– the location of Brown’s body and the evidence of his own face make this perfectly clear– but his story from the beginning fails to pass the smell test in any meaningful way. He describes a cloud of dust rising as Brown charges him (p. 226) and, astonishingly, claims that Brown was “almost bulking up to run through the shots” (p. 228), as if this young black man was literally the Hulk or some sort of inhuman monster.

He also describes Brown as charging him with one hand in his pants. He’s wanting to make us believe that he thought Brown had a gun; I’m too busy trying to picture the image of a person bent over and charging headfirst toward someone with one hand down his pants to even consider the possibility. It’s so ridiculous that I can’t even talk about it in a straightforward manner. The image is comical.

The grand jury, remember, didn’t have to convict this person. That wasn’t their job. Their job was to decide whether it was reasonable to take him to trial. Let that float through your head for a moment. This man killed an unarmed teenager in the streets, claimed that he was being beaten to death and yet has marks on him less severe than my toddler has inflicted on me, claimed that, at 6’4″ and 210 pounds he was “like a five-year-old” next to an eighteen-year-old kid barely an inch taller than him… and the grand jury didn’t think there needed to be a trial.

Incidentally: he repeatedly insists that Michael Brown hit him with his right hand while he was punching him through the car window.

Darren Wilson was in the driver’s seat of his police car.

Brown was hitting him with his right hand, beating him nearly to death, according to Wilson’s testimony.

And the bruises and marks are on the right side of Wilson’s face.

Think about that for a moment.

The sickness in this country is very nearly too much to bear.

A story, if you don’t mind. Two, actually. Oddly, both take place on the same highway.

I am driving in the left lane on 465 south, the Indianapolis bypass. It is late at night, and I am (admittedly) speeding. I pull alongside a vehicle on my right side, who is more or less matching my speed. I glance in my rear-view mirror to see a vehicle in the distance behind me, a vehicle that goes from “in the distance” to “ten feet off my bumper” in a matter of seconds.

The car to my right is still not changing speed; the one behind me is very clearly in a huge hurry. So I accelerate to get out of his way. And the very second I hit 81 miles per hour– I did admit I was already speeding, but hitting 81 put me in a different bracket for my ticket– the unmarked cop car behind me hits the lights and pulls me over.

I was livid. If he’d pulled me over for the speed I was already driving at, I’d not have been so angry. I’d just have been busted. But I was literally only driving the speed he pulled me over for because he’d come out of nowhere and he was tailgating me. For all I knew, he was drunk– again, it was dark and an unmarked car; all I could see behind me were headlights.

I’m not going to pretend that I remember the precise conversation, but I was not polite with the cop.

A second story, on the same highway: It’s nighttime this time too, I’m coming home from my college graduation party, and in fact am still wearing my graduation gown. This time, I just get popped for 75 in a 65 at a speed trap. (I feel compelled to point out here that I haven’t gotten a ticket of any kind in seven years. Just FYI.) It’s fair, and I’m not angry about it. Unfortunately, I can’t find my proof of insurance, or my registration, or something. I know it’s somewhere in the car, but it’s not in an envelope or anything and I can’t track it down. The cop tells me he’ll give me a minute to find it and goes back to his car to do whatever cops do for fifteen minutes when they pull you over.

I find my documents and, not thinking anything of it, get out of my car, my graduation gown still flapping in the wind, and walk back to his car to give him my papers.

He, absorbed in whatever he’s doing, doesn’t see me coming– doesn’t even realize I’m there until I tap on his window, startling him.

Now: tell the exact same stories, only imagine I’m black.

On discomfort with entertainment

On March 19, 2014March 20, 2014 By Luther M. SilerIn Music, Politics, Stories4 Comments

AZ1XOjJCAAAgir_.jpg_large Lemme tell you an uncomfortable story. I don’t particularly like this story but it’s relevant so I’m gonna.

It is, oh, probably late 1998 sometime. I’m in my first quarter as a grad student at the University of Chicago. There are a lot of things I was good at in college; going to parties was never really one of them. It is odd, therefore, that I am at a party right now, and furthermore a party full of people who I only barely know, as our program has only just started, and– wonder among wonders– I am having fun. Quite a bit of fun, as it turns out, as several other people at the party have turned out to be huge fans of late eighties and nineties-era hiphop, and it is blaring on the stereo as our story begins. I am sitting next to another guy who has also just started at U of C and is loosely in the same Divinity school program I am; I haven’t talked to him in many years, but I suspect he is either a college professor or a stylite now.

(EDIT: Looked him up. College professor.)

We are having a grand old time. Pimpin’ ain’t easy by Big Daddy Kane comes on the rotation. We both have the song memorized. We are rapping. There is nothing better than Divinity School students rapping, by the way.

Do you happen to know this song? You may know where I’m headed right now. I need to emphasize this: we are being loud. It’s a loud party, mind you, but we’re on our third or fourth song in a row at this point and whoever is choosing the music is clearly egging us along.

We hit this verse:

I see trim and I bag it, take it home and rag it
The Big Daddy law is anti-faggot

There was not actually a needle scratch at that time, and the party did not actually come to a screeching, silent halt. That said, the beat drops away for the words “anti-faggot,” so they’re especially pronounced and hard to miss. But the two of us stopped, as what we had just said hit both of us at the same time, just in time for the next few lines of the song:

That means no homosexuality;
What’s in my pants’ll make you see reality
And if you wanna see a smooth black Casanova — BEND OVAH!

“My God, that’s terrible,” one of us said. I think it was me.

That was fifteen years ago (Jesus!) and I’m still more than a little ashamed of it.

Relevant: the hostess of the party was the first out lesbian (first “out” person of any gender, actually) who I’d ever called a friend*. I’m going to say this now without any idea of whether it’s actually true, but it was my perception at the time: IU had had a decent-sized gay community, but there was an unofficial “gay dorm” at IU and while I had known a couple of gay people through class I didn’t hang out with any of them. Alicia and I were talking about working-class lesbian bars during our first conversation, so the atmosphere was a trifle different at U of C.

(* 24 HOURS LATER EDIT: this is not true; I had at least one good friend who identified as gay in college. I had forgotten because the last I checked she was dating a guy. But in college she was definitely at least mostly into girls.)

Also relevant: I’m pretty sure it was her music collection we were listening to. There’s a small chance she’ll read this, as we’re Facebook friends; she can correct me if she wants. I don’t remember paying any particular social penalty for what happened– I’m pretty sure she and the other guy are still friends, and no one appeared to get mad at us. But it stuck with me anyway.

Here’s what got me thinking about this story, and yes, I’m using Scalzi to generate a post again. I’ve talked several times around here about where my personal lines are on what sorts of entertainment and what sorts of businesses I’ll support with my money. But John’s focus on what “problematic” (his word) artifacts you have enjoyed got me thinking. This isn’t about refusing to see Mel Gibson movies or eat at Chick-Fil-A; it’s about stuff that I know is fucked up and I like anyway. I can’t really listen to Big Daddy Kane anymore because the subject matter gets to me. But I can’t stop myself from rapping along if, say, something comes up on random play– and I should point out that It’s a Big Daddy Thing and Long Live the Kane remain on my hard drive, along with no doubt any amount of other problematic rap songs, a lot of which don’t have “It was 1989!” to excuse them any longer.

I dunno. I don’t play them around other people and I won’t be letting my son listen to them. I don’t– well, not often– deliberately choose to listen to them. But it ain’t like it would be difficult to hit delete and I haven’t done that yet either.

The last time I read The Lord of the Rings I did it with a particular eye toward looking for racism. I know that Tolkien catches a lot of abuse for the racism in his books and having read them a thousand times I find it overblown. One of my other favorite authors, on the other hand, is H. P. Lovecraft, who was undeniably a big ole’ racist and I love his stories anyway. Then again, they’re both dead, and they’ve both been dead a long time; long enough that if I’d used extra Os in the first long there nobody would criticize me for it. Does that excuse them? Does it excuse me?

I dunno. I hope so?

(Also: While a lot of the music I was listening to in late elementary and middle school and high school and since then was horrifyingly homophobic and sexist, I feel compelled to point out that I was eating up the anti-white/Afrocentric stuff just as much as everything else. Professor Griff got a lot of rotation from me back then, along with X-Clan and a few others. So I didn’t necessarily shy away from stuff that was critiquing me. I don’t know what that says about me or if it’s relevant but I may as well throw it in. I would not be the person I am today if I hadn’t started listening to Boogie Down Productions in fifth grade. Hiphop, for whatever it’s worth, is baked into my soul in a lot of ways. That includes both the good stuff and the bad.)

(Also also: the most recent example of liking problematic things? True Detective, clearly, which was, to put it charitably, unkind to its female characters and utterly dismissive toward people of color. I recognize these things, will not argue with people who disliked the show because of them, and loved the show regardless. Which is an expression of my own privilege, granted. I’m recognizing it, admit it, and… don’t really know what to do about it, if indeed I even need to.)

Regarding the “White Man March”…

On March 15, 2014 By Luther M. SilerIn idiocyLeave a comment

Some of the pointing and laughing on the internet today has been rather hilarious.

God, do I miss Preacher.

Think before you post

On February 16, 2014February 16, 2014 By Luther M. SilerIn idiocy47 Comments

This image has popped up at least four or five times in my Facebook feed in the last couple of days, and instead of starting the exact same fight in several different places I’m just gonna go ahead and start it here. I don’t know who the hell Joseph Sobran is, and I’m not about to Google him, but I’m pretty sure he’s either a moron or a racist. Because let’s spend just a few seconds thinking about what might have changed in American history and American culture since nineteen fucking fourteen.

Actually, no, let’s not even start with that; let’s start with the fact that it ain’t exactly hard to find high school Latin classes nowadays. Greek might be a trifle more difficult but it’s not like it doesn’t exist. And who was taking Greek and Latin a hundred years ago in what Sobran is stupidly referring to as “high school”? Rich white boys. Basically the only folks who had access to any postsecondary education of any kind at all in 1914.

Just to make sure we’re clear: “High school” as an institution in this country barely even existed in 1914. You got through sixth grade or so and that was it. Maybe the top five percent of everybody got further education beyond that, and if they did, they sure as shit didn’t call it “high school.” It was college prep, generally under individual tutors. You didn’t start seeing any real broad-based concept that people should attend school for twelve years until the late 30s or early 40s, and even then if you weren’t white and male and relatively well-off you could fuck right the hell off.

Brown v. Board of Education was in 1954, for Christ’s sake, which means we weren’t even trying to educate anybody in this country who wasn’t white until sixty years ago. And even then… hell, if you can’t remember the struggles over public schools in the sixties you have no business commenting on education in this country under any circumstances. If you are able to take a look at the incredibly vast way in which access to education has expanded in this country over the last hundred years and your take-away from that is “Durrr, people used to be smarter,” then you should not only throw yourself into a lake but you probably ought to never speak to me again.

Sub-rant: I’m also sick to fucking death of hearing about colleges and people affiliated with them complaining about having to remediate incoming freshmen. If only there were some mechanism by which colleges and universities could determine who was able to enroll in their classes! OH, right, they’re completely one hundred percent in charge of that. Raise your standards or quit fucking bitching. Assholes.

EDIT: Fuck it; I went ahead and Googled Joseph Sobran. Oh gee look I was exactly right: he was an anti-Semite (speaking of people who generally weren’t allowed access to higher education in 1914) and a Holocaust denier. So, great job, folks; this is an awesome guy to put dumb-ass quotes from on your Facebook page.