Hamilton College and SJW protests, and humor

The article is written by William Jacobson, my favorite writer at Legal Insurrection and proprietor of the site. He is writing about the present state of the leftist swing of his own alma mater.

An activist woman went into campus pub and noticed an inordinate mass of upper class males. The whole place is lousy with them.

The photograph of the pub reminded me of the row of houses on Auraria Campus here in Denver. Planning for the multi-university campus involved buying an entire neighborhood. They decided to keep one street of small houses and gut them then remodel for various purposes. One small home was transformed into a pub. I've only ever been inside once for a glimpse. Although rather nice I never went back for the reason this woman describes. It wasn't my kind of place. Too much testosterone wafting in the air.  Too much cheap beer. Indifferent pizza. Too noisy, too rowdy.

In actuality the place isn't any of those things but that was my gut feeling anyway. The simple fact is I had no business there. Nothing good could come of me hanging out there. I had no desire to meet people there.

At Hamilton, the women make the same individual decision. Truly, that's all there is to say about that. Anything beyond that basic truth is discussing incidentals.

Jackobson writes about the history of the place. The events describing its leftward swing. The new president. The change in atmosphere. The tribulations. He quotes passages from the school paper.

A protest group set out to disrupt the usual lunch demographic by collecting and occupying tables.

Fine. That's precisely how you mix. So long as you actually buy lunch. But sitting there simply being and occupying isn't going to cut so far as running a business goes. You go there because you want to be there and mix.

There is a great deal more at the link, a thorough description of the SWJ activities, their positions, but most of all, their feelings.

Huntington says that she and her friends had entered the Pub intending to have lunch, only to “immediately turn around and go eat somewhere else.” She calls this a reaction to the “spatial phenomena” where “women do not feel welcome in the space, along with people of color and LGBTQIA+ members.”

That exact same thing happened to me yesterday. I told the ladies that I'm walking down to Tony's market and asked them if I can bring anything back for them, some top ham for nibbling, perhaps, and some excellent cheese. When I got to Tony's I was distressed to lean the whole place is closed. For good. Boom. Just like that. Since I promised, I felt obliged to return with something good so I walked over to Torchy's to bring back a couple of tacos. But the line inside ran the full length of the building, two to three people deep, not single file, and the thought of standing so long among all those able-bodied gorgeous young people graciously holding doors open for me and engaging me in earnest and eager conversation, put me right off. So I came back empty handed.

The contemporary campus cult of intersectionality asserts that oppression and discrimination results from an individual’s various social identities and that those with certain combinations of identities are more likely to be oppressed than others. While there is no doubt that a disabled black woman is likely to experience more oppression than an able-bodied white male, elite college students continue to apply the concept of intersectionality to their own activism in a way which derides the individual agency of the historically-oppressed peoples they aim to represent. 

I know! In my twenties I knew a young man named Issac. Decades before the concept of intersectionality took hold on campuses, this man exemplified the whole thing. He is a case study. He was a bit overweight, black, gay, deaf, and a bit flamboyant. His manner and his dress somewhat effeminate. The other deaf people he hung out with couldn't understand a word that he said due to his black jive lingo expressed in sign. I talked to him some dozen to fifteen times on Saturday at the same place. He told me that I am the only person he's met who understands what he says, apparently by my responses, and the other deaf told me that they do not comprehend him, and I must admit that he is very odd. Our conversations were heartfelt. He went straight to the core. All that he spoke to me about as we drank beer outside on the crowded patio, and it was all very touching, was about his difficulties fitting in with the other deaf, difficulties fitting in with other gays, his difficulties relating with hearing blacks, difficulty with his own family. He was set back in so many ways that his path is utterly unique. With all that social stuff troubling him it was amazing to me how he can be so pleasant, creative and fun and enthusiastic while being so isolated. Not just feeling isolated, actually isolated. Yet there we were having fun in a club on a weekend, with all that emotional trouble simmering directly beneath it and that was possible only by being there.

So that's all there is to that.

The whole reading exercise got me laughing so hard that my sides hurt. I dropped down to comments and their remarks evoke various responses. I had to force myself to stop laughing in the dark at 5:00 in the morning because my gut was squeezing so hard it was turning into stone. What a way to wake up, splitting a hernia by laughing.

Laughing is like isometric exercises. It hurts.

It was the part about the woman speaking for LGBTetc and handicapped, lumping all women in with them, feeling themselves minority. I thought of that scene in Mommy Dearest where Joan Crawford says, "But y'a are a minority, Blanch, y'a are a minority." I went for the clip on YouTube, it runs in fifteen seconds, then YouTube presents another scene of Joan Crawford bringing up the silver tray with a rat underneath the platter dome. The whole setup is funny. The hallway, the furniture, the silver tray, her dress, her perverse makeup, her hair, her waiting outside the room for reaction, her sinister laughter, it's altogether hilarious. I finally understood what is so funny about that scene and why it's referred to so often. I was a complete nutter laughing my ass off at how that scene is produced. Historic comedy gold right there.

Then another commenter linked this. I want this book for my nephews. And so do a lot of other people want this imaginary book. If you go to Amazon and start typing "A tiger comes to ..." Amazon will autofill, "tea" and "pint." That means a lot of other people searched for this book that doesn't exist.

His mockup is based on the children's book The Tiger Who Came to Tea that is banal compared to his version.