It’s easy to laugh at a grown man in a rubber dog suit chewing on a squeaky toy. Maybe too easy, in fact, because to laugh is to dismiss it, denigrate it – ignore the fact that many of us have found comfort and joy in pretending to be animals at some point in our lives.
Secret Life of the Human Pups is a sympathetic look at the world of pup play, a movement that grew out of the BDSM community and has exploded in the last 15 years as the internet made it easier to reach out to likeminded people. While the pup community is a broad church, human pups tend to be male, gay, have an interest in dressing in leather, wear dog-like hoods, enjoy tactile interactions like stomach rubbing or ear tickling, play with toys, eat out of bowls and are often in a relationship with their human “handlers”.
Victor Davis Hanson also spoke about another subject dear to my heart. The failure of academia and the fact that we should stop pouring money down the rathole that is public education. Especially the university system that has become a cesspool. Hanson speaks about it as follows:
College.
"The university will either change soon or simply implode; its present course is unsustainable and rests on the premise that schizophrenic deans and presidents can still manage to write and say things to student cry bullies that they hope their donors and alumni never read or hear.
Colleges overcharge insolvent students through tuition increases far beyond the annual rate of inflation—the Ponzi scheme predicated on guaranteed federal loans that cannot be repaid by poorly educated graduates and drop-outs, many with little skills or demonstrable education. Obama has already promised relief to the disabled student debtor: expect that more amnesties will follow, probably predicated on the basis of race, class, and gender. In the meantime, the number of disabled indebted students will mysteriously soar.
In response, the university freely imposes speech codes, allows racial segregation, and winks at censorship of texts. It has suspended due process in cases of allegations of sexual assault, and allows 1930s-like violence (reminiscent of the Brownshirts) to disrupt public lectures and assemblies—if the agendas of the protestors profess social awareness. Only the hard sciences and professional schools in engineering, mathematics, and medicine have for the moment partially escaped the ruin.
Online colleges are far cheaper and more concerned with offering skill sets for cash. Their spread has so far been checked by the lack of general education enrichment, by the mythical college experience of physically living in or walking about a beautiful campus, and by the lack of prestige accorded a for-profit, online diploma. But if the traditional American college has largely given up on liberal education (due to its deductive and politicized mandatory –studies courses), if being on a campus can equate to an unpleasant ordeal of thought policing and mob rule, and if a diploma from a major university does not suggest that one knows anything about history, literature, science, or basic facts concerning our civilization, why would the university need to continue? Cui bono?
It runs now partly on past momentum, and partly because taxpayers and alumni donors still subsidize it. If a majority were to feel that their money only empowers fascism among faculty and administration, and if they were to conclude that students are not sympathetic in their indebtedness, but rather increasingly arrogant and ignorant in their passive aggressions, then they might well simply pull the plug on what is becoming their Frankenstein monster."
Well put. Online degrees will replace the bogus university experience and many hack professors will lose their rice bowl. It couldn't happen to a bigger bunch of scumbags.
So says Victor Davis Hanson the noted writer David on military and foreign affair on Instapundit.
He notes how the cumulative effect of the Obama administration and the deterioration of our cultural norms has lead very dangerous ground. Something I have thought for some time. He talks about the effect on Colleges, Race and the Economy. But I find his most interesting thoughts are about tribalism.
"A multiracial, single-cultural U.S. was an historical fluke. No other society has ever quite pulled that feat off—not Austria-Hungary, not Rwanda, not Iraq, not Yugoslavia. To ensure multiracial harmony, cultural unity (or what is now dismissively written off as the "melting pot") was essential.
Yet the Obama era has reawakened ethnic chauvinism and multiculturalism in a way we have never quite seen before in recent American history. Who would have thought that in 2009, the racist firebrand, tax-delinquent, anti-Semite, former FBI informant, and conspiracist Al Sharpton would become the chief presidential advisor on race, or that the attorney general would refer to blacks as “my people” and the rest of the country as “cowards,” or that the president would urge Latinos to “punish our enemies,” or that something chauvinistic called “Black Lives Matter” would consider a corollary ecumenical “All Lives Matter” as racist, or that “white privilege” would be a slur hurled against the largely working white classes by mostly minority and white elites in academia, politics, journalism and the arts?
Coupled with years of open borders, a failure to enforce immigration laws, hostility to integration and assimilation, and racial preferences in hiring and admissions, the Obama administration in just over seven years has nearly achieved its aims of racializing the American experience to such a degree that everyone must now belong to his particular tribe first, and begrudgingly remain an American a distant second.
An example of our future is found in Rome around the early 5th century AD onward, when parochialism and localism reasserted themselves, as Civis Romanus sum was rendered irrelevant. I fear that self-segregation is already institutionalized, as people migrate to live with like kind in red and blue states. And states such as California have divided into two antithetical societies, in which an interior Fresno is about as akin to coastal Newport or Palo Alto as Somalia is to Switzerland.
This is not going to end well, largely because the remedy—melting-pot assimilation, integration, and intermarriage—simply would threaten far too many lucrative careers ranging from those of an Al Sharpton and Black Lives Matter to La Raza and Jorge Ramos. When a person pledges his career and future to the color of his skin or tribe, he will fight tooth and nail for that crutch, given that his greatest fear is to be judged on the content of his character. Tribal identification is historically the last refuge for scoundrels."
I think he is exactly right. In fact he explains the essential appeal and continuing popularity of Donald Trump. That is what the pajama boys at NRO don't get and never will.
