As y’all undoubtedly know, mental illness is something of a badge of honor in the ivory tower. Screw HIPAA; most people in academia are willing, indeed eager, to tell you all about their mental problems. The students mostly do it to get out of classwork, of course — the minute you get the letter from Student Services, you can go ahead and start filing the “incomplete” paperwork with the registrar — but grad students and professors collect DSM diagnoses and SSRI prescriptions like the Japanese collect Pokemon and used panties.
Given that, and given how lunatic professors’ actual beliefs are, there’s pretty much nothing you can’t get away with saying in the ivory tower if you play your cards right. In much the same way Jon Stewart rode his “clown nose on / clown nose off” act to adulation from the smart set, you can say whatever you want if you keep it ambiguously crazy. (You know how it goes — if you agree with Stewart, he’s doing straight political commentary; but if you disagree with him to the point where he might lose sponsors, c’mon man, he’s just a tv comedian).
I’ll give you an example. Back in 2008, during the Democratic primaries, it was all the rage on campus to be anti-Obama. You’ll just have to trust me on that, I guess, but if you believed my previous “inside the ivory gulag” posts, I’m sure you’ll understand why that fad existed — everyone’s playing the “more radical than thou” game, and what’s more radical than being against the black guy, because his positions are such weak sauce Liberal boilerplate? The real People’s Candidate back then was Dennis Kucinich, and if normal people remember anything about him, it’s that he was more than a little Fox Mulder-y on the question of extraterrestrial life.
Anyway, whenever anyone asked me who I was voting for, I’d give Obama both barrels, always from the most extreme conservative position … but when I noticed the SJW I was talking to had finally cottoned to that, I ended with something like “And what’s worst is that unlike some candidates, Obama refuses to take the saucer people menace seriously!!”
Severian, “Friday Mailbag”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2021-06-04.
June 5, 2024
QotD: Mental health at “Flyover State”
Filed under: Education, Humour, Politics, Quotations, USA — Tags: BarackObama, Criticism, MentalHealth, Progressives, Severian, University — Nicholas @ 01:00
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