John J Miller started the day here in The Corner with the story of Professor Robert Klein Engler, who was fired from Roosevelt University and only discovered why two months later. It was for telling a joke:
A group of sociologists did a poll in Arizona regarding the state’s new immigration law. Sixty percent said they were in favor, and 40 percent said, ‘No hablo Ingles.’
For NR last year I wrote a “Happy Warrior” column about Milan Kundera’s first novel, about a loyal Party member in newly Communist Czechoslovakia with a great future ahead of him who makes one mistake: He makes a joke, and his life is ruined. He’s expelled from the Party and his university, and sent to work in the mines.
I first read The Joke as a schoolboy, when we thought such deranged scenarios were confined to the Warsaw Pact. I re-read it on the flight to Vancouver, the day before the British Columbia “Human Rights” Tribunal devoted the best part of a day’s court proceedings to hearing testimony from “expert witnesses” on the “tone” of my jokes. Fresh from that triumph, the BC HRT then convicted and fined Guy Earle, a stand-up comedian who committed the hitherto unknown crime of putting down a lesbian heckler homophobically. At the time of my NR column, I was writing about Dr. Lazar Greenfield, president-elect of the American College of Surgeons, whose career came to a sudden end after he wrote a light-hearted Valentine’s Day piece for Surgery News on the health benefits for women of semen. Although right on the facts, he offended the tender sensitivities of his feminist colleagues, and his decades of illustrious service availed him naught. Like Kundera’s protagonist, Dr. Greenfield had made an ideologically unsound joke, and was disappeared: Surgery News wound up pulping the entire issue.
And now we have Professor Engler. As I wrote in NR:
As a waggish adolescent, I liked the absurdity of the situation in which Ludvik finds himself. Later, I came to appreciate Kundera had skewered the touchiness of totalitarianism, and the consequential loss of any sense of proportion.
We are not yet a totalitarian society, but the touchiness of America’s wretched academy is certainly providing a fine pilot program.
As a gay Progressive of Color, I find Mr. Steyn's "comments" about the "touchiness" of those who seek a civil society respectful of all its members to be outrageously insulting and tremendously hurtful. It is unforgivable that he be allowed to post articles on the Internet. NRO should immediately dismiss Mr Steyn, and remove all previous contributions he has made.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseNothing can make up for the hurt he has caused, but it would be a good start; at least until the government could regulate such hate speech on the web.
I'm outraged!
(Please read in an Al Sharpton voice)
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseI find this comment outrageous. Where did you get your 'I'm special and have the right to never be outraged" card? I don't care if you're a purple people eater, grow some self worth!
Maybe NR should go dark for a day to protest such an outrageous comment.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseI think your sarcasm detector may not be functioning.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseBram, I think yours may have overloaded. Check his last sentence. ;)
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseRight. Disappear (someone) and then erase. Worse than the Witness Protection program under the "Justice" Department. Fits. MVD, NKVD, KGB comes to mind.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseFlamingo ... YOU are the reason Steyn wrote this post! I see you are an up-to-date member of the humorless left!
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseStephen, DMW, check your sarcasm detectors. They seem to be malfunctioning.
Reply to this commentLinkReport Abuse(I certainly hope they are, anyway.)
I'm a follower of Christ. All the nasty jokes I heard about Christ hurt me as well as you feel hurt by MS in his writing. But I never attempt to silence those who 'hurt my feelings'. I create my own answer to them by the life Christ encouraged me to have in His teachings found in the Bible. Lighting a candle is always better than cursing the darkness, Cheers.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseThank you, Mr. Steyn.
No one should ever be allowed to forget that it was the progressive intelligentsia in Germany who peddled hardest the virtues of the National Socialist German Workers Party.
Nazism in Germany was almost exclusively a marketing project for progressive college professors.
Of course, here in America, the progressive intelligentsia thinks they've improved on things by dropping the "National" to "Anti-National" (and, of course, changing the Deutsche to American).
So, here in the US, we can call them "Antzis", for short.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseNice formulation, but the anti-nationalist part won't stick in the long run. The more power that the leftists get, the more that they will discover that they like nationalism. Of course, it will be nationalism according to their definition. And God help us when the day comes that an American leftist decides that he likes the military.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseThat day has already been seen four times - during the TR, Wilson, FDR, and Johnson administrations. (Granted the last one was a mixed case.) in fact, you could argue that both Nixon and Bush Jr. were Progressives in many ways and they certainly had many pro-military supporters on the left (though more for their domestic policies).
The point is, the left is far from consistently anti-military and have several times already been happy to use it to flex their muscle domestically to keep the peasants in line.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseEven for you this is a stretch.. How can you conflate nationalist nazi supporters with the supposedly anti-American left? What do they have in common?
Reply to this commentLinkReport Abuse"What do they have in common?"
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseHe doesn't like either of them. Other than that, not much at all.
"How can you conflate nationalist nazi supporters with the supposedly anti-American left?"
A desire for the State to constantly increase its control of society? Ardent environmentalism? Belief in animal rights? Hatred of Big Business? Anti-semitism? "The personal is political?" Blaming all society's problems on "the other?"
This is a simplistic response, of course, but it's fairly clear nazis and the present American left have a good deal in common.
More, IMO, than the modern American right, which at its root wants less government intervention in society, as un-Nazi an ideal as can be imagined.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseTry reading Jonah's Liberal Facism. Clearly you need to be enlightened.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseGreat little post by Mr. Steyn. Will someone from "the other side" come on the comment threat here and defend this horrible behavior by Roosevelt U.? (It might be hard to take it seriously. It is so farcical, that anyone defending it might actually be doing it as a joke/tongue-in-cheek...)
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseA fair warning here for aspiring graduate students who think they are strong enough to not keep quiet after keeping quiet and worshiping Baal for umpteen years.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseI thought the same thing about Kundera's The Joke when I read it 20 years ago, and to the situation of 1960's Eastern Europe seemed somewhat exotic. But it doesn't seem exotic anymore. Some of that is just age and having traveled a little bit. But it's also because the same little things that many Czech writers used to describe are now popping up all over the place in "the West." Pretty sad.
Incidentally, the great Czech writer and publisher Josef Svorecky passed away January 3rd, two weeks after Havel.
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Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseI read Kundera's novel a decade ago, and I can tell you that there's a great difference between losing a private-sector job over a joke, and getting sent to a government-run gulag for a joke. Not to denigrate Prof. Miller's situation, but conflating the two is an insult to the victims of true totalitarianism.
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