Autopsy of an Education

~~~
I considered framing this as a selfless and objective account. I told myself (as I would tell you) that it wasn't a petition for pity, not a rant rooted in ressentiment, nor a humblebrag, nor a piece of excuse-making. Those are lies. The truth is that I am sad, and angry, and I do feel unfairly deprived of my privileges.  I can only bring myself to admit so because I suspect I'm not alone in this feeling.

The question lurking behind the present storytime is "How many?" How many young men like me had every reason to believe they were going places, so they did their best, only to discover that the system was not interested in their contributions?  How many have given up, and shut down, as I have?  Finally, what are the results for a society if this happens on a regular basis?

Speaking from my own experience, grade school gave me the sense of being singular, at least among those kids within busing distance.  My alleged smarts were spoken of like sorcery, a strange mysterious power conferred on me by the Fates. A classmate once asked if I had eaten a dictionary. I finished Grade 8 Math with a final mark above 100, which might say more about my math teacher than myself. All of which is to observe that the ear of one's ego has to bend toward something. It wouldn't have been sports. It couldn't have been church. Lord knows, it wasn't Canada. Not having a tribe of my own or a healthy and harmonious family, I could only take pride in my numerically-quantified academic accomplishments as an atomized individual.

So I was a student. A good student. A very good student. I would often like to protest that I didn't work that hard, only as hard as the projects apparently required, yet that minimal standard seemed to exceed that of others.  Completing these mostly pointless and stupid assignments, and watching others struggle with them, undoubtedly warped me in all kinds of ways.  I only wish that inflation and distortion of my character might have been harnessed for good.

This may be where I went astray. I never got to a point with math or science where it was anything more than rote learning. If you understood the principles and followed them correctly, you always found the right answer. Maybe I could have been a great mathematician, but I could think of nothing less interesting. The practice of science looked similarly thankless, long stretches of dull routine broken up by occasional excitement.  I made the choice to go into arts and humanities instead as soon as I had the option.

What was the essence of that choice? Was I moving toward understanding humanity, expressing myself, and thinking creatively, or was I just fleeing from the boring business of keeping this shit show running? I surely revelled in the maverick move of not doing the obvious, and I really hoped to find engaging shades of grey demanding messy interpretation, but I was also lazy, and worn-out from a decade of busywork while my peers were having childhoods. I think I had legitimate grievances against the status quo, against war and waste, corporatism and kakistocracy, but did I actually believe that I could not operate within the establishment without compromising my principles, or did it just look like too much trouble? I'm trying to recount the ways my education failed me, but I can't get past my own complicity. I could be a rich doctor right now, instead of a destitute dreg. Sometimes smart people are improbably stupid.

On that note, I eventually chose to attend Trent University. They had a department of cultural studies, and Maclean's magazine said they wore Birkenstocks and sometimes went to class in pyjamas there, so that's the school I picked. The highfalutin hand-waving the program used to describe itself sounded good enough. Of course there are power imbalances in society. Of course there's injustice. Who wouldn't want to make the world more just and fair? It did all sound a little airy, but the program promised workshops in the arts.  I would learn practical skills.  If not a professorship, I could go into film or theatre.  Three career tracks in one degree! What could go wrong?

I must pause at this point to draw out another animating idea for this bit, and that's the good faith assumption of a functioning society.  You want to believe that your elders and superiors have guarded against decadence and decline. You want to believe that expensive degrees have value. It looked on the surface like cultural studies might be an indulgently speculative enterprise, an ivory tower endeavour far-removed from reality.  I knew that to be the unschooled assumption of retrograde country bumpkins.  It simply wasn't conceivable that so many smart people could be caught up in a lie.  If the Emperor had no clothes, someone would have said something, and that cultural studies department would disband in shame.

Of course, they had no shame. I was told about the pathological propensities of my people to want a happy family and a strong leader, and I was told that another people were the supreme paragons of moral virtue in human history.  I figured out that I was only being very poorly taught how to put on a play or make a movie so that I could advance the social theories of my professors. Despite my efforts to avoid the drily predictable patterns of rationalistic quantitative analysis, there was still only one right answer, and what was worse: it didn't even agree with reason. 2 + 2 was always 5.

My experience of cultural studies was akin to gaslighting. The hostility to anything normative seemed to come out of nowhere in second year, after I had committed to the major, yet all the students and professors treated it as established, proven, and beyond debate that we should all be Marxists disassembling the dominant culture. I looked around the table and couldn't see anyone as confused as I felt.  Maybe it was me.  Maybe I was mistaken.  Maybe I was mad.  The alternative was a lot worse to contemplate.

I never kept my grades up for their own sake. The mark was a measure of the degree to which I had committed myself to understanding and embodying the principles conveyed. I could feel good about myself because I was playing along.  I was learning the ropes so that one day I might captain my own ship in a vast armada. Together we would do great and glorious things, noble things we can't even imagine.  All I had to do was listen to the words of those older and wiser than myself, apply what they had taught me, be reasonable, and speak the truth. Speech is social, and justice is true, so I thought that I was on board with social justice.

I never expected that my degree would end with an epic moral quandary.  I was just a few papers away from earning my Honours, papers that I had imagined would be the culmination of my learning, tying it all up in a neat bow that would point to what the next step should be.  Instead I was more confused than at the beginning, not to say that I didn't have more ideas in my head.  I knew the sociopolitical bullet points that I should work from if I knew what was good for me, but in truth, I had not been convinced of them.  I could fake it, I was sure of that, but I wasn't sure I would emerge from that process the same person. A little part of me would die, the part that wants my reason, actions, and conscience to be in accord with one another.  The very part that torments me to this day, but I keep alive anyway, in the hopes that one day I'll find a worthy use for it.

Academic Nazis

Academic Freedom For Students

The Gentle Tyranny of Nathan Rambukkana

~~~

 Wilfrid Laurier University is the latest scandalous instance of the political weaponisation of academia.  A year after Jordan Peterson warned that changes to Canada's Human Rights Act and Criminal Code amounted to legally-compelled speech, a teaching assistant has in fact been censured by an ad hoc tribunal for presenting Prof. Peterson's argument without reflexively condemning it.  The old characterization of university as a neutral space for higher learning is now passé.  Social justice as an ideology has been fully institutionalised.

Clearly Lindsay Shepherd, the offending TA, is the hero of the day.  She had the foresight to secretly record her superiors, the presence of mind to cogently convey her position, and the courage to face down a hostile panel accusing her of gendered violence and the passive endorsement of evil.

Wilfrid Laurier will undoubtedly suffer for this episode, but it's her supervising prof Dr. Rambukkana who comes off the worst in Shepherd's recording.  He accuses her of creating a toxic teaching climate with her problematic opinions.  Nonetheless, perhaps partly because he hasn't yet given any interviews, Rambukkana does not present as a real person.  He is a caricature, an absurdly convenient condensation of trends that have worried people like Peterson.  He steps forth and offers himself as a stock character in the dramatic enactment of our collective troubles.

If it wasn't him, it would be someone else.  If it wasn't Wilfrid Laurier, it would be another university.  However outrageous this occasion may be, despite or even because of the concreteness of the evidence, the scandal functions chiefly as a target for the projections of people who have already made up their mind on these matters.  The whole thing is so unsurprising that it's tempting to damn, denounce and decry and be done with it.

I wish it were that easy for me.  You see, fifteen years ago, Nathan Rambukkana was my TA.  I remember a sweet, gentle soul, who you can almost hear behind the tremulous and uncertain tones of his inquisition.  The question that presents itself is how did a well-meaning academic end up an Orwellian villain?  This is perhaps a question for us all to ask ourselves.

Nathan, what happened?  When did justice become about revenge for hurt feelings?  How did the infinite multiplicity of possible perspectives reduce to mandatory Marxism?  Who made that argument for you, and why did you never share it with us?  It confused me then and it confuses me now.

You know, the problematising of my positionality left me a broken wreck, so I've had fifteen years of sorrow in which to try to reconcile your seeming friendliness with the antisocial angst of my later professors.  There is no rational argument to be found, as far as I can tell.

For what it's worth, I think the most helpful thing you taught us was that reading cultural studies sometimes requires letting it wash over you without trying to understand it.  In hindsight, that sounds a bit like brainwashing.

All of this hoopla is over a short clip attesting to the existence of a debate, a piece of critical thinking in a communication class that you deemed to be inappropriate for school.

Do you remember, Nathan, the time you made us watch an entire episode of The Young Ones in lieu of conducting a tutorial?  I don't know if you thought you were giving us a treat, or if you were just hungover that day, but the case you made for its relevance to our studies was extremely weak, everyone hated it, and I was offended.  But I didn't take it to your bosses, because I was under the misapprehension that you're a nice person.

When Jared Taylor Came To Town

Big Buts: My Intellectual Journey

~~~

When I was six years old, I saw a flashing electric blue rectangle descend from the night sky.  I thought it over, and decided this was not the sort of thing I should talk about to anyone ever.  Because I couldn't talk about it, I gradually forgot about it.  This is the story of my intellectual journey.

When I was thirteen I bought Fingerprints of the Gods.  I discovered in that book that humanity's past might not be a single simple linear ascent to greater sophistication.  So I took Ancient History in high school, where I was told that humans began as apes, and civilisation began with pyramids.  There was no acknowledgment of any uncertainty in this story, so I kept my mouth shut.

I tried LSD, psilocybin, mescaline and synthetic phenethylamines, dextromethorphan, salvia divinorum, and a weak preparation of dimethyltryptamine.  These helped me to apprehend that every person has a spark of divinity within, an eternal consciousness watched over by an absolute awareness that precedes the universe.  It's not the sort of thing you talk about, so I didn't.

I went to university for three things: film, theatre, and the critical examination of culture to determine what the hell is wrong with the world.  I learned how to use a primitive camera for greater authenticity, how to pretend that a wooden box is really a chair, and how to place the blame for all the ills of the world on straight white men like myself.  Marx and Freud got together with Adorno and Marcuse to say that I was a born oppressor whose guilt was proven by my denials, a pathological sort of person who must be repressed to encourage tolerance.  I saw the mental dressing down that occurred when you didn't agree this was all brilliant stuff, so I gave up on participating in seminars.

Disillusioned with academic cultural studies, I applied my philosophy education to the perils and opportunities of the internet.  What could be gleaned from those who spoke only to niche audiences, or took advantage of anonymity?  I found that most every time there was a subject considered too crazy to countenance by polite society, there was at least a kernel of truth to it. Every time, too, there was someone who took that truth too far.  I didn't want to be a fool or to be thought one, so I didn't even begin to engage with any of these interesting topics, except to study them.

The Earth is almost certainly round, but I haven't been to space or studied the physics of planetary formation, so I have to take someone's word for it.  The return of flat earth theory is likely being helped along by intelligence interests for the study and manipulation of the population, but as a thought experiment it's a peerless gauge of a person's capacity for challenging their assumptions.  No, the Earth isn't flat, but all it would take is a vast intergenerational conspiracy to deceive you on the matter.  It's a valuable exercise to consider the inconceivable for a moment or two.

Vaccines are described as safe and effective, but their inserts list serious conditions as side effects.  The unconscionable opinion of the science-denying anti-vaccine Dr. Andrew Wakefield is that the measles-mumps-rubella vaccine should be issued separately at different times as three generic vaccines instead of one patented product at once with a greater potential for adverse effects.  This is why people have tried to silence and destroy him.  Vaccines may claim credit for the benefits of nutrition and sanitation, but the basic theory is still sound.

The elite meet in secret to party away their cares and perform ritual magic to absolve their consciences, but they always have, and the world hasn't ended yet.

There is strong laboratory evidence for mostly weak but almost universal powers of precognition, telepathy, clairvoyance and psychokinesis, but the people claiming strong powers have more reason than most to fake them.

JFK wanted to limit the power of the central bank, tell the people about UFOs, and cooperate with the Russkies to go to the Moon, so everyone got together to kill him, but he was probably Abraham Lincoln in a past life, so he may already be back.

Crop circles are mostly faked, but the people who regularly make them feel compelled to do so by an unknown force.

Stratospheric aerosol geo-engineering seems like it might be a real thing, but if we're all being contaminated by metals falling from the sky and seeping into our brains, then the people saying that necessarily have addled brains, and shouldn't be trusted.

Bread and milk are very bad for you.  You shouldn't eat them.  But they're delicious.

9/11 was executed by Saudi terrorists with help from Mossad, the CIA, and members of the Bush administration, but everyone fucking knows that.

Some people are absolute jerks, and when the delicate equilibrium of your brain is tipped so that you stop breaking down endogenous DMT at the normal rate, you spontaneously trip out on your own brain juices and your asshole boss turns into a lizard.  But that still doesn't prove there aren't reptile people.

Unidentified Flying Objects are a mixture of psychological, social, optical, and piezoelectric phenomena coupled with the observer effect operating on chimeric projections of consciousness grounded in other layers of reality, distorted by terrestrial psy-ops instigated by boys with toys they want to keep secret.

But before I had found all of these qualified positions, I was willing to throw myself into one.  Dr. Steven Greer said that he could use a combination of remote viewing protocols with Vipassana meditation to call down these UFOs.  I had just read some relevant books, and I dimly recalled seeing something in my youth, so I decided to reverse engineer Greer's methods and see me some UFOs.  With a vague sense of addressing myself to interdimensional star people, I continually asked in my head for a period of several months if I could please see some saucers. It worked, but what do you say about that?

After years of coping with the psychological fallout of seeing a fuckton of flying saucers on request, I came to terms with the mystery of our perennial interaction with others from a distant land, whatever the truth of it is.  I made my peace with the unspeakable at last.  I had weathered the gauntlet of conspiracies and the occult, of all the impossibly crazy ideas a person can consider, and I had emerged half-sane and not completely unreasonable.

It was around this time that it was pointed out to me that the critical theory I had read at university as an apparent critique of "our" own culture was actually disproportionately written by members of an ethnocentric tribe that considers itself as distinct from, and superior to, our deplorable culture.  It wasn't sober self-criticism at all.

It was then that I realised that actually paranormal phenomena are relatively easy to discuss.  You may accept or deny them.  Jews can only be praised or ignored.  To do otherwise is to invite accusations of stupidity and evil, for having the misfortune of asking a question that has been rendered curiously cartoonish.

This has been my intellectual journey thus far.

Academic Apostate Doesn't Hate His Roots

“I could see the same pattern in the many failed left-wing revolutions of Latin America and elsewhere. By combining actual travel with the historical study of socialism and revolution, I succeeded in disabusing myself of the utopian notions that fatally attract people to leftist ideas.”

Research Reliably Unreplicable

"Reproducibility is like brushing your teeth"--and 90% of scientists surveyed think there is a slight to significant crisis of oral hygiene in the published scientific literature.  No word on how concerned social scientists and arts professors are about brushing their teeth.

94% of Professors Think Their Work is Above Average

Researchers have determined that overconfidence leads to higher social status.  This is already generally understood at some level, as people who wish to attain higher social status have been shown to be more overconfident.  This is not perceived as narcissism, but as evidence of how beloved is the person.

When this insight gets paired with the Dunning-Kruger effect, which indicates that incompetent people are too incompetent to perceive their own incompetence, and are therefore perhaps overconfident, we find cause for concern in the organisation of human affairs.

Minority Silenced

DePaul College Republicans invited Milo Yiannopoulos to speak at their school on the subject of feminism.  At the last minute, the DePaul University administration demanded that the club pay for an expensive security team.  When protestors took to the stage, stole a microphone, and threatened to punch the speaker, administrators ordered the officers to stand down.  The event was eventually cancelled.

Confessions of a Straight White Male Cultural Studies Major

~~~

An empty decade ago, I got my degree in Cultural Studies from Trent University, in Peterborough, Ontario.  That was the most progressive program at the most progressive school I could find in Canada. 

It was ten years ago that I fled in shame--unable to write what I had to in order to receive my Honours.  Only today am I prepared to say that I couldn't get my Honours then because there was no honour to be found in what I was doing.

~~~

We must back up, to whatever point little Joey first learned the word, “society.”  What a revelation that concept was!  I was sure that things could be so much better, saner, safer, and more peaceful if this amorphous, capricious creature called “society” would only get its act together.  The utterance was always at the ready, deployed by wee Joey as a mild curse.  “Society.”

Clearly individuals were generally decent, but in association I could only see their accumulated error.  Somehow good people added up to a needlessly shit social environment, and in my hazy innocence I imagined that understanding and considering the social and psychological exigencies of our conduct could help cleanse us of this need to waste energy on condemnation and habitual idiocy.  We suffer not because we deserve it, not because we must, but for want of understanding just how much the inertia of past ages still directs us.

Yes, people weren't the problem, it was society.  The terrible disappointment that is humanity was but a mass of waves and murmurations echoing old impulses.  It wasn't something inherent in each faulty person, it was old mistakes handed down and uncorrected.  Our common heritage was our misperception of things.

~~~

I remember the feeling I had in junior high social studies class, when Mr. Houle explained why Canada was better than the United States.  America strove for a melting pot with one standard—he invoked “hotdogs and baseball” and got big laughs, so I know the message stuck—while we enlightened Canucks, in our more refined and elevated moral sense, presented a mosaic of cultures.  We were a place where every colour and creed could belong.  Our identity was all identities.

It should have made me feel full.  It should perhaps have made me feel privileged and proud and overwhelmed with the depth and breadth of the Canadian soul.  Instead it made me feel oddly hollow.

Of course other people from other cultures could bring their assorted foods, dances, and hats, and thereby give me a richer palette with which to colour my life, but what could I bring to another country of my own home, my own culture, my own identity?  We were everything and nothing, yet I knew there was something more in me than snow and maple syrup.

~~~

The school counselor called me down one day to tell me about a special program at the University of New Brunswick.  I got the impression mine was the name from our school she was giving them.

The program was a Bachelor of Philosophy in Interdisciplinary Leadership Studies.  They operated out of an old Victorian home, where I would be living and working alongside my classmates.  I took the tour, was shown a project they were working on, something about different perspectives on oil drilling, and then we sat down with the dean. 

Eventually he came to that awful, awful question: “Do you have any questions?”  I fished around for a moment, and then stumbled into asking him point-blank what the goals and objectives and principles and philosophy of the program were.  What were they trying to accomplish in the world?

In response, he reached for the brochure and read me the fucking blurb on the back.  It was then that I knew I would not be lead into whatever kind of leadership they were offering.

~~~

My childhood fixation with “society” gradually became more finely tuned and nuanced into a preoccupation with “bullshit.”  Yes, bullshit was the problem now.  If only society would get over its bullshit.

It seemed to me that English, Sociology, Psychology, History, Philosophy and Fine Arts were all too narrowly circumscribed by their own particular brands of bullshit.  What I needed was a degree in Bullshit Studies, but I couldn't find that.

I thought I got close enough when I found the only department of Cultural Studies then existing in the country at Trent.  So I went.

~~~

At first it was great.  For the first time in my life I felt intellectually stimulated and challenged.  It was exciting to have my field of view expanded so rapidly. 

It was good to be away from home.  I had a board plan for meals and a thousand mandatory flex dollars for personal pan pizzas, I had thirty hits of pretty good acid I brought from Nova Scotia, and it was now possible for me to get old Doctor Who on my computer.  Genesis of the Daleks.  The Caves of Androzani.  Those were good days.

I made one critical mistake, and that was critical thinking.  I took a course in practical reasoning in the philosophy department, learned logic, and did quite well at it—my highest mark, with a final of 96, if I remember right.

When my second year began, and I was now taking four cultural studies courses instead of one, a terrible sinking feeling appeared in my gut.  I suppressed it as best I could, but I couldn't convince myself I didn't detect a problem. 

I thought I had signed on for the study of culture, but it was increasingly apparent that we were studying it in order to impose our predetermined narrative upon it.  I couldn't help but notice that this narrative was built on assertions more than data.

I got very good at making those assertions.  I realised that I could throw my practical reasoning out the window, as it was irrelevant.  Writing in the proper mode was more performance than reason.  Eloquence, conviction, and slavish devotion to identity politics were all that was needed.

They had lots of good points and perspectives, but my intellectual conscience wouldn't permit me to ignore that the justification for the sanctification of Marx and Freud was never given.  With other names too, we read them to find the ways in which they were right.  Everything was interpretation, but there was only one acceptable interpretation.

We disagreed at our own peril.  With a breathtaking lack of self-awareness, the professor I most respected once castigated us for not speaking up and participating more often, apparently blissfully unaware that she would routinely make fun of anyone who stepped outside her dogma.  I'm almost certain that everyone else in that seminar had the same thought in that moment.

~~~

It wasn't until my third year that I learned about the Sokal hoax.  I think I made the mistake of Googling my education.  Within moments of wondering how the outside world viewed post-modernism, I discovered that a journal of cultural studies had accepted a paper made mostly of meaningless gibberish because the author had included enough buzz words that they liked. 

It was a big scandal and I hadn't heard a peep about it, much less sober discussion about the limitations of our methods.  This was pretty fucking damning, but I was so far into my degree that it seemed there was no turning back--and it still seemed inconceivable that a nascent discipline could be quite so fragmented, incoherent, and misanthropic as cultural studies appeared, so I was sure I was missing something, I just wasn't smart enough.  This was university, after all.  It was grown-up business.  There was no way it could be as fucked as it appeared.

~~~

In my final year, I took two 400-level courses with the intention of getting my Honours.  The only identity Mr. Houle had left me with was being a good student, so that was what I would do.

One of those classes was taught by a young gay man, the other by an old gay man.  Both courses drew heavily from Jacques Lacan, and both professors readily admitted that they didn't understand most of his mystical psychobabble.  This was supposed to be the summit of my learning, but my teachers seemed almost as confused as I was.

When it came time to compose my final papers, I could see all the hoops I was to jump through arrayed before me.  It didn't matter if I understood what I was saying, I just had to repeat some stuff with my own clever spin to make it sound like an elaboration of a proven idea.  I had to adopt a pose and sustain it for however many thousand words, building self-referential loops of nonsense until the mounting absurdity reaches such levels that the mind relents and agrees.

I still believed that we're driven by the unconscious.  I still believed that every cultural artifact encodes layers of meaning.  I still believed that there exist institutionalised injustices, and I still wanted peace and understanding for all people. 

Somehow all this brought me to was a listless self-loathing.  I still didn't know what my culture could possibly stand for, beyond slavery, exploitation, colonialism, patriarchy.  I still didn't know what I could stand for, other than to be an ally for aggrieved classes.

Indeed, when my nervous breakdown came and I e-mailed my teachers that I wouldn't finish the year, I don't think I imagined that the older gay professor appeared most upset to be losing an intelligent, straight, gentile ally who he had invested in.  I hope that's only a vicious projection on my part.  The young gay Jewish professor just seemed confused, while my three straight professors, all of them in the philosophy department, expressed various levels of support and concern. 

My metaphysics teacher shuffled things around to give me a pass with the work I'd done, so I could still get a degree.  Another phoned me in Nova Scotia, when he read my e-mail too late to make a difference, and earnestly tried to confirm I was sure about dropping the course, as I had written a paper he liked.  Between the philosophy and cultural studies departments, the difference in reaction when I faltered was striking.

~~~

At that time the problem was academic.  It was my own failure, or it was the excesses of my teachers, but it was behind me.  I tried for a few years to catch up on the readings I'd missed in the hopes that something would come together, but I only became more convinced that most of my higher education was best ignored.  I could retain some psychology and semiotics, film theory and the history of ideas, but as an animating ideology cultural studies was impossible.  It told stories of oppression in which I could only play a stock villain or a prostrate ally.  But at least it was only professors who believed that shit.

Now I'm actually worried.  What I thought ten years ago was a radical academic fringe confined to a hippie school and mentally stuck in '68 is now a swarming horde of shrieking cultural Marxists, determined to remake society in accordance with the dictates of their puny feelings.  I just want to convey to the rational men and women, gay and straight, Jew and gentile alike, that from my own lived experience, the ideological underpinnings of the militant social justice movement are every bit as mental as they may appear, and I barely got out alive to tell you so.

Soft and Hard Targets of Scepticism

When people like this get together, they become tribal. They pat each other on the back and tell each other how smart they are compared to those outside the tribe. But belonging to a tribe often makes you dumber.

Muslims Prize Canadian Freedoms

Canadian Muslims are more proud of being Canadian than non-Muslim Canadians--but young Muslims are more attached to their religious identity than their parents, more likely to value Canada for its multiculturalism and diversity rather than its freedom and democracy, more likely to be pessimistic about discrimination, and more likely to say their faith is more important to them than their nationality.

More female Muslims are wearing the niqab than ten years ago, with the largest growth among young people who have been to university.  In general, Muslims with less education are more likely to wear the niqab, but not in Canada.

Almost twice as many Muslims as non-Muslims think that the father should be the master of the house, and less than half as many think homosexuality should be accepted by society.  89% of Muslims report being satisfied with the direction Canada is going, compared with 56% of non-Muslims.

"Muslim Canadians," itself a discrimination, say they have experienced discrimination more than that reported by the "general population," an apparently undifferentiated mass.  How it could be logically otherwise is unclear.

Super-Whitey Is The Wizard Behind The Curtain

A professional education consultant speaking at the 17th annual White Privilege Conference in Philadelphia has suggested that teachers must be activists too, working to overcome the racial supremacist narrative of disciplined hard work leading to individual success.

The white imperial gaze must be deconstructed by transgressing against the normative hetero-patriarchal conceptions of goal orientation and proper English.  The hierarchical power structure of grading emphasizes traits chosen to favor whites!  Students should be assessed not for their individual merits, but rather taught as a class.

Classroom learning and class consciousness must be intimately intertwined, like the hammer and sickle of our mighty banner.

TV Worse Than Nothing For Learning, Parents Don't Care

Television time in early childhood has been found to decrease motor, vocabulary, math, and social skills, as well as "physical prowess at kindergarten."

Cover-Up Covered Up

Robert De Niro has withdrawn the documentary "Vaxxed: From Cover-Up to Catastrophe" from the Tribeca Film Festival.  De Niro had previously championed the film's right to contribute to a public discussion.  After consulting with members of "the scientific community," De Niro had an "awakening," and now shares their "concern with certain things in this film."

The filmmakers, who were not asked to respond to claims against their documentary, issued their own statement, with some business about free speech, art, and truth.

Students Fear Chalk

Leftist students hate and fear their projection of Donald Trump's hate and fear so much that his name scrawled in white chalk makes them afraid for their lives.

Bill Nye the Scientism Guy

Today's popular scientists and popularisers of science have come down firmly against the love of wisdom.  Most recently, this was done by a former children's show host, channeling Dr Johnson by dropping a hammer on your toe, and declaring, "I refute it thus!"

Colonial Art Deconstructed

Students at the University of Cape Town upset over lack of space in dormitories resulting from increased enrollment resulting from lower fees resulting from protests have burned an oil painting called "Extinguished Torch of Academic Freedom" by anti-apartheid artist Keresemose Richard Baholo, in protest.

Confessions of an Idiot

~~~

I had a prolonged, traumatic birth, as a terrible winter storm raged outside.  I eventually arrived on the leap day of 1984, with a scar on one cheek from the doctor's forceps. 

~~~

When I was a couple of years old, the neighbour boy knocked me unconscious with a lead pipe.  He was pretending to play baseball.  The stitches left a scar on my forehead over my third eye.

~~~

When I was six or seven, I saw a flashing electric blue rectangle descend from the night sky.  It was outside my window and behind some trees, but nothing about it looked like anything I'd seen before or since.  I thought it over, and couldn't see any good coming from discussing it with the adults.  The experience was never integrated, only occluded by being ignored.

~~~

When I was twelve or thirteen I began to develop a neurotic melancholia.  My brother was gone from the house, and my parents' marriage had started the slow and quiet march to dissolution.  I had gleaned from my social studies classes that my nation had no identity of its own, and it was increasingly clear that my education was a boring waste of my talents.  I had every opportunity to develop the bad cognitive habits and bodily environment for a pernicious and persistent depression.  These behavioural and biochemical ruts can be overcome, and the thought of quitting made a friendly gadfly, but any mental illness leaves a mark that never fully leaves.

~~~

I went to Trent University to learn how to be academically critical of my society.  The unheralded Semitic cynicism of the theorists on offer neglected the constructive responsibilities of philosophy.  We only destroyed.  It was understood but never justified that an egalitarian communist utopia would fill the resultant void.

I could only do well in philosophy and cultural studies by keeping them strictly delineated and compartmentalised in my mind.  Cultural studies selected from every discipline, but its critique was beholden only to pissy projection.

~~~

When I returned from Ontario in disgrace and confusion, and without Honours, my feeling of affinity for the moustache man and his project had become so acute that I took myself to have my head checked.  The NS Hospital was no help.  They deemed me sane.  This would be a valuable tether in the years to come.

~~~

Cannabis had made the existential ache endurable, so it had been no great leap to obey the cultural script and proceed to other psychoactive substances--only to discover how at-home they made me feel.  I learned the warp and woof of tryptamines and phenethylamines, of illumination and The Void.  On a summer off from school, down by the brook, on a bottle of cough syrup, some mushrooms, and a beer, I became aware of a consciousness greater than myself.  In the morning, I cast Him out as only chemical.

~~~

When those chemicals no longer had as much to teach me, I moved on to the hard stuff: exopolitics, the New Age, and conspiracy theory. 

I had exhausted my education; there were still too many missing pieces in my understanding before I would be able to make psychological and philosophical sense of those classes. 

I had exhausted entheogens; absent a proper initiation by a carrier of a wisdom tradition (or the time, security, stability, and supplies to rigourously develop my own tradition) neo-shamanism seemed to be a pie-eyed dead end, in terms of obtaining reliable and consistent information. 

Cultural studies had at least made me cognizant of our capacity for self-delusion, and of the cultural mediation of reality.  Psychedelics had made me aware of dimensions normally unseen.  With the hope that my philosophy classes in logic and reasoning were still working for me, it seemed the right time to cross my Rubicon--and try to learn profound things from the scary, dangerous, and untrustworthy Internet.  After all, those disreputable drugs hadn't been so bad!

I made vast strides into the unknown over a very short period.  In a flurry of cheap documentaries and questionable interviews, I caught up with ten years of paranormal, spiritual, conspiratorial, and batshit insane conversation.  Much of it was remarkable, most was incredible, and all of it was far beyond the pale of polite conversation.  I began to get comfortable with a constant consciousness of the limits of other people's realities.

There were certainly a lot of well-spoken people convinced of nefarious plots and epic cosmic battles.  They referenced the same undocumented fancies, and it was easy to get swept up in excitement over the imminent disclosure of alien life, and our imminent ascension into fluffy rainbows.  It was a strange time.

~~~

My pseudo-shamanic forays had finally begun to yield fruit.  My mystical readings had begun to cohere and come alive.  I was beginning to experience synchronicities.

I would hold conversations with an ethereal DJ.  It selected the songs in my extensive playlist that would answer with uncanny insight the question I was pondering.  First, the astonishment at such magic.  Second, the slow recognition of its ubiquity.

As the new year approached, I made a resolution to undertake an experiment.  It required a leap of faith.  I decided to take up the provisional acceptance of a series of dubious claims. 

If it was true that all existence is the fragmented consciousness of the One, all awareness must be made of the same stuff.  If we're all reaching higher levels of consciousness on our climb back to wholeness, there are probably intermediary conglomerations of awareness of which we can be a part.  If we're all connected through our common Source, it should be a simple matter to contact other intelligences by means of the very intelligence which seeks to make such a contact.

I resolved that in 2009 I would see a UFO.

~~~

I didn't step outside without looking up.  I didn't look up without asking to see.  Everywhere I went, everything I did, I held the thought in my mind that I wanted to make contact, I wanted to witness, I wanted to experience.  I asked in earnestness and humility.  I projected friendly compassion and curiosity.  I wanted to see a flying saucer and I meant it.

~~~

On the night in February when I signed for an apartment with my girlfriend, I walked to my warehouse night shift down a darkened road.  I was distracted from my feeling of relief and anticipation by a bright light in the sky straight ahead.

Before I had time to think about it, the word "angelic" popped into my mind.  This word wasn't really in my vocabulary, so it surprised me enough that I immediately took a closer look at the light.  It was too large and bright to be a planet, but it wasn't in motion except for a slight waver.  Something about the luminous shimmer convinced me that it was suitably angelic, and in a moment I found myself asking it in my head if it was a UFO.

The light gently winked at me in a seeming affirmation.

A pregnant pause; one-two-three.  A mugging double take wouldn't have been out of order.  That really happened, didn't it?  Another slow blink, after the same measure as the last question.  The light hovered still, now resolutely unblinking.

I tried to command it, telling it to do it again.  Instead, the light shrunk to the size of a faint star, and suddenly began moving to the right.  It quickly expanded to a large black shape with lights on it that passed almost overhead.  It was just enough like a plane that I could believe I had been fooled, and I spent the rest of the night laughing at the ambiguity of the sighting.

On further consideration, I couldn't remember a sound from an aircraft that came very close, nor a green light on the starboard side that faced me.

~~~

About a month after that first sighting, in a time of alienated despair, the floodgates were opened.  After noticing a series of strange aerial things one night, I saw a nearby flying object instantly reverse on its course without turning around--and there was no going back.

Over the course of 2009, forever to be remembered as That Year, I saw multiple daytime discs, luminous saucers, and glowing orbs, as well as countless suspicious lights that were surely almost all conventional.  Often enough, the more striking appearances seemed to interact with me and my expectations.  I found them to be playful, but also seemingly compassionate, sometimes responding to my emotional need to see them at a certain time or place, sometimes performing a novelty when I asked nicely.

It culminated in a pink saucer shrouded in mist going past my apartment window one afternoon like it was going for a Sunday drive.  This time our requisite exchange of recognition manifested as the orange-pink light of the object brightening responsively, and then the trail of vapour behind it got correspondingly longer.  Somehow this simple physical logic was too much.  Weird phantasms passing over populated areas are fine, but if they behave like they're real?  I had seen enough.

It was around this time that I was becoming preoccupied with my soul's mission, and beginning to suspect that my favourite singer-songwriter might be an evil sorcerer.  I had to grudgingly admit that it might be a good time to pause and reflect.

I reflected in retreat for years, exploiting the goodwill of friends and family to survive, struggling not to succumb to this new madness I didn't understand, or an old sadness I knew all too well.  I went back over everything; every experience, but also every fact and argument that led me there, and every one that followed from it.  I adopted more nuanced perspectives on secrets and mysteries.  I became more sure of some things and less sure of others.  Mostly I languished.

~~~

There is still no idiom sufficient to take account of reality.  Not science, not religion, not the left or right, not the high or straight.  Mostly there is insular confusion.  A vast spinning cosmos surrounds us, and we're too ridiculous to assume our inherent dignity and face that universe.

I have fled from my experiences even as I struggle to understand them.  The truth is that I have to let them be. I don't understand everything, and I have to let that be.  Most people are ignorant dumbasses without a shred of passion or curiosity, and I have to let that be.  There's too much to learn and teach and explore and discover to be held back by not knowing the destination, or not getting everyone to take the journey.