Trading Places ...

When looking at this graphic, yours truly thinks Jabberwocky and Alice in Wonderland or Thru the Looking Glass as both the left and the right are batshit crazy with the left taking honors on censorship and brain dead pandering to the begrieved group of the month.

We laughed at the Republican busybody who couldn't joke, declared war on dirty paintings, and peered through your bedroom window. Now that person has switched sides, and nobody's laughing

Fifteen years later, America is a thousand Dovers, and the press response is silence. This time it’s not a few Podunk school boards under assault by junk science and crackpot theologies, but Princeton University, the New York Times, the Smithsonian, and a hundred other institutions.

When the absurdity factor rocketed past Dover levels this week, the nation’s leading press organs barely commented, much less laughed. Doing so would have meant opening the floodgates on a story most everyone in media sees but no one is allowed to comment upon: that the political right and left in America have traded villainous cultural pathologies. Things we once despised about the right have been amplified a thousand-fold on the flip.

Conservatives once tried to legislate what went on in your bedroom; now it’s the left that obsesses over sexual codicils, not just for the bedroom but everywhere. Right-wingers from time to time made headlines campaigning against everything from The Last Temptation of Christ to “Fuck the Police,” though we laughed at the idea that Ice Cube made cops literally unsafe, and it was understood an artist had to do something fairly ambitious, like piss on a crucifix in public, to get conservative protesters off their couches.

The Jabberwock, as illustrated by John Tenniel, 1871

It gets better ...

Everything’s in play now. Consensual reality is on the run — the old certainties of US history and the receding promises of the future sink into a fiery sludge of the corona virus present. Things happen without apparent consequence. Authority is on the lam. Coercion stalks the land rooting out thought-crime. Fantasies and delusions rush into the space that reason has vacated in fear of its life. Maybe better not think it all. But you can’t help it, can you? To be human is to be dogged by your own thought.

And this...

Activists call for Harvard University’s Board of Overseers to be renamed due to racist connotations in latest wokeness crusade

The activist group has been urging individual members of Harvard’s second-highest governing body to get rid of the word “overseers” in its name since 2017, and with anti-racism protesters demonstrating across the nation since the slaying of George Floyd in May, the coalition says it may have the momentum to push through the renaming. One of the group’s leaders told the Harvard Crimson student newspaper that all five of the Board of Overseers candidates (out of 13) that the coalition has endorsed support the name change.  

It wouldn’t be surprising for Harvard to grant the request. The university ruled in 2016 that dormitory administrators would no longer be known as “house masters,” but rather “faculty deans.” Like “overseers,”“masters” was criticized by some students because of slavery connotations. Students are currently petitioning to rename the Mather House dormitory because it was named after former Harvard president Increase Mather, a class of 1656 alumnus who owned a slave.

Harvard’s Ivy League rival, Yale University, faces a campaign to change its name because of its ties to benefactor Elihu Yale, a slave trader.

The memory hole beckons