(162) Hvítna

I read an essay at The American Conservative which was a rejoinder to an article in Jacobin about universities—in other words, I read a circlejerk; the academic members had been unleashed from corduroy trousers, everyone was sat in a circle, and the mutual vertical movement had begun (it hurts and feels good at the same time—that’s the interplay between Jacobin and The American Conservative). The leftist wank-rag named after a black general who mass murdered, tortured, and raped whites before he consigned his island, Haiti, to perpetual poverty and dysfunction, featured an essay by a PhD candidate in history who wrote about transnational lesbian networks in the 20th century—she complained that she just couldn’t get a well-paid job from this subject.

Well, I always thought scholars were meant to be poor and you did scholarship because you loved intellectual exploration and pure intellectual investigation doesn’t pay; nobody is much interested in “the truth”—just self-aggrandisement, money, and sex; so that’s why you end up a threadbare scholar with a patched jacket and a little burned-down candle to light the way to Bedfordshire. However, as usual, I hated the response by The American Conservative more. Their columnist—also PhD—said that the lesbo PhD (those like her) should get an apprenticeship, a vegetable garden, and a family. I mean, what the fuck is this guy on about?

What he’s on about is status competition. People who do PhDs are not in the running for “apprenticeships”—even if such things exist today (which they don’t and haven’t for decades; it’s “master-apprentice” and we don’t have “masters” in a democracy). The advice was either brainlessly relayed by our “conservative” PhD who can’t think or is just consciously unhelpful—a put-down to some “not so important” academic discipline (PhD? Really, m’dear, you should be an apprentice industrial lathe operator). Given he addressed a woman it was bullshit. This whole “do an apprenticeship, not university” is status-hungry academics guarding their patch—unreal bullshit, as per.