It's All Going Away...

I wish to end the year with this:

Glenn Reynolds’s forthcoming book The New School: How the Information Age Will Save American Education from Itself vividly details the train wreck that is the institution of higher education in this country. “What can’t go on forever, won’t.” Reynolds makes the economist Herb Stein’s observation a centerpiece of his book.  Repellent pseudo-intellectual horrors like “Toward a Feminist Postcolonial Milk Studies” cannot go on forever; therefore, they won’t. This ruin of taxpayer money, to say nothing of the intellectual sanity of students and teachers, is too egregious to continue.  It will not continue. “Toward a Feminist Postcolonial Milk Studies” is just one of many, many signs that the house of intellect in this country has become a sort of Augean Stables, full of malodorous waste and bovine mooing.  It awaits its Hercules to perform a much needed lustration.

If you don't recognize the writing, it's, of course, Roger Kimball.  He speaks whereof he knows, "rancid, misbegotten products of wayward affluence much thought" and the "...truly egregious [that] bubbles up from the dismal pit of pseudo-intellectual academic lucubration" ... "special gem[s] of fatuous, wood-pulp darkening nonsense."

Note that Kimball applies the same Herb Stein logic that I, along with many others, apply to various aspects of wayward, decadent modern America if not the world.  Per Kimball, naturally, “Toward a Feminist Postcolonial Milk Studies” is of a piece with various forms of stupidity that are destined for the historical scrap heap, like much else.

Enjoy it now folks - particularly if you have gainful employment as an ecofeminist - because, like all other manifestations of stupidity on a grand, institutional scale, it's going away. 

Don't worry, we won't be stuck on stupid for too much longer.  We don't have the time and we don't have the money.  Common sense is coming back, no matter what we do.  It's coming back.  It has to, despite our most fervent wishes.

We won't be stuck on stupid for too much longer.  

It's all going away because we don't have enough money or enough time and I have just barely enough optimism left to be fairly confident that the human race will not jump into the abyss.  It's all going away, just when no one knows, but it is.  The fiscal version of the Big Electron is going to sweep us away.  Cue the George Carlin...oh, and Happy New Year.