Do You Hear the People Whine?

The Revolution Will Be Catered

Dear Reader: I hear you, I hear you. It’s been weeks since the last missive from The Cornfield! What gives? My apologies, friend. The lion’s share of my time and creative energy has been taken up with a new directing project and preparations for the encore performance (and live stream!) of my show, Lived Experience, June 1 at Triad Theater here in New York. The premiere in October was so well received, I decided to bring the act back to kick off Pride Month, old school style. Please join me from wherever you are—via the amazing live stream, six camera video production from the team at Fursh Media! I gotta tell ya, it’s just what I envisioned: an homage to the great TV variety specials of another decade!—you can buy your tickets here!

Like many others, I’ve been absorbing way too much content about the Israel/Gaza conflict and the US college campus demonstrations, and struggling with how to detach emotionally from it all. The anger, the disbelief, but mostly, the utter disgust I feel toward those insipid poseurs in their N95 masks and keffiyehs, camped out on the quads of our so-called “elite” universities. Now, I’ve already unleashed the kraken on what I call “Gen-o-cide Z” in this essay written in the aftermath of October 7. Obviously, I was riled up—better out than in—at least while we still have a First Amendment.

Finding the motivation to write has been, needless to say, a challenge. But my mother didn’t raise no quitter. I’ve decided to eschew the enervation of outrage (I will leave that to the master Douglas Murray, who actually knows what’s happening on the ground in Israel first hand) and rather, engage in some stress-relieving self care by unsheathing my poison pen. TRIGGER WARNING:

PSYCH! THERE’S NO TRIGGER WARNING!

You don’t need no stinkin’ trigger warning, Che Guevera. The privation and hardship you’re enduring in your North Face pup tents? It’s right up there with Soweyto and Kent State. I mean, you’re shitting in communal “gender neutral” poop buckets together. Oh, the humanity. But you’re tough little bolsheviks, right? You can take an old school bitch slap from a queer elder, no? Tell ya what, since everyone’s telling me you’re just young, idealistic kids, I’ll take my rings off first.

Fasten your seatbelts, ji-hotties!—I’m gonna take the ever-loving piss out of you. What passes today for campus “radicals?” Privileged, pretentious enfants terribles who, at Columbia for example, barricaded themselves inside Hamilton Hall, no doubt a deliberate gesture of solidarity toward student occupations there in the past. The civil rights activists who held acting dean Henry S. Coleman prisoner there in 1968; protesters against South African apartheid, who sat down there back in 1985. To be honest, I’m impressed that these kids know that much history—but then, I suspect their leftist professors encouraged this civil disobedience, filling them in on the history, and assuring them that they will be on the right side of it.

Students Barricade Outside Hamilton Hall, Columbia University

I doubt that those militant acolytes of Malcolm X or those inspired by Mandela ever sent out, from the Hall, a spokesperson like the petulant, anemic Ms. Johannah King-Slutsky. The po-faced PhD candidate, who has all the charisma of a DMV worker, made a statement to the press—well, actually, it was more of a whine—about something, well, that never happened: i.e., the university preventing food and water to be brought in to the Hall. A reporter asked if Columbia was actually doing this? Well, no, but “we want a commitment that they will not violently prevent us from doing so.” So that would be a no?

Puh-leeze, dear. “Violently preventing?!” Drama queens, all you kids; you’re shameless. You’re always exaggerating some dire consequence if you don’t get what you want. You’re an entire generation of Chicken Littles, squawking about imminent catastrophe—but you’re all crying wolf. This press conference was a stunt, intended presumably to give Ms. Hyphenated Slutsky an internet moment she can use to boost her progressive activist street cred or something—in actuality, it made her a laughing stock. Maybe she should have passed the mic to the non-binary queer for Palestine who stood stoically and inexplicably behind Johannah throughout, wearing acid wash jeans, a crop top and the requisite keffiyeh. They/Them might have at least been entertaining! Alas, Ms. King-Slutsky drawled on, admonishing the Columbia “community” for putting students at risk of dehydration and death from starvation (something unlikely to occur during what ultimately amounted to a 17 hour sit down)—she pleaded that they were asking only for “basic humanitarian aid!”

Johannah King-Slutsky

You’re not Palestinians in a war zone. You are not in need of “humanitarian aid.” Rather than chanting banalities you don’t understand, and camping out like children in the back yard, how about volunteering to assemble aid packages for the Red Cross—or fundraising for the relief effort in Gaza? Maybe you could assist Palestinian immigrants and refugees in New York with their correspondence; help them find services that might assist their families in the shadow of war? Maybe just sit in their kitchen, hold their hand, listen to their experiences in their home country and learn what their lives are like? How about dedicating yourself to an intensive study of the history of the Israel/Palestine conflict, so you can be authoritative and articulate about it, and engage in intelligent debate while at Columbia with the people you disagree with? Isn’t that what college is for (along with drinking, screwing and the occasional political protest)? Please consider that you trivialize the actual suffering of those you wish to aid by appropriating their struggle and pretending it’s yours. You can’t do that whilst enjoying the freedom to study at an exclusive university, in the middle of the greatest, most diverse and cosmopolitan city in the world! How about showing respect for the people in those far off countries you so wish to help by making the most of the advantages of a superb education, and using it in the real world to make a difference when you graduate?

Johannah, honey—you are a drab little pedant working on an incoherent and utterly useless dissertation having to do with, as you describe it, “fantasies of limitless energy in the transatlantic Romantic imagination.” And what kind of job will this PhD qualify you for—you self-professed “political strategist for leftist and progressive causes?” I suspect you’ll become an activist educator like the leftist teachers who filled you and your Marxist wannabe friends up with stirring stories of Columbia student civil rights warriors, and anti-apartheid freedom fighters. They fired you up and sent you forth to change the world! And you were totally committed…until your stomachs started to grumble.