The crazies always seem to out-crazy themselves. They out-crazy themselves faster than you can think up ways they could get any crazier.
Not long ago, a scholarly journal called GeoHumanities published an article by two academics called “The Perilous Whiteness of Pumpkins.”
One of those academics describes her academic interests as including “Southern cultures, gender, food studies in the humanities, feminist theories, Appalachian studies, public humanities, oral history practices, and the intersections of race, class, and gender in American literature and society.”
You get the idea.
Here’s my challenge to you: imagine what the abstract for this paper would look like if it were designed to be a parody of the actual paper.
Now here’s the actual abstract, and I’ll bet it’s even nuttier than the parody you imagined in your head:
This article examines the symbolic whiteness associated with pumpkins in the contemporary United States. Starbucks’ pumpkin spice latte, a widely circulated essay in McSweeney’s on “Decorative Gourd Season,” pumpkins in aspirational lifestyle magazines, and the reality television show Punkin Chunkin provide entry points into whiteness–pumpkin connections. Such analysis illuminates how class, gender, place, and especially race are employed in popular media and marketing of food and flavor; it suggests complicated interplay among food, leisure, labor, nostalgia, and race. Pumpkins in popular culture also reveal contemporary racial and class coding of rural versus urban places. Accumulation of critical, relational, and contextual analyses, including things seemingly as innocuous as pumpkins, points the way to a food studies of humanities and geography. When considered vis-à-vis violence and activism that incorporated pumpkins, these analyses point toward the perils of equating pumpkins and whiteness.
Whenever you hear someone calling for more money for higher education, understand that they’re calling for more of this. This does not survive in the absence of subsidies.
There are professors whose entire record of publication consists of inanities like this.
Where does four years of that get you?
Serving pumpkin spice latte at Starbucks, of course.
Meanwhile, you acquire zero real knowledge that might actually help you earn some dough and make a living.
Here’s something that does: the free eBook by my friend Daniel Levis, guest on episode 760.
I know a lot of libertarians who, knowing how fragile the alleged Obama recovery really is, want to build up alternative income streams as insurance against the pink slip.
All the best ways I know of involve mastery of email: building a list and selling (affiliate products or your own products) to that list.
And Daniel is the master.
No lectures about how your pumpkin pie is oppressing minorities here.
Just real stuff about how real people can become capitalists and prosper.
Check it out:
