Mark Steyn devotes his weekly Sun-Times column to the political and cultural infantilization of American society manifested in events related to the Virginia Tech massacre. He urges us to get “realistic about reality.” He doens’t miss the unreal contribution of Barack Obama last week. He notes that at Yale, the students cannot even pretend to be realistic about reality:
[A]t Yale, the dean of student affairs, Betty Trachtenberg, reacted to the Virginia Tech murders by taking decisive action: She banned all stage weapons from plays performed on campus. After protests from the drama department, she modified her decisive action to “permit the use of obviously fake weapons” such as plastic swords.
Unfortunately, Steyn’s not done with the Ivy League:
A few years back, a couple of alienated loser teens from a small Vermont town decided they were going to kill somebody, steal his ATM cards, and go to Australia. So they went to a remote house in the woods a couple of towns away, knocked on the door, and said their car had broken down. The guy thought their story smelled funny so he picked up his Glock and told ’em to get lost. So they concocted a better story, and pretended to be students doing an environmental survey. Unfortunately, the next old coot in the woods was sick of environmentalists and chased ’em away. Eventually they figured they could spend months knocking on doors in rural Vermont and New Hampshire and seeing nothing for their pains but cranky guys in plaid leveling both barrels through the screen door. So even these idiots worked it out: Where’s the nearest place around here where you’re most likely to encounter gullible defenseless types who have foresworn all means of resistance? Answer: Dartmouth College. So they drove over the Connecticut River, rang the doorbell, and brutally murdered a couple of well-meaning liberal professors. Two depraved misfits of crushing stupidity (to judge from their diaries) had nevertheless identified precisely the easiest murder victims in the twin-state area. To promote vulnerability as a moral virtue is not merely foolish. Like the new Yale props department policy, it signals to everyone that you’re not in the real world.
Yale, however, isn’t even in the play real world. That has to be some kind of a new low in the avoidance of reality. And the aphorism of the Roman poet Horace applies to “reality” as well as “nature”: “Though you drive nature out with a pitchfork, she will still find her way back.”
Footnote: See also Jack Kelly’s column on NBC’s irresonsibility in contributing to “the next public mass killing in America.”
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