My friend Miss Vegina and I had a rousing conversation on Facebook over the weekend about the tactics of some quarters of the animal rights movement, particularly regarding responses by Janet D. Stemwedel, PZ Myers, Orac, and many commenters to a discussion of protest events on Negotiation Is Over!.

Our back-and-forth is now posted on her blog, with an eye toward continuing the discussion. Please check it out.

This note is tame. It’s very, very tame. If adolescent dismissals of the discipline, and you generally, are the worst student criticisms you ever receive, then count yourself fortunate (or unfortunate, depending) to have lived such a sheltered career.

Support from well-wishers is fine, but it can quickly degenerate into unproductive enabling and groupthink. This is a mundane, trivial teaching event. The more you let it, or your colleagues’ overreactions, occupy your thoughts, the more the note’s author wins.

Turn it over to the chair? You know your chair. If half-hearted student gripes fall closer to “problems the chair considers important enough to take on”, or “opportunities to bond and build morale with new colleagues”, and not “everyday troubles a faculty member worthy of tenure ought to be able to handle without supervision”, then by all means.

Turn it over to campus security? Oy. Does your campus have a teaching resources center for faculty? The staff there would likely have experience with student correspondence, from whiny to threatening, and would likely know the campus policies and guidelines regarding referrals to the police. They might also be a good source of support and some dispassionate advice.

Finally, just because the group hug dynamic going on here profoundly unsettles me… what about the student’s underlying point? This student walked away from your class with the impression that sociology is a useless discipline that studies trivial matters. Mistaken? Absolutely. Considering your teaching style and choices of illustrative examples, though, is this a mistake that half-attentive students in your class could understandably make? Is this perhaps indicative that some students, especially those who don’t even remotely share your research interests, could benefit from applications of more relevance to what they prioritize?

Even the most vicious, biting student comment can sometimes have a kernel of insight, and we’re here to try to reach the angry ones, too. Some of your colleagues, in their fervor, seem to be losing sight of that this week.

To my immense amusement, the PR flacks are as nervous as ever, almost nobody seems to have cared enough about the Alan Dershowitz speech at UCI to blog about it, and I’ve gotten a hefty number of hits from people searching for Ron Paul’s pet conspiracy theories.

Huzzah.

Ron Paul

Ron Paul… the crawling candidate… I am the last… I will tell the audient void…

I do not recall distinctly when it began, but it was months ago. The general tension was horrible. To a season of political and social upheaval was added a strange and brooding apprehension of hideous ideological ineptitude; an ineptitude widespread and all-embracing, such an ineptitude as may be imagined only in the most terrible wankery of the night. I recall that the voters went about with pale and worried faces, and whispered warnings and prophecies which no one dared consciously repeat or acknowledge to himself that he had heard. A sense of monstrous stupidity was upon the land, and out of the abysses between the parties swept chill currents that made voters shiver in dark and lonely places. There was a demoniac alteration in the sequence of the seasons the autumn heat lingered fearsomely, and everyone felt that the world and perhaps the nation had passed from the control of known markets or forces to that of markets or forces which were unknown.

And it was then that Ron Paul came out of Texas. Who he was, none could tell, but he was of the old native blood and looked like a gnome. The libertarians knelt when they saw him, yet could not say why. He said he had risen up out of the slackness of thirty-two districts, and that he had heard messages from places not on this planet. Into the lands of civilisation came Ron Paul, sallow, slender, and sinister, always renting strange puppets of tubes and socks and combining them into web sites yet stranger. He spoke much of the sciences of economy and conspiracy and gave exhibitions of ignorance which sent his spectators away speechless, yet which swelled his fame to exceeding magnitude. Men advised one another to see Ron Paul, and shuddered. And where Ron Paul went, rest vanished, for the small hours were rent with the screams of nausea. Never before had the screams of nausea been such a public problem; now the wise men almost wished they could forbid sleep in the small hours, that the shrieks of cities might less horribly disturb the pale, pitying moon as it glimmered on green waters gliding under bridges, and old steeples crumbling against a sickly sky.

I remember when Ron Paul came to my city, the great, the old, the terrible city of unnumbered crimes. My student had told me of him, and of the impelling fascination and allurement of his revelations, and I burned with eagerness to explore his uttermost inanities. My student said they were horrible and impressive beyond my most fevered imaginings; and what was thrown on a screen in the darkened room prophesied things none but Ron Paul dared prophesy, and in the sputter of his sparks there was taken from men that which had never been taken before yet which showed only in the eyes. And I heard it hinted abroad that those who knew Ron Paul looked on sights which others saw not.

It was in the hot autumn that I went through the night with the restless crowds to see Ron Paul; through the stifling night and up the endless stairs into the choking room. And shadowed on a screen, I saw camouflaged forms amidst ruins, and pudgy evil faces peering from behind fallen monuments. And I saw the world battling against big government; against the waves of taxation from ultimate space; whirling, churning, struggling around the dimming, cooling gold standard. Then the slides played amazingly around the heads of the spectators, and hair stood up on end whilst supporters more grotesque than I can tell came out and squatted on the heads. And when I, who was colder and more scientific than the rest, mumbled a trembling protest about poseurs and political economy, Ron Paul drove us all out, down the dizzy stairs into the damp, hot, deserted midnight streets. I screamed aloud that I was not amused; that I never could be amused; and others screamed with me for solace. We swore to one another that the city was exactly the same, and still alive; and when the projector lights began to fade we cursed the company over and over again, and laughed at the queer faces we made.

I believe we felt something coming down from the greenish moon, for when we began to depend on its light we drifted into curious involuntary marching formations and seemed to know our destinations though we dared not think of them. Once we looked at the message boards and found the threads fallow and displaced by spam, with scarce a line of quote to show where the discourse had run. And again we saw an email list, lone, commentless, unmoderated, and almost unsubscribed. When we gazed around the election, we could not find the third party by the river, and noticed that the silhouette of the second party was ragged at the top. Then we split up into narrow columns, each of which seemed drawn in a different direction. One disappeared in a narrow chamber to the left, leaving only the echo of a raving foam. Another filed down a screed-choked primary entrance, howling with a laughter that was mad. My own column was sucked toward the undecided country, and presently I felt a chill which was not of the hot autumn; for as we stalked out on the press tour, we beheld around us the hellish teleprompters of evil debates. Trackless, inexplicable debates, swept asunder in one direction only, where lay a gulf all the lamer for its gibbering pundits. The column seemed very thin indeed as it plodded dreamily into the gulf. I lingered behind, for the black rift in democracy was frightful, and I thought I had heard the reverberations of a disquieting wail as my companions vanished; but my power to linger was slight. As if beckoned by those who had gone before, I half-floated between the titanic stages, quivering and afraid, into the sightless vortex of the unimaginable.

Screamingly sentient, dumbly delirious, only the markets that were can tell. A sickened, sensitive shadow writhing in hands that are not hands, and whirled blindly past ghastly midnights of rotting creation, corpses of dead nations with sores that were cities, charnel winds that brush the pallid stars and make them flicker low. Beyond the nations vague ghosts of monstrous things; half-seen columns of unsanctifled temples that rest on nameless rocks beneath space and reach up to dizzy vacua above the spheres of light and darkness. And through this revolting graveyard of the universe the muffled, maddening beating of drums, and thin, monotonous whine of blasphemous flutes from inconceivable, unlighted chambers beyond Time; the detestable pounding and piping whereunto dance slowly, awkwardly, and absurdly the gigantic, tenebrous ultimate markets the blind, voiceless, mindless gargoyles whose soul is
Ron Paul.